around with me. You know who I am and you know how good I am. I’ve had a rough

  time and I need money, and anyway at this stage of my career it’s crazy for me

  to be cutting my dealer in for thirty. Give me a contract and advance me ten

  thousand so I can set up a studio, and let’s not crap around any more.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “There are two dozen dealers within five blocks of here.”

  “Who would jump at the chance of taking on somebody named Paul Macy, I suppose?”

  “They’d know who I really was.”

  “Would they? The Rehab process is supposed to be foolproof. Suppose this is all

  a clever hoax? Suppose youare Paul Macy, and somebody’s coached you on how to

  sound like Nat Hamlin, and you’re just trying to sweat some quick cash out of

  me?”

  “Test me. Ask me anything about Hamlin’s life.” Macy sensed Hamlin’s distress

  now. Adrenalin flooding. Pores opening. Genitals contracting.

  “I don’t play guessing games,” said Gargan. Idly he punched a button; the room

  tilted the other way. Hamlin’s intestine lolled. The dealer said, “You’ve got no

  leverage, friend. No reputable dealer would trust a Rehab reconstruct who says

  he’s still got the skills of his old self. So the take-it-or-leave-it is on my

  side. I’ll sign you, Paul, because I’m sentimental and I love you, loved you in

  the old days, anyway, and I’ll give you some money to start you up again. But I

  won’t be blackjacked. Twenty-five percent and nothing lower.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Twenty-five.” A gargantuan yawn. “You’re starting to bore me, Paul.”

  “Don’t get snotty. Remember who you’re talking to, what kind of talent you’ve

  got sitting next to you here. A year from now you’ll regret having muscled me.

  Twenty percent, Gargantua.”

  “Twenty-five.”

  Now Hamlin was plainly upset. The swagger was gone; his ductless glands were

  working overtime. Macy, who had not ceased to probe avenues of neural

  connections, thought he had found a good one and that this might be a suitable

  moment for making a try at retaking the body. He pressed hard. Lunged. Claws

  outstretched, attacking the cerebral switchboard. But no go. Hamlin brushed him

  away as though he were a mosquito and said aloud, “Let’s split the difference.

  Twenty-two and a half and I’m yours.”

  An hour’s smooth drive in a rented car brought Hamlin to his old Connecticut

  estate. The car did its best to cope with Hamlin’s surprising ineptness as a

  driver. He handled the steering-stick crudely, overpushing it, frequently trying

  to override the car’s gyroscopic mind, constantly messing up the delicate

  homeostasis that kept the vehicle in its proper lane. Macy, from his

  vantage-point within, monitored Hamlin’s performance with mixed feelings.

  Obviously Hamlin, four or five years away from driving, had lost whatever skill

  at it he once had had, and that was worrying him, for it had occurred to him

  that in his absence he might have lost other skills also. Therefore he was

  working himself into a singleminded frenzy of concentration, gripping the stick

  in sweaty palm and trying to psych himself into complete mastery over the car.

  Macy knew he could play on Hamlin’s fears, intensifying his distress.You think

  you’ve come back to life, Nat, but nothing came back except your ego and your

  dirty mouth. You’ve lost your manual skills. You couldn’t cut paper dolls now,

  let alone turn out museum masterpieces. And so on. Undermining Hamlin’s

  self-confidence, attacking his main justification for having expelled his

  reconstruct. Weakening his grip on the body’s central nervous system, setting

  him up for a push.You think you’re still a great artist? Jesus, you don’t even

  know how to drive! The Rehab Center smashed you to bits, Nat, and you won’t ever

  be whole again. And then, getting Hamlin fuddled and panicky, he could make a

  try for a takeover.

