"Sam!" For once it was Eichra Oren, rather than one of his KGB-fearing American friends, who glanced around nervously to see if anyone was listening. Recalling suddenly that Sam's words would have been completely inaudible, even to someone standing right beside him, only made him angrier. When he realized how irrational a reaction that was, he took several deep, cleansing breaths and attempted to calm himself. "Sam, you're the only one I'd ever permit to say things like that to me."

  "Like the plain truth? Gee, Boss, that kinda gets me right . . . right . . . now where did I put that pesky organ?"

  "Asshole. I only meant that I trust you. Just don't wear the privilege out, all right?"

  "Feeling a bit touchy, are we? And on top of that, we get a dead body planted in our front yard, and El Mollusco Supremo gets slipped the ultimate Mickey, and me—"

  The man made a snorting noise. "And you, as usual, go all the way and get yourself murdered!"

  "Oh well, who was it who said `anything worth doing is worth overdoing'?"

  Eichra Oren made a face. "Charles Manson."

  "Well the experience is worth it, Boss. Basically, I'm a self-modifying program. I can go anywhere, do anything, even be in two places at once. And you wouldn't believe the colors! We'd be rich if I could bottle what I'm seeing and drop it on sugar cubes—as long as I get a chance to help you hunt down the moron who committed possibly the most imperfect murder in the history of crime!"

  The man laughed. "Not that we aren't entitled to an occasional nervous breakdown, but I suspect both of us are letting our emotions get in the way of our work. For instance, I shouldn't have accepted the assumption, right from the beginning, that Rosalind has been kidnaped. It's just that knowing her as I do—"

  "It's the likeliest possibility? Me, too, Boss. Rosalind is all right. Practical and intelligent. And she smells good. I can't see her stumbling into a gopher hole and breaking a leg—"

  "Or running off somewhere to `find herself'?"

  "Or taking it on the lam after bludgeoning poor old S*bb*ts*rrh into anchovy paste."

  "Lobster bisque," the man corrected. "Then again it's possible that to someone with a little more detachment, the other matters you mentioned—S*bb*ts*rrh and Mister Thoggosh—should be assigned a higher priority than we've given them."

  "Especially our esteemed employer? Don't listen to the Americans, Boss. A century of state capitalism has left them soft in the gray matter. The trouble with making the right moves and climbing the corporate ladder is that it doesn't go anywhere you want to go, and you're unfit for anything but cutting out paper dolls by the time you get to the top. What the hell, we've done what we've done."

  "I agree." The p'Nan assessor bent over and began his slow, searching shuffle across the leaf-littered clearing floor again. To his urbanized eye, completely unpracticed at detecting in the out of doors, it looked as though no one had been here since the beginning of time. "And I refuse to make excuses, even to myself."

  Sam simulated a rude noise. "Hooray for us and three cheers for our personal integrity. I hope you've been keeping up the premiums on our unemployment insurance. Not that we've accomplished much of anything with our day's inattention to duty."

  "How could we, Sam?" He stood up again and waved a frustrated arm around, indicating the ground he'd just covered a square centimeter at a time. "I've known all along exactly where Rosalind was supposed to be at the time she vanished, because I asked her myself to meet me at the house after our meeting with Mister Thoggosh. That was before we heard about the shuttlecraft fire, of course."

  "—I understand, Boss. At least we're not a total loss as detectives. We managed to find out that she was seen entering these woods by several human witnesses."

  The human camp had been the first place they'd searched, aided by thirty-odd Soviet Americans shaken by the destruction of their only way home, and as worried about their doctor as the Antarctican and what somebody had called his "virtual dog." It had taken all of the moral debt assessor's persuasive power to keep the whole mob from similarly "helping" him to comb the woods, at the risk of destroying fragile physical evidence that might lead them to her.

  Eichra Oren added, "And by our friend Scutigera—"

  "Ha! That wily old crustacean—"

  "He's not a crustacean, Sam, but a giant centipede and you know it. You only call him that to annoy him, and he's not here now, so lay off. He says he saw her halfway between the house and the camp. She'd have missed me at the house—we'd responded to the emergency by then—but Rosalind is hardly the type to flounce off over something like that, and we'd have gotten together eventually."

