She shook her head. "I don't know."

"Ever considered getting into politics?"

"You mean as a candidate myself?"

He looked at her steadily. "Yes."

"No. Not really. I don't think I'm qualified."

"You're not, aside from having good people skills and a certain degree of pa.s.sion. But you're also quite young. You could go back to school."

"Back to school? Dougla.s.s, I haven'tbeen to school since the Troubles."

He nodded. "And it shows. You're horrible with the InfoNet, you don't write well, you're ignorant about a lot of things you shouldn't be ignorant about. Finances, law, history, practical business." He shrugged.

"But you're bright and you work hard and you handle people well. If you wanted to go to school, it could be arranged. A degree in political science, perhaps, and an MBA wouldn't hurt you any. You could also take a degree in Unification Law; it's useful even if you never take the bar exam. Bodyguard is a dead end."

Denice blinked. "Are youserious?"

"You look thoroughly horrified, dear. Is going to school so scary?"

"I'd be-Dougla.s.s, I'd bethirty-five before I got through with all that!"

Unification Councilor Dougla.s.s Ripper gazed blankly at her for just a moment, then went into a fit of giggles he simply could not contain. "You'd be-thirty-five," he gasped. "My G.o.d, your life would be- over."He rolled over on his back in the bubbling warm water, stared up at the black night sky, just visible beyond the haze of the banked rows of sunpaint, and laughed so hard he couldn't breathe.

"Thirty-five!" He started to say something else, and then simply gasped again,"Thirty-five!"

Denice pushed his head under the water.

He came up choking and gasping for air. "Stop! Stop! I give-"

She gave him time to get some air, then pushed him under again and held him down while he fought. Not long, six or seven seconds, though it probably seemed longer to him. He pushed up hard and she let him up.

"I'm sorry," he sputtered, "I'm sorry sorry sorrysorry."

She sat back down on the little tile ledge. "You shouldn't laugh at me."

"Obviously not." He coughed once, shook his head slightly. "I'd feel d.a.m.n foolish being killed by my own bodyguard. How could I possibly explain it to Ichabod?" He waded over to where she sat, sat down next to her and took her hand in his. "I'm sorry, okay?"

Denice nodded. "Okay."

"I won't do it again."

"I'll hold you down longer next time," she warned him.

He looked deeply into her eyes, said very seriously, "I am totally and completely intimidated. I will never never laugh at you again."

She kissed him on the tip of his nose. "Good."

"It's just-"

"What?"

"You're the first person I've been in love with since I was twenty years old," he whispered. Denice looked down, nodded once, and Ripper said softly, "I want you to do well."

Somewhere in the city of Encino, slightly northwest-of-LosAngeles-Callia Sierran did not know exactly where, as she had been brought there in a darkened car-was the estate from which the Temples of Eris had arisen.

The Prophet Harry Devlin had once walked these grounds, had slept in these rooms.

Somewhere inside that estate, in a small empty room with a large bay window, Callia stood with her hands clasped behind her back, and said to the woman who had founded the Erisian Claw, who had recruited Callia and her brother into the Claw,, "I don't quite know where to start."

The woman who sat facing her, a teacup of fine china cradled in her lap, was clearly aged. In another time she might have pa.s.sed for thirty or thirty-five. Today the exquisite grain and slight looseness of the skin at her neck and hands marked her age: past her second round of geriatric skin regeneration, and thereby at least seventy, perhaps older. "Indeed," the woman said after a moment. "I've audited your report. Perhaps your impressions of the meeting would be most helpful."

Domino Terrencia, Callia's immediate supervisor-the woman who had largely raised Callia and her brother after their father's death at PKF hands-stood immediately behind the old woman. She nodded imperceptibly.

