After dinner we strolled through the lobby of the Zones Wetherall wasn't in his usual hurry to be off to some other appointment. After I'd signed his contracts, our dinner conversation had shifted to pleasantries. Until Wetherall mentioned my parents.

"Was it hard growing up without parents?" he asked.

"You know about that?"

"Yes."

I wasn't about to tell him any more than he needed to know. Especially since I didn't know what he'd spied out about me already. "Lots of children survive without parents. You grew up without a father, didn't you?"

Everyone knew the story of the impoverished childhood that had preceeded his rise to wealth.

"Mother was resourceful. We didn't live too far from here-in Colorado."

So we parried evasions for a while. Not that I cared about his childhood. I could see we were about as compatible as mustard and motor oil. We were standing near the doors when Dr. Blaine Thorp found us.

"Ah-hah!" he said, sticking out his hook accusingly.

"What's he doing here?" I said to Wetherall.

Thorp ignored me and turned to Wetherall. "So Professor Cobble has superseded me in your plans," he said. "I didn't realize that your work required the imprimatur of drab officialdom-I thought you were a visionary!"

"Well, Blaine," said Wetherall, "even visionaries need something solid to stand on. Liz here is of the opinion that your science is rather shaky."

"You liken yourself to the jewels, and everyone else to the pile below!" thundered Thorp. "I wonder how Professor Cobble feels about that comparison."

"Oh, please," I said.

A reporter who'd been staking out Thorp as he staked out the lobby wheeled, his spex trained on us.

I turned to see Wetherall's reaction. There was none. He was gone.

"You lunatic," I said to Thorp. "Why do we have to be in the same field? Why do we have to be on the same planet?"

"You suffer from what Freud called the 'narcissism of minor differences,'my dear," said Thorp. The reporter's spex reflected the overheads. I'd antic.i.p.ated being linked with Wetherall in tomorrow's papers. Now it was going to look like I'd put on this gown for a date with a chiropractor with delusions of grandeur. I could already hear the laughter of my colleagues.

"I don't know that one." I glanced around the lobby, wondering if I'd really lost Wetherall. "But I'm sure you'll explain." Maybe he was lurking behind one of the marigold trees.

"Simply put, we most intensely dislike those with the greatest similarities to ourselves. They threaten us. Hindus hate Muslims, not Chinese, et cetera. Therefore, you despise me because I reflect your real choices: eccentric science, bizarre alliances."

"Where's the narcissism?"

"Have you glanced in a mirror recently?"

"More recently than you'd imagine."

"So, you feel undue love for those minor characteristics that define your difference from me-primarily your academic sinecure-while ignoring the central resemblance." Noticing the photographer, he struck a triumphant pose with his hook. "The irony is, your replacing me in Wetherall's regard was part of my plan."

"How can we replace you when you won't go away?" a voice broke in.

It was Wetherall, back again, trailed by Murk Janglish. Something was going awry with Wetherall's smartwig, and the hair was climbing up around his hat like a many-tendrilled octopus. Meanwhile Janglish was tugging awkwardly on Wetherall's elbow-elbows seemed to be the lawyer's specialty. "Ramsdel," Janglish said, "Please. This isn't necessary. Your presence will only focus attention on this situation."

The reporter had that glazed look of deeply-gratified desire. The red light glinted in the corner of his spex.

"I'll go away when the secret of the jewels is revealed," Thorp said to Wetherall. "And you and Ms. Cobble are just the ones to do it for me. You'll work from the inside while I guide you from without. Together, the three of us-"

"Together, the three of us will do nothing," Wetherall said.

"Mr. Wetherall," I said. "It's okay, I can handle him-"

"I've no doubt you can, Dr. Cobble," Wetherall said. "But you're working for me now, and I stand by my employees. Dr. Thorp," he said, "if you have any complaints about your treatment, take them up with Mr. Janglish here." Wetherall held out his arm, I took it, and pushing past the photographer, we went straight to the elevator and up to my suite.

Once inside, Wetherall seemed to get an attack of shyness. He wrestled the petulant wig from his head and eyed the door nervously.

"You can wait here while things cool off downstairs," I said.

"That's not the way the paparazzi work. The longer I wait the more of them will gather." He handed the wig to me. "Would you take care of this?"

He slipped out of the room before I could ask him what to feed it.

So I plopped onto a chair the size of a subcompact car, kicked a Donya Durand shoe at the mirror and then stared into it, trying to find the simple, boring Professor Liz Cobble who had gotten out of bed that morning. At least my hair didn't crawl all over my scalp.

Sometimes I blamed my aunts for turning me into that boring Professor Liz Cobble. Aunt Lindsay was Professor of Vertebrate Semiology at the University of Wisconsin, and Aunt Kym ran the only sensory deprivation spa in Madison. Growing up in their purple and pink Victorian house had been much more of an adventure than I'd wanted after my parents died. Although I knew I could never be normal again, I could at least seem normal. Only the outside world was certain that I was living with a pair of lunatics.