  "Sounds like the story of your life. What beats me is that there's no sign she ever made it to the house."

  "Right." Eichra Oren looked at the ground around him in disgust and frustration. It may have been thickly littered with dead leaves, broken twigs, seed cases, and all sorts of bugs, but it was barren of information to his untrained eye. "I even sent a message home from Mister Thoggosh's office, telling her about the fire. She would have headed straight for Raftan's infirmary when she let herself in and read it. But according to him, and to the terminal I had installed for the benefit of those without implants, she never received it."

  "Lift that hand again, Boss, will you? That's what I thought—it's shaking. Is that worry about Rosalind or simple fatigue? Have you eaten anything today?"

  The man grinned. "A little of both, probably. Sam, you sound like my mother—which is something of a coincidence. I had an odd hallucinatory experience myself, if you could call it that, earlier, while you were off tormenting Scutigera."

  "Crustaceans don't torment, Boss, they can take care of themselves. What kind of odd experience?"

  "If you tell anybody about this . . . I thought I saw my mother. Strike that, Sam, I did see my mother, although whether she was really there is another question. I was pushing through a thicket. When I got to the other side, there she was in one of her billowy party gowns, about forty meters away, across a clearing."

  Sam was silent for several seconds. "I think you need a good meal and a lot of sleep."

  Sensing his friend's concern, Eichra Oren nodded. "That's exactly what I think. I also think I've been cracking up ever since we came to this blasted asteroid."

  "You've said that before, Boss. I don't believe it."

  "Then account for what I saw, Sam. I didn't just get a vague glimpse of her. She turned and looked at me and winked—my mother! Then she slipped between some bushes and there wasn't any more trace of her afterward than we've found of Rosalind."

  "Hmm. You don't suppose it could be some kind of feedback from what I'm going through, could it?"

  The man lifted both eyebrows this time. "I hadn't thought of that. She surely didn't come here the way we did, through Mister Thoggosh's dimensional translator."

  "That we'd know about. On this little world, it's the light show to end all light shows. I can still see and hear the tropical storm we caused arriving here."

  "So can I. I like your feedback theory. Let's consult one of the implant network technicians about it."

  "In our copious free time. Meanwhile, I see that our trusty scouts have come back empty-handed."

  Together, through Eichra Oren's eyes, they watched a pair of armed men trudging toward them, looking every bit as worn out as the debt assessor felt himself. One was relatively short and broad, the other tall and black. Each carried an ASSR-issue Mini-30 semiautomatic rifle chambered for the obsolete 7.62x39mm cartridge, and some sort of pistol on his belt. When they'd come close enough for the gesture to be seen, the short, broad one, Major Jesus Ortiz, shook his head. He and the implant network's newest reporter, C. C. Jones, had taken up hunting several times a week, to feed the American expedition.

  Eichra Oren shrugged back at Ortiz. Within minutes they were joined by the soil geologist, Captain Hector Guillermo, and Major Federico Ortega y Pena, the expedition's botanist. They, too, were familiar with the territory, and had been searching from the opposite side, with no more apparent success than Ortiz and Jones.

  "So here we are," Sam observed. "From the place Rosalind was seen by Scutigera, to the place she was supposed to have been, not a single clue, not even to the woods-wise senses of Davy Boone and Daniel Crockett over yonder. Which leaves only three alternative possibilities, each of them more depressing than the other two."

  "Thousands of offices, residences, businesses, warehouses, and other structures in the Elders' settlement," Eichra Oren agreed. "Or thousands of kilometers of endless, twisting corridor, down below, constructed by the Predecessors."

  "Or the rest of this stupid asteroid's surface," Sam finished the list, "a geographical area equal, I've been told by those who know, to the American state of Soviet Texas."

  "Yippee-ki-yo, motherfucker!" the man quoted with uncharacteristic sarcasm. His knees had begun to shake like his hands.

