"Don't be so coy. I've heard how savage you primitives can be." Nya ran an exploratory finger down the front of Belilo's uniform, between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The rest of the crowd watched the scene with delicious antic.i.p.ation. Belilo tensed and clenched her fists, prepared for a fight. She would show Nya and the others just how savage she could be.

Then Ama.s.sa touched Belilo lightly on the shoulder. "Remember, you must behave yourselves. Life can be awfully unpleasant for those who don't cooperate. Nya won't hurt you." She looked over to the woman whose hands were continuing their exploration of Belilo's body. "You won't hurt her, will you? It would be such a waste of such unique material."

"Nothing that can't be fixed," Nya said, her eyes not wavering from Belilo.

"See?" Ama.s.sa said to comfort her frightened captive.

But Belilo was far from comforted. She tried to break away, but two other people had sneaked up behind her. They pushed her forward, straight into Nya's arms. Nya laughed as she embraced her prey, and Ama.s.sa joined her in the laughter. The general tone throughout the room was one of high amus.e.m.e.nt.Symington and Hawker both started forward to help their friend, and fell flat on their faces. Strong anklets had grown out of the floor, wrapped around their feet and held them securely in one spot. They could do nothing to help, and had to watch impotently the fate of their comrade.

Belilo was trying to use her combat training against her attacker. One foot lashed out a vicious swipe that caught Nya off guard. The smaller woman went flying across the room, knocking into several of the onlookers. Ama.s.sa clucked and shook her head, then reached down to her belt. Belilo's left foot, still on the ground, was instantly pinioned just as the men's had been. Belilo stood awkwardly poised with her right foot still in the air. She tried to catch her balance and keep the foot away from the floor so it wouldn't be caught like the other one. While she was engaged in that delicate maneuver, other guests came up behind her and grabbed both her arms, while two more grabbed her free leg and held it outstretched.

Nya got slowly to her feet and came forward to face Belilo. Hawker would not have called the smile on her lips cruel; it was merely devoid of any warmth. Nya reached out to touch the struggling but helpless woman again and gently unfastened the front seam of her uniform. "Such pa.s.sion, such fire," she remarked to herself as she began to peel Belilo's clothing methodically from her body. "Primitive, indeed."

Belilo spit in her face, but Nya kept stripping her undeterred. In just a few minutes, with the aid of her accomplices, she had Belilo standing naked before the crowd. Nya inspected the body, nodding approval of Belilo's muscle tone and admiring the scars she'd acquired during her long military career. Then, as Ama.s.sa dissolved the ankle restraint, Nya and her friends carried Belilo through the crowd and out of Hawker's sight.

Ama.s.sa released the restraints on Hawker and Symington. "I suppose you should be commended for your primitive impetuosity, but a little of that can go a long way. Let's see if you can be just a little more civilized, shall we?"

"What was civilized about that?" Symington asked as he stood up, but he never received an answer. He was almost immediately encircled by a group of admirers-mostly female, but some male-exploring his large, muscular frame. They began stroking him and tearing at his clothing, s.e.xual hunger naked on their faces.Ama.s.sa came over to Hawker as he knelt, and spread her wings around him protectively. "This one's mine," she announced to the crowd at large.

Then, looking into Hawker's face, she said sweetly, "There's nothing to fear. I won't let anything hurt you. Here, try one of these."

Before he knew what she was doing, she popped a tiny tablet into his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but she held a hand over his mouth with more strength than he would have thought she had. He refused to swallow the pill, but it made no difference; the tablet dissolved on his tongue with a fizzy sensation, like the carbon dioxide "exploding" candy he'd had as a child. The fizziness spread outward from his tongue to his cheeks, and finally upward to his eyes and his brain, where it exploded like fireworks on a summer night.

The room did not spin, exactly, but it did go off center, and his every movement to right himself only made the situation worse. The swirling color patterns of the walls, which had seemed so subtle before, suddenly shrieked at him; the red lanced out at his eyes, the yellow threatened him with deadly flames and the blue licked out at his feet like an inviting ocean, tempting him to drown himself in its depths. The noise around him, the talking of Ama.s.sa's guests, dopplered in and out of his range like an obscene siren. His skin itched from the feet of a million imagined ants, but his mind was bathed in honey balm and scarcely noticed. Hie tongue tasted of peppermint and sour apples, while his nose was filled with the musky scent of his own body, unbathed for several days.

