“The bug itself?” Charlie demanded. “Or just the instructions for how to tailor it?”

  “Just the instructions—an edible vector, gastro-resistant. It was the fastest way and she was really pissed off, she wanted it fast, and she said her people would take less time to—”

  “Thank God,” Charlie said. “Then we still have a chance. Does she want to see you again?”

  “Tomorrow. For lunch at Obelisco. For lunchV Roddy was almost in tears, and resisting them mightily. “She’ll kill me with the bug I gave her! But I’ll have to go! If I don’t she’ll have me hunted down and they’ll throw me in jail!”

  ’ ‘No one’s going to throw you in jail. She’s not Net Force people, whoever she is.”

  “Then whoever she works for will just hunt me down and kill me!”

  “That does seem more likely,” Mark admitted. “If I’d given them what you’d given them, Vd kill me too. The fewer people know where this came from, the better.”

  Roddy looked panic-stricken, and utterly wretched. Maj felt for him. At the same time … she found herself getting a horrible idea, a wonderful, horrible idea … and she turned to Charlie, her mouth open to start telling him about it, and saw that she didn’t have to. The same idea was already alight in his eyes.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “Oooh, remind me never to get you mad at me.”

  “It’s mutual,” Maj said, thinking of the Muffin, and of what might have happened to her, which these people would not have cared about in the slightest, should there have been some kind of accident and the “internal” version of the plague turned out to be contagious after all. “Roddy, you have to go have lunch with her.”

  ’ ‘She y ll kill me!”

  “She’ll try .. . and you know how. But we can have a little surprise waiting for her. Look—you’re not alone on this one. Here’s what you do.”

  The explanations took surprisingly little time. Maj was rather shocked to see how quickly the gotcha expression came back to Roddy’s face .. . but this time she thought he might have had reason.

  “Can you do it?” Mark said. “Are you sure? Because if you can’t, the whole thing falls to pieces. We’re going to be depending on you.”

  Roddy stared at him, as if hearing a phrase for the first time. “I can do it,” he said rather hoarsely.

  “Okay. Then get yourself out of here. Enjoy that lunch. I hear Michelin has been getting ready to give the place its first rosette. And afterwards, call the number I gave you right away.”

  Roddy nodded, looking like someone who’d been through too much in too short a time. He started to walk away into the darkness … then paused.

  “Why are you doing this for me when I did what I did to you?” he said, almost inaudibly.

  The question that won’t go away, Maj thought. Has the simple tradition of doing good back even when someone tries to screw you over gone away so completely from the world? But maybe it had. All the better reason to bring it back, then: a “golden oldie,” as her brother would call it. She had had to go look that one up when Rick last used it.

  Mark and Charlie stood mute for the moment. “Just go on,” Maj said finally. “Roddy .. . after all this sorts itself out, I want to talk to you about simming. A lot. But I really don’t much want to talk to you right now at all, so I would consider it a courtesy if you would just go the frack away. We’ll see you tomorrow. You know when.”

  Roddy gave her a look that Maj couldn’t fathom in the slightest. Then he was gone.

  The shapes in the shadows hurried away, dissolving in the darkness.

  Mark looked after Roddy for a moment. ‘ ‘Really mixed-up guy,” he said. “But there’s something there to save, I think. I hope.”

  “Yeah, well,” Maj said. “And what about usl Winters is going to be really flamed that we didn’t tell him right away when all this started to heat up—even though there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in the Sahara he’d have believed us, it was so far out there. I almost wish we had brought him in—we may need some saving ourselves.”

  “Oh, come on, we didn’t have time,” said Mark. “When the pot boils over, what do you do? Run to tell somebody it’s boiling? Or take it off the stove yourself?” He shrugged, looked at the complicated programming construct that he was almost finished building, and sighed. “Meanwhile, we don’t need this after all. At least not for its original purpose. However, regarding this Rachel person …”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “And those genetically altered coli bugs. They’re still out there … and when they get in here, if they’re not dealt with right away, there’s going to be trouble.”