  "I admire the way you always know the right thing to say, Boss," Sam replied. "For what it's worth, my money's on the interior—the deeper the better."

  "You don't have any money, Sam."

  "I've been meaning to discuss that with you." Eichra Oren could feel Sam shrug. "I don't have anything right now, except myself, but do you hear me complaining?"

  Bone weary with this futile searching, the debt assessor sighed. "Do nautiloids squirt luminous ink?"

  SIXTY-FIVE Persephone, If You Please

  "Now what, in heaven's name, is this?"

  Toya Pulaski looked at the object in her hand and shook her head. Under a brittle crust of fossilized fluorocarbon contaminants, she could see that it was similar to—but much larger than—something she'd once examined from Mister Thoggosh's personal collection of Predecessor artifacts, gathered from over a hundred alternative versions of the Solar System. The Predecessors had certainly gotten around, she thought, and they were real litterbugs.

  Roger Owen peered over her shoulder. "It's a hydrospanner. You know how the Predecessors used triangular bolt heads. Well, you apply lateral pressure to the grip extensions and the energy is transferred through internal counterrotating channels—if there's any fluid left inside—to the jaws, which rotate. See, it still works after a billion years. `Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.' " He gave her behind a gentle pat, an intimate gesture of affection she was still trying to get used to. "Very handy in tight spaces and free fall."

  She set the prehistoric tool down, turned, and regarded him suspiciously. "Roger, I never saw anything like that before I came to this asteroid. How do you always know these things?"

  "What's to know?" He shrugged, spreading his broad, blunt hands. "I'm a machinist. I just wish it was half as easy to identify some of the rest of this junk."

  Thrown together from the nautiloid equivalent of plywood and sawhorses, the rough table before them was heavy with paraphernalia they'd retrieved over the past few days from inside the ancient space vessel that was 5023 Eris. From time to time they'd checked with Model 17, to make sure that nothing they brought up here for scientific examination was vital to her own important work. As it had turned out, there were more than enough tools and other equipment down there for a million Model 17s or her organic progenitors, and her objections—always made politely—had been few and far between.

  Until this morning, they'd also had the enthusiastic and competent assistance of S*bb*ts*rrh, the Small Artifactologist. Learning that the sea-scorpionoid was dead—had been horribly murdered, in fact—they'd decided to carry on with what they were doing out of respect for the little fellow. Besides, they'd received news of the shuttle fires at the same time, and neither of them, presumably, wanted to think very much about what that might mean to their futures.

  A sudden flash of movement caught Toya's eye. She looked up to see that it was only the warm breeze playing gently with a loose flap of the makeshift plastic awning they'd rigged over their worktable to protect the artifacts they were studying—and themselves, of course—from the weather, which on 5023 Eris consisted primarily of diffuse sunlight and rain showers engineered by the Elders' environmental specialists to occur every evening as regularly as clockwork.

  Briefly, she considered a third, more cheerful datum they'd had this afternoon by radio from the human encampment on the opposite side of the asteroid. Mister Thoggosh's wild entrepreneurial venture had paid off, at least technologically: Model 17's first prolonged run of the Virtual Drive had been even more successful—if as undetectable by the nervous system of any organic sapient—than the ten-million-kilometer start-up test. No one, Toya thought, would guess from glancing at the butter-colored sky overhead that 5023 Eris, with its tiny artificial sun, was just about to cross the orbit of Jupiter.

  Before she looked down again, one of the bagel-shaped nautiloid aerostats settled to the floor of the lush green valley where they'd found the entrance to the interior of the billion-year-old vessel, and where she and Owen had established their own personal—and private—headquarters for the past few weeks.

  It was Eichra Oren, of all people, who stepped out of the little machine and strode toward them, nylon rucksack in one hand and sword in the other. As usual, he wore a splashy Hawaiian shirt, faded Levis, and battered neoprene and Kevlar running shoes. It was still strange to see the Antarctican all alone, and stranger yet to realize that his sapient dog Sam was dead—and not dead at the same time.

