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Chapter Eight
Rezerval

Niklaas was deep in level four hundred and twenty-two of Geek Dungeons when the nursing aide tapped on his shoulder, throwing his concentration off and blowing his ongoing attempt to write a decryption program that would enable the screen jump spell before the Dark Nerd blew him away with a disk wiper.

"My apologies, Haar Silvan," the aide said. "A visitor."

Niklaas closed the game with a tap of his right forefinger and smiled politely, as if he really didn't care that she'd just caused him to pay a three-thousand-point early escape penalty that would probably prevent him getting to the five-hundredth level before his seventeenth birthday. After all, it wasn't like he had a lot else to do in the three months to go before his birthday. Or after.

Or ever.

Then he saw who the visitor was and his smile became genuine. "Tomi! But what—how—?"

Tomi Oksanen was walking toward his bed. His gait was somewhat stiff and jerky, but he was definitely walking. No float-chair, no visible supporters.

It had been a strange friendship in the first place; no one would have expected the teenage son of a high Federation officer to join forces with the somewhat older black sheep of the Oksanen family, which itself was something of a black sheep on Rezerval—lots of money, even more unsavory rumors about where the money came from, and a family of bland, smiling towheads whose cherubic faces gave no hint about which of the rumors might be true.

Tomi, though, hadn't been much of a smiler even before the infamous party where some of Rezerval's young society died from popping tainted joytoys, and he'd had a lot less to smile about after the party. The poison that an embittered Oksanen ex-employee had laced the joytoys with hadn't killed him, but it had paralyzed much of his nervous system and landed him in the same intensive care ward as Niklaas. Nights that each of them spent listening to the other one struggling for breath, days punctuated by the torture sessions called rehab therapy, and the shared despair of knowing that neither of them would ever approach the top of the waiting list for 'mat implants had forged a bond between these two most unlikely of friends, a bond that had survived Tomi's removal from the medical center for home care by the phalanx of trained nurses and therapists the Oksanen family could hire for him. They'd still had net-letters, and, once Tomi could get around in a float-chair, occasional visits. There'd been times when only Tomi's sardonic black humor had given Niklaas the will to face another day in the prison that his body had become. As for Tomi, he claimed there were times when only the sight of Niklaas's invincible naivete and belief in fables like universal justice amused him enough to distract him from his own troubles.

"Muscle stimulators?" Niklaas guessed. "Braces under your pants?"

Tomi grinned and pivoted, holding his arms out so that Niklaas could see that there was no place where his skin-tight jumpsuit showed the betraying bulge of a lock brace or a stim box. "You know they said those wouldn't work for anybody'd t-trashed his central nervous system the way I d-did, Niki!"

The stutter was new, and would have worried Niklaas if the greater miracle of Tomi's walking hadn't overwhelmed him. They did say it wasn't good if new symptoms showed up months later, a sign that the nerve damage was ongoing. But who cared, if the nerve repair was also happening?

"How'd you get a 'mat?" Niklaas whispered. He tapped his finger nervously on the bedspread until Tomi drew up a chair with a jerky scrape across the floor and plopped down beside him. "I didn't think there was enough money to bribe your way to the top of the list."

Tomi gave the seraphic smile that was an Oksanen family trademark, the innocent look that warned older acquaintances of Oksanens to check their creds and keep a hand on their balls. "No bribery, Niklaas. It's a new, experimental t-tr- . . . t- . . . surgery," he finished, having given up on "treatment."

"I haven't heard about anything like that." And he called up the med journal abstracts daily, looking for some hope between the unavailable 'mat transplants and the wishful-thinking world of the dreamers who claimed yak milk and soy extract would cause natural nerve regeneration.

"It's not exactly being written up in the literature."

"Oh. Very experimental, then."

"No, just very expensive. T-t- . . . Couple of words, Niki." Tomi lowered his voice and whispered, "Cassilis Clinic."

"Where?" It was hopeless, of course. Anything that an Oksanen considered expensive was far beyond the reach of a Federation official's salary. But just in case . . . "Where? Here on Rezerval?"

"Castelnuovo P-pr-"

"Castelnuovo Province," Niki said before his friend could find a synonym.

Tomi's head bobbed in that strange jerking motion, like a chicken pecking for food. Niki didn't remember that happening before, either. Well, stuttering and twitching might not be one's idea of the perfect life, but it beat the hell out of being stuck in a Med Center ward working your way up to the five-hundredth level of Geek Dungeons or tapping the net screens with your one working finger to browse the literature on nerve regeneration.

"And it doesn't use 'mats?"

"Nobody on the list is losing a p-pl- . . . chance at a 'mat b-because of this," Tomi promised.

"You swear?" Niklaas had been fighting his conscience ever since he regained consciousness and figured out that his chances of a legitimate 'mat implant were slim to none, what with new cases of Fournier Syndrome being diagnosed faster than 'mats could be bred on Kalapriya. Okay, he'd tried a dumb kid trick with his new roloprops, and that shouldn't wreck his life . . . but neither should it wreck the life of some guy who'd been born before the gene-screens caught signs of Fournier Syndrome, and who now faced paralysis in his twenties and death before he was thirty. Even if Mom's connections in the Federation could help her sneak him to the top of the list . . . and the chances of that also were slim to none . . . he wasn't getting his repair at the price of some other guy's death sentence.

But seeing somebody else who'd had no hope of making the list, somebody who'd been worse off than him and had done something even dumber, walking around like a halfway normal human being . . . to see Tomi with a future, able to go places, maybe even able to have sex some day . . . this was twisting his conscience into a pretzel. It was one thing to pretend to accept your fate when there were other people in the same fix. It was a lot harder to keep up the pretense now.

"Your family wouldn't care whose place you took," he pointed out. "You don't have to uphold the honor of the Federation's Secretary of Internal Information." Life had been a lot easier when Mom was just another supergeek, before the high quality of her technical work got her bumped up the ladder until she was eligible for a Federation appointment where she didn't hardly get to do any technical work at all.

The Federation appointment wasn't a lot of fun for Mom, either. She never said so—the Silvan motto was "Serve with Honor"—but Niki knew she missed the freedom of geeking around in the Federation nets and coming up with clever fixes for problems nobody else had even discovered.

Tomi bobbed his head jerkily. "Right, we wouldn't care . . . but you would, right? You and Annemari, you are like something out of a historical vid sometimes, all your notions about 'honor' and 'service.' So while I was there, kid, I had some of our p-people check it out. They say this clinic is d-definitely not sneaking 'mats from any of the Federation medical centers. And they wouldn't bother lying t-to me, would they, because they know I wouldn't mind one way or another."

After Tomi's departure Niklaas didn't bother to reactivate the game. He put off calling his mother, too, and told himself the reason was that he didn't want to discuss this mysterious clinic in Castelnuovo Province over a com channel to Federation offices; not secure enough. She visited him every day, it could wait.

The real reason was that he didn't want to know for sure just yet. He didn't want to find out that the Cassilis Clinic was a fake, or that Tomi had been lying when he hinted that they had another source for 'mats, or that they could never raise the credits on a Federation official's salary. Just for a little while, he wanted to believe that he had a future.

The nurse-aide who'd interrupted his game stopped by again after a little while.

"Are you feeling all right, Haar Silvan? You haven't started playing again, and you look a little flushed." She put the back of her hand against his forehead. Niklaas started imagining what it would feel like if she put it somewhere else on his body, assuming he could feel the touch, and immediately became a lot more flushed.