His mind moved, his body remained. He was floating well-above the tumult, an omniscient but impotent G.o.d. Ama.s.sa's guests danced and wheeled, just as he had seen their bubbles dancing through the sky.

Gravity was no master to them; they defied it at their will, soaring and spinning through the crowded s.p.a.ce, their bodies touching and rubbing in sensual patterns as random as they were erotic. His mind pierced the wall, through the other bubbles that congregated around Ama.s.sa's, watching the frenetic gyrations of the aerial ballet matching the simulated pa.s.sions of their creators. He saw Belilo in another bubble, spread-eagled and held helpless by some invisible force, while Nya and a dozen of her minions stroked her and poked her, kissed her and clawed her, laughing at their captive's increasingly hoa.r.s.e screams...

The sight was repellent, and Hawker left quickly. He floated back to Ama.s.sa's bubble, less crowded now that the party had dispersed.Symington was gone, carried off somewhere by his circle of admirers.

Green was still on his couch, ignored, his twisted body probably too abhorrent even for this decadent crowd. The Hawker-body was on the floor, stripped naked, center of attention. It was writhing in painful convulsions in reaction to the drug, while Ama.s.sa and her friends sat around discussing the phenomenon. The Hawker-mind was too detached, though, and floated against one wall, all uncaring.

When the convulsions stopped he found himself back in his body, but the effects of the drug were far from ended. Time became elastic, stretching out before him like a rubber band, only to snap back with painful abruptness in an instant. Sometimes the actions of the people around him seemed like a speeded-up movie, and he wanted to laugh at the comical antics, while at other times everything around him came to a dead stop and he wanted to shout to get them moving again.

The ceiling, with its changing patterns of light and darkness, became the most fascinating object in the universe. He devoted his entire attention to it. He realized that things were happening to his body; he could tell, in an abstract way, that feelings of a s.e.xual nature were crawling ever so slowly along his nerves to his brain, but they never fully penetrated. He could tell he had an erection, and the tension built to a monstrous o.r.g.a.s.m, an e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n that went on endlessly through time and s.p.a.ce. But those were distractions, and he wished they would go away so he could concentrate more fully on the ceiling. That was really important.

After a while the ceiling ceased to occupy him, and he found himself floating again-only this time it was the body and mind together. He was naked in empty s.p.a.ce, surrounded by ghosts, wraithlike figures he could see right through. They pinched him and tickled him, and when he reached out to defend himself his hand would go through them as though they didn't exist. Then the whole world went blurry, as though seen by a myopic without his gla.s.ses. Shapes lost all definition and objects had no distinct edges. Smells tickled his nostril hairs without staying long enough to be identified. Sounds came to him as through the wrong end of a telescope, making no sense whatsoever. He felt that if they would only slow down, and if he could play them backward on a tape recorder, they might just have some meaning-but they kept coming at him without a stop.

Putting his hands to his ears did no good; it could not shut out the screaming of some madman in the room, and it wasn't for driftless agesthat he realized the screaming madman was himself.

It was not long after that when the shadows crept up over the horizon of his peripheral vision and engulfed him in a merciful darkness of sleep.

His tongue was fuzzy and his eyeb.a.l.l.s ached. Those were the first sensations to hit him as he drew out of the pit into which Ama.s.sa's strange drug had cast him. His nose was stuffy and he had to breathe through his mouth. His body was naked but cool, and he felt as though he were floating in a swimming pool. Another body was pressed tightly against his-a female body, soft and smooth and delicate, her slender arms encircling him.

"How did you get your wings?" he heard his own voice ask, as though he'd been in the middle of a conversation and continued on automatically.

"I had them surgically adapted when I was nineteen. Aren't they magnificent?"

Hawker finally opened his eyes despite the throbbing sensation that caused. He was staring directly into Ama.s.sa's face, and she was gazing at him with a beatific smile. The two of them were floating in the air in the middle of her bubble; she was holding both of them aloft, with her beautiful feathered angel wings spread wide apart for his inspection.