  “So,” Mark said, ambling over to look at the structure Charlie had been building, “are they going to be dealt with?”

  “Oh, conclusively,” Charlie said with a rather feral grin. “I’m gonna see to that. Meanwhile …” He looked at them both. “You two are both about to be pretty sick. Before we get out of here, you’d better let me give the paramedics a call so I can speak medical to them and let ‘em know what to expect when they pick you up.”

  “And what should we expect?” Mark said, looking rather dubious.

  “Among other things,” Charlie said, “I hope you liked what you had for breakfast, because you’re going to see it again. Repeatedly. And many other things you’ve eaten between childhood and now. Fortunately, there shouldn’t be too many other symptoms … which is just as well, because the ones you do have are going to give you enough to think about.”

  Maj groaned. “How long are we going to be sick?” “Until tomorrow,” Charlie said. “The treatment isn’t going to be difficult, and you’ll at least be able to go virtual again, though they’re not going to let you out of bed. But if I were you, when the ambulances arrive, get really sick. Look bad” — and he grinned—“for the cameras.”

  It seemed part of Charlie’s nature that just about everything he said had an air of absolute authenticity, of something that was real, or about to be that way. Almost as soon as she went non-virtual, and frequently over the next twelve hours, Maj had reason to curse that fact again and again, for it all came about exactly as he had predicted.

  She spent those twelve hours throwing up almost nonstop. Maj did not have to try to look bad for any cameras. It came more than naturally for her. As the paramedics were carrying her out of her house to the medevac unit, she put in her bid to qualify for the preliminary rounds of the Eastern Division Projectile Vomiting Finals. In the hospital she had hoped she would at least get some sympathy, but by and large the nurses treated her with a casual and unconcerned compassion, which suggested that they had seen much better throwing up in their time, and that the sooner she got out of their way and left the bed for someone who really needed it, the better they would like it. The only consolation, Maj thought, was that the son of the director of Net Force was almost certainly getting the same treatment, if not worse.

  But it all seemed bad enough at her end. Almost as soon as she could spend more than five minutes without needing the bucket, her mother was sitting by her bedside, saying, “I talked to James Winters this morning, dear. Maj, I can’t believe you got involved in this without telling me!”

  She could do little at that point but moan. “Mom,” she said, “it all happened so fast. It was kind of like when a pot boils over on the stove. Do you run off to tell someone it’s boiling, or do you turn it off yourself?”

  Her mother sighed, looking surprisingly resigned for some reason Maj couldn’t work out. “Never mind, honey,” she said. “Your father said something similar, God knows why. I would think you’re an experiment in male parthenogenesis, if I didn’t know better.” She started going through the large beat-up canvas shopping bag that she used as a purse on “normal” days, if there were any such things around their household. “Ricky says hello, and he wants to know why he’s started to meet people who say they didn’t know he was into simming.”

  “Oh, jeez,” Maj said, having forgotten completely about masquerading as her brother in Roddy’s sim. “Uh, I’ll explain it to him later.”

  “Please do. And the Muffin sent you this.” Her mother extracted a slightly crumpled drawing of something winged, which after a little study Maj was able to make out as an Archaeopteryx. Writ large at the top of it, slightly shakily, were the words I lov you mady, and under these, I told yu ISA it.

  Maj smiled. “Is she okay?”

  “She’s jealous. She wants to go for a ride in the noisy flyer too, she says.”

  There was a knock on the door frame, and James Winters stuck his head around it. “Busy?”

  “I’m not throwing up at the moment,” Maj said, “if it’s the same thing.”

  “You’ll keep her company, Mr. Winters, will you?” said Maj’s mother. “I have to go off to a PTA thing, and they’re all going to think I’m caught in traffic somewhere.” Maj’s mother bent over her and smooched her on the forehead. “I’ll see you afterwards, honey.”

  Her mom headed out. Winters sat down in the vacated chair and looked around him. “All the requisites of a comfortable stay, I see.”