"I'm not sick," he assured her. "Just . . . thinking."

"Must be pleasant thoughts, for a change," she teased with a smile.

"I was thinking," Niklaas said slowly, "of what life would be like if the only barrier to an active sex life were persuading some girl to get active with me."

The nurse-aide's smile froze in place. "I shouldn't think that would pose much of a problem for you, Haar Silvan," she said softly, brushing a lock of bronze-gold hair from his forehead as she removed her hand. She turned away quickly and hoped he hadn't seen the look in her eyes. Poor boy, he knew as well as she did that he'd likely never face that particular problem. Spontaneous nerve regeneration was a better chance for him than getting to the top of the 'mat waiting list.

She'd read about a case of spontaneous nerve regeneration.

Once.

And it hadn't been very well documented.

Annemari Silvan's office had been designed to maximize the peaceful flow of spiritual and mental energies, with the usual color and aura harmonizer cooperating with a spirit specialist. The result was a room perfectly suited to Annemari's cool silver-gilt beauty and sharply concentrated mind. The colors were calm silvers and greys, conducive to concentration and with the added advantage that the fading gold of her hair, the only color accent, seemed bright by contrast. The reflecting vid screens on desk and walls were carefully angled so that the light, and any ill-meaning spirits, bouncing off them would be trapped in the fountain of moving mirrors in one corner or the swaying crystal chimes hanging from the ceiling in another corner. Tall silver bins with angled lids were intended to conceal any messy stacks of papers from sight.

It was a beautiful room for one person to sit in, alone and undisturbed, concentrating on high intellectual problems.

Annemari reckoned that she had spent all of fifteen minutes doing that since taking office five years ago.

And that had been on a Sunday morning, at 3:00 a.m., when she slipped up to her office to kick her shoes off and rest her smile muscles after a particularly draining diplomatic reception; and it had only lasted fifteen minutes because one of her programmers had been working through the night, saw her office lights and thought he'd found the perfect time for an informal chat with the boss about how she wanted the new info screen design to work.

Now, in midweek, the subtle silvers and greys of the decorator's scheme were drowned in a rising tide of flimsies in Federation green, urgent notes in Federation orange, diplomatic disks sealed with Federation red, and computer printouts in recycled beige. Annemari felt rather recycled beige herself, as she tried simultaneously to cope with the usual demands of her job and to follow up three separate lines of investigation into the black-market bacteriomats. Some of her official workload could be delegated to her staff; so far she hadn't dared let anybody except Calandra know about the bacteriomat investigation.

That might have to change soon, if she couldn't reconcile the scanty but mutually incompatible bits of information she had dragged off the data nets.

Niklaas's conversation with Tomi Oksanen was the first lead she'd had since Calandra Vissi dropped out of communication. Unfortunately, he'd thought it over by himself for several days before asking her if she knew anything about the Cassilis Clinic, and in those days it seemed that Tomi Oksanen had disappeared. The Oksanen family was not known for divulging information readily, but usually it was the financial data that they buried beneath layer upon layer of misleading documents and false trails to nonexistent banking corporations. Annemari was extremely good at working through financial deceptions. Her twenty years of programming experience stood her in good stead here. The Oksanens and other upper-class financial criminals hired computoads and technonerds to conceal their dealings; Annemari had been a technonerd, and she could still think like one. She knew how all the major Federation databases were designed; she'd designed some of them herself. She'd even written the code for some parts herself. And the trapdoors she'd written for debugging purposes were extremely useful when she wanted unrecorded access to databases that she had no official reason for looking at.

If Tomi Oksanen had been, say, a credit transaction as part of a money-laundering deal between the Oksanens and some more openly criminal family like the Boghaert clan, she'd have tracked him down in no time at all.

Theoretically, a human being should leave far more traces in the system than a single credit transaction and should be correspondingly easier to track down. But Annemari's attempts to meet with Tomi Oksanen and ask him about the Cassilis Clinic had been met with the famous Oksanen blank-wall silence. Tomi? Oh, yes, one of the younger ones, they said casually, as if his playboy exploits hadn't been enlivening the gossip vids—and costing the Oksanen family—for years. In the Med Center? Yes, they had heard he'd been ill. Didn't Auntie Minna say something about his going to the South Coast to recuperate? Or maybe it had been the Valima Mountains. These young people, you know, always flitting about. No, his parents weren't on-planet just now. Couldn't say exactly where they'd be, complicated itinerary, could have been changes. Come to think of it, didn't somebody mention that Tomi was going to stay with one of his lady friends, Kaarina or maybe it was Kristi or could have been Chiara, dear me, forget my own name next, that I will . . .

Annemari made the requisite polite noises and closed the vid channels. She hadn't had much hope for that line of inquiry; she was no good at these games of conversational fencing, couldn't keep her mind on how to corner her opponent because it took all her energy to stop her screaming at them that they were bloody liars. Should have put somebody from her staff on the job, someone like young Jeppe; he was good with people. Except she daren't trust anybody else with these inquiries, and anyway Jeppe was busy smoothing ruffled feathers over in the legislative offices, where Legist Kovalainen claimed the Information Department was deliberately blocking his request for a statistical analysis of all Federation employees sorted on six different properties, four of which hadn't been defined as data fields when most of the employees were hired and processed, and three of which couldn't be listed in the database because they constituted illegal invasion of personal privacy. It would be really, really nice if Jeppe managed to get Kovalainen to understand the difference between "won't give you the information" and "don't have it in the first place and aren't legally empowered to get it" without giving him an excuse to complain that Annemari's department was incompetent. More likely, though, the best he'd be able to do would be to point Kovalainen at some other department and get him to harass them for a while.

Meanwhile, there was the ongoing credentials check on spaceport officials, the request from Health for a program to map possible disease vectors related to the new plague on Junya IV, and the job of reconciling the data retrieval programs embodied in the Information Freedom project with the data concealment programs in the Right to Personal Privacy project. Annemari had delegated all those jobs as best she could, but her best wasn't good enough; two of the three senior staff members entrusted with the projects had already requested meetings, and one of them wanted the meeting to include a representative from the legislative office as the Freedom and Privacy acts, respectively, were self-contradictory statutes already passed by the Legists. "Ask Legist Kovalainen to join you," Annemari suggested, "I happen to know he's very interested in information retrieval issues." There, that would keep Kovalainen busy, and now she could get Jeppe back to work on something useful . . . like . . . like compiling a statistical analysis of non-Federation medical clinics on Rezerval, number of patients treated, qualifications of staff, whatever other details she could think of to bury the questions she was really interested in. With special attention to Castelnuovo Province.

She promised Vibeke a meeting that afternoon to discuss the Health Department request, reassured herself that Anders Ruggiero seemed able to write and run a simple background and reference checking request without her active supervision, and asked Jeppe for a full report on non-Federation clinics in Castelnuovo Province.

"More BS from the Health Department?" Jeppe moaned.

"Could be a little more interesting than usual," Annemari said without committing herself on the source of the request. "We want full staff lists and resumes, tax data, lists of patients and what they were treated for . . . and don't worry about Privacy Act restrictions on this one."

"Kovalainen will explode," Jeppe predicted.

"Kovalainen doesn't need to be told about all our internal business. That's why I want you on this, Jeppe; I need someone discreet. There are political considerations . . ." Annemari let her voice trail off. "I don't need to tell you about the possible complications here."