"I've never seen anything quite like them," he said truthfully.

Her eyes narrowed a bit and she looked at him more critically. "It's worn off, hasn't it?"

"What?"

"The outgo, the drug I gave you."

"I guess so."

"Would you like some more?"

"No!"

He realized instantly, from her expression, that his reply had been much too vehement, and he tried to soften its impact. "That is, I... not right now. I'm not used to something like that, I need time to recover.Maybe later."

Ama.s.sa smiled and ruffled his hair with one playful hand. "I must remember, my darling primitive, that your body is not as adaptive as ours."

"I'm afraid not." He hesitated. "How long was I... under?"

Ama.s.sa pouted; time meant little to her, and she hated having to think about it. "Oh, about three days, I think. "Does it matter?"

Three days! Who knew what could have happened in all that time?

Would the army still be searching for him, or had Singh's ruse put them off the trail? "Where are my friends?" he asked.

"The twisted one is still with me-he wasn't much fun, and no one else wanted him. As for the others..." She shrugged. "They're off somewhere.

I'm not sure precisely where."

"Will I have a chance to see them again?"

"Perhaps." Ama.s.sa's tone made it plain she was annoyed at the direction the conversation was going. "Right now, though, they're no concern of yours. You should be more interested in pleasing me."

To emphasize her point, Ama.s.sa rubbed her body suggestively against his. Her smooth bare skin pressed tightly to his own had the desired effect; Hawker came quickly erect, and Ama.s.sa moved her hips slightly to allow him to slip easily inside her. She then threw her entire being into a grinding motion that left Hawker gasping with raw desire.

They spun rhythmically through the empty air, and a sudden wave of vertigo almost made Hawker lose his erection. Sensing this, Ama.s.sa redoubled her efforts and restored him to full potency. Hawker pushed from his mind the fact that they were floating in midair, refused to think about the spins and somersaults Ama.s.sa was putting them through, cleared from his brain every external distraction. Ama.s.sa was right: he had to please her if he wanted to escape eventually from this glorious but frightening prison. Hawker concentrated all his feeling into the s.e.xual pa.s.sion of their union, letting the pressure build until it exploded in a climax so intense it was actually painful.His body went limp, and Ama.s.sa lowered them both to the ground, to which she gave a soft, spongy consistency. Hawker lay panting on his back while she gently traced the muscles of his arm with one long, delicate finger. "Would you mind if I asked you a question?" he said when he'd regained his breath.

He could feel her fingers pause over his skin, fingernails ready to pierce him if he displeased her. "Is it about your friends?" she asked coldly.

"Not exactly. I was just wondering whether the army was still looking for us. Technically we're deserters, and the army doesn't like to let deserters get off too easily. Also, we stole Green away from them before they were finished studying him, and I don't think they were very happy about that."

Ama.s.sa relaxed once more. "There have been some bulletins about fugitives, but very vague. Something about your being armed and dangerous." She smiled, as though at a private joke. "But we know better, don't we?"

She was so smug, so superior, and yet Hawker knew there was nothing he could do. She had too much control over the situation. "Are you going to turn us in?"

"Maybe, someday. Not for a while, though." She grinned greedily.

"You're much too... entertaining."

"I thought you were involved with Consakannis."

"Oh, sometimes," she dismissed casually. "Right now he's over with Nya's group, involved in something or other. He'll wander back into my life, eventually."

Hawker lapsed into silence again, resting in the afterglow of the fantastic lovemaking. His body was coated with sweat, and he felt too weak to do anything. The exertion, following such a long period under the influence of the outgo drug, had worn him down. Right now, he couldn't force himself to care what his future might be.

After a while, Ama.s.sa asked, "Why did you do it? Why did you and the others desert?"Hawker paused and took a few deep breaths while he tried to sort the story out in his mind. "Friendship," he said. "I didn't like what they were doing to my friend."

"I don't understand."