  “The bucket,” Maj said, “the inspiring view of the parking lot, the virt-hookup, which for some reason won’t activate. Yes, it’s all here.”

  “I wanted a chance to talk to you first,” Winters said. “And also, you should take a few hours, at least, to recoup your strength before you dive straight back into virtuality.” He sat back, folding his arms and looking around him.

  “How’s Mark?” Maj said.

  “About the same as you.”

  “Ick,” Maj said with feeling.

  “Oh, he won’t be that way for long,” said Winters. “Mark is a resilient type. And he’s feeling pleased with himself, which is Mark’s normal state of mind.”

  Maj smiled very slightly.

  “And you?” Winters said. “Are you feeling pleased with yourself?”

  “Should I be?” Maj said.

  “Sneaky,” said Winters. “If you’re trying to finagle me into giving you a positive evaluation, I might have to agree that one might be forthcoming, with some extenuating circumstances.”

  Maj kept her mouth shut and tried to work out whether this was a compliment.

  Winters gave her a wry look after a moment. “You found a nasty situation and you investigated it as covertly as you could,” he said. “When it started to blow up in your face, you thought the situation through and acted decisively. And when it got dangerous, you took the danger where the genuinely committed take it,” Winters said. “On yourselves: in your own bodies. That kind of commitment requires that it be honored at the moment, regardless of what the future may hold.”

  “Uh.” Maj was not sure about the phrasing on that last part. “But how did you—I mean—”

  “Mark Gridley,” said Winters, “being his father’s son and therefore a cautious young cuss as regards documentation, routinely records everything he does—all his virtual experience— back to his own workspace. God only knows what his data storage costs per month. So we’ve seen everything you did and said in Roddy’s workspace, and by and large I think you three acted responsibly … minus a couple of lapses which I will discuss with you and Mark and Charlie at some time when two out of the three of you are able to concentrate profitably on something besides the bottom of an emesis basin.”

  He looked rather severe. Maj gulped, trying hard not to think about the emesis basin, and wondered what she had said or done that would be construed as “lapses.”

  “Meanwhile,” Winters continued, glancing out the window at an ambulance coming in for a landing, ”we’ll be analyzing your analysis of the ‘mirroring’ structure for some time to see how closely it matches our own, as ours unfolds. But what a sweet piece of business this is all going to turn out to be, after the dust settles. L’Officier has genuinely come up with something major here.”

  “You’re not going to throw him in jail or anything, are you?” Maj said.

  Winters regarded her speculatively. “Your father told me you were going to say something like that,” he said. “He says you describe this behavior as ‘not being able to stay mad at anybody.’ A shame we can’t find a way to spread that virtually as easily as this bug could have been spread.”

  “Where do you know Dad from?” Maj said.

  Winters got an amused look. ‘ ‘Probably you should ask him about that. He may tell you. But if he doesn’t, you should just assume that some old connections may be better left unadver-tised.”

  Maj blinked at that. Her father … something weird and secret? The unreconstructed ivory-tower academic? “Wait a minute, what do you—”

  “Meanwhile,” Winters said, apparently not noticing the interruption, “as regards Roddy, some of his treatment will depend on how fully he cooperates with us, naturally. But I don’t see any great problems. For one thing, he is being very cooperative. Apparently you three explained matters to him in terms he understood exactly.”

  Maj began to wonder which had been more perfect: Roddy’s understanding of the situation’s ethics, or of Mark Gridley and the art of “pulping.”

  “And for another thing,” Winter said, “it would be nuts to either alienate him, or leave him in a situation where some other opportunistic group can get their hands on him and force him to do something similar. The news is out now that a technique of virtual infection may exist. That we’re going to do everything we can to make it look like a false rumor won’t help. The genie’s out of the bottle, and rumors like this tend to start people thinking.” Winters sighed. “It’s better to keep Roddy under our eye, where we can protect him and his mother … and at the same time help him see what other little wonders he might come up with, given a free rein and the occasional suggestion. There’s no denying that he’s already made a tremendous contribution to science, even if he did it under questionable circumstances.”