Jeppe nodded wisely, as if he actually had some idea what she was talking about. Which was convenient, because Annemari had no idea how she could justify this project if he asked. She'd been banking on the typical technonerd reluctance to admit there was anything at all he didn't already know, and apparently it had worked.

Once Jeppe left, Annemari scrawled Gone for the day on the back of a memo, closed and locked her office door, and set her desk console to route all incoming calls other than Jeppe's to a message list. She spared a moment's envy for the characters in one of the old-fashioned romantic comedy vids she'd seen, who had assistants called "secretaries" specifically to guard the door against visitors. If she didn't have to practically hide out in her own office to get a little uninterrupted time, how much more work she could do!

Of course, her work nowadays was to deal with the interruptions. Ninety percent of her job wasn't technical at all; it was smoothing feathers and adjusting competing demands and setting priorities. And when there was any real computer work to be done, she had to delegate it to one of her eager young assistants.

But this couldn't be delegated. Mentally flexing her fingers, Annemari settled down happily to do a little personal, private research on the Cassilis Clinic, so she'd have some background with which to interpret Jeppe's results. The readily available public information was bland and virtually information-free; with little effort she was able to pull up vids of a long, low white building set in a beautifully landscaped park, short speeches from unidentified but impressive-looking men and women in white coats, blurred views of what were probably the latest in monitors and other medical devices, and testimonials from satisfied patients. "I looked and felt ten years younger after a thorough workup at the Cassilis Clinic," was the general tenor of the testimonials.

It would be interesting to see what Jeppe could add to this picture. So far, all she had was lots of surface pleasantness, no real data, and a general sense that the Cassilis Clinic was a cross between elective beauty surgery and an overpriced health spa for the rich and bored.

Felt like an Oksanen family operation to her. Would a list of employees prove enlightening?

While she waited for Jeppe's results, Annemari checked the progress of the infospyder she'd activated to track Tomi Oksanen's credit usage, transit vouchers, and other traces he might have left in the net. Like the Cassilis Clinic public site, the results were interesting, but not informative. Up to four days ago—the day of his visit to Niklaas—the program had turned up about what you'd expect from an Oksanen playboy. Lots of credit chits from fashionable restaurants, a major funds-verified transaction from a Rezerval jeweler. Annemari recognized the name. Splashy stuff featuring really beautiful Thyrkan rainbow crystals in really tacky gold settings; Tomi must have a new girlfriend, and her taste was about what one would expect from a girl willing to go out with an Oksanen.

The interesting part about that transaction was that Tomi had a girl and felt it worth splashing credits in the form of showy jewelry on her. The Oksanen men had a reputation for being generous with the women they ran around with, but only for services received.

If Tomi was in condition to receive any services at all from his new girl, the Cassilis Clinic had worked the kind of miracle Annemari had thought only bacteriomats could perform.

Niklaas said Tomi had sworn that nobody on the list was losing a chance at a 'mat transplant because of Cassilis Clinic. But what was the word of an Oksanen worth?

The rest of the record was the usual—no public transit records, of course, but a handful of dangerous-flying notices, two summonses for failure to appear and answer charges of causing a flitter accident, the kind of fines that would have got the attention of anybody but an Oksanen, and a large credit transfer to somebody Annemari had never heard of, who turned out to be the injured party in the flitter accident. Who had also failed to appear at the second hearing, the day after the transfer, so the matter had been dropped. Solved in the usual Oksanen family fashion: throw enough money at it and it'll go away.

The really interesting—and frustrating—thing was that there were no traces of Tomi Oksanen anywhere in the net for the last four days. For some reason the Oksanens must have decided to keep his recent activities private. Annemari tapped in a code that would open Rezerval's largest secure financial systems database to her. This would show any of Tomi's transactions that had been blocked from view.

Nothing showed up.

Annemari trawled through Rezerval's off-planet transactions and discovered that some of her colleagues were keeping surprisingly large credit accounts on Toussaint, a non-Federation world that was a favorite for tax evaders. But that was none of her business, so she ignored the information and asked for any transactions specific to the Oksanen family.

That brought up a flood of data, probably enough to keep Federation lawyers happily employed for years picking holes in the Oksanen financial empire if only there were a legitimate way of sending the information to them. Annemari narrowed the search to the last four days and to transactions involving Tomi Oksanen personally.

There were none.

No credits, no flitter tickets, nothing.

Of course even an Oksanen had the power to drop off the net for a while; anybody sufficiently rich and discreet could achieve that by using only personal flitters and private landing zones, making no transactions, entering no controlled areas, staying on-planet. It would not be trivially easy on Rezerval, where half the planet was made up of Federation offices and other controlled zones where proof of identity and time of entry were automatically recorded. But it was possible, even if not exactly in the notoriously flashy Oksanen style.

The really interesting thing was that this wasn't the first blank in Tomi Oksanen's records. He had "disappeared," in the sense of leaving no traces in the system, for twenty days following his release against medical recommendations from the Med Center and into the care of Oksanen family physicians.

Twenty days in the Cassilis Clinic? With no charges recorded—from what looked like a luxury spa and plastic surgery clinic?

A chime from the deskvid announced that Jeppe was sending preliminary results directly to her. Annemari wished she had told him to sneaker-mail them; papers carried by hand left no record, e-transmissions were not as secure. Oh well, she'd asked for enough stuff to disguise her real interests; it took long enough to sort the mass of data and pick out the records relating to Cassilis Clinic.

Jeppe hadn't been able to get at a list of patients and treatments; an attached note indicated that he had some ways around the Clinic's security but wasn't sure he could get in without setting off alerts. Good judgment call, that. Annemari didn't particularly want anyone at the Cassilis Clinic to worry about being investigated—not yet, anyway. And she also didn't want to tell Jeppe or anybody else about the extra bits of code she'd inserted into most Federation database systems as a programmer.

Because the tax information was in public Federation databases, Jeppe had been able to do a thorough job on that without breaking any regulations at all. Annemari would not have been surprised to find that as far as the Federation knew nobody had drawn any income from the Cassilis Clinic—but no, that would have been obvious. The Oksanens were liars, cheats, and notorious tax evaders, but they weren't obvious; that was what made it such a pleasure to pit her wits against theirs. Jeppe's spyder had neatly sorted taxpayers reporting income from the Cassilis Clinic by amount, so that the list began with several blandly meaningless corporation names and ended with the pittances paid to daily scrubbers, groundskeepers and other low-level employees.

It was the ones in the high-middle part of the list that interested Annemari. These would be the top-salaried employees, the surgeons and medtechs. Lots of surgeons. You'd expect that. No, lots of surgeons, far more than it would take to staff the plastic surgery part of a clinic like that. Annemari randomly highlighted about ten percent of the names and set the spyder's parameters to pull up resumes; any licensed clinic was obliged to file resumes for all technical and medical staff, so those also had been available to Jeppe. She read the results, frowning slightly, then requested full resumes on everybody reporting income between—hmm, what did a Federation Level Five medtech get, 600,000 credits a year? Okay, make it everybody between 500,000 and 5 million; that would pick up some top techs and some of the smaller dummy corporations, but should cover everybody she was interested in.

And that list was very interesting. Annemari skimmed through it once, deleted the obvious and expectable entries—well, okay, maybe not so obvious. She had had no idea a "cosmetic consultant" could get paid that much, but right now she didn't have time to waste on the makeup people and the personal trainers and the groomers and buffers. With those culled out, she studied the list of surgeons and other specialists employed at the Cassilis Clinic with deep interest. The obvious cosmetic specialties were well represented, but there was another group whose areas of expertise seemed at first glance to have nothing to do with the clinic's public goals.