Slowly and carefully, Hawker told Ama.s.sa the full story, from Green's malformed duplication through the decision to free him from the laboratory to the actual escape and flight, ending with the story of their "rendezvous" with Ama.s.sa and her friends. He was hoping to win her sympathy, thinking that if he told the story in an appealing enough manner he might actually touch her heart and enlist her support in the venture. But even as he spoke, he could see it wouldn't work. Ama.s.sa had no soul, no pity-or if she did, it worked along entirely different lines. The very word "friendship" was not the same for her, and the concept of self-sacrifice to help another was alien to her culture. The lack of comprehension was written in her face and broadcast through her eyes; she simply could not understand why Hawker and the others would go to so much trouble and personal aggravation for the sake of someone else.

"I don't know what's going to happen to him now," Hawker concluded sadly. "We got him away from the army, which is what he wanted, but this isn't exactly what we had in mind for him, either. I don't know what we really expected to do. In his condition he could probably never live anywhere naturally."

He shook his head. "Maybe it would be kinder to kill him and put him out of his misery, like shooting a horse with a broken leg. But I just can't do that. He's been my friend forever, it seems. I owe it to him to try everything possible to save him."

"And it wouldn't do any good, even if you did kill him," Ama.s.sa said.

"The army would just duple him again, and start the whole process over."

"At least that's one thing they can't do."

"Everyone and everything can be dupled," Ama.s.sa said firmly.

"You don't understand. Philaskut told us that Green's recording was so badly damaged by whatever happened to it that it fell apart right after they dupled him. That's the whole problem-they can't recreate his pattern.""It's you who doesn't understand, Maybe his original pattern was destroyed, but they can still make a copy of him the way he is now."

Hawker tensed. "What?"

"I looked at him closely while you were under outgo. He's got a transmitter in his neck, the same as I do." She stretched out her throat to show him the tiny b.u.t.ton implanted just below the skin surface.

Looking at the device, Hawker remembered that Philaskut had had one-and had said that everyone on Cellina did, too. Self-consciously he put a hand on his own neck, but felt nothing. "What exactly is that?" he asked, trying to sound much more casual than he felt.

"It's a broadcast transmitter. It makes a continuous reading of my molecular pattern and sends it to Resurrection Central, where my file is recorded and continuously updated. If I were to die, Resurrection Central could duple me exactly the way I was the instant before my death. Or, say, if I had my leg cut off, they could go back in the files to my pattern at the moment before my leg was cut off and duple me whole again. It's a wonderful concept, don't you think?"

Hawker did not, could not, answer. He buried his face in his hands and gritted his teeth in frustration. All of this had been for nothing! They had not saved Green from anything. They had perhaps saved this particular edition-but the army could duple him as he was just before he was kidnapped, and poor Dave would have to go through that h.e.l.l all over again. All this running, all this hiding, all this torture-it was all a study in futility! He wanted to scream at his own stupidity.

Instead, he laughed. The hysteria burst out in loud gales of laughter that had tears pouring from his eyes and his nose running like a faucet.

His whole body shook, and he turned over on his side away from Ama.s.sa.

"What's funny?" his captor asked.

It took a few seconds for Hawker to bring himself back under control.

"It's ridiculous," he said, wiping at the tears with the back of his forearm.

"Here I am, worried about the army's tracking us down, and they probably don't even care. They've got Dave in their lab again, conducting the same old tests.""I don't think so," Ama.s.sa said. "In the bulletins I heard, they definitely mentioned they wanted this one back if possible."

"Why? That doesn't make sense."

"I didn't pay much attention. Something about minute differences between the original and the duple. All I know is they wanted to make sure they couldn't get the original before they made a duple. It sounded silly to me, too, but that's what they said."

Her fingers began kneading Hawker's muscles in a sensual pattern, starting at his shoulder blades and working slowly down his body, distracting him from further thoughts at this time.

Some time later, when she went out to visit some friends, Hawker was left alone in the bubble with Green. At first the twisted man was in his unfortunate state of semiconsciousness, but after a while it cleared. He looked at Hawker and smiled. "Hi," he said. "Down from your trip yet?"

"You know about that?"

"I was conscious a few times and saw you. It looked horrible."

Hawker shuddered. "I don't ever want to go through that again. Maybe they think it's fun, but I can't take it. You were right about them-they're all heartless b.a.s.t.a.r.ds." He described what had happened during the "party," and then went into detail about the conversation he'd had with Ama.s.sa.

