'He bribed doctors to forge death certificates.'

Moxon slid the papers back in the envelope. 'Sure, sure. But it's Christmas now '

'Christmas! I think about Kratt, every Christmas, he fits right in there, Herod and the Holy Innocents. Herod and the 'Let me call you a doctor.'

'Makes you wonder did Herod really want to kill Christ, or was he happy just killing any babies?'

'Take it easy, Ben. Just wait right here, I'll go get help and we'll take you up to bed. Wait.'

Moxon found Francine in the kitchen. 'Ben's sick as a dog, we'll have to put him in the spare room and call the doctor. He's out of his head with fever right now. Still goes on about Kratt and that poisoned gingerbread business.'

She understood. 'He still blames himself.'

'Probably right to blame himself.' Moxon lifted his small head and stared unseeing towards the two cooks who were arguing about a missing electric knife. 'And for Indica's walking out on him. The fact is, Ben's always been a fuckup.'

He went back to the library with one of the waiters to find Ben shaking and weeping and sweating; sweat dripped from his chin to the desk blotter.

'He was here, right here in the room!'

'Who, Ben? Kratt?'

'Roderick was right here!' Ben pointed a shaking finger at the darkness. 'My robot! My son, in whom I am well pleased!'

Moxon and Toy looked at one another; each took a shuddering arm. 'Up we go now.'

'He came into the room and stood right there. I saw him, he was wearing a ski sweater. Black, with little white figures on it. Like little people, self-made men. He didn't say anything but he knew who I was. He knew I was protecting him from Herod ...'

On the second occasion when Roderick tried the library, Ben was gone but Allbright was there, examining books.

'Oh it's you. Getting to be like a reunion here, I saw your pal earlier. The guy that wears dark glasses. Felix.'

'I ... please I ...'

'You gonna puke? Try the wastebasket there.'

'I need an outlet ...'

Allbright dusted off a volume. 'Who doesn't? Here's a rare little item. Life of Sir Charles M'Carthy. First edition, clothbound, slight foxing.'

'Help.' Roderick was on all fours behind the desk, fumbling with an electric cord that seemed to run from his navel. 'Help ... plug in.'

'Hope this isn't a suicide. Here.' Allbright reached down and plugged the cord into the wall socket. He watched Roderick's eyes go opaque, then close.

After a minute, Roderick sat upright in something like the lotus position. His navel was still plugged to 120V AC, his eyes still closed. 'My batteries. I don't usually let them run low like that.'

Allbright dropped Sir Charles M'Carthy into his battered briefcase and searched for more first editions. 'Yeah, I feel like that sometimes. Only being a poet I can't even kill myself. It would look too much like imitation of better poets.'

'Suicide. I don't see the point of it.' A v-shaped smile in the shadow by the desk. 'Why take a last step? Why not go on living if only to see what happens next?'

Allbright's laugh made him cough, then sneeze. 'Life as a soap opera, eh? A never-ending series of episodes in Dorinda's Destiny? Trouble is, life isn't as real as TV, not any more. We've traded away our reality. We have no past, no future, no minds, no souls.'

'I don't understand, Mr Allbright.'

'The past, that's just Scarlett O'Hara in a taffeta-hung bed and Washington throwing a dollar across the Potomac or the Delaware all people remember is the dollar, all else is mist and plastic dinosaurs. The past is five minutes ago, it's what happened before the last commercial.

'The future now, that's just space wars, white plastic rockets against black, Terra versus Ratstar. Names don't matter, what matters is the violence. The future has to be galactic annihilation, 1984 for a million years, a spaceboot grinding an alien face forever. Nobody believes in the future anyway, except maybe a few crank science-fiction writers or maybe the people who want to freeze other people into peopie-sicles and store them for a price. And imagine that, asking ice to pay for itself. Yet one more ingenious way to package and market the future.

'So what's left? The mind? Not even a ghost in a machine any more. Now the mind is just something you improve by reading condensed books and listening to distilled records, everybody now knows the mind has secret powers and you can write off to California to unlock, get rich through safe hypnosis in your spare time. The soul? That's now just one more brand of saleable music, money seems to make everything more real, doesn't it? Money is more alive than we are. No wonder kids have started calling themselves robots, they know what's expected of them. It's a robot world.'

'A robot world?'

'Sure, any decent machine can get in on the ground floor, work its way up, become President one or two made it already. A robot has plenty of native advantages to start with: never wastes time, no personal problems, never picks nose in public. Winning combination there.'

Roderick opened his eyes. 'What makes you think a robot would want to get ahead? Couldn't it just enjoy being alive?'