Time to activate another kind of data search, the kind she wasn't so good at. Annemari tapped her deskvid and sent a note to Nunzia Hirvonen asking her to respond when she had time.

Nunzia was on vocal almost before Annemari took her fingertip off the screen. The top half of her face, the liquid dark eyes and arching brows, showed over the spyder's resume spreadsheet. "Anni! What's up? You going to take up eating lunch? There's this new place on the Concourse—"

"Wow," Annemari said, caught off guard. "I didn't think you would be free right now."

"I'm not," Nunzia said. "Scrubbing for surgery, talking on voice control, thirty more seconds, slice and dice some poor guy's brain."

"Improving it in the process, I trust."

"Honey, how could surgery not improve it? He's a guy." Nunzia's laugh was like warm honey flowing down into a pool.

"Fifteen seconds, now. Is that long enough for you to tell me if there's any reason a general health spa and plastic surgery clinic should need neurosurgeons?"

"Only if they plan to botch up customers' facial nerves on a regular basis, and want to do the repairs in-house," Nunzia said crisply, "in which case they shouldn't be in business anyway. Wait a minute—you said neurosurgeons? Plural?"

Annemari nodded, then remembered Nunzia had said she was on vocals only. "Right. Three at least, probably five—I'm not sure what some of these subspecialties mean."

"That," Nunzia said with her usual assurance, "makes no sense."

"That depends," Annemari murmured to herself.

"Now you have to meet me for lunch," Nunzia announced, "and Tell All. I want the full story. Gaetano's on the Concourse, twelve sharp. If you get there first, order us some bruschetta with lemongrass sauce for starters. See you there."

Before lunchtime Annemari dealt quickly and competently with three more requests for various statistical analyses, an attempt by the head of Data Entry to steal her best two nerds, and a complaint from Legist Kovalainen that the "girl" who'd asked him to join the meeting on the Information and Privacy Acts couldn't explain anything. She also comforted Vibeke— "Don't worry, nobody can explain anything to Kovalainen; he hasn't the basic equipment for understanding it. I just wanted him off Jeppe's back for the day, and now I owe you one. Okay, I owe you two. After lunch?"

While she handled data and personnel crises, the back of her head was turning over Tomi Oksanen's mysterious recovery and equally mysterious disappearance, the glorified health spa in Castelnuovo Province that kept three—or maybe five—highly paid neurosurgeons on permanent staff, and one puzzling little bit of data the transit-permits-search spyder had retrieved for her. Something she hadn't even been looking for, but it was a smart spyder program and remembered she'd previously been interested in this matter. Put together, these three matters weren't puzzling in the slightest; in fact, Annemari sailed off to her lunch meeting with Nunzia feeling that she had probably figured out almost everything she needed to know.

The one thing she hadn't thought of was the risk of encountering Evert Cornelis on her way out of the building.

"Annemari! Nothing wrong, I hope?" Evert looked toward the Med Center.

"No, no, I'm just going to lunch," she reassured him, and then realized she might have made a slight mistake.

"I have to see this," Evert announced. "You never take time off for lunch. What's lured you away from the delights of a fruitpak at your desk while yelling at your staff?"

"I don't yell at my staff," Annemari said.

"No, sorry, wrong word. You freeze them with a glance, of course. But what inspired you to take a break? Let me guess, you're avoiding Legist Kovalainen."

Annemari's pace quickened. "Is he looking for me?"

"I'd recommend a long lunch," Evert said obliquely. "Where are we going?"

"I'm meeting Dr. Hirvonen," Annemari said. "It's a business lunch. We have Federation business to discuss."

"Excellent! I love traditional Italo-Thai food."

"How did you—"

"Know you were headed for Gaetano's?" Evert beamed. "It's the only place on the Concourse that Nunzia considers serves decent food. She just doesn't appreciate the subtler pleasures of Franco-Mexican at Bistro Tapatia. No matter, I'll take you there another day."

"That would be lovely, Evert," Annemari said politely, "I'll look forward to seeing you then. Now, if you'll excuse me, I don't want to be late for this meeting with Dr. Hirvonen." It was as close to a brush-off as ingrained civility would permit her to go.

"Oh, I'm coming with you," Evert insisted. "Told you I like Italo-Thai, and as it happens, I've some business to discuss with you, too. That little matter you asked me about the other day, about your 'friend' on Kalapriya?"

After looking at the information the transit spyder had turned up Annemari no longer felt anxious about Calandra, but it would have been really rude to tell him so if he'd already gone to the trouble to contact his Aunt Sanne. She resigned herself to listening while Evert told a long involved story with a predictable ending, slowed her pace so that he could get the breath to tell his story in his preferred fashion, and wondered, while he nattered on, whether there was any way short of murder to shake him off before she met Nunzia at Gaetano's.

" . . . so, like you told me, and perfectly right you were, m'dear, as always, Sanne was only too happy to send me a long gossipy vid about all her social doings in Valentin. And I mean long!" Evert shook his head in wonder. "Gods, how that woman can rattle on. No idea where she gets it from. Rest of m'family can stick to the point and give you a straight answer to a simple question, but like my father always said—or was it Uncle Baar—anyway, one of 'em said, 'Ask Sanne if it was raining when she came inside and you'll have to hear all about the damage the water spotting would've done to her pricey new organic coverall if it had been raining, which is when you'll learn it wasn't.' " He paused. "Now where was I?"

"Sanne's news from Valentin," Annemari prompted.

"Oh! Right. Well, of course you didn't want me to ask a simple question anyway, so it's not her fault, but I just wish you had listened to the vid instead of me, Annemari."

"So do I," Annemari murmured against the protests of her better self.

Fortunately, Evert didn't take the comment as she had meant it. He patted her shoulder. "There, there, noble of you, but Sanne's a family misfortune—I mean, member—and I wouldn't really want to inflict her conversation on anyone else. Anyway, first word out of her mouth was about some grand banquet and dance they'd planned on having for the visiting Diplomat, so of course I thought I'd get to hear then whether Calandra had shown up or not, but no. First the woman has to tell me all about her new dress for the ball, and I give you my word, Annemari, I didn't know anybody could say that much about one dress—specially on a restricted planet where they're only allowed to use organics and native manufacture. Then all the gossip and matchmaking before the ball, and after all that it turns out . . ."

"Calandra didn't show?"

"Why, no!" Evert was startled into plain speech. "That's what I've been trying to tell you, Annemari. Calandra was there and she's perfectly all right. Sanne's husband, Pledger, was seated at the head table with her for the banquet, and he seemed quite taken with her. So did the young man they assigned as her escort, according to Sanne. She said they were having altogether too much fun at the ball and Calandra ain't dignified enough by half for a Diplomatic envoy."

Annemari stopped in front of the green pavilion outside Gaetano's. "Evert, that's impossible."

"What, for a Diplo to lighten up? Unlikely, maybe, but surely possible. I even have hopes of seeing you let your hair down, Annemari. Been meaning to tell you, it's high time you stopped spending every Joy Luck Fortune night home with a glass of milk and an old holovid."

Annemari devoutly hoped Evert didn't know the title of the last holovid she'd rented, presently flashing across the inside of her head in neon-pink lettering with little hearts attached. Not that there was anything wrong with watching something called With All My Heart. It would just be . . . embarrassing. And after the unauthorized searches she'd recently pulled off, she couldn't help thinking how easy it would be for anyone who knew his way around Federation computer systems to bring up a list of the last ten holos she'd rented.

