“Mmm-hmm,” she said, managing to hiccough through her tears. A cliche, but it got ’em every time.

  “Not as an actress, Arran, please. As yourself. Do you love me? Do you want me?”

  She rolled partway onto her side, lifted herself on one elbow, and said, the tears forcing a little catch in her voice, “I need you like I need somec, Ham. Why have you stayed away so long?”

  He looked relieved. He walked slowly back to her. And everything was peaceful again. They made love four more times, between each course of dinner, and for variety they let the servants watch. I’ve done it once before, Arran remembered, but it was five loops ago, about, and these are different servants anyway. Of course the servants, underpaid beginning actors all, used it as an excuse to get some interesting onstage time, and turned it into an orgy among themselves, managing every conceivable sexual act in only an hour and a half. Arran barely noticed them, though. They were the kind of fools who thought the audience wanted quantity. If some sex is good, a lot is better, they think. Arran knew better. Tease them. Let them beg. Let them find beauty in it, too, not just titillation, not just lust. That’s why she was a star, and they were playing servants in somebody else’s loop.

  That night Ham and Arran slept in each other’s arms.

  And in the morning, Arran woke to find Ham staring at her, his face an odd mixture of love and pain. “Ham,” she said softly, stroking his cheek. “What do you want?”

  The longing in his face only increased. “Marry me,” he said softly.

  “Do you really mean it?” she asked, in her little-girl voice.

  “I mean it. Time our wakings together, always.”

  “Always is a long time,” she said. It was a good all-purpose line.

  “And I mean it,” he said. “Marry me. Mother knows we’ve made enough money over the years. We don’t ever have to let these other bastards into our lives again. We don’t ever have to wear these damned loop recorders again.” And as he said that, he patted the recorder strapped to her thigh.

  Arran inwardly groaned. He wasn’t through with the games yet. Of course the audience wouldn’t know what he meant—the computer that created the loop from the loop recorder was programmed to delete the recorder itself from the holo. The audience never saw it. And now Ham was referring to it. What was he trying to do, give her a nervous breakdown? Some friend.

  Well, I can play his game. “I won’t marry you,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “Don’t you see how I love you? Do you think any of these phonies who pay to make love to you will ever feel one shred of real emotion toward you? To them you’re a chance to make money, to make a name for themselves, to strike it rich. But I don’t need money. I have a name. All I want is you. And all I can give you is me.”

  “Sweet,” she said, coldly, and got up and went to the kitchen. The clock said eleven thirty. They had slept late. She was relieved. At noon she had to leave to get to the Sleeproom. In a half hour this farce would be over. Now to build it to a climax.

  “Arran,” Ham said, following her. “Arran, I’m serious. I’m not in character!”

  That much is obvious, Arran thought but did not say.

  “You’re a liar,” she said, rudely.

  He looked puzzled. “Why should I lie? Haven’t I made it plain to you that I’m telling the truth? That I’m not acting?”

  “Not acting,” she said, sneering (but seductively, seductively. Never out of character, she reminded herself), and she turned her back to him. “Not acting. Well, as long as we’re being honest about things, and throwing away both pretense and art, I’ll play it your way, too. Do you know what I think of you?”

  “What?” he asked.

  “I think this is the cheapest, dirtiest trick I’ve ever seen. Coming here like this, doing everything you could to lead me into thinking you loved me, when all the time you were just exploiting me. Worse than all the others! You’re the worst!”

  He looked stricken. “I’d never exploit you!” he said.

  “Marry me!” Arran laughed, mocking him. “Marry me, says you, and then what? What if this poor little girl actually did marry you? What would you do? Force me to stay in the flat forever? Keep away all my other friends, all my other—yes, even my lovers, you’d make me give them all up! Hundreds of men love me, but you, Hamilton, you want to own me forever, exclusively! What a coup that would be, wouldn’t it? No one would ever get to look at my body again,” she said, moving her body in such a way that no one in the world could possibly want to look anywhere else, “except you. And you say you don’t want to exploit me. How can I believe you?”

