genuine reality as a person, as a human being, than that wall over there.

  So you keep telling me. If I don’t exist, though, why do I worry about Lissa?

  Why do I enjoy sipping this sherry? Why do I work so hard at the network?

  —Because you’ve been programmed to. Crap, Macy, can’t you see that you’re only a

  clever machine that’s been slipped into a vacant human body? Which turned out to

  be not quite vacant, which still had some bits of its former owner hiding in it.

  If you were capable of facing your own situation decently and honestly, you’d

  recognize that—

  Right,Macy cut in.I’d recognize that I’m a nothing and you’re a genius, and I’d

  get the hell out of your head.

  —Yes.

  Sorry, Hamlin. You’re wasting our time asking me to. Why should I commit suicide

  just to give you a second chance to mess up your life?

  —Suicide! Suicide! You’ve got to be alive before you can commit suicide!

  I’m alive.

  —Only in the most narrow technical sense.

  Fuck you, Hamlin.

  —Let’s try to keep the conversation on a friendly basis, okay?

  How can I be friendly when you invite me to kill myself? Where’s the advantage

  for me in accepting your deal? What do you have to offer that makes it worth my

  while to give you this body back?

  —Nothing. I can only appeal to your sense of equity. I’m more talented than you.

  I’m more valuable to society. I deserve to live more than you do.

  I’m not so sure of that. Society’s verdict was that you had no value at all, in

  fact that you were dangerous and had to be destroyed. Not even rehabilitated, in

  the old pre-Rehab sense of the word. Destroyed.

  —A miscarriage of justice. I could have been salvaged. I went insane, I don’t

  deny it, I did a lot of harm to a bunch of innocent women. But that’s all over.

  If I came back now, I’d be beyond all that crap. I’d keep to myself and practice

  my art.

  Sure you would. Sure. Look, Hamlin, if you want this body back, take it away

  from me—if you can. But I’m not giving it to you just for the asking. I don’t

  think as little of myself as you do. Forget it.

  —I wish I could make you see my point of view.

  Half past seven. Sill no Lissa. Macy switched from sherry to bourbon. Also lit

  the first gold of the evening. A deep drag; instant response, lightheadedness, a

  loss of contact with his feet. Just a touch of pot-paranoia, too: suppose Hamlin

  made a grab for his brain while he was fuddled with liquor and fumes? Could he

  fight back properly? His skullmate had been quiet for ten or fifteen minutes

  now. Gathering strength for an assault, maybe. Keep your guard up.

  But no assault came. The intoxicants that lulled Macy seemed to lull Hamlin as

  well.

  Eight o’clock.

  Hamlin? You still there?

  —You rang, milord?

  Talk to me.

  —Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a

  new nation conceived in liberty and—

  No, be serious. Tell me something. What’s it like for you, inside there?

  —Crowded and nasty.

  How do you visualize yourself?

  —As an octopus. A very small octopus, Macy, maybe a millionth of an inch in

  diameter, sitting smack in the middle of the left side of your head. With long

  skinny tentacles reaching out to various parts of your brain.

  Can you see the outside world?

  —When I want to. It uses some energy, but it isn’t really hard. I hook into your

  optic input, is all, and then I see whatever you’re seeing.

  What about hearing?

  —A different kind of hookup. I keep that one patched in nearly all the time.

  Sense of touch? Smell? Taste?

  —The same. It’s no great trick to cut into your sensory receptors and find out

  what’s going on outside.

  What about reading my thoughts?

  —Easy. A tentacle into the cerebral cortex. I monitor you constantly there,

  Macy. You think it, I pick it up instantly. And I can sort out your consciously

  directed mental impulses from the mush of mental noise that you put out

  steadily, too.

  How did you learn these things?

  —Trial and error. I woke up, see, not knowing where I was, what had happened to

  me. Lissa gave me a telepathic nudge, not even realizing she was doing it, and

  there I was. Locked in a dark room, a coffin, for all I knew. So I started

  groping around in your head. Accidentally touched something and made a

  connection. Hey, I can see! Touched something else. I can hear! What’s this?

  Somebody else is wearing my body! But if I make contact here, I can pick up his

  thoughts. And so on. It took a few days.

  And you keep learning things all the time, eh, Hamlin?

  —Frankly, I haven’t been making much progress lately. I’m finding it hard to

  override your conscious control, your motor centers, your speech center. To make

  you walk where I want you to walk, to make you say what I want you to say. I can

  do a little of that, but it costs me a terrific load of energy, and sooner or

  later you pull me loose. Maybe there’s a secret to overriding you that I haven’t

  found yet.

  You manage to mess with my heartbeat pretty easily, though.

  —Oh, yes. I’ve got decent control over most of your autonomic system. I could

  turn your heart off in five seconds. But what’s the use? You die, I’d die too. I

  could play with your digestive juices and give you an ulcer by morning. Only

  this is my body as much as yours: I don’t gain anything by damaging it.

