I flexed the card again, and Honeysuckle's totipotent family chop showed up, the semi-infamous Rancifer icon.

Honeysuckle leered. "That'll get you and your friend anything you ask for from the G-Gnome -- including tits, if that's what you really want."

I stiffened right up, but managed not to change my expression -- I hoped.

I knew the whole class was watching and listening.

"No, I want a spike."

"Me too," said Jinx in a comradely way, although I could sense that he was having second thoughts just like me.

"Pardon me, but I'm sure neither one of you knows your efferents from your afferents. But if you both show up tomorrow with spikes, I'll have to admit you've got plenty of testo-estro."

And with that, Honeysuckle turned her back on us as if we had ceased to exist.

The teacher called us to return to our studies then, and so I couldn't talk anymore with Jinx.

Needless to say, the rest of the four-hour school day moved slow as a crawlypatch. With Honeysuckle's card in my pocket, I couldn't concentrate on plectics or cladistics or kundalini or behavioral pragmatics or even lunch!

(And they were serving my favorite that day too: deep-fried free-range croc with null-cal Ben and Jerry's for dessert.) All I wanted was to be finished with classes, so that Jinx and I could decide what, if anything, we were going to do with the magic flashcard.

At last -- of course and however -- we were free.

Or as free as any eleven-year-old ever is in this ageist society!

Jinx and I met at our usual place, beneath the towering forty-foot paulownia tree on the edge of the schoolyard. We had helped to plant the giant when it was just a tiny seedling two years ago, on Global Arbor Day, and it had been our special spot ever since.

If Jinx had had feet, he probably would have been kicking the dirt. As it was, he exhibited his nervousness by picking bark off our tree.

"I don't know about you," my spaceling proxy said when I came up to him, "but I can't think straight. What do you say we bind some satori and just sit a minute?"

"Now you're firing! I hear the Chromatin Cafe has that new line of Archer Daniels-Midland tropes on tap...."

"Then what are we waiting for? Let's go!" So with Jinx swinging himself along as I ambled, we made our way to the Chromatin Cafe.

We were supposed to be reporting to our separate afterschool apprenticeships. Jinx to his nafta boss at the Mercosur Mart (he was training to run an entrepot for Asgard) and me to the local branch of the Sheldrake Institute, where I was trying to grok morphic field modulation.

But if we were indeed going to be spiked, then missing our work stints would be the least of our transgressions.

The CC was only half a klick from the school, so we didn't bother with the slidewalks. It felt good to use my muscles after so much virtual nonexercise, and I knew Jinx felt the same.

Soon we were inside the sodaparlor with its old-fashioned decorations, primitive PET-scan printouts, and NMR images of brain-glucose uptake, flickering on ancient crackly low-res monitors.

"Two Joshu Juices," I said to the poptate kibernetica behind the counter, presenting Honeysuckle's flashcard. If she didn't pay for anything else, at least she'd pay for our drinks.

"Make mine a Potala Punch," countermanded Jinx.

"The order is two Joshu Juices and one Potala Punch," said the kibe.

"No. One of each."

"The order is one Joshu Juice and one Potala Punch."

"Flame on!"

"This is an assent?"

"Does the Goddess use tampons?"

The poptate churned its heuristics for ten seconds, then began to brew us our sidechains.

"Want to sit by the pond?" asked Jinx, after the drinks were mixed.

"Sure."

I carried the juices, and we found an empty bench on the grassy marge of the small ornamental pond. Two or three baseline ducks were paddling in the reeds, and I was reminded of my dumb id2 and Honeysuckle's sexy one.

I plopped down on the syalon seat, and Jinx used his strong arms to lever himself up beside me. Sitting together like this, his head nearly on a level with mine, it was easy to forget his lack of legs.

We clinked our glasses, and I quoted the ADM jingle.

"'Peace of mind--'"

"'--for a nudollar ninety-nine!'" finished Jinx.

We downed our brews and waited for the effects.

The tropes had been expertly reverse-engineered from a sampling of meditating monks: in the case of Jinx's drink, from the mind of the Dalai Lama himself. In a minute or so, the world took on a shimmering translucence, and I felt connected to the whole universe. Nothing mattered, but everything counted. All my problems were non-existent.