  Hamilton came closer to her, tried to touch her, tried to plead with her, but she only grew angry, cursed him. “Stay away from me!” she screamed.

  “Arran, you can’t mean it,” Ham said, softly.

  “I have never meant anything more thoroughly in my life,” she said.

  He looked in her eyes, looked deep. And finally he spoke again. “Either you’re so much an actress that the real Arran Handully is lost, or you really do mean that. And either way, there’s nothing for me to stay here for.” And Arran watched admiringly as Hamilton gathered up his clothing, and not even bothering to dress, he left, closing the door quietly before him. A beautiful exit, Arran thought. A lesser actor couldn’t have resisted the temptation to say one last line. But not Ham—and now, if Arran played it right, this grotesque scene could be, after all, a genuine climax to the loop.

  And so she played the scene, at first muttering about what a terrible man Ham was, and then progressing quickly to wondering whether he’d ever come back. “I hope he does,” she said, and soon was weeping, crying out that she couldn’t live without him. “Please come back, Ham!” she said pitifully. “I’m sorry I refused you! I want to marry you.”

  But then she looked at the clock. Nearly noon. Thank Mother. “But it’s time,” she said. “Time to go to the Sleeproom. The Sleeproom!” New hope came into her voice. “That’s it!

  I’ll go to the Sleeproom. I’ll let the years pass by, and when I wake, there he’ll be, waiting for me!” She rhapsodized for a few more minutes, then threw a robe around herself and ran lightly, eagerly down the corridors to the Sleeproom.

  In the tape-and-tap she chattered gaily to the attendant. “He’ll be there waiting for me,” she said, smiling. “Everything will be all right.” The sleep helmet went on, and Arran kept talking. “You do think there’s hope for me, don’t you?” she asked, and the woman whose soft hands were now removing the helmet answered, “There’s always hope, ma’am. Everybody has hope.”

  Arran smiled, then got up and walked briskly to the sleep table. She didn’t remember ever doing this before, though she knew she must have—and then it occurred to her that this time she could watch the actual loop, see what really happened to her when the somec entered her veins.

  But because she didn’t remember any other administration of somec, she didn’t realize the difference when the attendant gently put a needle only a millimeter under the surface of the palm of her skin. “It’s so sharp,” Arran said, “but I’m glad it doesn’t hurt.” And instead of the hot pain of somec, a gentle drowsiness filled her, and she was whispering Ham’s name as she drifted off to sleep. Whispering his name, but silently cursing him under her breath. He may be a great actor, she told herself, but I ought to kick his head through a garbage chute for giving me a rotten time like that. Oh well. It’ll sell seats in the theaters. Yawn. And then she slept.

  The loop continued for a few more minutes, as the attendants went through a mumbo-jumbo of nonsensical, meaningless activities. And finally they stepped back as if they were through, Arran’s nude body lying on the table. Pause for the loop recorder to take the ending, and then:

  A buzzer, and the door opened and Triuff came in, laughing in glee. “What a loop,” she said, as she unstrapped the recorder from Arran’s leg.

  When Triuff had gone, the attendants put the real needle in Arran’s arm, and the heat poured through her veins. Asleep though she had already been, Arran cried out in agony, and the sweat drenched the table in only a few minutes. It was ugly, painful, frightening. It just wouldn’t do to have the masses see what somec was really like. Let them think the sleep is gentle; let them think the dreams are sweet.

  When Arran woke, her first thought was to find out if the loop had worked. She had certainly gone through enough effort—now to see if Triuff’s predictions of retirement had been fulfilled.

  They had been.

  Triuff was waiting right outside the Sleeproom, and hugged Arran tightly. “Arran, you wouldn’t believe it!” she said, laughing uproariously. “Your last three loops had already set records—the highest-grossing loops of all time. But this one! This one!”

  “Well?” Arran demanded.

  “More than three times the total of those three loops put together!”

  Arran smiled. “Then I can retire?”

