sealed too, encased in purple plastic from throat to toes, like a chrysalis,

  everything covered but nothing concealed: her tight wrap startlingly displayed

  the outlines of her bony body. Superb skeletal structure. She said, “I’m Loftus.

  I’ll show you to Mr. Fredericks’ office.”

  “Mr. Bercovici—”

  She didn’t wait. Hurrying down the hall, legs going like pistons, bare feet

  hitting the spongy floor, thwunk thwunk thwunk. Trim flat rump: no buttocks at

  all, so far as he could tell, merely a termination, like a cat’s hindquarters.

  He was upset. Bercovici was the one who had interviewed him at the Rehab Center,

  all smiles and sincerity, thinning blond hair, pudgy cheeks. Don’t worry, Mr.

  Macy, I’ll be looking after you personally during your difficult transition back

  to daily life. Bercovici was his lifeline. Without looking back, the black girl

  called out, “Mr. Bercovici’s been transferred to the Addis Ababa office.”

  “But I spoke to him only ten days ago, Miss Loftus!”

  She halted. Momentary blaze of the eyes. “Loftusis quite sufficient,” she said.

  Then the expression softened. Perhaps remembering she was dealing with a

  convalescent. “Sometimes transfers happen rapidly here. But Mr. Fredericks has

  your full dossier. He’s aware of the problems.”

  Mr. Fredericks had a long cavernous office, rounded and womby, from the sloping

  ceiling of which dangled hundreds of soft pink globes, breast-shaped; a tiny

  light was mounted in each nipple. He was a small dapper man with a moist

  handshake. Macy received from him a sweet sad embarrassed smile, the kind one

  gives a man who has had a couple of limbs or perhaps his genitals amputated to

  check the metastasis of some new lightning cancer. “So glad you’ve come, Mr.

  Macy. Paul, may I make it? And call me Stilton. We’re all informal here. A

  wonderful opportunity for you in this organization.” Eyes going to Macy’s Rehab

  badge, then away, then back, as though he couldn’t refrain from staring at it.

  The stigmata of healing.

  “Show you around,” Fredericks was saying. “Get to know everybody. The options

  here are tremendous: the whole world of modern data-intake at your service.

  We’ll start you slowly, feed you into the news in ninety-second slices first,

  then, as you pick up real ease at it, we’ll nudge you into the front line.”

  Good evening, ladies and chentlemen, this is Pavel Nathanielovitch Macy coming

  to you from the Kremlin on the eve of the long-awaited summit.

  The rear wall of Fredericks’ office vanished as though it had been annihilated

  by some wandering mass of anti-matter, and Macy found himself staring into an

  immense stupefying abyss, a dark well hundreds of feet across and perhaps

  infinitely deep. A great many golden specks floated freely in that bowl of

  nothingness. He was so awestruck by the unexpected sight that he lost a chunk of

  Fredericks’ commentary, but picked up on it in time to hear, “You see, we have

  thousands, literally thousands of free-ranging hovereye cameras posted in every

  spot throughout the world where news is likely to break. Their normal altitude

  is eighty to a hundred feet, but of course we can raise or lower them on

  command. You can think of them simply as passive observers hanging everywhere

  overhead, little self-contained self-propelled passive observers, sitting up

  there soaking in a full range of audio and visual information and holding it all

  on twenty-four-hour tap-scanning drums. Those of us here at Manhattan North

  Headquarters can tap in on any of these inputs as needed. For instance, if I

  want to get some idea of what’s doing at the Sterility Day parade in Trafalgar

  Square—” he touched a small blue button in a broad console on his desk, and up

  out of the darkness one of the golden specks came zooming, halting in midair

  just beyond the place where the wall of Fredericks’ office had been. “What we

  have here,” Fredericks explained, “is the slave-servo counterpart of the

  hovereye camera that’s hanging above that parade right now. I simply induce an

  output—here, we get a visual”—Macy saw gesticulating women waving banners and

  setting off flares—“and here we get the audio.” Raucous screams, the chanting of

  slogans.

  Macy hadn’t heard of Sterility Day before. The world becomes terribly strange

  when you spend four years out of circulation.

  “If we want any of this for the next newscast, you see, we just pump the signal

  into a recorder and set it up for editing—and meanwhile the hovereye is still up

  there, soaking it all in, relaying on demand. Gathering the news is no frigging

  chore at all when you have ten thousand of these lovely little motherfuckers

  working for you all over the place.” A nervous giggle. “Sometimes our language

  gets a little rough around here. You stop noticing it after a while.” One

  doesn’t speak crude Anglo-Saxon to a man who wears the badge of his trauma on

  his lapel, is that it?

  Fredericks had him by the arm. “Time to meet your new colleagues,” he was

  saying. “I want to fill you in completely. You’re going to love it working

  here.”