But that somebody wouldn't be Evert, who called Tech Support when the cleaners disconnected the power to his deskvid. He was guessing about her habits . . . more or less correctly.

Unfortunately, he interpreted the pause as permission to continue dissecting her personal life. Or lack of one.

"It was one thing when Kaarle—when you were widowed and left alone with Niklaas to raise. I know you didn't want to leave him in the creche anytime you weren't working. But Kaarle's been dead for years now, Annemari, and Niklaas—"

"Still needs me," Annemari cut him off. "No, Evert, that's not what I want to talk about. Are you sure your aunt Sanne said she saw Calandra?"

"Just told you so," said Evert. "Said she danced all night. Calandra, I mean, not Sanne."

"And exactly when was the ball?"

"On the fourteenth."

Annemari frowned. "I suppose that's just possible. I should have checked the time on those transit records."

"You found records showing she was someplace else at the time?"

"Or just after . . . Is Tasman on Federation time?"

Evert shrugged. "Dunno, but that's easy enough to check. But I'll trust a live person over a computer database any day, and so should you, Annemari—you know how easy it is to hack into those things. If somebody tried to fake a journey for Calandra to some other place, you need to be looking into who'd want to do that, not questioning my family's eyewitness information!"

"I would," said Annemari abstractedly, as she tried to figure out what this latest twist could mean, "except it wasn't Calandra Vissi's travel plans I found."

"Then what—how—"

"Come inside and sit down, you two!" Nunzia Hirvonen swept up beside them, hugged Annemari and pushed Evert toward the door. "I'm starving. Order first, then gossip."

Gaetano's might serve traditional Italo-Thai food, but the décor had been managed by a thoroughly modern aura consultant, from the collage of antique coins over the door to attract wealth to the trailing red cords that dangled from beams to dissipate negative energies. The entire north wall was covered by a screen of falling water dropping onto rounded stones, and the rounded lines of chairs and tables supported a smooth flow of energy from the fountain through the entire room.

Over the bruschetta con limone Annemari gave up on discretion and decided to tell everybody everything. It didn't take much decision; Nunzia's warm pressure was almost impossible to resist. Besides, she didn't want to wait until after lunch to explain to Evert why Calandra couldn't have been at the banquet on Kalapriya.

First she had to fill Nunzia in on the background—the offer of a bacteriomat implant for Nikki from an anonymous source, her dispatching of Calandra Vissi to look into the possibility that somebody was stealing bacteriomats from the Barents Trading Society's stock, her subsequent loss of contact with Calandra and request that Evert check on her discreetly through his family contacts on Kalapriya. "But while I was waiting to hear from Evert," she explained, "just this morning, in fact, one of my spyder programs came up with transit records for Thecla Partheni, leaving Tasman the day after I lost contact with Calandra, returning to Rezerval that same day. Or . . . I need to check what time Tasman is on; it could have been the equivalent of really late at night on Kalapriya, which would explain your aunt seeing Calandra at the ball, Evert."

Both Nunzia and Evert looked blank.

"Look," Annemari said, "this is really seriously classified information, and I never said anything, okay? But Thecla Partheni is one of Calandra's spare identities. Obviously her cover was compromised and she had to switch identities. Also obviously, she found some clue that sent her back here to Rezerval. And I would have thought, from the timing, that it all happened on Tasman. She couldn't have been on Kalapriya more than a few hours at most."

"But she was there," Evert pointed out. "Damn it, Annemari, you've talked with the Tasman officer who escorted Calandra to the Kalapriya shuttle, and I've just had a vid from m'aunt Sanne going on and on about what Calandra wore to the ball in her honor. Did your spyder show Calandra returning to Tasman? No? Well then, most likely one of those Tasman thieves lifted Calandra's spare ID and used it to get off-station."

"The spare identities aren't stealable," Annemari explained. "Nunzia, you know how they're done for Diplos, can you explain to Evert why we know nobody stole the Thecla Partheni ID?"

"It doesn't exist," Nunzia said promptly. "Not physically, not outside Calandra's brain. One of her neurochip implants allows her to activate a signal that will cause Federation computers and any system drawing on their databases to recognize her retinal scans and DNA as belonging to—what did you say the alternate name was, Annemari?"

"Thecla," Annemari said. "Thecla Partheni. We had to pick something that would be ethnically compatible with her general physical appearance. Calandra's small and dark; she might be able to convince a computer her real name was something like Katrijna van Alstyne, but no human being would believe she was from Barents. Oh, why am I going on about this, it doesn't matter; the point is that the retinal and DNA scans confirm that Calandra left Tasman for Rezerval as Thecla Partheni. And I haven't found any records showing Thecla—or Calandra—returning from Kalapriya to Tasman."

"That just means they're misfiled," Evert said, "because she was definitely in Valentin on Kalapriya the evening of the fourteenth. And if you don't believe me, I'll drag you to my rooms and force you to watch m'aunt Sanne going on and on about the damned ball."

"I just might take you up on that," Annemari said absently. "Does Sanne say anything about seeing Calandra after the ball?"

"No, but she wouldn't, would she?"

"She might say something about the surprising early departure of the Diplomat . . . Evert, could you check with her again and find out if she knows what Calandra has been doing since the day of her arrival?"

Evert groaned.

"Or maybe you could ask somebody else?"

Evert's brow furrowed. "I've got a young relative in the Guards . . . no, that's no use; Moylen's only a leutnant, he wouldn't be in on high diplomatic doings. It'll have to be Sanne. But is it really necessary? I thought you had settled that she went back to Tasman."

"Maybe. The timing's funny. And . . . Kalapriya is technology-restricted; they wouldn't be checking bio-data the way the space stations and shuttles do. It's just barely possible that Calandra found out something at the ball that made her return to Tasman at once, without reporting to me. But it's also possible that the shuttle taking this person from Tasman to Kalapriya didn't run the passengers through proper security and ID checks. An impersonator might be able to make herself up to look enough like Calandra to fool some Tasman officer who'd only seen her once before, if that. And if somebody is impersonating my Diplomat on Kalapriya," Annemari said firmly, "I'd really, really like to know about it."

"Then look for Calandra and ask her. And why do you suppose she hasn't checked in with you already?"

"Possibly," Annemari said, "for the same reason that she chose to use an alternate identity. Perhaps she doesn't want somebody to know that she's a Diplomat. In which case she'd hardly be walking in through the front door of a Federation office building, would she?"

"You know, Annemari," Evert murmured, "your eyes go more grey than blue when you're being sarcastic. It's not becoming. We both know there are plenty of ways your pet Diplomat could reach you without 'walking in through the front door.' If you really think Thecla Partheni is Calandra and that she returned to Rezerval four days ago, you ought to be worried sick. Why aren't you?"

"Because I have reason to think she's following up the clue that brought her back here," Annemari answered.

"How can you think that if you haven't heard from her?"

"She left the Rezerval main port by the Garibaldi gate," Annemari said, looking at Nunzia rather than Evert. "Most of the public transit from there runs south . . ."

"To Castelnuovo Province," Nunzia nodded. "Let me guess. That's the location of the clinic you were asking about?"