Callia interpreted it correctly:Be brief, "Yes, ma'am. We met with 'Sieur Obodi downtown, at the law offices of Greenberg and Ba.s.s, at eight-thirty this morning." She did not need to elaborate on the point; Greenberg and Ba.s.s had fronted for the Rebs for at least twenty years. "He's clearly legitimate; he wants to work with us, and he seems to have the authority to make such a commitment for the Rebs. The list of Rebs who were there was quite impressive; Christian J. Summers, Maxwell Devlin, half a dozen others who are in my report. Perhaps even more significant, ma'am, was who didnot show. Belinda Singer was not there, and when I asked about her was told that she had retired from administrative duties. Nor was EX. Chandler present; as you're probably aware, hedid retire, straight off Earth, about six months ago.

He's living in an orbital retirement home and apparently his security istough." She paused. "I think he got on the wrong side of Obodi, and ran."

"Sensible," the old woman remarked. "What were you told about Tommy Boone, and what was your impression of Sieur Obodi?"

"Tommy Boone, ma'am, 'sleeps with the fish.'"

"How colorful."

"Old One slang," said Domino quietly.

"The Italians?"

"Yes."

The old woman nodded. "Interesting." To Callia: "Does he?"

"Sleep with the fish?" Callia thought about it. "The Peaceforcer Elite who deserted, Christian Summers-he was present. If Boone were alive, Summers would have stayed in j.a.pan, I think. There was no love between those two. Beyond that I can't say."

"Go on."

Callia said, "Ma'am, 'Sieur Obodiscares me. I believe that he is in fact in control of the Johnny Rebs. I found him formidable; a matter of personal bearing. I think you would have to meet him to understand.

He speaks with a slight accent, as our reports said, but Idon't think it's Italian; his accent's nothing like Domino's. He speaks as though he were raised speaking a tonal language such as j.a.panese. How someone who is clearly not an American has ended up in control of the Johnny Rebs is, frankly, beyond me." Callia paused. "But there's little doubt that he is. When he spoke, people listened the way they used to listen to Tommy Boone. And we already know that Rebs who don't take his orders die. Quickly."

The old woman looked out the window at the tall green fields of marijuana, sipped cold tea from her china teacup, and said without emphasis, "Lovely."

Late on the evening of Sat.u.r.day, May 2, after a stop in Kansas City to go through the new orientation materials 'Sieur Obodi had designed, Jimmy Ramirez flew a semiballistic into Los Angeles via LAX. He found the trip itself-quite apart from the business on which he had come to Los Angeles-rather exciting.

It was only the second time since escaping the Fringe that he had left the Greater New York area; and that first occasion had merely been a brief trip to Boston some two years prior.

He had never even been on a semiballistic before.

Los Angeles was very nearly as alien as he had expected; a billboard that greeted him upon debarking said:Welcome to TransCon-Free Los Angeles.

He picked up his single piece of luggage at the terminal, briefly toyed with and then rejected the idea of hiring one of the human-driven cabs. The lack of TransCon in Los Angeles meant that peoplecould drive their own cars, if they wished; it did not mean that it was a good idea. Jimmy knew that his own reflexes, excellent though they were, were no match for those of a carcomp's; the idea of entrusting his life to a driver whose reflexes were almost certainly worse than his own sounded suicidal, not exciting.

Not that he would have admitted it to anyone, but he was afraid of heights anyway.

Old Downtown was a fifteen-minute flight from LAX. Jimmy Ramirez, alone in the cab's backseat, made no pretense of sophistication. He stared out the windows at southwest Los Angeles, stopping every few minutes, when the heights got to him, to settle his nerves. Despite the carpet of lights stretching from one end of the horizon to the other, it all seemed, in some odd sense, curiously rural, and after a moment Jimmy placed it; Los Angeles lacked s.p.a.cesc.r.a.pers. Though he saw a few buildings that he guessed to be one hundred or one hundred and fifty floors, surely none of them topped two hundred. He wondered briefly at the lack of s.p.a.cesc.r.a.pers, and then leapt to the reasonable conclusion that they had avoided building s.p.a.cesc.r.a.pers because of the danger of earthquakes. He was incorrect; a s.p.a.cesc.r.a.per with a base that covered two square blocks was quite safe from even the worst earthquake; it was no likelier to fall over than a small mountain. Los Angeles, in 2076, simply did not have the population density necessary to make a s.p.a.cesc.r.a.per capable of permanently supporting a population of some 350,000, persons a necessity.