  Out of the office. The rear wall mysteriously restoring itself as they leave,

  the dark well of the hovereyes vanishing once more. Down the humid fallopian

  passageways. Doors opening. Neat, well-groomed executives everywhere, all of

  them getting up to greet him. Some of them speaking exceptionally loudly and

  clearly, as if they thought a man who had had his troubles might find it

  difficult to understand what they said. Long-legged girls flashing the promise

  of ecstasy. Some of them looking a trifle scared; maybe they were hip to the

  evil deeds of his former self. Macy was aware of what crimes the previous user

  of his body had committed, and sometimes they scared him a little, too.

  “In here,” Fredericks said. Into a bright, gaudy room, twice the size of

  Fredericks’ office. “I’d like you to meet the chief of daytime news, Paul. One

  hell of a guy. Harold Griswold, and he’s some beautiful son of a bitch. Harold,

  here’s our new man, Paul Macy. Number six on the late news. Bercovici told you

  the story, right? Right. He’s going to fit in here perfectly.”

  Griswold stood up, a slow and complex process, and smiled. Macy smiled. His

  facial muscles were beginning to ache from all the smiling he had done in the

  last hour and a half. One doesn’t smile much at a Rehab Center. He shook the

  hand of the chief of daytime news. Griswold was implausibly tall, slabjawed,

  perhaps fifty years old, obviously a man of great prestige; he reminded Macy

  somehow of George Washington. He wore a bright-blue tank suit, an earwatch, and

  an elaborate breastplate of several kinds of exotic polished woods. His office

  was like a museum annex, with works of art everywhere: shaped paintings,

  crystallines, talk-spikes, programmed resonances. A million-dollar collection.

  In the corner, to the right of Griswold’s kidney-shaped desk, stood a striking

  psychosculpture, a figure of an old woman. Macy, who had been glancing from

  piece to piece by way of an implied compliment to Griswold, lurched forward at

  the sight of the last work, coughed, grabbed the edge of the desk to steady

  himself. He felt as though he had been clubbed at the back of the neck.

  Instantly friendly hands clutched at him. “Are you all right? What’s the

  trouble, fella?” Macy fought off dizziness. He straightened and shook himself

  free of the propping hands.

  “I don’t know what hit me,” he muttered. “Just as I looked at that sculpture in

  the corner—”

  “The Hamlin over there?” Griswold asked. “One of my favorites. A gift from my

  first wife, ten years back, when Hamlin was still an unknown—”

  “If you don’t mind—some cold water—”

  Two gulps. Another cup. Three gulps. Carefully averting his eyes from the figure

  of the old woman. The Hamlin over there. The sleek smooth network men frowning

  at him, then erasing the frowns the instant he noticed. Everyone so solicitous.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “You know, it’s only my first day on the outside. The

  strain, the tension.”

  “Of course. The tension.” Griswold.

  “The strain. We understand.” Fredericks.

  He forced himself to look at the psychosculpture. The Hamlin over there. An

  excellent piece of work. Poignance; pathos; a sense of the tragedy of aging, a

  sense of the heroism of defying time. A soft hum coming from its resonators,

  subtly coloring the mood it was designed to stimulate. The Hamlin over there.

  Macy said, “That’sNathaniel Hamlin who did it?”

  “Right,” Griswold said. “God only knows what it’s worth now. On account of

  Hamlin’s tragic fate. Not that I have the slightest interest in selling, but of

  course when an artist dies young his work skyrockets amazingly in value.”

  He didn’t know, then. He couldn’t just be pretending. And he couldn’t be that

  dumb. Either Bercovici hadn’t told him, or he’d been told and hadn’t cared

  enough to remember. That was interesting. Macy was shaken, though, by the

  intensity of his reaction to the unexpected sight of the sculpture. They hadn’t

  warned him at the Rehab Center that such things might happen. He made a mental

  note to ask about it when he went back next week for his first session of

  outpatient post-therapy therapy. And a mental note, also, to stay out of

  Griswold’s office as much as possible.

  The sculpture was still exerting an effect on him. He felt an undertow, the

  sucking of a subcerebral ocean in his mind. Hollow echoing sounds of surf from

  far below. A hammering against the threshold of consciousness. The Hamlin over

  there. That’sNathaniel Hamlin who did it? On account of his tragic fate. Jesus.

  Jesus. A bad attack of wobbly knees. Sweaty forehead. Paroxysms of confusion.

  Going to collapse, going to fall down in a screaming fit, going to vomit all

  over Harold Griswold’s nappy green electronic carpet. Unless you regain control

  fast. He turned apologetically to Stilton Fredericks and said in a thick furry

  voice, “It’s more upsetting than I thought. You’d better get me out of here

  fast.”

  Fredericks took his arm. A firm grasp. To Griswold: “I’ll explain afterward.”

  Propelling Macy urgently toward the door. Stumbling feet. Head swaying on neck.

  Jesus. Outside the office, finally.

  The moment of intolerableangst ebbing.

  “I feel much better now,” Macy murmured.

  “Can I get you a pill?”

  “No. No. Nothing.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t look all right.”

