But surprisin'ly enough, the net effect of all these after-hours horror stories is not to discourage us gips, but rather to make us feel special and important. After all, who else has such a vital job as us? Cleanin' up this poor abused planet is -- or should be -- society's number-one priority, after all, and they ain't invented a robot yet that's smart enough or tough enough to do what we do, or take the shit we endure. Imagine some hunk of heuristics pokin' its sensors into the hells we gotta enter, without fryin' its CCD's and crispin' its boards. As for the splices, the union keeps them out. And as long as we get our regular search-and-repair silicrobe shots, we ain't gonna suffer any more weird diseases or terry-tomas than your average New Yorker or Nevadan.

Not that I do it mainly for glory or outa some sense of duty to humanity.

Shit, no. I don't think you'll find one greenpeacer out of every thousand gipsies you talk to. I do it cuz the eft's damn good, and so are the bennies, and you can retire after fifteen years. (My company, Dallas Detox, Inc., was one of the first to pioneer that particular policy, and that's one of the reasons I'm purely proud to work for them. Another's that they are one hunnerd percent American, and there's not many companies left that can make such a claim, 'specially since they fully phased the Union in ten years ago. Now, I don't hold with them Sons of Dixie, or any of the other constitutionalist groups, legal or underground, but there is something about being ruled by Canucks that just goes up my craw a mile. And if I got to be ruled by them, leastwise I don't have to work for them. Yet.) Anyway, it's a decent life, and sometimes an excitin' one, even if, as I said, it's no career for a married man -- as Geraldine never tires of remindin' me. But I ain't married. And I never listen to Geraldine.

When Stack came into the dorm, wavin' the metamedium printout that bore the DDI logo in its upper corner (a pair of tweezers nippin' a double helix) and smilin', we all knew we had gotten a good postin'. But we couldn'ta guessed how good till the crewboss spoke.

"Parliament has voted, boys and girls. The Slikslak is deadmeat, and DDI's gonna pick the corpse."

Well, the roar of excitement that greeted this announcement rattled the biopolymer panels of the big Komfykwik Kottage we were livin' in, there on the shores of Lake Baikal in Greater Free Mongolia, which stagnant pisshole we had finally finished de-acidifyin' and ecobalancin' and revivifyin' and suchlike.

We were goin' home, stateside, back to the good old U.S. of A. (and I'll continue to call it that till my dyin' day, despite all laws to the contrary).

To actually get an assignment back in civilization -- it was too good to be true. No more funny food or dark-skinned women or comic jabber which you couldn't understand without takin' a pill. It was hog heaven for a poor gipsy.

I was emptyin' my locker and packin' my kit on my bunk when Geraldine sidled up to me all innocent-like. I pretended not to notice her.

"Lew," she said, in a voice as sweet as corn syrup on candied yams, "Stack is making up the room-roster for Waxahachie. We are going to put up at a local motel, and all the rooms're doubles. I don't suppose..."

I looked up at Geraldine then. She was wearin' earrings shaped like biohazard signs, her brown hair was cropped shorter'n mine, with a lopsided swatch across her brow, her face was naked of makeup, save for silicrobe tattoon butterflies at the corners of her lips, and she barely filled out her size small DDI-issue coverall. She reminded me of the kid sister I'd never had.

"Geraldine, I do appreciate the offer or suggestion or proposition or whatever you wanna call it. But if I have told you once, I've told you a million times. The chemistry is just not there. My probe don't match your target. Look, I like my women big, busty, and dumb, and you are neither."

The tattoons a milli beneath Geraldine's skin fluttered their wings in agitation as the tears leaked like Israeli root-drips from her eyes.

"I -- I could be dumb for you, Lew, if that was what you really wanted.

There's new tropes for that, I heard. Dumbdown, MoreOn... As for the other stuff, well, it'd cost me plenty, but I'd do it for you. Honest, I would--"

I slapped my own forehead. "Holy shit, Geraldine, I ain't askin' you to change, get that into your head right now. I was only outlinin', like, the kind of woman that jumps my gaps. Listen." I put an arm real uncle-like around her shoulder. "You're a helluva gipsy. I never seen anyone better at dredgin'

a bay or sprayin' a forest full of pear-thrips than you. I am proud to be your partner on any job Stack gives us. But that's where it ends, you latch?