'Let me read you something, friend.' Allbright took down a slim volume and read aloud: '"Jack keeps one hour. The policeman develops all pages. Some sister is offended. Jack's nurse offended all reasons. A few fat pilots warded off more vegetables." They call that computer poetry. Poetry? I wonder. Sounds like something Swift cooked up at the Academy of Lagodo, just keep flipping through the combinations and watching nothing much come up. Does this computer know it's writing poetry, and not just figuring a payroll or firing off a missile?'

Roderick opened his mouth to reply, but no reply came. Allbright picked up his heavy briefcase and shuffled to the door. 'I mean to say, if that stuff is poetry, then sex with a vibrator must be love.'

The door closed behind him, then opened immediately, letting in a slice of light, piano chords, and a stumbling couple.

'Oh! Excuse me!' Judi Mazzini let out a yelp of laughter as she steered the man in dark glasses, turning him around and leading him out as though he were blind.

Mrs McBabbitt lived high in a glass tower by the river. Roderick had not kissed her in the taxi and he did not kiss her in the elevator.

'Come on in, Roddy, have a drink or something.'

'Thanks, I'll come in but I nice apartment.' There was a bowl of yellow roses on a round table, and next to it, a picture of Mr Kratt. 'But who, this can't be Mr McBabbitt, this '

'No, an old friend, an old friend. He well stays here sometimes. You might as well know he pays for this place, he kind of owns me. I never usually bring anybody here, only I don't know, tonight I just felt anyway, you're different. You don't really want anything, do you?'

'Well I well I '

'I don't mean you're like queer, you just seem to not want anything. You seem like chaste.'

'Ha. What er happened to Mr McBabbitt, if you don't mind my asking?'

'Him? Oh, he's Doctor McBabbitt, he was my plastic surgeon. Or you could say I was his showcase. He tried out everything on me, damn near everything. All those years, all those years ...'

'Pain,' said Roderick softly.

'Pain, oh sure, not that that mattered so much. People put up with pain at the dentist, it all depends on what you want out of life, I wanted beauty. All I ever wanted was beauty, so I married him. I picked him because he was the best. Very best.'

They sat together on the sofa, leaning together stiffly as she wept.

'Oh this is stupid, stupid, I've got nothing to cry about. He was the very best, he still is. I mean he had style. He didn't get all his ideas from movie stars and strippers, he used to look at paintings a lot too, Old Masters and that. Like one guy, I think it was Corpeggio, anyway he painted this beautiful woman and when some French prince got hold of it he took a knife and cut the painting all to pieces. Only somebody secretly got them all and put it back together, all but the head. They had to paint a new head. You know, Dr McBabbitt liked his work because he got to be both people, you know? The painter and the guy with the knife. You know?'

She jumped to her feet and smoothed the black velvet. 'I feel lots better now. You want a coffee or anything before you leave?'

XII.

America come alive!

Grab on to a brand new day!

' Good morning, Mr and Ms America, I'm Jeb Goodhart '

' and I'm Brie Wittgenstein, bringing you the early news update '

'Good God, what? What's it?' Indica fought for consciousness, for some clue to this booming, blustering confusion in which giant orange faces grinned and bellowed at her from across a room of the wrong shape. She seemed to be ten feet from the floor, and there was a large spider on her pillow.

' says it's the most severe quake in Ruritania since nineteen Dr Tarr's head appeared from under her bed. 'Morning! Sleep all right?'

'What? Yes I but I just what I bunk beds? Where are we?' 'Ha ha, don't you remember? This is my old frat house, Digamma Upsilon Nu.'

'Your old, why should I remember your old ?'

'No, but don't you remember the snowbank? We skidded into a big snowbank? And I went for help while you stayed in the car?'

'I remember you telling me not to go to sleep.' The spider on her pillow became a contact lens, glued in place by a false eyelash. She rescued it. 'That pissed me off, because I'd already taken my two Dormistran, how could I stay awake?'

'Yes well see we turned out to be only a mile from my old frat house here, whereas almost sixteen miles to my place with god knows what damage to the front end of my wait a minute, you took sleeping pills? On the way to my place? If you I mean thought it was going to be that bad, why bother coming? I mean '

'Hey kids, does your Mom buy you Flavoreenos? My Mom does and I really love her, because Flavoreenos are corn-style flakes in 26 delicious flavours! Have you tried cherry cola? Chili dog? Chocolate sardine parfait? Mmmm, I get a new flavour every morning, because my Mom loves me and I love Flavoreenos!'

'Okay okay maybe I was a little nervous but anyway here we are in bunk beds does it matter? And do we need that TV on with all that, that wall projection kids with orange hair eight feet tall eating blue goop Jesus Jack I don't feel so well.'

'Just um trying to catch the weather, new antifreeze account I '

There was a knock at the door. Tarr answered it to a burly young man with a flat nose. 'Brother Tarr? I'm supposed to give you your bill here. Uh, here.'