  The process was already well under way. The fumes of Hamlin’s tensions drifted

  through Macy’s interior holdfast. The oily smell of fear and doubt. Go on, give

  him a shove, he’s vulnerable now. But the scheme was futile, Macy knew. He

  hadn’t yet found the handles with which he could flip Hamlin out of his dominant

  position. Even if he had, he wouldn’t dare attempt a takeover at 120 miles an

  hour; no matter how good this car’s homeostasis was supposed to be, it wasn’t

  programmed for self-drive, and while he and Hamlin struggled for control the

  auto might go over the edge of the embankment, or up a wall, or into the

  oncoming flow, in some wild uncorrected orgy of positive feedback.

  So Macy sat passive while Hamlin shakily negotiated the highway and more capably

  guided the car up the winding leafy country lanes to the place where he once had

  lived. Parking the car perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Leaving the road,

  walking cautiously through the woods. Heartbreaking summeriness here. The

  foliage so green and new. Bright yellow and white flowers. Chipmunks and

  squirrels. Clumps of frondy ferns. They had held back the urban tide here, the

  surging sea of concrete and pollution, the onslaught of extinctions. An outpost

  of natural life, maintained for the very rich.

  And there, beyond that blinding white stand of stunning birches, the house.

  Lofty walls of high-piled gray-brown boulders set in ancient gray mortar.

  Leaded-glass windows agleam in the noonlight. Hamlin’s heart leaping and

  bouncing. Old memories in an agitated dance. Look, look there. The pond, the

  creek, the pool. Exactly as Lissa had described it, exactly as Macy had seen it

  through the lens of Hamlin’s reminiscing mind. And the studio annex. Where so

  many miracles were worked.

  —Why did you come here?

  A pilgrimage. A sentimental journey.

  —It’s somebody else’s house now.

  Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Macy?

  —I have your welfare at heart. You can’t just prowl around here. It may be

  patrolled by dogs. Scanners everywhere. You know what’ll happen to you if you’re

  caught?

  Hamlin didn’t reply. He edged toward the studio, and Macy picked up an inchoate

  scheme for forcing a window and getting inside. Hamlin seemed to expect to find

  his workshop intact, all the elaborate psychosculpting apparatus still sitting

  where he had left it. Folly. The studio was probably some blithery suburbanite

  matron’s greenhouse now. Hamlin continued to slink through the copse bordering

  the creek. Let him try, let him just try. The alarm will go off and the place

  will be full of cops in ten minutes. A frantic chase through the woods.

  Snub-nosed shiny cyber-hounds snuffling on silent treads over last year’s fallen

  leaves, homing in on the fleeing man’s telltale thermals. The fugitive

  encircled, entrapped, seized. Identified as Paul Macy, Rehab reconstruct, but

  the police, checking with Gomez & Co., would swiftly discover that Macy had been

  plagued by a resurgence of his prior identity. And then. Swift action. Wham!

  Needles in his arm. Hamlin reamed out a second time.

  What about his threat to destroy their shared body in case of trouble? No, Macy

  thought, he can’t do it, not while he’s up there running the conscious brain. A

  man can’t simply shut off his own heartbeat by willing it. He could when he was

  down here where I am, plugged into all the neural connections, but he can’t do

  it now. So Hamlin will die a second time, and the body will survive. For me to

  have. Go on, Nat, creep and creep and creep, bust into your studio, trip the

  alarm, summon the hounds, start me on the road back to independent life. Yes.

  I’ll be so very grateful.

  What’s this rising from the pool, though? Blithery suburban matron herself!

  Venus on the half shell. Woman in her middle forties, tall, not exactly plump

  but well endowed, dark hair, long arching waist, thickish thighs, amiable

  vacuous face. Her snatch chastely shielded by a skimpy cache-sexe; breasts bare,

  full, probably not as high as they used to be. Staring in surprise at Hamlin

  advancing toward her.

  Quick adrenal response from Hamlin, too. Pupils dilated, heartbeat accelerated,

  prick stiffening. No wonder he’s excited. The quintessential rape situation.

  Daytime, suburbs, woman alone, scantily clad, man emerges out of woods. Fling

  her down, hand over mouth, spread the thighs, give her the ram.Ooom. Load the

  box and prance away. Another notch carved in your cock.