Strictly a professional relationship."

Geraldine had turned the taps off by the time I finished my speechifyin'.

She knuckled her eyes, then extended one hand. We shook.

"Okay," she said, sadder'n a preacher who's seen the collection come up empty, "if that's the way you want it. It's better than nothing, I guess."

We loosed our shake. "See you on the plane, Lew."

I went back to my packin'. What a mixed-up gal. I wondered why people had to lose it when it came to their emotions. Thank the Lord we at least had tropes and strobers nowadays to help. It was hard to imagine how it had been just a few decades ago, before the bioboys understood all there was to know about the brain. Not that you should come to rely too much on such aids, I believed. There was something to be said for a natural life. Why, look at me, for instance. Once I had taken all the mnemotropins prescribed in school and learned what I had to, did I keep on takin' 'em? Nope, not me. As my daddy always said, "Son, if we was meant to get our experience outa a pill, the Good Lord woulda made 'em easier to swallow."

Before that day was over, we were boardin' a DDI suborb, all laughin' andjokin' at the thought of hittin' the streets of Dallas once again. We had barely settled into the flight, however, when we were told to buckle up once more for the landin' and take our circadian-adjusters. That's the problem with these hour-long jumps: they don't give you no time to feel like you really been travelin'. One minute your ass is in Mongolia, the next minute you're home. It does require some mental gymnastics.

We got hung up in Customs for a couple of hours -- longer'n the flight itself. Turned out a couple of our gips had tried to make a little extracurricular eft for themselves by attemptin' to smuggle back Mongolian bugs in their blood. Probably some kind of ethnic-specific high that they figured would sell well among the Dallas community of ex-pat Hong Kongers. The Customs probes had unzipped the nongenotype codes faster'n spit dryin' on a griddle, and Stack had some fancy dancin' to do to get off with just a bloodwash, by claimin' our innocent liddle boys was infected without their knowledge.

In the terminal we were crossin' the atrium when a squad of IMF crick-cops bulled through, carryin' their chromo-cookers and packin'

splat-pistols, lookin' mean as eighty-year-old virgins with libido-locks, headin' doubtlessly for some Fourth-World infection or infestation of some sort. We gave 'em a wide berth outa respect, as they are about the only ones with a dirtier job than us gips. We got it relatively easy, dealin' with old well-known hazards, while they get all the new and superdangerous shit.

Outside DDI had a couple of Energenetix cowbellies with drivers waitin'

for us. Most of the folks clambered right into the minivans (I made a point of gettin' in a different one from Geraldine), but Tino and Drifter -- the boys who had gotten pinched by Customs -- had to take a piss real bad. Side effect of the bloodwash. They'd be leakier'n a sharecropper's cabin in a hurricane for the next day.

Stack called out, "Don't waste the biomass, boys."

Tino and Drifter grumbled, but they each opened up a fuel intake cap, unvelcroed their flies, butted their groins up to the vans, and did their best to top off the tanks.

Refastenin' their coveralls, the two climbed in rather sheepishly.

Tamarind, a bantam-weight black gal sittin' next to me, who always managed to get off a great zinger with perfect timin', said, "A lot different than the last sockets I seen you boys plugging."

Everyone cut loose with all the laughter we'd been holdin' in, roarin', and howlin' fit to burst. Even Drifter and Tino eventually joined in the gipsy camaraderie. Hell, we knew it could've been any of us that'd got caught, and we couldn't hold the wasted time against them. Come what may, us gips hang tighter'n the plies of steelwood laminated with barnacle-grip.

Thus enjoyin' ourselves in our loose gipsy way, we motored south out of the mass of gleamin', glassy Dallas towers, headin' toward our latest assignment.

Waxahachie was about twenty-five miles south of the city, so we had roughly a forty-minute drive. (You can't push a cowbelly much faster'n sixty kph, especially when fully loaded.) Some gips settled in for a nap, which helps the circadian-adjusters kick in, but I was too excited to be back home to sleep, so I levered open a window and let the familiar dusty scents of a Texas summer waft in while I watched the scenery laze by.