  As if he couldn't wait, when he was still several dozen meters away, the debt assessor lifted his scabbarded weapon of office and waved it at the couple. But it was hardly the friendly greeting they were expecting that followed the gesture. "Rosalind Nguyen is missing," he told them with a grim expression. "We think it's possible she was kidnaped, and we're going down below to look for her."

  "How can we help?" Toya and Owen spoke the words simultaneously. To the extent that they were capable, they understood the situation with Sam and the bizarre manner in which he'd managed to survive what had happened to him; neither of them bothered to ask what Eichra Oren had meant by "we". Nor did they ask why he and Sam believed Rosalind had been kidnaped, or what made them think that she was down inside the asteroid. Eichra Oren was the famous detective, after all—or as close as nautiloid civilization had come to producing one.

  The man blinked. "I don't know. How can you help?" He tapped the side of his head. "We have a three-dimensional map of all of the areas we've explored so far down there. I have a couple of other technological tricks to try. And we're in constant touch by cerebro-cortical implant with Model 17, who's supposed to know where everything is whether we've gotten around to exploring it yet or not."

  "You can always use an extra pair of eyes." Owen moved to one end of the worktable, rinsed his grimy hands under the tap of a plastic water reservoir, and carefully dried them on a roll of paper towels. He drew his regulation EAA Witness, a high-capacity service automatic originally carried by the ASSR Marines, a special-purpose variant with an oversized trigger guard for arctic use, which had proven useful with spacesuit gloves, as well. Seeing that the magazine was full and the chamber loaded, he reholstered his pistol, patted the pleated pockets of his Aerospace Force coverall where he carried extra magazines, and nodded. "Count me in."

  "Me, too," Pulaski declared. She seized up an olive-drab canvas bag and began scooping up certain items she believed they might need, for the most part freeze-dried rations. Until this minute, she'd been embarrassed to have Eichra Oren see their untidy campsite—they'd been too busy to do housekeeping—especially the single sleeping bag airing out on a line stretched between two saplings. Now all that was forgotten in the light of Rosalind's disappearance and with the prospect of adventure ahead. "I don't have a gun, but I can see and hear as well as either of you two."

  "So you can, my little chickadee," Owen replied, doing a terrible W. C. Fields imitation, "and I would be honored beyond my poor ability to express it if you should desire to carry my very own personal shotgun for the defense of your delicate—"

  "I'd be more honored, Mr. Dukenfield," she grinned and shook her head, "if I weren't aware that that blasted Remington of yours weighs about nine pounds, fully loaded."

  The corporal flicked ashes from his imaginary cigar and waggled his eyebrows. "But my little petunia, what does nine pounds come to in a mere one-tenth gravity field?"

  "The same nine pounds of ungainly mass it comes to at one full gee." Toya watched Eichra Oren's face, knowing that he'd be surprised to hear her bantering this way with Owen. She couldn't help being proud of herself. She'd been a fairly humorless—and timid—old maid, she knew, when they'd first met. "All right, give me the damned gun, Roger. I'm no pistol fighter like you desperados, but at least I know which end of a shotgun to point with."

  Owen nodded, handing her the weapon, a semiautomatic twelve-gauge with extended magazine and short, riot-length barrel. "Before we descend into the abyss," he suggested to Eichra Oren, "there's something special I want you to see."

  Toya trailing along, he led the man out from under the awning to a point behind a clump of bushes which almost formed a hedge. Propped over a small, smokeless fire stood a kettlelike vessel of raw copper with a long coil of the same material leading from the top. Its free end slowly dripped a thin, transparent liquid into an ASF canteen.

  "Arthur Empleado would shit blood if he saw this," the machinist declared proudly, "if he weren't too busy sticking his long brown nose into Mister Thoggosh's business."

  The Antarctican looked puzzled. "What is it?"

  Both Americans gave him an unbelieving stare. "You've heard of Dutch courage, haven't you?" Owen asked.

  "It was included in my vocabulary injections." Eichra Oren nodded. Toya wondered whether he was serious or had merely adjusted to the level of discourse. "A euphemism for liquor."

  "And Southern comfort?"

  "Yes, that, too."