The fact that Aunt Lindsay and Aunt Kym loved me only made things harder. For their part, they were open minded when I insisted on wearing clothes to school and dating outside of my gender, although I could tell they thought I was being oppressed by the patriarchy and commodified by the Bank of America. I became a little reclusive, and a little p.r.i.c.kly about challenges to my own way of doing things. I spent a lot of time as a child watching myself for signs that I would end up like them, and in reaction I became Ms. Dutiful Grind.

But I still remember the smell of the scented electrolyte that always clung to Aunt Kym like the oddest of perfumes, eau d'inconscience collective. And Aunt Lindsay teaching me to read as I sat on her lap and she took me through her charts of the seven stages of courtship in the lesser cetaceans.

I suppose exobiology wasn't a surprising career choice for somebody with a seeker of primal truths in place of one parent and a student of the sign language of animals in place of the other. But I'd intended to be entirely more sober about the way I lived than my aunts.

Except that here I was, rattling around in a new jar of mixed nuts. Fanatic Blaine Thorp and pathetic Ramsdel Wetherall, soft Nguyen O'Hara and hard Murk Janglish. And me.

I had only myself to blame.

One day after my dinner with Wetherall, Nguyen O'Hara and I started for Stateline aboard Laputa, which was being towed by the base truck on its electromagnetic tether. The guestrooms aboard the lifthouse were lavishly outfitted, if not exactly up to Zones standards. Wetherall had arranged to have my office chair and desk moved overnight so I would feel comfortable in my work environment. I chatted briefly with one of his jolly avatars, who said he'd gone ahead to coordinate the arrival of equipment and supplies.

We cleared the Wasatch Range by midday, and the wastes unfolded before us. The dwarfing effect of the expanse always catches me by surprise, no matter how many times I visit the desert. The absolute white and flat of the evaporated salt plains takes ordinary vastness to the level of the conceptual: Earth's tabula rasa. The human mind flinches from the blank page. All we can do is build scrawny highways through to the next inhabitable place, out from under the hammer of weather, off the edge of the table of the possible. Whatever their reasons, the s.h.i.tdogs had chosen the loneliest place on earth.

Ordinarily the loneliest. For, by the time we arrived at the rendezvous point, we weren't alone. The combination of the Wetherall angle, the Laputa photo op, and the public confrontation with Thorp had rekindled interest in the Stateline site. Two kilometers west of the shimmering piles and dark entrenchments of s.h.i.tdog territory, a sprawl of vans and campers and bubbles had sprung up; it was almost the size of the army of reporters that covered Holy Joe Jolson on his pilgrimage to Bayonne. Wetherall's people had marked off the boundary of his property, and the media had nested just outside it, on public land.

I had no doubt one of Wetherall's avatars was negotiating for its purchase even as we watched.

As we approached the encampment, the base truck shortened our tether, until we hovered only fifteen meters above the salt flat. I wondered what Nguyen was doing. I wasn't in suspense for long; the truck parked between the Time/Pepsi compound and the NewsMelt van. Laputa was to be the star attraction of the media circus. The truck began to reel us in for boarding.

I found Nguyen in his office. "You're docking right in the middle of the feeding frenzy?"

"Indeed," said Nguyen. "Someone has to be the story-why not us? It was Wetherall's idea, actually. He asked that we stay here to divert attention. He wants to discourage fly-overs at the worksite or the piles. Wise, I think."

"But I'm allergic to cameras," I said. "My tongue swells up and my IQ drops." Nguyen didn't hear me. He peered intently down at the crowd that was gathering around his truck. I thought he might be taking a head count. "You like this, don't you? The publicity?"

"Whether I like it or not is beside the point. It's part of the business. I'm an architect, Liz. Do you have any idea how many of us are left?"

I shook my head.

"Any computer can design a building these days. All I have to sell is style. If people don't know who I am, then how will they know that I have it? If you're not comfortable with reporters, let your avatar handle them. That's what Wetherall does. He's famous for his accessibility, which is nice trick considering he's a recluse."

There were at least a hundred people beneath us now. Most were pointing cameras at the stairway that was extending toward the lifthouse from the rear of the truck.

"But if we're in the middle of everything, how is Wetherall going to get on board? They'll spot him in a minute."

He glanced up at me, surprised, then nodded as if he had just discovered an interesting secret. "But Wetherall isn't staying here, Liz. That was never the plan." He showed me the sly O'Hara smile. "Sorry to disappoint, but it's just the two of us."

No sooner had he said this than his screen blinked: a call. I expected Wetherall, or a Wetherall avatar, but it was Murk Janglish.

"We need to discuss your contract, O'Hara," began Janglish, without saying h.e.l.lo. "You've lined out all the work-for-hire language. That won't do."

"My name is Nguyen. Say Ngu-yen."