We passed a small orchard of peachtrees at one point. The trees were full of splices harvesting the force-grown fruit. The human overseer lay in the shade, collar-box by his side, within easy reach. To me the splices looked about 50 percent chimp, 40 percent lemur, and 10 percent human. But I coulda been off by a few percent either way.

"I sure do dislike those splices," said Tamarind. "Thank heavens we got laws keeping them down."

"Not to mention the collars and diet-leashes," I added. Then I got a funny notion which I had to share. "Hey, Tam, you ever feel weird about the splices and your heritage and all? I mean, like maybe they hold the sameposition now that your folks did, a couple of centuries ago?"

"Shit no. They aren't human, after all, are they? And that makes all the difference."

I could see her point. "Well, I guess in a way the splices make it possible for an old redneck like me to be buddies with a gal of color like yourself and mostways not think twice about it."

Tam punched me in the shoulder. "You got it, Lew."

Shortly after that, we pulled into the parking lot of the motel Geraldine had mentioned to me back at Lake Baikal. There were a lot of other DDI vehicles there, all with the tweezered helix on their sides, and, as I later found out, some other gipsies were even bunkin' in the quarters that used to house the Slikslak staff. I figured this for one of the biggest deconstruction jobs I had ever taken part in. With any luck, it'd last a good long time, so I could continue to enjoy the comforts of a real bed, good American food, and sweet Texas poontang, a juicy sample of which I was gonna make haste to lay my hands and stiff probe on as soon as possible.

In the motel lobby, Stack called our names off a roster. "Shooter, you're bunking with Benzene Bill in three-sixteen."

I swore. Benzene Bill -- so called for the tattoon of a spinning snake-in-mouth Kekule ring he sported off his massive right bicep -- was a mean-natured sumbitch I had never gotten along with. Maybe I woulda been better off with Geraldine, even if I had hadda fend off her constant feminine advances.

I found Bill in the crowd, and we headed for our room together in tense silence.

Inside, Bill said, "Lissen, Sludgehead, if I want to bring some nookie back here, you'd better clear out on my say-so, whether it's for the whole night or not."

I put my kit down and calmly faced him. "Bill, the facts is, you are as ugly as an ape 'n' hornytoad splice, and no sleeve is gonna look twice at you, lessen she's paid some big eft, or she's maybe been dosed with a combo of uglybuster and lubricine."

Bill grabbed the front of my coverall. "Why, you cocksucker--"

"Bill," I said all calm and gentle-like, "do you remember Marseilles?"

He snorted then, but he let me go right fast. Retreating to his bed, he began unpacking his kit, and there was no more said about me clearin' out for his improbable ruttin'.

It's good to get the terms straight in any relationship right from the start.

Well, the day was pretty shot by then, but we still had time for a tour of the Slikslak itself, to get acquainted with the place we were gonna be demolishin'.

Everyone was kinda disappointed when we arrived at the old Superconductin' Supercollider, which had had such a checkered, on-again, off-again history. Wasn't much of the SCSC aboveground. It was all buried beneath the prairie, a ring of deep-cooled magnets and beam-bouncers and particle-chambers some fifty miles in diameter, all contaminated by decades of experimentation in a nice mild way that promised low rems. (I understand the lunar facility that replaced the Slikslak is twice as big, and cost half as much to build, what with the free vacuum and new superwire.) When we got down below, though, everyone's enthusiasm picked up. This job was gonna be easy -- hardly any exotics aside from liquid hydrogen -- and the sheer size of the place meant it would take practically forever. What a sugartit assignment!

Back at the motel, with dusk comin' down like silk sheets in a Paris helmsley, we found that DDI had laid on a humongous Tex-Mex barbecue for our first night. As I've said a hundred times -- and not just when Stack was around to overhear -- they are swell employers with a lot of class. Smellin'

the beefaloes and leanpigs turnin' on their spits, holding a cold cheer-beer in my hand, watchin' the stars poppin' out one by one like random pixels onGod's antique monochrome display, listenin' to the joyful chatter of my fellow gips, contemplatin' the easy job ahead of me, I was as near to heaven as I have ever been on this mostly sad ol' earth.