Then it was Evert's turn to listen while Annemari described Tomi Oksanen's mysterious recovery, the visit to Niklaas in which he'd mentioned the Cassilis Clinic, and his subsequent disappearance. "On the public nets it shows up as a combination health spa and plastic surgery clinic for the rich and beautiful who want to stay that way," she concluded, "but they're paying a lot of surgeons, and they're not all reconstruction men. At least three neurosurgeons that I know of. Maybe more—Nunzia, what's stereotactic injection?"

"A technique used, among other things, for implanting neuronal cells," Nunzia said. "If they've got a specialist in that on staff—"

"Two," said Annemari with a brisk, satisfied nod.

"Then they're doing something in the way of rebuilding neural networks," Nunzia said. "And either it's something very complicated, or they're doing a lot of it, because 'mat insertion is actually a fairly simple procedure."

"Really?" Evert asked. "Personally, I'd as soon have as many highly paid surgeons as possible helping out before anybody puts a hole in my skull for therapeutic purposes."

Nunzia smiled slightly. "You're safe from 'mat reconstruction, Haar Cornelis. Even now, we can't repair what was never there to begin with."

"I do believe I've just been insulted," Evert said. He grinned at Nunzia and she returned his smile more warmly than her words would have suggested. Annemari began to see a solution to one of her long-standing problems. Not exactly one of the most urgent ones, still . . . But the possibility of Evert and Nunzia getting together was pleasant enough, and surprising enough, to divert her for a moment from everything else.

"Anyway," Nunzia said when she finally broke eye contact with Evert and dove into her pappardelle al cinghale, "cutting holes in the skull is hardly cutting-edge surgery. They've been doing it since the Stone Age to treat everything from epilepsy to osteomyelitis." She gestured largely with her fork. "Difference is, we know what we're doing and why it works. They just drilled a hole and hoped it would let the demons out."

"Whereas modern surgeons," Evert said with exquisite politeness, "do just the opposite—drill a hole and poke a demon in. Or am I behind the times? Does modern neuroscience have an explanation for exactly how the bacteriomats of Kalapriya work their wonders?"

"One point to you," Nunzia said without malice. "No, we don't know exactly how they work, and yes, before you say it, surgeons of the forty-first century probably will look pityingly upon us poor ignoramuses of the Plastic Age. What they do know is that they're a major advance on primitive stem-cell therapy. Back in the twenty-first century surgeons had found that stem cells injected into an adult brain would somehow figure out what kinds of cells were missing or damaged and grow themselves into replacements. That took care of a lot of problems."

"So what do Kalapriyan bacteriomats have over stem cells?"

"One word. Structure!" Nunzia jabbed her fork at the plate and pushed her food around into an undifferentiated mess. "Nobody ever did succeed in persuading stem cells to grow long enough axons to repair severely damaged spinal cords. But biofilms, like the 'mats, aren't just one species but a collection of microbial species working together. So when you get a biofilm that likes to live in human brains and nerves, it doesn't need to grow single supercells; it can create a whole community of linked, cooperating cells to bridge the gap." She pushed individual bits of pasta into a line across her plate. "And the 'mats mimic whole structures in the brain, the way stem cells mimic individual cells—which allows them to do repairs far beyond what was accomplished with stem-cell therapy. Bottom line, your chances of surviving demyelinizing infections, brain tumors, or latent Fournier Syndrome—not only surviving, but walking away—are better than ever before."

"Only if you can get on the list," Annemari murmured, blinking rapidly.

"Gods. I'm a tactless idiot," Nunzia said, putting her fork down. "Anni, can you forgive—"

"Annemari, I'm so sorry—" Evert began.

Annemari managed a smile, and a moment later had command of her voice. "Help me check out the Cassilis Clinic, and you're both off the hook. Otherwise, I'll make you feel guilty and miserable forever. Deal?"

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Contents
Framed

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Contents

Chapter Eight
Rezerval

Niklaas was deep in level four hundred and twenty-two of Geek Dungeons when the nursing aide tapped on his shoulder, throwing his concentration off and blowing his ongoing attempt to write a decryption program that would enable the screen jump spell before the Dark Nerd blew him away with a disk wiper.

"My apologies, Haar Silvan," the aide said. "A visitor."

Niklaas closed the game with a tap of his right forefinger and smiled politely, as if he really didn't care that she'd just caused him to pay a three-thousand-point early escape penalty that would probably prevent him getting to the five-hundredth level before his seventeenth birthday. After all, it wasn't like he had a lot else to do in the three months to go before his birthday. Or after.

Or ever.

Then he saw who the visitor was and his smile became genuine. "Tomi! But what—how—?"

Tomi Oksanen was walking toward his bed. His gait was somewhat stiff and jerky, but he was definitely walking. No float-chair, no visible supporters.

It had been a strange friendship in the first place; no one would have expected the teenage son of a high Federation officer to join forces with the somewhat older black sheep of the Oksanen family, which itself was something of a black sheep on Rezerval—lots of money, even more unsavory rumors about where the money came from, and a family of bland, smiling towheads whose cherubic faces gave no hint about which of the rumors might be true.

Tomi, though, hadn't been much of a smiler even before the infamous party where some of Rezerval's young society died from popping tainted joytoys, and he'd had a lot less to smile about after the party. The poison that an embittered Oksanen ex-employee had laced the joytoys with hadn't killed him, but it had paralyzed much of his nervous system and landed him in the same intensive care ward as Niklaas. Nights that each of them spent listening to the other one struggling for breath, days punctuated by the torture sessions called rehab therapy, and the shared despair of knowing that neither of them would ever approach the top of the waiting list for 'mat implants had forged a bond between these two most unlikely of friends, a bond that had survived Tomi's removal from the medical center for home care by the phalanx of trained nurses and therapists the Oksanen family could hire for him. They'd still had net-letters, and, once Tomi could get around in a float-chair, occasional visits. There'd been times when only Tomi's sardonic black humor had given Niklaas the will to face another day in the prison that his body had become. As for Tomi, he claimed there were times when only the sight of Niklaas's invincible naivete and belief in fables like universal justice amused him enough to distract him from his own troubles.

"Muscle stimulators?" Niklaas guessed. "Braces under your pants?"

Tomi grinned and pivoted, holding his arms out so that Niklaas could see that there was no place where his skin-tight jumpsuit showed the betraying bulge of a lock brace or a stim box. "You know they said those wouldn't work for anybody'd t-trashed his central nervous system the way I d-did, Niki!"

The stutter was new, and would have worried Niklaas if the greater miracle of Tomi's walking hadn't overwhelmed him. They did say it wasn't good if new symptoms showed up months later, a sign that the nerve damage was ongoing. But who cared, if the nerve repair was also happening?

"How'd you get a 'mat?" Niklaas whispered. He tapped his finger nervously on the bedspread until Tomi drew up a chair with a jerky scrape across the floor and plopped down beside him. "I didn't think there was enough money to bribe your way to the top of the list."

Tomi gave the seraphic smile that was an Oksanen family trademark, the innocent look that warned older acquaintances of Oksanens to check their creds and keep a hand on their balls. "No bribery, Niklaas. It's a new, experimental t-tr- . . . t- . . . surgery," he finished, having given up on "treatment."

"I haven't heard about anything like that." And he called up the med journal abstracts daily, looking for some hope between the unavailable 'mat transplants and the wishful-thinking world of the dreamers who claimed yak milk and soy extract would cause natural nerve regeneration.

"It's not exactly being written up in the literature."

"Oh. Very experimental, then."

"No, just very expensive. T-t- . . . Couple of words, Niki." Tomi lowered his voice and whispered, "Cassilis Clinic."