'What's this? Looks more like somebody's bill for a week at the Waldorf wait a minute, what's this item here, fifty bucks for snow, what's that supposed to '

'Bathtub fulla snow, Brother Tarr. Just like you ordered. We filled it while you was asleep.'

Just like I wait now, hold on fellas, no, hold on '

Three other burly young men came in, seized Tarr and carried him struggling into the bathroom. After a few shrieks and shouts, a dozen guffaws, the boys came out, blew kisses to Indica and left. A minute later, Tarr came out grinning, naked, towelling himself. 'Ha ha, damn it, I forgot what great jokers the brothers can be.'

'Yeah very amusing.' She turned to the TV.

' Bimibian police claim the schoolgirls were throwing stones, and say it was only in self-defence that officers opened fire with automatic weapons and raked the classrooms. No death figures have been released yet, but unofficial estimates When she and Tarr were dressed, Flat Nose came back with a genuine bill. 'And we didn't charge nothing for towing your car, Brother Tarr. Because you're a good sport.'

Tarr grinned and opened his chequebook. Indica said, 'You boys like gags, do you?'

Flat Nose grinned. 'We pull some perdy good ones around here, like last year we made up a guy and we enrolled him in a lotta classes, whole buncha stuff. We even took exams for him, he got a B average, perdy good, huh?' His laughter sounded like a child's imitation of a machinegun, as he left with his cheque.

'Jesus,' said Indica. 'Nothing changes around the U, I've been away from it years now, same asshole kids still here pulling the same asshole stunts, hanging toilet seats on the Student Union tower why don't we get out of here?'

He looked at the TV. 'Guess I missed the weather '

'Good news for kids in Topeka, Kansas, where the Santa Claus strike is over 'And just in time, Brie, with five more shopping days till Christmas. And in a New Jersey divorce court a judge has just awarded a couple joint custody of their Christmas tree wonder who gets to change the bulbs ...'

Within minutes they had exchanged the dazzle of orange faces for the dazzle of sun on snow, the boom of TV for the roar of radio.

... keep your de-entures gri-ipping tight Eat in heavenly peace Eat in heavenly peace 'I called the office,' said Tarr. 'But Judi my sec isn't in yet. So I can drop you anywhere, plenty of time.' The car sped through outlying fragments of the campus, past book-stores and sweatshirt boutiques, past the new Life Sciences building with its imposing sculpture of a clam. 'I'll have to chew her ass out good, though, being this late.'

'But Jack, wasn't she at the party last night? Maybe the poor girl just overslept.'

'So? Of course I still expect her to turn up on time, and normally she's very conscientious too, that's why this leaves me in a bind, I wanted to finish mapping out this Middle East campaign with her before we run into Christmas.'

Dent-a-poise has the answer for you Confidence with what-ev-er you chew Eat in heavenly ...

'Market forecasting, isn't that kind of crystal ball stuff?' she asked. The car was leaving University environs and entering a neighbourhood of cheap bars, pawnshops, fast food and barricaded liquor stores.

'Crystal ball, hmm, you could say that. In fact, we use psychic data right along with more conventional info, you'd be surprised how well they correlate. Not long ago we had an account, a well-known company who wanted to open up a chain of taco stands in the University area. Or was it pizza-burgers? Anyway, what they wanted was an optimal set of locations. So we took a map of the campus, held a pendulum over it, and just assessed the strength of the swing.'

'You're kidding.'

'Nope. There were four strong-swing areas and these turned out to be the four ideal locations! You could call that good guesswork but was it?'

'I wouldn't know,' she said, amused. 'To me, psychic stuff is just all in the mind.'

'Yes yes, of course, nothing wrong with healthy scepticism and I myself LOOK OUT! DAMN YOU!' He hit the brakes as a ragged figure in a torn storm-coat danced across the street in front of them. The car slid on glare ice a few feet, hit the man gently and had no apparent effect; for he too slid, flailing his arms until he could regain his dancing pace and make it to the kerb. There he removed a glove and gave them the finger.

'Damn these derelicts, every Christmas they swarm down here, makes you wish the city would just bring in exterminators, put out I don't know maybe bottles of poison wine in paper bags '

'But Jack, look! Look, isn't that Allbright, he was at the party.'

'And here he is in his own environ what are you doing?'

Before the car could move again she had the window down and was waving. 'Allbright! Hey! You need a ride anywhere?'

The gaunt figure paused, Z-bent to peer at them, then danced over. 'And a Merry Christmas to you, good lady, and to your good gentleman, God bless you for your true Christian spirit as you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, ride the pedestrian '

'Just get in the car and shut up,' Tarr said. 'Allbright the damn light's changing.'

Allbright squeezed in beside Indica, letting his arm hang out the open window. 'Where we going, kids?'

'Just shut up.'