I stopped to grab a spirulina-dog and an orange soda. If von Bulow was here, he would just be settling down, not moving on, and I could take my time.

"Want something?" I asked Hamster.

"Oh, yes, sir, if you please. One of those nice chili-dogs, with extra sauce."

I made Hamster take its special supplement. One a day, or goodbye world.

Sold only to registered human owners. That's why there are no runaway transgenics. Or not so many.

When we were finished, I crumpled my napkin and threw it on the Boardwalk. A litter-critter snatched it up. "Let's go get Mister von Bulow," I said to Hamster.

"If you say so, then that's what we must do, sir."

I found him inside the Time-Warner-Sears casino, at the roulette table.

His ID card lay on the betting board, flexed to show his eft balance. He kept sliding the card from one red and black number to another, and his balance kept getting bigger and bigger. I watched him for a while. His lilac eyes were half-glazed over, his face wore a zoned-out expression. The experimental H-I trope, as modified by the Vat Rats, was plainly a success. Von Bulow was rapt up in the nonlinear dynamics of the wheel, seeing chance and aleatory patterns materialized in intelligible forms that guided his play.

He never lost a spin. His balance was rising toward geostat orbit. His winning streak had attracted a crowd of ginza-joes and dolly-dears, house playpets and freelance eft-lifters, not to mention members of the management, who stood around looking like they had swallowed a quart of worms. I doubted if they'd object when I booted von Bulow.

I worked my way to his side. The management had halted play to check the wheel and scan the crowd for remote interference. I used the opportunity.

"Jurgen, I've got a message from your wife."

He jumped. "What? Who are you? How do you know my wife?" He narrowed his eyes, as if to use his new insights to unriddle me. A muscle jerked along his jaw. "That is, if you even do know her."

"Ask not who the panther roars for, slagger, it roars for you."

He pushed back his chair. "All right, all right, not here, for Christ's sake. Let's step outside."

We walked out to a deserted balcony. Overhead the stars glistened like scales on snake. Von Bulow and I stood about four feet apart. I sensed Hamster by my side.

"Geneva wants her trope back, Jurgen."

He snorted. "Let her come and get it."

"She was busy, so she sent me instead." I had the boot concealed in my palm.

Before I could move, I was facing his flashlight, a Krupp pocket model.

"Don't complicate things, Jurgen--" I said, then went for him.

Laserlight lanced past my side, scorching my vest so I could smell burning ripstop. One shot was all he got off before I slapped the boot on his neck.

The neural shunt burrowed under his skin and fastened itself to his spinal cord in a millie. Von Bulow collapsed to the floor.

I turned around. Hamster was twitching with a scorched hole through its tunic over its heart. I went over to the splice and picked it up.

"Not nice, not nice, sir--" it said, then died.

I went back to von Bulow. First I kicked him a half dozen times in the gut and balls. He didn't say anything, because he couldn't feel anything below his neck, and couldn't see what I was doing. Then I slapped an orange sticker on him to show he was booted. I got an autochair from the casino, put him in it, and headed for the train station.

As predicted, the management put up no fuss. I left Hamster for them to dispose of. Geneva would find a surcharge on her bill equal to the splice's original cost.

At the station, I copped a dose of Double-up from a public S&M parlor.

The ninety minutes back to Boston was enough to express my displeasure fully to von Bulow.

I was going to have to mention to Geneva to block her ears when she had the boot removed.

BLANKIE.

Previously unpublished.

The second-floor nursery window had been left open on a temperate summerday.

That was the fatal invitation.

No antique wire screen protected the opening into the sensate house. An intelligent invisible air curtain defeated insects, large particulates, and drifting organic debris such as clothtree leaves and airfish spume.

Barnacle-like microjets around the window frame constantly tracked the incoming intruders in jerky chaotic patterns before emitting their dissuasive blasts. Large intruders over five hundred grams would be anticipated and neutralized by the house's alarm net and its entrained armaments.

But a small, alert wren-form bird, like the one alighting now upon the window sill, was anticipated by neither system.

The bird surveyed the nursery interior.

The walls held embedded silicrobe animated pictures: fairytale characters that capered across the constantly shifting backgrounds. The Big Bad Wolf pursued a cloaked Little Red Riding Hood; the young ballerina in her cursed red slippers danced till exhausted.

