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  Whispr didn’t understand. “There are a lot of dumb pre-adults in this world who have to deal with messed-up melds. What’s so special about one furball who tried to riffle your purse?”

  Her gaze lingered on the park a moment longer. Then she shrugged and turned away. “Probably nothing. It just struck me as kind of an odd coincidence. Like all the peacemakers being from the same age group. No older adults and no young children.”

  “Uh-huh. Next you’re gonna tell me they’ve all got slipshod repair melds with brain-bugged nanodevices that disappear when you try to look at them.”

  “No.” Turning, she started back the way they had come. She was not going to go through the park. They would find another way to their destination. “No, I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “That’s good, doc. Because I can only handle so much weirdness at one time, and I don’t need for you to go all weirdness on me, too. Not now. Not here. It would spoil my day. Last day in the big city, I’m not gonna take my leave from here without taking in a little entertainment.”

  Setting all preposterous hypotheses aside for the moment, she eyed him guardedly. “What kind of ‘little entertainment’?”

  “You don’t wanna know, Ingrid.”

  “I am an experienced physician, Whispr. I doubt there is anything of any entertainment value whatsoever that you could engage in that would unsettle me.”

  “Okay.” Leaning over and down, he whispered into her ear and then straightened. It was good that he did so.

  She would have slapped him hard if she could have reached his face.

  Even walking the long way around it didn’t take much time to find the rental service that had been recommended by the mobiad they had spoken to at the Table Mountain lift station. Could the human agent manning the front desk of such an outwardly modest enterprise satisfy their request for something small, efficient, inconspicuous, and tough? He could. After registering a deposit would it be possible to defer final payment until the vehicle was returned? It would. As they were traveling incognito in hopes of closing a highly sensitive business deal might they complete the necessary forms under a set of mutually agreeable aliases? A short pudgy Natural dark of mien but bright of eye, the agent responded with an accommodatingly conspiratorial nod. They should.

  Promising to return at the hour of opening tomorrow morning to pick up their chosen vehicle and declining to indicate where they were staying, his highly satisfied customers then departed. The agent watched them go.

  An odd couple, he mused. A Meld slender to the point of invisibility and a reticent but highly educated companion. He wondered what sort of secretive business such a patently mismatched couple were intent upon. For a brief moment he toyed with the idea of having them followed. Deciding that his curiosity had been overstimulated from spending far too much time watching locally made immersion vits, he put the notion aside. Merely because they were mismatched did not mean they were worthy of further interest or speculative expenditure on his part.

  Stimulation of another kind was much on Whispr’s mind when he and Ingrid returned to their new hotel after lazing their way through an early dinner. Centrally located, pleasantly modest, in fact not unlike the smaller one they had utilized in Simon’s Town, the mobiad-filled entry admitted them in response to a flick of the doctor’s room card and a qwikcheck of the guests’ retinas.

  Back in their eleventh-floor room he watched as she hung her jacket on a hallway coat hook and headed for the single bedroom. Though the convertible couch on which he had enjoyed a decent night’s sleep the previous night beckoned, he made no move toward it. The single large window was becoming more transparent as the sun descended behind it.

  His brain told him to stay where he was. Sometimes he listened to it, sometimes other organs raised their voices higher. He had repressed as long as he could. Fortified with a pocketful of the doctor’s subsist, he felt he had done so as long as he could.

  “I’m going out.”

  In the process of removing her shoes, she poked her head out of the bedroom. “Going out? But we just ate.”

  “Yeah. I told you earlier. I’m going for dessert.”

  As she emerged from the bedroom he noticed that she had one shoe on and one off. The humanizing asymmetry made her look almost approachable. Almost.

  “Can I come with you? I wouldn’t mind something with a little sugar in it.”

  “The kind of sweetness I’m going shopping for wouldn’t appeal to you.”

  She cocked her head sideways as she looked back at him. “How do you know what kind of dessert I like? We haven’t eaten together all that much.”