"Where?" It was hopeless, of course. Anything that an Oksanen considered expensive was far beyond the reach of a Federation official's salary. But just in case . . . "Where? Here on Rezerval?"

"Castelnuovo P-pr-"

"Castelnuovo Province," Niki said before his friend could find a synonym.

Tomi's head bobbed in that strange jerking motion, like a chicken pecking for food. Niki didn't remember that happening before, either. Well, stuttering and twitching might not be one's idea of the perfect life, but it beat the hell out of being stuck in a Med Center ward working your way up to the five-hundredth level of Geek Dungeons or tapping the net screens with your one working finger to browse the literature on nerve regeneration.

"And it doesn't use 'mats?"

"Nobody on the list is losing a p-pl- . . . chance at a 'mat b-because of this," Tomi promised.

"You swear?" Niklaas had been fighting his conscience ever since he regained consciousness and figured out that his chances of a legitimate 'mat implant were slim to none, what with new cases of Fournier Syndrome being diagnosed faster than 'mats could be bred on Kalapriya. Okay, he'd tried a dumb kid trick with his new roloprops, and that shouldn't wreck his life . . . but neither should it wreck the life of some guy who'd been born before the gene-screens caught signs of Fournier Syndrome, and who now faced paralysis in his twenties and death before he was thirty. Even if Mom's connections in the Federation could help her sneak him to the top of the list . . . and the chances of that also were slim to none . . . he wasn't getting his repair at the price of some other guy's death sentence.

But seeing somebody else who'd had no hope of making the list, somebody who'd been worse off than him and had done something even dumber, walking around like a halfway normal human being . . . to see Tomi with a future, able to go places, maybe even able to have sex some day . . . this was twisting his conscience into a pretzel. It was one thing to pretend to accept your fate when there were other people in the same fix. It was a lot harder to keep up the pretense now.

"Your family wouldn't care whose place you took," he pointed out. "You don't have to uphold the honor of the Federation's Secretary of Internal Information." Life had been a lot easier when Mom was just another supergeek, before the high quality of her technical work got her bumped up the ladder until she was eligible for a Federation appointment where she didn't hardly get to do any technical work at all.

The Federation appointment wasn't a lot of fun for Mom, either. She never said so—the Silvan motto was "Serve with Honor"—but Niki knew she missed the freedom of geeking around in the Federation nets and coming up with clever fixes for problems nobody else had even discovered.

Tomi bobbed his head jerkily. "Right, we wouldn't care . . . but you would, right? You and Annemari, you are like something out of a historical vid sometimes, all your notions about 'honor' and 'service.' So while I was there, kid, I had some of our p-people check it out. They say this clinic is d-definitely not sneaking 'mats from any of the Federation medical centers. And they wouldn't bother lying t-to me, would they, because they know I wouldn't mind one way or another."

After Tomi's departure Niklaas didn't bother to reactivate the game. He put off calling his mother, too, and told himself the reason was that he didn't want to discuss this mysterious clinic in Castelnuovo Province over a com channel to Federation offices; not secure enough. She visited him every day, it could wait.

The real reason was that he didn't want to know for sure just yet. He didn't want to find out that the Cassilis Clinic was a fake, or that Tomi had been lying when he hinted that they had another source for 'mats, or that they could never raise the credits on a Federation official's salary. Just for a little while, he wanted to believe that he had a future.

The nurse-aide who'd interrupted his game stopped by again after a little while.

"Are you feeling all right, Haar Silvan? You haven't started playing again, and you look a little flushed." She put the back of her hand against his forehead. Niklaas started imagining what it would feel like if she put it somewhere else on his body, assuming he could feel the touch, and immediately became a lot more flushed.

"I'm not sick," he assured her. "Just . . . thinking."

"Must be pleasant thoughts, for a change," she teased with a smile.

"I was thinking," Niklaas said slowly, "of what life would be like if the only barrier to an active sex life were persuading some girl to get active with me."

The nurse-aide's smile froze in place. "I shouldn't think that would pose much of a problem for you, Haar Silvan," she said softly, brushing a lock of bronze-gold hair from his forehead as she removed her hand. She turned away quickly and hoped he hadn't seen the look in her eyes. Poor boy, he knew as well as she did that he'd likely never face that particular problem. Spontaneous nerve regeneration was a better chance for him than getting to the top of the 'mat waiting list.

She'd read about a case of spontaneous nerve regeneration.

Once.

And it hadn't been very well documented.

Annemari Silvan's office had been designed to maximize the peaceful flow of spiritual and mental energies, with the usual color and aura harmonizer cooperating with a spirit specialist. The result was a room perfectly suited to Annemari's cool silver-gilt beauty and sharply concentrated mind. The colors were calm silvers and greys, conducive to concentration and with the added advantage that the fading gold of her hair, the only color accent, seemed bright by contrast. The reflecting vid screens on desk and walls were carefully angled so that the light, and any ill-meaning spirits, bouncing off them would be trapped in the fountain of moving mirrors in one corner or the swaying crystal chimes hanging from the ceiling in another corner. Tall silver bins with angled lids were intended to conceal any messy stacks of papers from sight.

It was a beautiful room for one person to sit in, alone and undisturbed, concentrating on high intellectual problems.

Annemari reckoned that she had spent all of fifteen minutes doing that since taking office five years ago.

And that had been on a Sunday morning, at 3:00 a.m., when she slipped up to her office to kick her shoes off and rest her smile muscles after a particularly draining diplomatic reception; and it had only lasted fifteen minutes because one of her programmers had been working through the night, saw her office lights and thought he'd found the perfect time for an informal chat with the boss about how she wanted the new info screen design to work.

Now, in midweek, the subtle silvers and greys of the decorator's scheme were drowned in a rising tide of flimsies in Federation green, urgent notes in Federation orange, diplomatic disks sealed with Federation red, and computer printouts in recycled beige. Annemari felt rather recycled beige herself, as she tried simultaneously to cope with the usual demands of her job and to follow up three separate lines of investigation into the black-market bacteriomats. Some of her official workload could be delegated to her staff; so far she hadn't dared let anybody except Calandra know about the bacteriomat investigation.

That might have to change soon, if she couldn't reconcile the scanty but mutually incompatible bits of information she had dragged off the data nets.

Niklaas's conversation with Tomi Oksanen was the first lead she'd had since Calandra Vissi dropped out of communication. Unfortunately, he'd thought it over by himself for several days before asking her if she knew anything about the Cassilis Clinic, and in those days it seemed that Tomi Oksanen had disappeared. The Oksanen family was not known for divulging information readily, but usually it was the financial data that they buried beneath layer upon layer of misleading documents and false trails to nonexistent banking corporations. Annemari was extremely good at working through financial deceptions. Her twenty years of programming experience stood her in good stead here. The Oksanens and other upper-class financial criminals hired computoads and technonerds to conceal their dealings; Annemari had been a technonerd, and she could still think like one. She knew how all the major Federation databases were designed; she'd designed some of them herself. She'd even written the code for some parts herself. And the trapdoors she'd written for debugging purposes were extremely useful when she wanted unrecorded access to databases that she had no official reason for looking at.

If Tomi Oksanen had been, say, a credit transaction as part of a money-laundering deal between the Oksanens and some more openly criminal family like the Boghaert clan, she'd have tracked him down in no time at all.