  “Only if you want to,” Triuff said. “I have several pretty good deals worked out—”

  “Forget it,” Arran said.

  “They wouldn’t take much work, only a few days each—”

  “I said forget it. From now on I never strap another recorder to my leg again. I’ll guest. But I won’t record.”

  “Fine, fine,” Triuff said. “I told them, but they made me promise to ask you anyway.”

  “And probably paid you a pretty penny, too,” Arran answered. Triuff shrugged and smiled.

  “You’re the greatest ever,” Triuff said. “No one has ever done so well as you.”

  Arran shook her head. “Might be true,” she said, “but I was really sweating it. That was a rotten trick you pulled on me, having Ham break character like that.”

  Triuff shook her head. “No, no, not at all, Arran. That must have been his idea. I told him to threaten to kill you—a real climax, you know. And then he went in and did what he did. Well, no harm done. It’s an exquisite scene, and because he broke character—and you, too, there at the end—the audience believed that it was real. Beautiful. Of course, everybody and his duck is breaking character now, but it doesn’t work anymore. Everyone knows it’s just another device. But the first time, with you and Ham—” and Triuff made an expansive gesture “—it was magnificent.”

  Arran led the way down the corridor. “Well, I’m glad it worked. But I’m still looking forward to a chance to rake Ham over the coals for it.”

  “Oh, Arran, I’m sorry,” Triuff said.

  Arran stopped and faced her manager. “For what?”

  Triuff actually looked sad. “Arran, it’s Hamilton. Not even a week after you went under—it was the saddest thing. Everybody talked about it for days.”

  “What! Did something happen to him?”

  “He hung himself. Turned off the lights in his flat so none of the watchers could see him, and hung himself from a light fixture with a bathrobe tie. He died right away, no chance to revive him. It was terrible.”

  Arran was surprised to find a lump in her throat. A real one. “Ham’s dead,” she said softly. She remembered all the scenes they had played together, and a real fondness for him came over her. I’m not even acting, she realized. I truly cared for the man. Sweet, wonderful Ham.

  “Does anyone know why he did it?” Arran asked.

  Triuff shook her head. “No one has the slightest idea. And the thing I just can’t believe—there it was, a scene they’ve never had before in a loop, a real suicide. And he didn’t even record it!”

  Killing Children

  A child must die to create an adult. But knowledge does not soften pain. Just the opposite!

  He heard the door click open but did not turn away from the tall pile of soft plastic blocks he was building. Instead he sought among the blocks scattered on the warm floor an orange block. Orange was definitely required, since it helped make no pattern whatsoever.

  “Link?” said an overfamiliar voice behind him, a strange familiar voice that, alone of all voices, could make him turn, startled. I killed her, he thought softly. She is dead.

  But he turned around slowly and there, indeed, was his mother, flesh as well as voice, the slender, oh-so-delicious looking body (not forty-five! couldn’t be forty-five!) and the immaculate clothing and the terror in her eyes.

  “Link?” she asked.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said stupidly, his voice deep and slow. I sound like a mental cripple, he realized. But he did not repeat the words. He merely smiled at her (the light making her hair seem like a halo, the fabric of her blouse clinging slightly to the undercurve of her breast, no, mustn’t notice that, must think instead of motherhood and filial devotion. Why isn’t she dead? Was that, please God, the dream, and this the reality? Or is this vision why I’m in this place?) and a tear or two dazzled in his eyes, making it hard for him to see, and in the dimness he supposed for a moment that she was not blond, but brownhaired; but she had always been blond—

  Seeing the tear and ignoring the continued madness in his dancing gaze, his mother held out her arms for a second, only a second, and then put her hands on her hips (note the way the point of her hips and the curve of her abdomen leave two slender depressions pointing downward, Link said to himself) and got an angry look, a hurt look on her face, and said, “What, don’t I even get a hug from my boy?”

