My mother's people.

"Violet?" I asked softly as I moved among them. As with babies, I couldn't, even tell male from female among these elderly. Let alone such conceits of wealth as chims, neuts, or herms.

"Violet?

A bald head shivered no.

I walked on, "Violet?"

A clawed hand took mine, turned it over, pebbled skin dragging over my own calluses. Then it dropped away.

"Violet?"

"Violet4291," creaked a voice that I had to bend close to hear. "Not your wavelength."

After that, I asked for my mother by her full name. I had always thought of Violet4264 as a name and a slave number. Not as a mark of dignity.

On and on I walked, getting farther and farther from the sweepers' hatch. I would never find my way back from this place without their help. But I didn't want to, not without my mother.

Every step was h.e.l.l, a stride back into a time I had no memory of, but I knew I belonged there.

My heart burned for vengeance on the Proctor and his kind. My heart burned for my mother. Where was she?

PERHAPS AN HOUR later, when I had spoken to forty or more of the elderly slaves, Balloon Muscles finally caught up with me and pulled me aside. "Have you found her?" he asked, his fingers clutched tight on my elbow.

"No." I tried to shake him off-there were more of my mother's people half-hidden in the shadows ahead. They cl.u.s.tered just past the short horizons, all the ghosts of my history. I strained, but his heavy-gravity grip was far too strong for me.

"Will you find her?" His eyes glinted.

"If she's here. Let go of me."

"Will you find her?" He gave the words a strange emphasis.

I held my tongue and stayed my fist. Something was to hand. So I simply stared him down.

Finally his grip softened. He looked at his feet, then past me, not meeting my eye again. "She's lost to us," he whispered. "We thought you... her son..."

"She's dead?" My voice pitched up. "You brought me here, through all this, just to tell me she's dead?"

"No." Balloon Muscles sounded desperate. "She's not dead. Violet4264 still speaks to us. We simply can't find her."

Around me, one by one, the ancient slaves began speaking. Their words were in synch, a single voice moving dozens of mouths.

"Disperse."

"Leave him."

"He will be safe.'*

"The Proctor's men are coming."

"We will not."

"They're coming."

"The Proctor."

"My son."

"Leave."

"Stay."

"My boy."

The whisper faded, and in a scuttling rush; the old people were gone. Someone shrieked, and close by I heard Balloon Muscles crying, the weird, slow sobs of someone with heavy gravity lungs. Joy, relief, sadness.

My mother had come back to me. To them.

"How?" I turned to ask Balloon Muscles, my own eyes stinging. But my guide was gone too.

Then Rocky Muldoon loomed out of the darkness, amid flickering riot-control strobe lights, there with his port security crew. He pointed and a concussion grenade landed four or five meters from me, knocking me hard onto my back.

Rocky and his cops surged forward. In my rage I tried to fight them all.

AFTER A LONG but fairly courteous interrogation- they broke no bones, for one, even though I had energetically resisted arrest-Rocky hauled me out into the diamond-walled walkway to talk beneath the stars.

"Katie O'Harra's undocking in about an hour." His voice was rough, tight, over-controlled. "You can be on her, or you can rot beneath the Ruby Palace."

"Ah." I searched his face for any sign of the Rocky I knew. The one I'd shared my bed with. The one who'd begged me for stories of life between ports, who'd listened to my tales of s.p.a.cing like a little kid.

I saw none of that in him now. All I could see was a man whose mother had left him with an unpayable debt to the Proctor.

Blank as a mirror, Rocky was.

I couldn't say anything. My words had been drained by needle and electric shock. I stared uncaring at the stars, trying to ignore the pull of the carvings on the dark rock nearby.

"It's got nothing to do with you," he said. "They're a... a cult, down there. People go into the service tunnels and blind themselves and call themselves slaves. They claim this Violet4264 as their prophet. Nothing you saw means anything." There was urgency in his voice. He was desperate for me to believe him. "It's not real. It's just a little social problem peculiar to C-Rock City."

I managed to dredge up a word, echoing one of our earlier conversations. "History," I said from somewhere far away.

"Yes." Rocky was relieved. "History. And now drugs, delusions, pretense of psychic powers. And an attempt to undermine the Proctor."

"Ah," I croaked.

Rocky-and his Proctor-wouldn't be this afraid of a "little social problem." It was real, what I'd seen in s.p.a.ces between the tunnels.

Real.

"Go back to Katie, Porkpie. Forget all this. You're n.o.body's son. You never had a mother. You're on your own." Rocky paused, gathering his lies. "But I know you. You don't need anything else. You're fine without it."

"Ah," I said again. Real.

He chose to take that for a.s.sent.

Stumbling, I was led in steps and stages to the outer ring tunnel of Number Two rock. The docks there were pa.s.sage home. Rocky signed me in, retrieved my liberty tag, and bent to hug me. His breath was hot and fast in my ear. "Don't come back for a while. Maybe ever. You got me, Porkpie?"

"I got you," I said, surprised that the words had found me. I turned my back on him before he could turn his on me, and then I was aboard Katie O'Harra amid laughs about drunken sailors and unfunny jokes about dereliction of duty.

I AWOKE ALONE in my hammock, mouth dry as shuttle rations. Even now my little cabin still smelled of Rocky's aftershave. There was a hotbox on the floor, the message light on my comm station blinking red. People wanted me.