"Say it? Why?

"You and Wetherall are like good-cop, bad-cop." Nguyen smiled. "He entices, and you come along afterwards to punish."

Murk Janglish seemed taken aback. "I'm sending you a clean copy," he said. "You need to sign it. No changes."

"All right, Murk." Nguyen's expression was saintly. "But only if you deliver it in person."

"Why the h.e.l.l would I do that?"

"Why the h.e.l.l would I do that, Nguyen," said Nguyen O'Hara.

Janglish's screen went dark.

"I don't know whether to describe that as a bad personality or no personality," I said.

"Oh, it's a personality," said O'Hara.

The first thing I noticed as I came down the stairway was the big stink. The piles were two kilometers away and the air was dead calm and still there it was, like a bituminous skunk in the next door neighbor's yard. Unpleasant, but not yet painful.

I had put on a Laputa uniform so that I could pa.s.s as one of the staff. I'd told Nguyen that I wanted to stretch my legs and he had told me that I was free to go as I pleased. That wasn't true exactly. Once the reporters figured out who I was, I'd be trapped in the lifthouse, unless I was willing to give interviews. Which I was definitely not. I was going to let my avatar do all the talking, just as soon Wetherall delivered it.

I wandered through the colony, listening to the journalists grouse. They complained about the big stink, of course, and the heat and the boredom and the bad food and the power rationing. Fox had ordered another Solelectric array from Salt Lake City, but it wouldn't be operational until next Monday. Several locals from Wendover were trucking in fresh water, which they were happy to sell to the fourth estate at champagne prices.

I discovered one vehicle I knew all too well: Blaine Thorp's "Dog Squad" car. I ducked behind an old school bus before anyone saw me and then sighted back on Laputa to get my bearings, so I could be sure never to come this way again. I wasn't interested in public debates with the lunatic.

It was about ten minutes later that I noticed the Billy Bar wrapper stuck to the flap of a trashcan. I lifted the lid; there were more inside. I knocked on doors nearby until a woman from Izvestia directed me to the Jolly Freeze van parked at the easternmost edge of the colony. The sides were dark; the pix of Judy Jolly Freeze sat in a chair, hands folded neatly in her lap, her eyes closed.

"Wetherall?" I walked around the van twice, hunting for some sign of life, then knocked at the rear door. "Wetherall!"

"Liz?" Judy opened one eye. "Ssssh!" She pointed. "Over here." I went around to the side of the van that faced the empty salt vastness.

At first I couldn't see Wetherall's avatar, because it was only half a meter tall and hiding behind Billy Bar's legs. "I want to talk, Wetherall," I said. "I just saw Thorp's car. Let me in."

"I'm not here," said the avatar. "And I can't talk right now."

"But you are talking. Where are you?"

"Not far, a motel. I'll see you in a few days." The avatar turned away from me and gestured at someone I couldn't see. "No, no, not you. Her. I'll be there in a minute."

"Wetherall, are you with someone?"

"It's just business. Stay right where you are."

"What do you mean, stay where I am? Where would I go?"

"Very good, Cobble." The avatar's voice was full of false camaraderie. "You do that, all right? Good night now." And then it faded. Where its image had cowered, there was only a smooth silver glow in the gathering darkness.

I told myself I didn't care who Wetherall slept with. I only felt sorry for her. So what if he had come back to save me at the Rain Forest? He'd called me Cobble, like I was some junior a.s.sistant n.o.body. I pounded the van with the side of my hand; I think I got Billy Bar right in his pudgy little chin.

"My friends call me Liz, a.s.shole."

It was only on the way back to Laputa that it hit me: Why would the avatar have to be insulting, when it could spend as much time with me as necessary, while the real Wetherall was with his bimbo? Wasn't that the point of avatars?

Unless it had been the real Wetherall who answered my call. But that was even more inexplicable: why would he take my call if he were in a motel room with some other woman?

I was back in control by the time I got back to Laputa. I had to be if I intended to pa.s.s safely under the quizzical arch of Nguyen O'Hara's eyebrow. And I had decided not to harbor any ill feelings-or any feelings at all-toward Wetherall.

"I'm back, Nguyen." I called, as I climbed the stairway to the living room.

"In here, Liz," he replied from the kitchen. He was sitting at the table with his back to me. I couldn't see at first what he was doing, but I could smell it.

"What's going on?" I asked.

He had a half dozen saucers arranged in front of him. "Ammonia-formula EasyWipe," he said, pointing. "Vicks Vaporub. Diced vitamins." Two of the saucers contained a scatter of burned remains. "Plastic and rubber," he said and then indicated a ruined something that might once have been an orange or maybe an apple if it hadn't been covered with a greenish, tennis-ball fur. "I retrieved this lovely from the bottom of the composter." There was a odd slackness at the corners of his mouth, a brightness to his eyes.

"Nguyen, we've got more stink than we can handle already."