  “It’ll pass. It shook me up more than I expected. Listen, Fredericks—Stilton—I

  don’t want you to think that I’m fragile, or anything, but you know I’ve just

  been released from the Rehab Center, and for the first few days—”

  “It’s perfectly natural,” said Fredericks. A comradely pat on the shoulder. “We

  understand the problem. We can make allowances. This was my fault, anyway. I

  should have checked things out before I brought you in there. He’s got so many

  works of art in his office, though—”

  “Sure. How could you have known?”

  “I should have checked anyway. Now that I see the difficulty, I’ll check the

  whole building. I simply didn’t realize that it would upset you so much to come

  face to face with one of your own sculptures.”

  “Not mine,” Macy said, shaking his head emphatically. “Not mine.”

  TWO

  DAYTIME it wasn’t so bad. He built a cozy routine for himself and lived within

  it, just as they had advised him at the Center to do. The Rehab people had found

  him a little apartment near the upper tip of Old Manhattan, five minutes from

  the network office by short-hop tube, forty minutes if he walked; he hadn’t

  wanted to risk exposing himself to the chaotic rush-hour environment of the

  tubes too soon, and so at first he went to work on foot. The exercise was good

  for him, and he had nothing better to do with his time anyway. But from the

  fourth day on he took the tube. The jostling and the screeching of wheels turned

  out not to bother him as much as he feared it might, and, packed belly to rump

  in the cars, he didn’t have to worry about people staring at him or his Rehab

  badge.

  At work he slipped easily and comfortably into the network’s news-broadcast

  operation. He had had six months of vocational training at the Center, and so he

  came to his new career already skilled in voice projection, sincerity dynamics,

  makeup technique, and other such things; he needed only to learn the details of

  the network’s daily practice, the authority levels and flow patterns and such.

  Everybody was kind to him, although after the first few days most of them

  dropped the maddening exaggerated courtesy that made him feel like such a

  cripple. They showed him what to do, they covered his blunders, they responded

  patiently and good-humoredly to his questions.

  In the beginning Fredericks didn’t let him do any actual broadcasting, just

  dummy off-the-air runs under simulated studio circumstances. Instead he was put

  to work reading scripts aloud for the timing, and monitoring air checks of the

  other broadcasters. But he did so well at the dummy runs that by the fifth day

  they were putting him on the late news to do ninety-second capsule reports in

  what they called the mosaic-texture section, in which a bunch of broadcasters

  offered quick bouncy segments of the news in swift succession. Fredericks told

  him that in another few weeks he’d be allowed to handle full-scale stories, even

  to select his own accompanying hovereye coverage. So all went well

  professionally.

  The nights were something else.

  Lonely, for one thing.You’d be wisest to avoid sexual liaisons, at least at the

  outset, the Center therapists had suggested.They could be disturbing during the

  initial two or three weeks of adjustment. He paid heed. He refrained from

  bringing any of the network girls home with him, though plenty of them made it

  clear that they were available. Just ask, honey. At night he sat alone in the

  modest apartment. Watching a lot of holovision. Pretending that it was important

  to his career to study how the various networks handled the news. In truth he

  simply wanted the companionship of the bright screen and the loud audio; he left

  it on even when he wasn’t watching anything.

  He didn’t go out in the evenings. A matter of economy, he told himself.

  Supposedly he had been a wealthy man in his former life, or at least pretty

  damned prosperous. A successful artist, work in constant demand, prices going up

  at the gallery every year, that kind of thing. But his assets had been forfeit

  to the state. Most of his money had been used up by the costs of his therapy and

  the termination settlement awarded his wife. What little was left had gone into

  renting and furnishing his apartment. He was essentially a pauper until the

  network salary checks began coming in. But he knew that the real reason for

  staying home was fear. He wasn’t ready yet to explore the night world of this

  formidable city. He couldn’t go out there while his new self was still moist and

  malleable around the edges.

  Then there were the dreams.

  He hadn’t had nightmares at the Rehab Center. He had them now. Traumatic

  identity crises punctuated his sleep. He ran breathlessly down long gleaming

  ropy corridors, pursued by a man who wore his face. He stood by the shore of a

  viscous gray-green pool that bubbled and steamed and heaved, and a gnarled hairy

  claw reached up from its depths and groped for him. He tiptoed across a sea of

  quicksand, sinking deeper and deeper, and something underneath plucked at his

  toes. Pulling him under with a loud plop. A coven of monsters waiting down

  below. Teeth and green horns and yellow eyes. Often he woke up shrieking. And

  then lay awake, listening to something knocking on the inside of his skull. Let

  me out, let me out, let me out! Great gusts of wind blew through his brain. Vast

  snorting snores setting the medulla atremble. A slumbering giant, restless,

  cranky, trapped behind his forehead. Belching and farting within his head.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  Also the peculiar doubleness of self assailed him, the sensation of being

  enshrouded and entangled in the scraps and threads of his old identity, so that

  he momentarily was sucked back into it. I am Nat Hamlin. Married, successful.

  Psychosculptor. This is my face. These are my hands. Why am I in this unfamiliar

  little apartment? No. No. I am Paul Macy. I used to be. Formerly was. In another