Los Angeles did not sport one of the world's fouruncompleted s.p.a.cesc.r.a.pers, begun, as the other three had been, over twenty years prior, before the Ministry of Population Control had finally succeeded in reversing Earth's explosive population growth.

The cabcomp's tourist program asked Jimmy if he wished to detour to see the sh.e.l.l of L.A.'s only s.p.a.cesc.r.a.per.

Jimmy Ramirez snorted. "No. I'm in a hurry. And I've d.a.m.n straight seen a sh.e.l.l before."

The cabcomp did not try to speak to him again.

The cab came down atop a small black skysc.r.a.per in Old Downtown, fifty or sixty stories high. The skysc.r.a.per was the twin of another skysc.r.a.per immediately beside it.

The parking s.p.a.ce the cab came down upon bore the legend, visible from the sky: In Your Wildest Dreams Don't EvenThink About Parking Here On the wind-whipped roof, just beyond the row of floodlamps that illuminated the downlot, stood two men Jimmy Ramirez had never met before. Even before he got out of his cab he recognized them both from Max Devlin's descriptions.

The tall one, blond hair gathered away from his face in a tight ponytail, was 'Sieur Obodi, the man who had taken down Tommy Boone. The short, broader one would be Chris Summers, the only non-French Peaceforcer Elite the System had ever seen; the only Peaceforcer Elite who had ever deserted.

After Trent the Uncatchable, Christian J. Summers was, Jimmy knew, the most wanted fugitive in the System. Even Tommy Boone, when he was alive, had never made it past number three on the PKF listing of fugitives.

The PKF did not actually make up a "most-wanted" list; they simply posted rewards.

Trent the Uncatchable's bounty was CU:5,000,000, at a time when the average cost of a day's labor, worldwide, hovered around CU:15.

Christian J. Summers was worth CU:3,500,000.

Summers came forward as the cab's fans died down, fanwash tugging at his clothes. He looked exactly like what he was, an early PKF Elite, from the days when the treatments that toughened the skin had also stiffened the face into a rigid mask. His handshake was dry and very hard.

" 'Sieur Ramirez. A pleasure."

"Likewise."

"Come on." Summers led Jimmy across the windy ferrocrete roof surface, to where 'Sieur Obodi stood waiting for them.

Watching.

It was Jimmy's first impression of Obodi, of the man's eyes upon him as he approached. Even in the relative darkness atop the skysc.r.a.per, they gleamed, bright sparks of blue in a deeply tanned, apparently Caucasian face. His lips were thin, curved into a faint smile.

He took a single step forward as Jimmy Ramirez neared him, and held out his hand.

Coming from any other person Jimmy Ramirez had ever known in his life, 'Sieur Obodi's greeting would have sounded nothing but pretentious.

From Obodi it sent a chill down his spine.

"Welcome, James Ramirez," said 'Sieur Obodi, enfolding Jimmy's outstretched hand in both of his, a warm, seductive smile lighting his face, "welcome to your destiny."

At a distance of two kilometers, an avatar of Ralf the Wise and Powerful, safely ensconced in the circuitry of the cab Jimmy Ramirez had taken from LAX, circled around and around the Bank of America Building.

Denice ran through the briefing materials for Australia on the semiballistic, while Ripper dozed.

There were advantages to not needing much sleep; if she had required as much sleep as Ripper, Denice did not know when she would ever have found the time to prepare for anything. When he was awake, Ripper was a full-time job.

"Australia," the briefing began, "yearns for respect."

Its post-Unification history has been one of significant accomplishment. It separated from the British Commonwealth in the years immediately before the Unification. Though the French PKF was characteristically brutal in its pacification of England, Australia fared better; like the French they resented the English, and further had a history of cordial relations with France stretching back to World War I. Though Australia was not among the founding Unification countries, Australia did not contest the Unification, and once the course to the Unification War was clear, made reasonable accommodations with Unification forces.