And that peaceful feelin', so pure and unnatural, I reckon now, is what should have alerted me to my comin' troubles.

It was the first weekend after we had started the Slikslak job, and we gips were ready to party. Several days of bone-breakin' labor, with nothin' to do after hours except raster whatever gaudy gore'n'garters plasma-com the flatscreen was offerin' or play a hand of flashcards or metabolize some samogon at the dingy Waxahachie roadhouse known as Mustang Sally's (the lady owner wore a palomino's tail), had left us achin' for some release.

So a bunch of us -- me, Geraldine, Tam, Tino, Spud, Geneva, IgE, even Benzene Bill and some others -- signed out a van and made the trip into Dallas, lookin' for some Big Fun.

I was drivin' and all my actions felt effortless. We had all had a thorough tonin'-up performed on us by the company cell-scrubber, so all my workweek aches and pains were gone. My skin was as tingly as that of a playpet from Hedonics Plus. Beyond the ultrapure single-crystal windshield, the speedy nighttime scenery looked particularly hi-rez, with all the shadows dithered to fractal depths. I was confident tonight would rack up some megadigits on the Fun Readouts.

Once in Dallas, we headed straight for Deep Ellum, the prime pleasure district of the city. Parking the van and setting its defenses, we hit the crowded sidewalks, walkin' with our kickass gipsy style, guys as if we had a barrel between our legs, gals like they were slidin' along on a greased pole right at crotch height.

I tell you, it made me proud as the ten-year-old who knocked up the neighborhood widow to be stridin' through the city with my fellow gips, confident in our solidarity and fully aware of our so-ci-et-al importance.

Deep Ellum was thronged with folks of every stripe and pedigree enjoyin'

the false halogen day. There were splices runnin' errands for their owners.

There were preteeny peptide-poppers four or five cohorts down the genetic line from my own, streamin' free 'n' wild with the members of their sets and posses, sportin' their fancy Action Potential clothes. There were gerrys and gullas. There were NU cops carryin' flashlights and shockers to keep the peace amongst the various factions, not to mention the local dirty-harrys. All in all, it was a highly stochastic and organic scene.

Well, we began hittin' the bars around eight, exposin' our receptors to various bands rangin' across the noise spectrum, from multipolar music to old-fashioned country-western picked out on a lone synthesizer, and meanwhile not neglectin' to ingest all manner of delightful deliriants and insidious intoxicants.

Around midnight I seemed to come back to myself as if my consciousness was a balloon on a tether light-years-long, which I had to oh-so-slowly reel in.

"Where are we?" I said to Tino.

"In Parts Unknown."

I gathered that was the name of the bar where we sat. It was a smoky, noisy, jam-packed troglo kind of place. On its raw stone walls hung neo-neon signs that said stuff like REDRAW YOUR MAP2 and WHAT'S YOUR AMPERAGE? The bartender was a simian splice which hung by its tail from an aerial rail and mixed drinks with four human hands.

All of a sudden, like storm waters through an arroyo, or the opening of petcocks on the feedline of a breeder-tank, I remembered my urges of a few days ago, to bury my face in some down-home Texas target. In an instant I was hornier'n a kid's pet unicorn. I scoped out the dance floor, spottin'

Geraldine shakin' her skinny little butt with some local dude. Then my eyes passed over her to alight on my dream girl.

She stood a good six feet tall, thanks to her hi-heels. Five-inch ivoryspikes that grew out of the calcaneum of her tarsus bones, they were tipped with gold caps. The rest of her feet were bare, with special hi-impact soles that I could see when she kicked toward the ceiling. She wore some Wind Skin neoprene tights, but nothin' above the waist. Her tits were enormous, and thanks to the implanted cantilever lifts, projected out as firm and confident as a CEO's handshake. She had had the refractive index of her aureoles altered so that they were mirrors. On her cheeks were little patches of iridescent fish-scales. I was willin' to bet a week's eft that her tongue was cat-raspy.

In short, she was just what the cellscrubber ordered.

I pranced out onto the dance floor, cocky as a dirty-harry carrying heavy metal and a journal full of wires.