In the middle of the room stood a white biopolymer crib shaped like an egg halved along its long dimension and resting in a bip support base. The Bayer logo blinked orange from portside. In the crib lay a naked baby boy of several months, tummy up. Above him floated a mobile representing the Earth and some of its myriad orbiting artificial satellites. The large globe revolved and its tiny attendants spun in their intricate, never-intersecting orbital dance supported only by shaped magnetic fields emitted from the crib.

Beneath the baby was a Blankie, its Ixsys brandmark plain in one corner.

The Blankie was approximately as big as a large bath towel. Its glycoprotein glycolipid paradermal surface was colored a delicate pastel blue and resembled in texture antique eggcrate bedding foam. Except that the individual nubbins of the Blankie were much more closely spaced, and in the shallow dimples of the Blankie gleamed a subtle organic sheen like a piece of raw liver.

The bird flew from its perch on the sill and landed on the crib's edge, its claws clutching the material of the Bayer halfshell.

At that point two things happened.

All of the flat silicrobe characters on the wall stiffened and stopped.

The Woodsman, who had just emerged to rescue the swallowed Little Red Riding Hood, was the one exception. He dropped his one-dimensional axe and began to yell.

"Intruder! Intruder! All security kibes to the nursery!"

Simultaneous with the alert, the baby began to pee. A fountain of yellow shot up a few centimeters from it.

When the first drops of pee hit the Blankie, it responded in its trophic instinctive way. The portion of the Blankie between the boy's legs elongated like a pseudopod or flap and reached up to cap and drink the urine for its own metabolic purposes, simultaneously cleaning and drying the infant's wet skin.

The bird dropped down into the crib while the Blankie was preoccupied. It jabbed its beak into the Blankie. Then, in one spastic implosive moment it pumped the contents of its nonbasal nasal sacs into the Blankie.

In a flash, its load of venom delivered, the bird darted to the rim of the crib and launched itself toward the window.

Now alert, the window caught it instantly in a flash-extruded web of Ivax Stickum.

The bird self-destructively exploded, charring the windowframe.

In the crib the Blankie was writhing and churning like a wounded octopus.

Fractal blooms whipped up from it, then fell across the baby, who began to cry.

Within a second or two, the blooms coalesced into a blue webwork. When a strand fell across the baby's mouth, its cries ceased.

The door to the nursery flew open and assorted kibernetics appeared.

But it was too late.

The Blankie tightened its embrace like a basal anaconda. The sounds of snapping bones were registered by the confused and helpless kibes.

I popped the silver datapins from the player, abruptly terminating the sounds of little Harry Day-Lewis's death, collected less than a day ago.

Although I had watched the tragedy unfold a dozen times since then, I hadn't quite yet gotten used to that fatal, snapping-sticks sound. I doubted I ever would.

I was sitting in my office in the building that housed the Boston branch of the North American Union's Internal Recon and Security division. Although I had occupied this fiftieth-floor corner room for sixteen months, since my last promotion, it still felt alien to me. All those years operating my own private investigating firm out of increasingly cheaper quarters had left me unused to luxuries such as Organogenesis self-cleaning carpets and Zeneca squirmonomic chairs. Not to mention the steady posting to my eft-account.

But I had had to get out of the PI biz after the job I had done for Geneva Hippenstiel-Imhausen. That had been my last case before my crackup.

While booting her husband, I had lost my sidekick, a useless low-end splice named Hamster. If you had asked me prior to the murder of the cut-rate transgenic what the little shag meant to me, I would have said zepto-nothing.

But there was a lot I hadn't known about myself back then, and my fatherly affection for the splice had been one such secret.

I had purchased Hamster right after my wife left me and apparently had transferred a lot of unresolved feelings to it. Anyway, that's what Doctor Varela, the expert in Behavioral Pragmatics, had told me during my analysis.

But the beep analysis hadn't happened until I hit planck-bottom, winding up in a clinic for mel-heads. In illegal doses, the melatonin-analogue-based trope I became addicted to let me sleep all day except for an hour or two, lost in pleasant dreams inspired by a second trope, TraumWerks (produced, ironically enough, by the H-I gembaitch owned by my ex-client).

I had wasted away to a muscleless ninety pounds before a routine sweep of streetlife picked me up and deposited me in Varela's rehab joint.

When I got out, officially a functioning member of society again, I had opted to continue in law-enforcement, rather than be regrooved for a different job. Accepted by the IRS, I had started as a simple walkabout operating out of my Kenmore Square koban, eventually reaching my current status, a detective in the Unit for Polypeptide Classification and Monitoring, better known as the Protein Police. (Our motto: "We collect strings.") Now, rolling the datapins reflectively between my fingers, as if hoping to feel the intangible nanoscratches that encoded Harry Day-Lewis's death, I wondered if maybe I was getting too old for this job. I had thought I was used to nasty. But this was a new magnitude of evil.