  “What are you going to do about Rachel?” Maj said.

  Winters smiled at that, and the expression was genuinely wintry. “It’s more like what have you already done about her, isn’t it?”

  “Uh, well…”

  “Seems like a waste of energy to deconstruct an intervention that’s in place already and so far along,” Winters said. “And so elegantly nasty. Jeez, you and Charlie should be kept far away from each other in future. Like sodium and water. But I think what’s going to be done is what you had planned.”

  Maj grinned.

  “That’s exactly what I meant,” Winters said, shaking his head in resignation. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world … and I wouldn’t ask you to either. It would hardly be fair to keep you out of the kill. When ‘Rachel’ goes in … we’ll flash you the word. There’s no reason you can’t be there virtually, after all.”

  Maj’s heart leapt. .

  “She’ll go in, all right,” Winters said. “The people who were covertly watching your house and the Gridley place got all the evidence anyone could have needed … and the people here who’ve been approached for information have been telling them the most horrible stories. The raging fevers, the convulsions, the whole buckets of—”

  Maj’s eyes abruptly went wide. She pitched hastily over toward the other side of the bed.

  “Sorry,” Winters said, “I’ll call you later, when you’re not otherwise occupied, and we’ll discuss your further career options. …”

  Upside down, her head pounding, through the tears and the terrible taste, Maj found that it was still possible to smile, no matter how raw the back of your throat was.

  Rachel got to lunch at Obelisco a little early. She greeted the maitre d’ with a twenty-dollar handshake, and expressed a desire for a table off to the side, in a quiet spot, as well as a couple of other requests. The table was immediately produced for her, and she sat down and let the waiter bring her a glass of a Grisons-bred blauer Burgunder wine, while she admired the sunny decor, the cheerful yellow napery, and golden sponge-stenciled walls, all decorated with coiling hop vines and flowers and wreaths of Graubuendner chiles. The wood-burning grill was full of vine-cutting coals. The steak was supposed to be excellent here, and she intended to find out, since this was on the expense account.

  Right on time came Roddy, looking nervous, but also cheerful at the smell that hit him as he came in the door. This was hardly unexpected. Rachel had discovered at their one other lunch that Roddy was a trencherman, one of those people who had had the clean-your-plate, don’t-you-know-children-are-starving-on-the-moon ethos beaten into them well past removing. That suited her purposes entirely.

  Roddy sat down, and they chatted cheerful nothings over the menu, made their choices, and talked more nothings until the appetizers arrived. Roddy was eager to pump her for information about what was going on, but Rachel had no intention of spoiling his appetite until it had done its job, so she refused charmingly to be drawn in, all through the appetizers of buendnerfleisch and capuns.

  Roddy, having had four glasses of soda water, as a function of his nervousness, now got up and headed off for the men’s room. This was. something Rachel had seen before. Immediately after that, as Rachel had set it up with the maitre dthe entrees arrived: for her, grilled tournedos of beef with polenta and aubergine salsa; for Roddy, shredded veal “geschnetzel-tes” in a cream sauce with morels, and Bernese fried-onion rosti. Perfect, Rachel thought, and having checked again to make sure Roddy was still out of sight, came out with the little thumb-sized bottle of detector liquid.

  It was another of life’s little ironies. One of the edible-drug companies, the same one that had made itself famous in the previous century for its shake-on “cures” for flatulence and lactose intolerance, had brought out a shake-on liquid that, when coming in contact with food, immediately fluoresced an unmistakable air-rescue orange if the surface of the food contained any of the “fatal” strains of E. coll Everybody used such “shakies” at the table, as commonly as they might use a small personal bottle of chili sauce or a low-sodium shake-on. Now Rachel carefully shook a little of the “detector” on the food on Roddy’s plate (and, palming it, into his drink), peered at the plate for a moment, saw no sign of change, and leaned back again, unconcerned. No one around her would have the slightest interest. No one around her would imagine that the shake-on itself contained E. coli of a very specialized kind.

 

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