Staring out over the perfect pond, I saw the surface ripple in the middle, then break to reveal the finned back of an airfish making the phase-change into the second half of its life.

We had just studied the specs on these splices, and they rushed into my brain in perfect arrays.

Having filled its flotation bladders with hydrogen broken out of the water and revamped its physiology, the airfish was now ready to live in the atmosphere. It would subsist for a few months on airborne microzooa, spore, and pollen, all the while sucking low-level ozone from the air and concentrating it in a different bladder. Rising higher and higher, it would eventually burst at around 15,000 meters, the lower edge of the ozone layer, releasing its cargo of reactive molecules where they would do good, not harm.

Highly unslouch. Truly nonfactorable goldstar-plus cytofabrication. I definitely wasn't down with the kids who'd try to shoot the O3-suckers with flashlights just to watch the hydrogen mini-explosion.

Jinx spoke up with deep significance. "The airfish is born, becomes adult, does its work, then dies." Without satori tropes, Jinx's words probably don't mean much, or else sound ultra-simplex. But I can't tell you what they meant to me then. They seemed to encapsulate our whole situation in a nutshell.

"We're 'fish too," I answered. "But we're also more than 'fish."

"You're bright as a three-alarm solar flare, girl!"

I knew then that I loved Jinx and would always be with him.

At that very moment, as if in confirmation of our love, another couple wandered in to sit on the bench next to us.

The woman wore Systemix meat, a Great Mother soma-type. Dressed only in a grass skirt, she had a double line of small breasts running down her torso, and her hips were broad as the lake behind the Yellow River dam.

Her companion's silicrobe trademark told me he was racked out by Cellpro.

And what a superstring raster he was! Hawkheaded Horus, noble falcon plumage mantling his shoulders.

Jinx and I looked on in mute admiration for several minutes. In the midst of our trope-induced satori, the couple seemed like heavenly visitors. Even after the glamour had worn off our vision, they still looked megatrump, if merely human.

Ignoring us, the adults quaffed their drinks. (Horus's pointy birdtongue was ultra-uptake!) The brews must have been some kind of aphrodelix, since the couple soon started into some heavy petting. Horus's loincloth quickly became a tent, and I got awfully jealous and sad at the same time.

"Jinx," I pleaded irrationally, "let's use Honeysuekle's card to get the moddies we've always talked about, then run away together!"

Jinx held my hand. "Arnie, think twice. Putting legs on me is no simplex patch job. I'd be laid up for days. We couldn't travel very far even in a hired scar car without leaving a trail even a senile augie-doggie could follow.

"Honeysuckle would be pissing prostaglandins at the theft of her card.

And then our poohs -- or yours anyway -- would snatch us back, and the next thing you know, we'd be wearing obedience collars like some splice! No, the only thing to do is to hold out for a year. It's not such a long time...."

Jinx spoke with the voice of reason, and I knew what he advocated was the only sensible course. Still, my whole soul rebelled at the notion of going on with our boring lives without doing something, especially when we'd have to face all our cohort tomorrow.

I stood up. "I guess the only thing left to do then is to get spiked. At least it'll show our poohs we've got wills of our own. And it should shut Honeysuckle right up. Are you in a dedicated mode?"

Jinx boosted himself off the bench, thumping onto the grass. "Does a carebear sit in the pedwards?"

I laughed. "G-Gnome, here we come!"

Slidewalk Seven was only a one-block stroll north of us, so we chose that transport over the Arteries.

If you pulled out a length of your intestines and slit it longwise, you'd expose the velvety microvilli lining, the zillions of little fingers that propel food through your gut. You'd also have a pretty good model of a slidewalk.

The sturdy silicrobe microvilli of the slidewalk propelled anything placed atop them along at a steady 5kph. (You could ride the network cross-continent in just a month, if you wanted to spend your vacation that boring way, like many slouch oldsters did.) Each invisible finger was rooted in place, yet flexible enough to pass on its burden to its neighbor. (In constant motion, the slidewalks conveyed a visual impression similar to the waveriness of heated syalon pavement. And if you rode them barefoot, they tickled almost subliminally.) Different lanes had different built-in directional orientations, for two-way travel.