My office door said, "Kasimzhomart Saunders wishes to enter."

"Let him in."

K-mart was my current human partner. His parents had emigrated to the NU from Kazakhstan during the tumult of the Last Jihad. As NUish as me, he looked more exotic, affecting a dark complexion, Mongolian topknot and long drooping mustachios. Today he wore a sleeveless shirt (at our rank, uniforms were not mandatory) that bore the demand of the Selfless Viridians: "Give me euthanasia or give me death!" My partner was big into irony.

Waggling his poqetpal significantly in the air, K-mart said, "Finally got the burst on the Day-Lewis family. Their respective peltsies took their time cleaning up the data. Ran it through a dozen intelligent filters before they'd release it. No proprietary secrets left. But there's still everything we need.

Want a squirt?"

"Sure. Pipe it over."

The file showed up on my desk screen a second later. I picked up the flimsy and flung it at the wall like a floppy pizza. The flexistik screen clung upside down, sensed its new orientation, and flipped its display. Now both K-mart and I could read it. After letting me have a quick scan, K-mart summarized. "Standard plutes.

Politics just what you'd expect from members of the tekhnari. Semideviationist nouveau peronistas. Marshall, the plug, works for Xytronyx, field-testing mosaics. The socket, Melisma, heads a crada sired by Cima Labs out of Phenix Biocomposites. No major kinks -- except for occasional separate visits to Hedonics Plus. She favors the Paris Percheron lines, while he goes in for the Moon Moth."

I made an admonishing mudra as deftly as I could, lacking hyperflexion.

"Unless this is strictly necessary--"

K-mart smiled at the notion of having official access to the peccadillos of others. He was still young. "Just thought you should know all the angles.

Anyway, they decided to put the prodge together last year, when their combined eft topped two hundred kay. Set themselves up as prime candidates for a kidnapping and ransom demand from any posse of wackos. Sons of Dixie, League of Country Gentlemen, Radical Optimists, Plus Fourierists, you name 'em -- they'd all like a crack at such a scion."

"But there was nothing overt, right? No warning posts, no anonymous messenger splices, no letter bombs?"

"Right. The attack on the Blankie was the first sign of any trouble."

"No chance they're behind it themselves? Some insurance scam? Post-vitrio depression?"

"Nope. If you want to drop the pins on the interrogation, you'll see how authentically quenched they were."

"I didn't really think so. But you have to trace all the pathways."

K-mart twirled his mustachios like some reductionist-paradigm villian.

"You know what I figure?"

"What?"

"The Blankie itself was supposed to do the kidnapping. Crawl away with the prodge out the window, after it got its subversion-shot from the bird. But the ganglia-mappings were screwy -- bad engineering -- and the heist went sour."

I thought about K-mart's theory for a moment. It just didn't ring true to me. How would the combined mass of the Blankie and its human burden have gotten past the sensate alarm? Surely any kidnappers sophisticated enough to gimmick a bird like that would have considered such a crucial detail. Maybe the Blankie could have bypassed the house's circuits somehow after its alteration. But then where would the pickup have occured? I couldn't picture the Blankie inch-worming its way through town unnoticed. And there had been no suspicious intruders located in the immediate neighborhood. No, the whole kidnapping angle, although it was the obvious answer, seemed wrong somehow.

"These Blankies -- I've never heard of them before this. Are they new?"

K-mart chased down a few hyperlinks and found the information. "Ixsys submitted all the documentation and beta-test results on them six months ago.

The NUdies approved the Blankies for the domestic market a month after that.

Global licensing from the WTO still pending."

"What's their market-share?"

"Only ten percent. The Blankies don't have a lot of the higher functions of other childminders. Most parents still favor Carebears and Mother Gooses when the prodge gets a little older. But the Blankies are cheap and easy for round the-clock sanitary functions and monitoring. They never sleep, for one thing. Helps explain how they went from a zero to ten share in just under half a year...."

I got up from my imipolex seat, which flattened out into its default shape, awaiting the next occupant. "Sign a lie-detector out of the stables." I didn't work with the IRS splices directly anymore, leaving that part of the job to K-mart. "We're going to pay the swellheads and trumps at Ixsys a little visit."