  —Ahaha! Still at it. Your old tricks.

  Don’t bother me,Hamlin snapped. Making an effort, recovering his sexual

  equilibrium, his social poise. Giving her a sexosocial smile and a little

  genteel nod. Everything under control. “I hope I didn’t startle you, ma’am.” The

  voice unctuous.

  “Not fatally.” Her eyes fluttering from his face to the Rehab badge and back to

  face. A little confused but not alarmed. She didn’t try to cover her breasts

  despite the potential provocativeness of the situation. The cheerful poise of

  the upper crust. “Forgive me if I’m making a terrible mistake, but aren’t

  you—weren’t you—”

  “Nat Hamlin, yes. Who used to live here. But my name is Paul Macy now.”

  —Liar!

  “I recognized you at once. How pleasant of you to visit us!” Obviously unaware

  of the impropriety of a reconstruct’s visiting his earlier self’s old haunts. Or

  not caring. “Lynn Bryson, by the way. We’ve been here two years now. My husband

  is a helix surgeon. Shall I get you a drink, Mr. ah Macy? Or something to

  smoke?”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Bryson. You bought the place from Hamlin’s ah widow?”

  “From Mrs. Hamlin, yes. Such a fascinating woman! Naturally she didn’t care to

  stay here any longer, with such terrible memories on all sides. We struck up a

  wonderful friendship during the time when the house was changing hands.”

  “I’ve heard many fine things about her,” Hamlin said. “Of course I have no

  recollection of her. You understand.”

  “Of course.”

  “Hamlin’s past is a closed book to me. But you understand I have a certain

  natural curiosity about the people and places of his life. As if he were, in a

  sense, a famous ancestor of mine, and I felt I should know more about him.”

  “Of course.”

  “Does Mrs. Hamlin still live in this area?”

  “Oh, no, she’s in Westchester now. Bedford City, I believe.”

  “Remarried?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  The knife turning in Hamlin’s gut.

  “You happen to know her new husband’s name?” Very carefully, concealing all

  traces of tension.

  “I could find it,” the woman said. “A Jewish name. Klein, Schmidt, Katz,

  something like that, a short word, Germanic. A person in the theater, a producer

  maybe, a very fine man.” Her smile grew broader. Her eyes appraised Hamlin’s

  body with complacent sensuality. As if she wouldn’t mind some pronging. Her

  vicarious way of attaining intimacy with the departed great artist. She should

  only know. Off with that bit of plastic about her waist, down on the grass, the

  white fleshy thighs parting.Ooom. “Won’t you come with me?” she said airily. “I

  have it in the house. And you’ll want to see the house, anyway. The studio. Do

  you know, we’ve kept Mr. Hamlin’s studio exactly as it was when he—before

  he—when his troubles started—”

  “You have?” A wild interior leap. Excited. “Everything still intact?”

  “Mrs. Hamlin didn’t want any of his things, so they came to us with the house.

  And we thought, well, the way they have Rembrandt’s house on display in

  Amsterdam, or the house of Rubens in what is it Antwerp, so we would keep

  Nathaniel Hamlin’s studio intact here, not for public display of course, but

  simply as a kind of shrine, a memorial, and in case some scholar wished to see

  it, some great admirer of Hamlin, well, we would make it accessible. And then of

  course future generations. Won’t you come with me?” Smiling, turning, striding

  across the barbered lawn. Meaty buttocks waggle waggle waggle. Hamlin, sweating,

  adrenalized, following. The familiar old stone house. The squat spacious annex.