  “I’m not talking about eating. I alluded to this particular need earlier.” His tone was flat. “I’m going to find the red-light district.”

  “Oh.” She was clearly taken aback. “That. You’re right. I don’t think I do want to come.” She hesitated. “We’re leaving first thing in the morning and we’re safe and undiscovered here. Is this—diversion—really necessary?”

  “No,” he snapped. What was she now—his mother? “It’s not ‘necessary.’ What it is, is long overdue. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  Her expression froze. “Oh, wouldn’t you, now?”

  “No I wouldn’t, now.” He turned to go. “I’m not going to stay out all night. For one thing I know as well as you that we’re leaving early in the morning. For another, the allowance you give me isn’t nearly enough to buy a whole night of what I want.”

  She nodded curtly. The detached systematic physician was plainly warring with the inquisitive single woman. “If you don’t mind my asking—what are you going to ‘buy’?”

  He allowed himself a smile of misplaced self-satisfaction. “Don’t know. Don’t know this city. Don’t know what’s available, don’t know where, don’t know for how much. Right now I’m in smorgasbord mode. Don’t worry. I’ll fill you in with all the juicy details when I get back. If you’re still up.”

  Her tone turned as frosty as her look. “I was just mildly curious. I hardly require all the ‘juicy details.’ ”

  “That works for me.” He smiled thinly. “This way I won’t have to worry about remembering them.” Pivoting, he headed for the doorway. “Don’t wait up for me, doc. You need your beauty sleep.”

  A redness rose in her cheeks that threatened to match her newly maniped hair color. “What’s that supposed to …?”

  But he was already out the door.

  WHISPR, NÉ ARCHIBALD KOWALSKI, didn’t know much about history, didn’t know much about biology—but he did know at least one truism of supreme importance. Knew it because it had been imparted to him by the Mad Scholar of Iron Mountain Park. The Mad Scholar was reputed to be a Turkish-French exprofessor from the Atlanta branch of Kaust University who had undergone one too many delicate brain melds in eternal and ever-frustrated hopes of increasing the size of his integrated organic hard drive. The result was that his brain now cut in and out with the same unpredictability and irregularity as a small town’s electrical supply. Having lost his position, his reputation, and his family, he eked out a half-crazed existence wandering the park and the streets that bordered it on four sides by dispensing sagacious bon mots wrapped in varying degrees of accuracy. Sometimes he requested a donation in return for portions of this uncontrolled erudite spew, sometimes not.

  Having encountering the wild-eyed bearded old man on more than one sojourn of his own in that part of Greater Savannah, Whispr knew him for the harmless if loquacious crank that he was. On this particular occasion, however, the Mad Scholar of Twenty-third Street and Jackson had stepped sideways to block Whispr’s path. Grabbing the wary but self-possessed pedestrian by his nearly nonexistent shoulders, the unhinged learned one had gazed glaze-eyed into Whispr’s own.

  “D’you know, skinny Meldman, the secret of humankind? D’you know what it’s all about?”

  “No.” One of Whispr’s hands was drifting surreptitiously in the direction of the pocket in which r
esided the expandable stiletto he often carried. “But I get the feeling I’m about to find out.”

  “It’s simple, it’s so simple and so obvious!” The hands digging into Whispr’s clavicles were large but weak from lack of proper nutrition. “I’ll tell you, no charge because it’s so obvious, and you can do with it what you will.” The bearded one looked around and licked his lips, clearly on the verge of imparting the answer to some great mystery.

  “Sex and power. That’s all there is to it. That’s all there is to us. Those two and nothing more. Everything devolves from them. All else is meaningless—art, music, literature, science, history, mathematics, engineering—everything.” The fingers dug deeper into Whispr’s lean shoulders. “We’ve not advanced hardly at all from the chimps. The bonobos are better than us, if less literate. It’s all about the location of the larynx and a few fortunately mutated brain genes; otherwise the differences are moot.”