The Amgen motto -- "Taxis, not taxis" -- was spelled out right in the substance of the slidewalks. I remembered having to have my dads explain it to me when I was little, since I never knew that "tax-us" could also bepronounced "tax-ease," or even what they were.

Jinx swung himself deftly onboard with the other passengers, vars, kibes, and citizens, and I had to stutter-skip to stay with him. I wasn't usually so awkward, but guess I was kind of nervous about our plans, even though I thought I had convinced myself it was the only way.

As if sensing my unease, Jinx tried to make me laugh. "Did you ever download any reductionist paradigm fiction where the author tried to imagine a system like this and came up with miles of rubber belts on rollers?"

Jinx's trick worked, and I laughed like a hyena splice. "That's not true.

You're yanking my rods."

Jinx held up one hand. "Parity-plus, Arnie. I'll give you the urals, and you can see for yourself."

I chuckled some more. Those ancients -- where were their heads at?!

Before too long, we were dismounting at Bughouse Square.

The thronging Square always reminded me of an old-time carnival midway you might see on some historical channel of the metamedium: lines of garish booths and arcades, peopled by touts and vendors under gaudy silicrobe signage. The centerpiece of the Square, the original Chiron Bughouse, looked positively postmodern, next to the more recent exotic additions to the meatmart.

Here you could find a chromosartor or genebender or simple trope doser who would perform any possible alteration on your somatype or genotype -- for a price. If you had the eft, you could be snipped, ripped or zipped; pumped, stumped or trumped; strobed, lobed or probed; primped, skimped or pimped; vented, scented or demented.

I stood for a minute or so bathing in the scary, alluring, surreal circus, until Jinx tugged at the hem of my doublet.

"Let's find number ten-forty, before we change our minds."

Tracking round the Square, past the TATA Box and the Primordium, past the Organelle Store and Radio Shack Biocircuits outlet, we soon came to the G-Gnome's Cave.

Its facade was all fractal-modeled grocrete stalactites and stalagmites framing an irregular entrance curtained by enviromental ribbons.

I looked at Jinx, and he looked at me. Taking his hand, I tried to be as brave as my truncated spaceling.

"Let's get spiked," I said.

And we went through the ribbons.

My dads told me that a decade or two ago there was a rage for somatypes modeled on the characters in some old reedpair fantasy novel, sparked by a new virtuality rendering of the work. So for a while all you saw on the streets were bobbits and snorks and smogs, or creatures with some such names.

I figured the G-Gnome must have modeled himself on a troll or dwarf or some other runt from that book. His big blue eyes, capped by furry brows, were nearly on a level with Jinx's, and the G-Gnome was standing on his bandy legs!

Two tufts of snowy fluffaduff sprang from behind his ears and decorated his otherwise bare skull. He wore a leather bib apron over a Windskin suit, and his hands were more massive than Jinx's.

To have maintained the same outdated look all these years made me think he was a conservative, slowmole kind of guy, and I instantly felt better to be putting myself in his brawny hands, so reassuringly similar to my proxy's.

"Children," the G-Gnome rumbled, "how can I help you?"

"We're here--" I began, then stopped.

A thrid-vid display had come on at our arrival, and now, cycling through a display of the G-Gnome's wetwares, it had reached the boobs.

They were so beautiful. Conical or melony, brown or creamy, drip-nippled or virgin-tipped, they were like taunting mirages in my personal desert.

It was all I could do to turn back to the G-Gnome and beg, "Please, shut that off." With my luck, the next thing shown would be a variety of the cocks Jinx lacked.

The proprietor complied, and I could breathe. "Thank you. We're here to get spikes."

The G-Gnome's professional smile never wavered, but I could sense something tightening inside him.

"You have your parents'--"

"We've got this," I said, and offered Honeysuckle's card.

Taking it, the G-Gnome flexed it back and forth with a noncommittal expression, but I could see nudollar signs in his eyes.

"Peej Rancifer lent you her card without, ah, duress?..."

I tried a haughty sniff like Honeysuckle used. "Of course. We're the best of friends."

"There should be no problem then."

"I hope not," I said, as the G-Gnome's words made my knees go watery.