  A cheery wave of her hand. “There’s an entrance to the studio on the far side

  of—” Hamlin was already on his way around there. “Oh, I see you know that.” But

  how is it that he knows it? No indication that she suspects anything. “I’ll look

  for Mrs. Hamlin’s new name, and her address too, I suppose, and I’ll meet you in

  a couple of minutes in the—”

  Studio. Exactly as be had left it. To the left of the door, the big rectangular

  window. Floods of light. Facing the window, the posing dais with the microphones

  and scanners and sensors still in place and even his last chalkmarks still on

  the floor. On the right-hand wall his command console, levers and knobs and

  studs and dials that would surely have perplexed Rembrandt or Rubens or for that

  matter Leonardo da Vinci. The headphones. The ionization controller. The

  unjacked connectors. The datascreen. The light-pen. The sonic generator. Such a

  tangle of apparatus. In back, the other little room, the annex of the annex,

  more things visible, coils of wire, metal struts, mounds of modeling clay, the

  big electropantograph, the photomultiplier, the image intensifier, and other

  things which Hamlin did not seem to recognize. Hamlin wandered numbly among it

  all. Macy picked up his somber thoughts. The artist was frightened, even

  appalled, by the complexity of the studio. Trying to adjust to the idea that he

  had once used all this stuff by second nature. What was this thing for? And

  this? And this? Shit, how does it all work? I can’t remember a thing.

  —Rehab wrecked you, Nat, more than you realize.

  Shut your hole. I could pick all this up again in three hours.A note of false

  bravado, though. Powerful currents of uncertainty coming from him. Hamlin broke

  off a chunk of modeling clay and began to knead it. Stiff, after all this time.

  The clay. And he was too. The fingers unresponsive. Let’s sculpt Mrs. Bryson.

  Here, we roll a long tube of clay like so, and we. No. Instantly the proportions

  were awry. Hamlin nibbled his lip. Correcting his intuitive beginning. She’s

  tall, yes, and wide through the hips, and we’ll need some clay here for the

  boobs.

  —Give up, Nat, you don’t have it any more.

  Piss off, Macy. What do you know?

  Yet Hamlin was unable to conceal the extent of his uneasiness from his

  passenger. He was fumbling with the clay, mangling it, blundering at this

  elementary task of modeling, straining to get the image in his mind transferred

  to the lump in his hands. In that tense moment Macy made new connections and for

  the first time gained some control over Hamlin’s central nervous system.Plink.

  Strumming the neurons. Hamlin’s elbow jerked. The tube of clay bent double at

  the sudden accidental convulsion.Plink. Another twitch. Hamlin shouting silently

  at him now, bellowing in rage. Macy was enjoying this. He continued to tug at

  Hamlin’s synapses while the artist trembled and shivered in mounting wrath and

  frustration. The half-shaped model of Mrs. Bryson a ruin. Hamlin glancing around

  nervously at his own equipment, so alien to him, so terrifying. Telling himself

  that in four, four and a half years it was possible for a person to forget all

  sorts of superficial mechanical things, but that you never lost the real talent,

  the basic underlying inborn gift, the set of perceptions and insights that is

  the real material to which the artist applies his learned craftsmanship.

  —Go on, Nat, keep saying it, you may even start to believe it soon.

  Let me alone. Let me alone. I could learn all this machinery again in half a

  day!

  —Sure you could, sweetheart. Who ever doubted it?

  Giving Hamlin another twong in the medulla, a blork in the autonomic, a whonk in

  the limbic. Yes! Really learning my way around in here, now! Just as he did in

  me. The shoe on the other cortex, though. I’ll get him. I’ll get him good.

  Hamlin was doing a manic dance, twitching around the room as Macy toyed with

  him. He couldn’t seem to get himself together enough to deliver a retaliatory

  shot; it was as if the vibrations emanated by all the psychosculpting apparatus

  kept him dizzy and off balance. Keep hammering away, Macy told himself. This may

  be your chance to get back on top. Twong and twong and twong! Arms whipping

  about wildly. Knees jerking. I think I could make him crap in his undies now. A

  nice psychological point to score, but why shit things up for myself in case I

  take over?

  And then Hamlin began to fight back. Coldly, furiously, ramming Macy down into