Though there was still something wrong with my words, courtesy of Rocky Muldoon's interrogation chemistry, there was nothing wrong with my memory.

He'd lied. It was real. Far too real. My mother had awoken from wherever she slept. I'd somehow brought her back to C-Rock City.

I wondered now why Rocky had let me live. Maybe he was afraid of my mother. To fear her the way he did, he had to believe in her.

The Proctor believed in her. He had to. Otherwise his minions would have swept the tunnels of the surviving slaves long ago. And he'd have had Rocky dump me out of an airlock.

I think Rocky loved me, maybe a little. Something like that. But I knew he loved C-Rock City more.

I sat up in my hammock, then fought off the lurching pain in my head. The hotbox blinked at me, a little throwaway timer indicating less than an hour remained of its thermal integrity.

I opened it. Inside was a steaming hot pork pot-pie.

There was also a note, written in actual handwriting on an actual sc.r.a.p of paper. It was a brittle, torn manifest printout. Not the kind of thing worth keeping, certainly.

But the paper was decades old.

At least as old as me.

I turned it over and my hair p.r.i.c.kled when I saw what was written there in fresh ink: TO MY BOY, WITH LOVE.

I resisted the urge to clutch the paper for fear of ruining it.

Someday Katie O'Harra would return to C-Rock City.

Someday I'd be back. I'd change things.

Someday.

For now, not knowing what else to do, I ate the pie.

The Bowdler Strain.

James Lovegrove.

THE BOWDLER STRAIN escaped from the MoD research facility at Chilton Mead in Gloucestershire, at 7:30pm on Thursday June 18th.

The point of origin was the facility's Ideative Manipulation laboratory. The initial vector was none other than the head of Ideative Manipulation, Professor Hugo Bantling.

Scientists, as a race, tend to be sober, serious, even reticent individuals, not unduly p.r.o.ne to vulgarity. Professor Bantling was no exception.

Thus it wasn't until past ten that evening, when he was preparing his nightcap of cocoa and the milk boiled over, that the professor had cause to realize that he had been exposed to one of his own logoviruses.

By then, of course, it was too late.

ON HIS WAY home, Professor Bantling had spoken to: one of his a.s.sistants, Dr. Roxanne Quest; a janitor, Tom Wells; a colleague, Professor Cyril Prudhomme, Head of Communicable Allergy; the guard at the facility's main gate (he/she must remain nameless for security reasons); the attendant at the Texaco garage on the A481 between Chilton Mead and High Leversham, Miss Kylie Bracewell; the proprietor of the One Stop Foodstore and Off-Licence in High Leversham, Mr. Vijay Latif; and his housekeeper, Mrs. Barbara McCartney.

To each of these Bantling had offered no more than a couple of dozen words; in the case of the janitor, the security guard, Kylie Bracewell, and Vijay Latif, no more than a "thank you" and a "good evening." Each, nonetheless, was immediately infected, and proceeded to infect numerous others over the course of the rest of the evening, and they in turn infected still others, and so on. So the logovirus was already out of control, effectively an epidemic, long before Professor Bantling became aware of its presence in his own neural system.

When the milk boiled over, sousing the hob in seething white, the professor instantly and reflexively swore. Inattention was to him the greatest sin that anyone-but particularly a man of science- could commit.

The irony here is obvious, for it was the swearing that alerted Bantling to the fact that he or one of his team may have recently committed a far more serious sin of inattention than merely taking your eye off a saucepan of milk for a moment.

"$#!," said Bantling.

He blinked.

He frowned.

He repeated the epithet, slowly this time and low-voiced.

He clasped a hand to his mouth. A groan escaped him.

Half a minute later he was on the phone to the laboratory.

Half an hour after that, he was back at Chilton Mead, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

COLONEL JAMES NUTTER, Chief of Operations at Chilton Mead, had had to endure taunts about his surname since kindergarten. It was this, more than anything, which had burned out of him the tolerance of others' foibles that each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is born with. Nutter was a toughened sh.e.l.l of a man, almost devoid of empathy. The one thing in life he truly loved was the army, not least because now that he had attained high rank, n.o.body ever poked fun at him anymore.

It was two o'clock in the morning. Chilton Mead was on a state of high alert. Colonel Nutter had just come off the phone to the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister was not a happy person. Neither, consequently, was Nutter.

"What the F happened, professor?" he demanded of Bantling, who had been summoned to the colonel's office in a manner that did not antic.i.p.ate refusal.

"Who is responsible for this F!^ mess? And how is it that I can't well swear without my voice going all peculiar?"

The professor was no less tired than Nutter, and no less tetchy. "In reply to your last question, colonel, do you not read the reports I send out to all senior administrative personnel? Because if not, I have to wonder why I bother with them. They take up an awful lot of time that I could otherwise devote to more fruitful pursuits."

Nutter went red in the cheeks, both angered and embarra.s.sed. "I'm a busy man, professor. What goes on at this facility is less important to me than the fact that it can continue to go on free from external intervention, be that in the form of terrorist action or government prying. I do know that you scientist chaps are up to some pretty bizarre stuff here. Much more than that, I don't need and don't want to know."