  “Your moot’s a hoot.” Whispr had firmly removed the other man’s hands and pushed him aside. “And your secret’s no secret. Everybody on the street knows that. Even a few high-lifers know that. Politicos certainly know that.”

  So saying he had left the baffled, befuddled, and bemused Mad Scholar in his wake; a deranged elderly ex-academic who through madness and the passage of time had finally come to a truth known instinctively to anyone who had spent the majority of their life on the street.

  Sex and power, Whispr mused as he strolled purposefully deeper into the inner intestines of Cape Town. As if that was some kind of great revelation. Like most of his friends he knew all about sex and power because like them he had never had more than a very little of either. From a lifetime of experienced observation he also knew that you could use the former to get the latter, and the latter to obtain the former. Of course everything else was incidental; nothing else was more than an accessory.

  The red-light district was easy enough for an experienced urban explorer like himself to find. A few questions pressed on passing citizens of increasingly deprived social status led inevitably to encounters with other citizens of increasingly depraved social interests. Cape Town being an international port of far greater importance than Savannah, its late-night “entertainment” district was of correspondingly greater extent and complexity. As he crossed the invisible yet clearly defined boundary between the genteel and the genital, moving with the easy edgy grace of a nervous cricket in search of fresh offal, it would have been apparent to anyone tracking his progress that here was someone who was operating in familiarly dissolute surroundings.

  Surroundings in which, he reflected, the good doctor Seastrom would have stood out like red licorice in a bowl of salted nuts.

  The bowl of nuts flowing around him took the form of hawkers, barkers, sales folk, and a plethora of shockingly uncensored mobiads whose franchise was restricted to the district. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Cape Town there was little in the way of sexual variation that was not on offer. Most of it was accepted, or endured, or otherwise legalized, though no matter how broadly statutes were written or deviances from the social norm tolerated there was always a new perversion or a variation on an old one that was sufficiently shocking even to the contemporary mind’s eye to get itself banned.

  These too were, of course, also unashamedly on offer.

  Though there was much for the lonely to avail themselves of via the box, science had not succeeded in finding an electronically generated substitute for actual physical human contact. Not yet, anyway. While the military was reputed to have made considerable strides in the development of what were known as tactiles, such expensive and difficult-to-manifest articulations of what were as yet little more than incredibly complex programs had yet to make their way to even the high-paying illicit marketplace. Short of genuine physicality, however, those who sought sexual surcease through the box did not lack for diversion. That was not what Whispr was looking for, however. In a world drowning in simulation, he sought a dose of reality.

  He had managed to ward off the screeching beseeching of half a dozen persistent touts until a short, youthful Natural fell into step alongside. Well, he wasn’t completely Natural, Whispr realized as he gave the local a quick once-over. A series of intense colors climbed from the base of each individual hair to flare off at the tips. Instead of being composed of keratin, the man’s blossoming natural was a ball of gengineered fiberoptics. Nor were the colors entirely random. They formed patterns that changed with each couple of steps: images that were animate, expository, and occasionally obscene. The young man’s skull had been transformed into a mobile animated ad.

  Whispr mused that it was sensible to choose a short man for a walking advert. If he was of average height or taller, then the potential customer wouldn’t be able to see the ads without straining. Doubtless when not on duty the walking advertisement could turn his head display off, perhaps merely by thinking about it. Being part of the peddler’s body the advert’s movements would not be electronically restricted to a limited area like those of the floating motile advertisements known as mobiads.

  Despite the increasingly salacious nature of the displays Whispr kept his attention on the road ahead. It proved harder to ignore the tout’s voice. In its own way its content was no less colorful than the man’s artfully melded pate.

  “Good evening, my friend.”

  “Not yet it isn’t.” Whispr did not turn in the direction of the bipedal remora.