  Nevertheless you can cause me plenty of pain.

  —Indeed I can. I could harass you most miserably, Macy. How would you like the

  sensation of a toothache, twenty-five hours a day? Not the toothache itself,

  nothing a dentist could fix, just the sensation of it. How would you like a

  premature ejaculation, every time? How would you like a feedback loop in your

  auditory system so that you heard everything twice with a half-second delay? I

  could make your life hell. But I’m not really a sadist. I don’t have any hard

  feelings toward you. I simply want my body back. I still hope we can work things

  out in an amiable way, without the need for me to apply real pressure.

  Let’s not start that routine again.Macy reached for the bourbon.I want to know

  more about you. What it’s like for you in there. Can you actually see the

  interior of my brain?

  —See it? The neurons, the synapses, the brain cells? Not really. Only in a

  metaphorical sense. A visionary sense. I can set up one-to-one percept

  equivalents, such as my perception of myself as a miniature octopus, do you

  follow? But I don’t actually see. It’s hard to explain. I’m aware of things,

  structures, forms, but I simply can’t communicate that awareness to someone who

  hasn’t ever been on the inside himself. You have to remember that I don’t have

  an organic existence. I’m not a lump of something solid under your headbone, a

  kind of tumor. I’m just a web of electrochemical impulses, Macy, and I perceive

  things differently.

  But aren’t we all just webs of electrochemical impulses? What am I if not that?

  —True. Except that you’re linked with this brain at so many points that you

  don’t have any sense of yourself as something distinct from the bodily organ

  through which you perceive things. I do. I’m dissociated, disembodied. I sense

  my own existence as something quite separate from the existence of this brain,

  here, through which I get various sensory inputs when I ask for them, and

  through which I can force an output by working at it. It’s weird, Macy, and it’s

  lousy, and I don’t like it at all. But I can’t achieve a real hookup, because

  you’re in the way in so many places, entrenched too deeply for me to dislodge

  you.

  What are we going to do, then?

  —Continue annoying each other, I suppose.

  Quarter to nine. Really ought to check up on Lissa somehow, go down to her

  apartment, ask the cops to investigate. Not very ambitious right now, though.

  Maybe she’ll come in soon. A long long walk on a spring night, home after dark.

  —You’re in love with her, aren’t you, Macy?

  I don’t think so. A certain physical attraction, I don’t deny that. And a kind

  of solidarity of the crippled—she’s got troubles, I’ve got troubles, we really

  ought to stick together, that kind of feeling. But not love. I don’t know her

  that well. I don’t even know myself that well. I have no illusions about that:

  I’m inexperienced, I’m emotionally immature, I’m brand new in the world.

  —And you’re in love with her.

  Define your terms.

  —Don’t hand me that sophomoric manure. You know what I mean. Let me tell you a

  few things about your Lissa, though, that somebody who is as you rightly say

  emotionally immature might not have noticed.

  Go ahead.

  —She’s completely selfish. She exists only for the benefit of Lissa Moore. A

  bitch, a witch, a cunt that walks, a life-force eater. She’ll try to suck the

  vitality out of you. She tried it with me, hoping she could drain some of my

  talent out of me and into her. I was fighting her all the way. I held her off

  pretty well. Although I think that ESP of hers infected me somehow and caused my

  breakdown. I didn’t realize that at the time it was happening, Macy, but it

  occurred to me later, that she was fastening onto me, messing up my mind,

  robbing me of strength, pushing me over some sort of brink. And after a year or

  so I fell in. She won’t need as long with you. She’ll bleed you dry in a month.

  You make her sound like a monster. She strikes me as being an awfully pathetic

  monster, Hamlin.

  —That’s because you’ve come to know her only when she’s in trouble. This ESP of

  hers, do you think it was an accident? Something that just sprouted in her, like

  the measles? It’s that hunger of hers. To use people, to devour people, to drain

  people, to engulf people. Which finally got out of hand, which ran away with

  her. Now she drains automatically, she pulls in impulses from all sides, more

  than her mind can stand, and it’s killing her. It’s burning her out. But she

  asked for it.

  How harsh you are.

  —Just realistic. I never knew a woman who wasn’t some kind of vampire, and

  Lissa’s the most dangerous one I knew. A cunt is a cunt. A little bundle of

  ambitions. I fell for it, for a while. And it ruined me, Macy, it used me up.

  I think your whole outlook on women is distorted.

  —Maybe yes, maybe no. But at least I came by it honestly. Through living.

  Through experiencing. Through drawing my own conclusions. I didn’t pick up my

  ideas vicariously. I didn’t have them pumped into me at a Rehab Center.

  Granted. Which still doesn’t make your ideas righter than mine.

  —Whatever you say. I just wanted to warn you about her.

  I’m amazed at the difference in our images of her. You see her as a marauder, a

  vampire, a drinker of souls. My impression is just the opposite: that she’s a

  weak, passive, dependent girl, terrified by the world. How can they be

  reconciled?