Her partner was a little south-of-the-border dude that I pegged right from the start as a Brazilian. The Brazzes was heavy into Texas lately, ever since The Doctor's Plot to assassinate the PM had caused such chaos in the upper echelons of the NU.

I tapped the Brazz on the shoulder. "Hey, meninio, how's about lettin' me cut in?"

The little sludgehead just ignored me. His sleeve, though, seemed to like the idea. She stropped her lower lip with her tongue, and I swore I could hear the sandpaper sound of it above the music. The Brazz's cockiness and his sleeve's allure got me so damn inflamed that I did something rash. I spun the Brazz around and coldcocked him with a right to the jaw. Then I grabbed his sleeve and tugged her toward the door. She didn't resist for more'n a milli.

Outside in some shadows I backed her up against a wall and stuck my tongue halfway down her throat. Then I took a handful of her crotch.

I was like to die when I encountered a basket full of male equipment. I disengaged quickly from the kiss, but was too shocked to withdraw my hand.

"What's the matter, honey?" she said. "Looking for this?"

I felt everything squirm and writhe beneath my palm like a hooked crawfish, resultin' in a slow and stealthy envagination and labiation.

Holy radwaste! I'd picked up a maff!

Last time I was stateside, maffs had hung out in their own clubs, and a feller was mostly safe from accidentally hittin' on one. I guessed things had changed since then.

I backed off and trod on someone's foot.

It was the little Brazz. I fell into an offensive posture, then stopped.

He was holding something out to me. His card. I felt sorta dumb, still makin' deadly-like with my hands, so I relaxed and took it.

"Senhor," said the Brazz, "you will have the honor of meeting me, Flaviano Diaz, in the local cockpit, daiqui a oito dias, or your carcass will grace the window of the local emporio."

He bowed and left. That was when I looked at his card.

It said: Flaviano Diaz, Capoeira Instructor, Redbelt, First Degree.

I stood barefoot and barechested in the dusty yard behind the motel, sweatin' under a Saturday noontime sun hot as an episode of Siouxie Sexcrime.

What a hell of a way to be spendin' my free time, practicin' for an engagement that was like as not gonna result in my own bloody death by evisceration. But I had no one to blame except my own fool self, and as my daddy always said, "Son, there is no point in beatin' up on yourself if you can beat on someone else." And that was what I fully intended to do, or die tryin'.

I lifted another five-pound bag of flour from the crateful I had borryed from the commissary. I walked somewhat awkwardly over to the shade cast by the scrawny pin oak that was the motel's sole foliage. Hangin' over a branch from a rope was a sling of plastic netting, just at head-height. I took out the empty slashed flour bag that was inside the ripped net and substituted the full one. When I walked off a few paces, I left a trail of white footprints leadin' from the pile of flour on the ground.

Facin' the suspended flour sack, I went all cat-like, tryin' to will the tension and doubt from my body and mind. I moved in on the enemy, fakin' andfeintin', dippin' and glidin'. When I felt I had that dumb ol' flour sack completely befuddled, I pivoted and launched a high arcin' perfect kick at it.

Sunlight flashed off a crescent of glass as it razored through the bag and nettin', spillin' flour like a cloud of construction silicrobes.

Someone whistled behind me. I turned. It was Benzene Bill.

"I'm glad you wasn't wearing those when we tangled before," he said.

Bill's words flashed me back to Marseilles, when we had been involved in the big Mediterranean cleanup. He was new to the team then and seemed to have taken an instant dislikin' to me, probably cuz I was the only one his size. I got sick of his endless hasslin' of me and decided to settle things once and for all. In the city, I found an academy that taught savate, or "ler box fransay," as they call it otherwise. With appropriate trope conditionin', I was soon qualified to kick the wings off a fly in flight. Shortly thereafter, I put Bill down once and for all. Bill, being a lazy bully, never upped the stakes by goin' in for his own conditionin'.

Later, when we were stationed on the Thai-Kampuchean border doin'

jungle-biome restoration at the site of some old refugee camps, I took the chance to study a little at a monastery, under the monks what taught Thai kick-boxin'.