  “You are looking, I can tell, for something special. I can direct you. I am Vusiquos.” An arm extended. When Whispr declined to take the proffered hand, it segued smoothly into a sweeping gesture. “I know everything and everyone in this part of the city, and I can tell you are hungry—looking for a late-night snack. I am proud to say that I consider myself a gourmet of late-night snacks.” He chuckled. “Low in calories and low in fat. Unless you are looking for fat. Or something made with saturated oils.”

  “And you take no commission, of course,” Whispr murmured as he strolled. “You’re doing this because you want to be my friend.”

  The much shorter local drew back as if offended. “Do not speak crazy talk, my friend! I hope to make big commission off your as-yet-unknown perverted tastes. On a personal basis, already I don’t like you.”

  Whispr slowed a step and a thin smile spread across his face. It didn’t have far to go. “That’s more like it. I can trust a man who admits to his own self-interest.”

  The remora looked pleased. “Your self-interest is my self-interest.”

  Whispr pushed out his lower lip slightly. “And I suppose my perversion is your perversion?”

  “Probably not. Myself favors tall white women who are partial amputees. I like them to have some range of movement when I …”

  “That’s sick.”

  “Yes,” the tout agreed readily, “and your tastes are for sure Catholic-Kosher-Halal, which is why you are wandering alone through this dignified corner of the city at this respectable hour of the night. Judge not, my friend, lest you be found wanting in the tools department.” His own reciprocal smile spread. “What can I unveil for you? What do you favor? What is your pleasure-obsession on this fine brisk evening?”

  Whispr did not have to ponder. “I’m looking for a virgin.”

  “Aren’t we all?” The remora chuckled at his own comeback; one that could be freely employed as punctuation for several dozen straight lines. “Not a problem, my friend.” He studied his angular customer closely. “Male or female? Human or animal? New or reconditioned?”

  A fight was spilling out of a performance club across the street. Since it involved women, it drew its own crowd of spectators. Glad of the free entertainment, they cheered the battling pair on. No weapons being in evidence, Whispr turned away. It was not a serious fight, and he had seen all too many of the latter on the meaner streets of Savannah to be entertained by this one.

  “Human. Female. As to the last, it doesn’t matter,” he told the remora.

  The tout was mak
ing mental notes. “How many arms? Legs? I know an Indian-run place famous for its banging lore that has a couple of she-vas with enough melded arms to make a man think he’s getting a three-for-one deal!”

  Whispr shook his head. “The normal number. Same for eyes, ears, boobs, and all the other usual appurtenances. In proper and acceptable proportions.”

  The remora’s eyes widened. “You want a—Natural?”

  “Don’t be silly. Do I look like I can afford a Natural virgin?”

  “No you don’t, but I never presume. Presumption is the way of bad business. A bad appearance often masks the existence of good money.” He drew himself up. “Okay—one virgin. You positive-sure nothing else?” He eyed his new client intently. “No add-ons of any kind? No surprises? No ‘specialty’ manips at all?”

  Whispr shook his head. Somewhere out beyond the insistent drifting mobiads and light-emanating shopfronts and squealing bars and retina-blinding lights lay the rest of the city. Beyond that lay vineyards and orchards, and beyond them, if one went far enough, were to be found the exposed bones of old Africa, with their ancient tales and energetic tribesfolk, mysterious legends and exotic wildlife. Beyond also lay the most prominent and secretive and well guarded of the SAEC’s research facilities, which the quest to penetrate would probably result in his incarceration or death.

  But not now, not here.

  “Maybe just one,” he added quietly.

  “Ah!” The remora looked gratified. “I knew it! What is it you desire? Your perversions, my friend, are blowing in the wind. Tell me and I will pluck them for you.”

  “I want,” he told the eager tout, “for her to be kind.”

  The considerably shorter man blinked at his foreign client. “ ‘Kind’? What kind of ‘kind’?”

  “Kind,” Whispr repeated. “As in, nice to me.”