  —They don’t need to be. Why shouldn’t my image of her be different from yours?

  I’m different from you. We’re two very different persons.

  And if an outsider tried to make an assessment of Lissa based on what we told

  him?

  —He’d have to make parallax adjustments to compensate for our differences in

  perspective.

  But which is the real Lissa? Yours or mine?

  —Both. She can be passive and weak and still be a monster and a vampire.

  You really believe, though, that she deliberately sets out to drain vitality

  from people?

  —Not necessarily deliberately, Macy. She may not even realize what she’s doing.

  I’m sure she didn’t realize it until her inputs got too intense to cope with. It

  was just a thing she had, a telepathic thing, a need, a hunger. Which had the

  incidental effect of destroying people who came close to her.

  I don’t feel that she’s been destroying me.

  —You’re welcome to her, pal.

  Twenty minutes to ten. Another shot of bourbon. Smo-o-th. Another Acapulco

  special, long and luscious, in the all-new, improved, negative-ion-filter

  format. The good haziness happening now. Perhaps Lissa’s dismembered body has by

  this time been scattered throughout the six boroughs of the city. She seems

  remote and unreal to him. For the past ten minutes he has allowed himself to

  indulge in a mood of intense nostalgia. A curious species of nostalgia for the

  life he did not live. Meditating on the fragments of Hamlin’s experience that

  have bled through to him across the boundaries that separate their identities.

  And yearning for more.

  Hamlin?

  —Yes.

  How hard would it be to merge our memory files entirely?

  —I don’t follow you. What do you mean?

  So that I’d have access to everything you can remember. And you’d have access to

  all that had happened to me.

  —I imagine it wouldn’t be hard.

  I’m willing if you are.

  —It would mount to a merging of identities, you realize. We wouldn’t be sure

  where one of us ends and the other begins. We’d blend, after a while. Frankly,

  I’d wipe you out.

  You think so?

  —A pretty good chance of it.

  What makes you so sure?

  —Because I’d bring to the blending thirty-five years of genuine experience. Your

  thirty-five years of synthetic memories would overlay that like a film of dirt,

  and after a time I’d polish it away, leaving my real life blended to your four

  years in the Rehab Center, with some interplays from your ersatz existence

  coloring my recollections of the things I actually did. What would emerge would

  be a Nat Hamlin somewhat polluted by Paul Macy. Is that what you want? I’m

  willing if you are, Macy.

  I didn’t mean such a complete joining. Just an exchange of memory banks.

  —I already have as much access to what the Rehab Center gave you as I need.

  But I don’t have any access to your past, except some stuff that came floating

  through the barrier while I was asleep. And I want more.

  —What for?

  Because I’m starting to recognize it as my own Identity. Because I feel cut off

  from myself. I want to know what this body did, where it traveled, what it ate,

  who it slept with, what it was like to be a psychosculptor. The need’s been

  growing in me for a couple of hours now. Or maybe longer. It frustrates me to

  know that I was somebody important, somebody vital, and that I’m completely cut

  off from his life.

  —But you weren’t anybody important, Macy.I was. You weren’t anybody at all. A

  Rehab doctor’s wet dream.

  Don’t rub it in.

  —You admit it?

  I never denied I was only a construct, Hamlin.

  —Then why don’t you just step aside and let me have the body, then?

  I keep telling you. My past may be a fake, but my present is real as hell, and

  I’m not giving it up.

  —So you want to add my past to yours, to give you that extra little dimension of

  reality. You want to go on being Paul Macy, but you want to be able to think you

  used to be Nat Hamlin, too?

  Something like that.

  —Up yours, Macy. My memories are my own property. They’re all I’ve got. Why

  should I let you muck around in them? Why should I sweat to make you feel

  realer?

  Ten-fifteen. How quiet it is at this time of night. Somehow went without dinner

  and never even noticed. Sleepy. Sleepy. Phone the police? Tomorrow, maybe. She

  must have gone back to her own place, I guess. Mmmm. Mmmmmm.

  —I have a new proposition for you.

  Eh? Huh?

  —Wake up, Macy.

  What’s the matter?

  —I want to talk to you. You’ve been dozing.

  Okay. So talk. I’m listening.

  —Let’s make a deal. Let’s share the body on an alternating basis. First you run

  it, then me, then you again, then me again, and so on indefinitely. Operating it

  under the Paul Macy identity, naturally, so we don’t get into legal

  difficulties.

  You mean we switch every day? Monday Wednesday Friday it’s me in charge, Tuesday

  Thursday Saturday it’s you, Sunday we hold dialogs?

  —Not exactly like that. You need the body four days a week to do your job,

  right? Those four days it’s yours. Saturdays and Sundays and holidays are mine.

  Weekday evenings we divide in such a way that you get some, I get some. We can

  work out ad-hoc arrangements for swapping time back and forth as the occasion

  demands.

  I don’t see why I have to give you any time at all, Hamlin. The court awarded

  your body to me.