  The words were the incantation required to get Link from the floor to his full 190 centimeters of height. He walked to her, reaching out his long arms for her—

  “No—” she gurgled, pushing him away, “Don’t—just a little kiss. Just a kiss.”

  She puckered for a childish kiss, and so he, too, puckered his lips and leaned down. At the last moment, however, she turned her head and he kissed her clumsily on the ear and hair.

  “Oh, how wet,” she said in her disgusted voice. She reached into her hipbag and pulled out a tissue, wiped her ear, laughing softly, “Clumsy, clumsy boy, Link, you always have been . . . .”

  Link stood in confusion. And as so many times before, puzzled as to what to do next that would not earn a rebuke. He remained in that confusion, knowing that there was something that he ought to do, something that he must decide, but instead deciding nothing, only playing again and again the same loop of thought in the same childish mental voice in which he had always played it, “Mummy mad, mummy mad, mummy mad.” She watched him, her lips forming a sort of half-smile (note the natural gloss on the lips, she never painted, never had to, lips always just slightly moist, partly open, the tongue playing gentle love games with the teeth), unsure of what was happening.

  “Link?” she said. “Link, don’t you have a smile for Mother?”

  And Link tried to remember how to smile. What did it feel like? There were muscles that must be pulled, and his face should feel tight—

  “No!” she screamed, stepping back from him and encountering the closed door. She apparently had expected it to be open—as if this were not a mental hospital and patients were free to roam the corridors at will. She whirled and hammered on the door with her fists, shouting frantically, “Let me out of here!”

  They let her out, the tall men with the pleasant smiles who also took Link to the bathroom five times a day because somehow he had forgotten to notice when he needed to. And as the door closed behind her, Link still stood, unable to decide what he should do, and wondering why his hands were stretched out in front of him, the hands set to grip something circular, something vertical and cylindrical, something, perhaps, the shape of a human throat.

  In Doctor Hort’s office, Mrs. Danol sat, poised and beautiful, distractingly so, and Hort wondered whether this was indeed the same woman who had wept in the attendants’ arms only a few minutes before.

  “All I care about is my son,” she said. “He was gone, vanished for seven terrible, terrible months, and all I know now is that I’ve found him again and I want him home. With me!” Hort sighed. “Mrs. Danol, Linkeree is criminally insane. This is a government facility, remember? He murdered a girl.”

  “She probably deserved it.”

  “She had supported him and cared for him for seven months, Mrs. Danol.”

  “She probably seduced him.”

  “They had a very active sex life, in which both were eager participants.” Mrs. Danol looked horrified. “Did my son tell you that?”

  “No, the tenants downstairs told the police that.”

  “Hearsay, then.”

  “The government has a very limited budget on this planet, Mrs. Danol. Most people live in apartments where privacy is strictly impossible.”

  And Mrs. Danol shuddered, apparently in disgust at the plight of the poor wretches that huddled in the government compound in this benighted capital of this benighted colony.

  “I wish I could leave here,” she said.

  “It would have been nice at one time,” Hort answered. “Your son hates this world. Or, rather, more particularly, he hates what he has seen of this world.”

  “Well, I can understand that. Those hideous wild people—and the people in the city aren’t much better.”

  Hort was amused at her reverse democracy—she esteemed all persons her infinite inferiors, and therefore equal to each other. “Nevertheless, now Linkeree must stay here and we must attempt a cure.”

  “Oh, that’s all I want for my boy. For him to be the sweet, loving child he used to be—I can’t believe he really killed her!”

  “There were seventeen witnesses to the strangling, two of them hospitalized when he turned on them after they pried him away from the corpse. He definitely killed her.”

  “But why,” she said emotionally, her breasts heaving with passion in a way that amused Hort—he had known many such closet exhibitionists in his time. “Why would he kill her?”

  “Because, Mrs. Danol, except for hair color and several years of age, she looked almost exactly like you.”

  Mrs. Danol sat upright. “My God, Doctor, you’re joking!”

  “Almost the only thing that Link has been consistent about since he arrived here is his firm belief that it was you that he killed.”