Green was very thoughtful after Hawker had finished. Hawker, not knowing what else to say, ended with the apology, "I'm sorry, Dave, I tried to help, really I did. I guess I kinda f.u.c.ked up again, huh?"

"It's not all lost yet," Green murmured.

"Huh? What do you mean? Whether they capture us or kill us, they can still make more copies of you."

"But the duple isn't as good as the original. It's like making a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy, it gets slightly fainter each time you do it. The difference might not mean much in practical, everyday terms-they could duple you a million times and there wouldn't be a milligram of differencein the lot. But in my case, they want to study the pattern as it was originally created, and minute differences could be very significant. That's why they haven't dupled me yet-they want to make absolutely sure the original version is unavailable before they work on a copy."

"Big deal. They won't wait forever. If they haven't found you in a couple of weeks, they'll probably take their chances with a duple anyway."

"But if a pattern can be destroyed once, it can be destroyed twice."

Hawker blinked. "What's that mean?"

"They can't use my original pattern to duple me, because that broke. If we could get to this Resurrection Central, wherever it is, and destroy the file they've got on me there, they couldn't use that pattern, either."

Hawker smacked his forehead with his palm. "Why didn't I think of that?" Then, in a more practical vein, "But how can we get in there? If that's where they store the records of everyone on Cellina, it must be a very important place. They'll have thousands of guards all the time."

"Not necessarily." Green smiled, a particularly grotesque expression on his twisted face. "It might even be one of the least guarded places on the whole planet."

"I don't believe that. They'd take good care of it. Just think what would happen if anything went wrong."

"Oh, I'm sure they've kept it safe from enemy attack-probably buried underground or something, with lots of shielding. But as for intruders, why bother keeping guard? Everyone on Cellina is in the same boat-damaging the records might damage themselves. I don't think anyone in the world-or at least in this world-would jeopardize his own immortality like that. The way you've described it, this entire culture is based on an implicit faith in the inevitability of resurrection. n.o.body would attack Resurrection Central, because to do so would imperil his own welfare. Getting in there is not going to be the problem; finding out which records are mine and destroying them may be a bit tougher."

He paused thoughtfully. "The only thing that bothers me is, why aren't they using this technique on the ordinary soldiers like you? It would seem to be the perfect solution to the problem of people losing their memory oflives in which they die. If they could make a continuous record..."

His voice trailed off, and a glazed look came over his eyes, indicating he'd slipped from reality once more. Hawker sighed and moved away again, going to a chair to await Ama.s.sa's return.

Over the course of the next two days, Hawker managed to elicit more information about Resurrection Central out of Ama.s.sa. Although she had never actually died herself, she had been there on five previous occasions to restore her body after several "accidents" had removed one or more vital parts. Hawker had to be careful to phrase his questions so that she did not suspect he had more than a casual interest in the subject, but he was able to learn enough to draw up tentative plans.

Resurrection Central was an enormous complex several hundred kilometers away. Its job was so vast-monitoring and recording the patterns of every person on Cellina-that it took an entire mountain to house it. The core of the mountain had been hollowed out and filled with ever increasing data banks and resurrection chambers. The complex was entirely automated; no humans worked there. Ama.s.sa had seen no guards or defenses of any kind when she was there-but then, Hawker reasoned, she was not a trained soldier, and had not been planning any attacks on the facility.

Hawker talked the situation over with Green when the two men were alone and Green was coherent. The cripple digested the information and made some tentative plans, and also formulated a hypothesis for why the army was not using this process on the soldiers. "They seem to need a whole mountain to receive the signals from these little transmitters and store the data away. That implies two drawbacks I can think of: it's not very mobile, and it's very vulnerable to enemy attack. They can probably store all our old patterns in something the size of a briefcase, which is easier for them to carry around and harder for the enemy to destroy. What they sacrifice in terms of our continued memory they make up in added flexibility."

Finally there was another party for all the people in this bubble city, and Hawker persuaded Ama.s.sa to take him along when she connected her bubble up to the others. She was rather jealous of him, but he argued that unless he had a chance at some variety he might go stale. Actually, variety of the sort this group could offer was the last thing he needed-but he did have to contact Belilo and/or Symington again if he was going to take anyeffective action to continue their efforts at helping Green.