The Australians have become a significant factor in s.p.a.ce travel; one of Earth's largest s.p.a.ceports is located in the Australian outback.

Australia, despite its relatively small population, is a significant electoral resource; almost alone among modern democracies, Australia requires, on penalty of a stiff fine, that its citizens partic.i.p.ate in all elections, both local and Unification. (It has gone to great lengths to make this feasible; it is one of the few countries in the Unification that has completely eliminated the ballot box in favor of InfoNet-based voting.) Given the forty-two percent turnout that characterizes Unification voters worldwide, this gives the Australian voter a say in Unification politics that is significantly out of proportion to the actual population of the Australian continent.

Native Australians have a distinct neurosis concerning the traditional lack of respect given their people by the outer world. Founded by England as a penal colony in 1788, and used so for the first eighty years of their existence, Australia possessed, until the end of the twentieth century, an insignificant voice in world politics.

Since the Unification, this has largely changed; but the erroneous impression that they have insufficient say in how Australia is treated by the outer world, including the Unification proper, has remained, and is a sensitive subject.

When Dougla.s.s Ripper traveled, he did so with a retinue of not less than a dozen people; depending on the locale to be visited, his party sometimes ran as high as twenty-five persons. Denice had been amazed, at first, at the size of his staff. On any given day she never saw more than a few of them; her first staff meeting had been a revelation. Over forty people had shown up: Ichabod, the Chief of Staff; two speech writers, a Director of Communications, an InfoNet Access Coordinator, Election Committee Manager, Ripper's personal secretary, the secretary's secretary, the Deputy a.s.sistant for Executive Branch Liaison-and people with a dozen other t.i.tles, and the secretaries and aides and a.s.sistants of those people.

It was over a month before Denice had even gotten all the names straight.

For the India-Australia-j.a.pan trip, Ripper had taken fifteen people with him; six were bodyguards.

Four of the bodyguards stayed with Ripper in their Canberra hotel room while Ichabod Martin and Denice examined the hall where Ripper was to speak. They went down together, two hours ahead of time.

They did not expect to find anything. The PKF Personal Security squads a.s.signed to Councilor Ripper had marked the room clean that morning, and two different Australian security agencies had double-checked their work. The hall was a large rectangular area, about sixty meters wide, by eighty long, by perhaps six high. A single large double door stood at the south end of the hall, with two smaller doors at the east and west, near the raised speaker's platform.

A PKF Elite stood at each of the three doors.

They did not expect to find anything, but they had not expected to find anything in Portugal either-and therefore had checked Ripper's hotel room rather cursorily.

If the a.s.sa.s.sin had not exactly been hiding under the bed, he was not far from it. Sometime during the night before Ripper's arrival in Portugal the a.s.sa.s.sin had checked into the room immediately beneath Ripper's, and cut a small hole through the ceiling and into Ripper's hotel room.

The fact that he was sleeping with Denice probably saved Ripper's life; they were drifting off to sleep when a sound disturbed Denice.

She came awake in motion. She pushed Ripperhard, one-handed, from the bed they shared,.pushing herself in the other direction with the same movement. Her handgun, a sixteen-shot automatic with explosive sh.e.l.ls, sat with a spare clip atop the dresser at the bedside and she reached for it with her left hand as she rolled backward away from the bed- -the gun and the spare clip leapt from the dresser's surface, into her waiting hand. She came out of the roll, came to her feet firing.

The bed exploded in flame.

There were sixteen shots in the handgun and she wasted the entire clip into a spot on the floor. The clip ejected itself when empty and Denice the bed is burning, a thin, sharp beam of ruby laser light waving up through the burning bed, stopping when it meets the ceiling above it, flames crawling up from the surface of the bed.

slammed the spare home and fired again.

Ichabod and Bruce appeared in the hotel room's doorway, Excalibur laser rifles in hand. They made the correct decision, pulling Ripper from the hotel room without delay, leaving Denice behind to deal with the threat.

The second clip was empty.

The laser light had ceased.