Theoretically, a human being should leave far more traces in the system than a single credit transaction and should be correspondingly easier to track down. But Annemari's attempts to meet with Tomi Oksanen and ask him about the Cassilis Clinic had been met with the famous Oksanen blank-wall silence. Tomi? Oh, yes, one of the younger ones, they said casually, as if his playboy exploits hadn't been enlivening the gossip vids—and costing the Oksanen family—for years. In the Med Center? Yes, they had heard he'd been ill. Didn't Auntie Minna say something about his going to the South Coast to recuperate? Or maybe it had been the Valima Mountains. These young people, you know, always flitting about. No, his parents weren't on-planet just now. Couldn't say exactly where they'd be, complicated itinerary, could have been changes. Come to think of it, didn't somebody mention that Tomi was going to stay with one of his lady friends, Kaarina or maybe it was Kristi or could have been Chiara, dear me, forget my own name next, that I will . . .

Annemari made the requisite polite noises and closed the vid channels. She hadn't had much hope for that line of inquiry; she was no good at these games of conversational fencing, couldn't keep her mind on how to corner her opponent because it took all her energy to stop her screaming at them that they were bloody liars. Should have put somebody from her staff on the job, someone like young Jeppe; he was good with people. Except she daren't trust anybody else with these inquiries, and anyway Jeppe was busy smoothing ruffled feathers over in the legislative offices, where Legist Kovalainen claimed the Information Department was deliberately blocking his request for a statistical analysis of all Federation employees sorted on six different properties, four of which hadn't been defined as data fields when most of the employees were hired and processed, and three of which couldn't be listed in the database because they constituted illegal invasion of personal privacy. It would be really, really nice if Jeppe managed to get Kovalainen to understand the difference between "won't give you the information" and "don't have it in the first place and aren't legally empowered to get it" without giving him an excuse to complain that Annemari's department was incompetent. More likely, though, the best he'd be able to do would be to point Kovalainen at some other department and get him to harass them for a while.

Meanwhile, there was the ongoing credentials check on spaceport officials, the request from Health for a program to map possible disease vectors related to the new plague on Junya IV, and the job of reconciling the data retrieval programs embodied in the Information Freedom project with the data concealment programs in the Right to Personal Privacy project. Annemari had delegated all those jobs as best she could, but her best wasn't good enough; two of the three senior staff members entrusted with the projects had already requested meetings, and one of them wanted the meeting to include a representative from the legislative office as the Freedom and Privacy acts, respectively, were self-contradictory statutes already passed by the Legists. "Ask Legist Kovalainen to join you," Annemari suggested, "I happen to know he's very interested in information retrieval issues." There, that would keep Kovalainen busy, and now she could get Jeppe back to work on something useful . . . like . . . like compiling a statistical analysis of non-Federation medical clinics on Rezerval, number of patients treated, qualifications of staff, whatever other details she could think of to bury the questions she was really interested in. With special attention to Castelnuovo Province.

She promised Vibeke a meeting that afternoon to discuss the Health Department request, reassured herself that Anders Ruggiero seemed able to write and run a simple background and reference checking request without her active supervision, and asked Jeppe for a full report on non-Federation clinics in Castelnuovo Province.

"More BS from the Health Department?" Jeppe moaned.

"Could be a little more interesting than usual," Annemari said without committing herself on the source of the request. "We want full staff lists and resumes, tax data, lists of patients and what they were treated for . . . and don't worry about Privacy Act restrictions on this one."

"Kovalainen will explode," Jeppe predicted.

"Kovalainen doesn't need to be told about all our internal business. That's why I want you on this, Jeppe; I need someone discreet. There are political considerations . . ." Annemari let her voice trail off. "I don't need to tell you about the possible complications here."

Jeppe nodded wisely, as if he actually had some idea what she was talking about. Which was convenient, because Annemari had no idea how she could justify this project if he asked. She'd been banking on the typical technonerd reluctance to admit there was anything at all he didn't already know, and apparently it had worked.

Once Jeppe left, Annemari scrawled Gone for the day on the back of a memo, closed and locked her office door, and set her desk console to route all incoming calls other than Jeppe's to a message list. She spared a moment's envy for the characters in one of the old-fashioned romantic comedy vids she'd seen, who had assistants called "secretaries" specifically to guard the door against visitors. If she didn't have to practically hide out in her own office to get a little uninterrupted time, how much more work she could do!

Of course, her work nowadays was to deal with the interruptions. Ninety percent of her job wasn't technical at all; it was smoothing feathers and adjusting competing demands and setting priorities. And when there was any real computer work to be done, she had to delegate it to one of her eager young assistants.

But this couldn't be delegated. Mentally flexing her fingers, Annemari settled down happily to do a little personal, private research on the Cassilis Clinic, so she'd have some background with which to interpret Jeppe's results. The readily available public information was bland and virtually information-free; with little effort she was able to pull up vids of a long, low white building set in a beautifully landscaped park, short speeches from unidentified but impressive-looking men and women in white coats, blurred views of what were probably the latest in monitors and other medical devices, and testimonials from satisfied patients. "I looked and felt ten years younger after a thorough workup at the Cassilis Clinic," was the general tenor of the testimonials.

It would be interesting to see what Jeppe could add to this picture. So far, all she had was lots of surface pleasantness, no real data, and a general sense that the Cassilis Clinic was a cross between elective beauty surgery and an overpriced health spa for the rich and bored.

Felt like an Oksanen family operation to her. Would a list of employees prove enlightening?

While she waited for Jeppe's results, Annemari checked the progress of the infospyder she'd activated to track Tomi Oksanen's credit usage, transit vouchers, and other traces he might have left in the net. Like the Cassilis Clinic public site, the results were interesting, but not informative. Up to four days ago—the day of his visit to Niklaas—the program had turned up about what you'd expect from an Oksanen playboy. Lots of credit chits from fashionable restaurants, a major funds-verified transaction from a Rezerval jeweler. Annemari recognized the name. Splashy stuff featuring really beautiful Thyrkan rainbow crystals in really tacky gold settings; Tomi must have a new girlfriend, and her taste was about what one would expect from a girl willing to go out with an Oksanen.

The interesting part about that transaction was that Tomi had a girl and felt it worth splashing credits in the form of showy jewelry on her. The Oksanen men had a reputation for being generous with the women they ran around with, but only for services received.

If Tomi was in condition to receive any services at all from his new girl, the Cassilis Clinic had worked the kind of miracle Annemari had thought only bacteriomats could perform.

Niklaas said Tomi had sworn that nobody on the list was losing a chance at a 'mat transplant because of Cassilis Clinic. But what was the word of an Oksanen worth?

The rest of the record was the usual—no public transit records, of course, but a handful of dangerous-flying notices, two summonses for failure to appear and answer charges of causing a flitter accident, the kind of fines that would have got the attention of anybody but an Oksanen, and a large credit transfer to somebody Annemari had never heard of, who turned out to be the injured party in the flitter accident. Who had also failed to appear at the second hearing, the day after the transfer, so the matter had been dropped. Solved in the usual Oksanen family fashion: throw enough money at it and it'll go away.

The really interesting—and frustrating—thing was that there were no traces of Tomi Oksanen anywhere in the net for the last four days. For some reason the Oksanens must have decided to keep his recent activities private. Annemari tapped in a code that would open Rezerval's largest secure financial systems database to her. This would show any of Tomi's transactions that had been blocked from view.

Nothing showed up.

Annemari trawled through Rezerval's off-planet transactions and discovered that some of her colleagues were keeping surprisingly large credit accounts on Toussaint, a non-Federation world that was a favorite for tax evaders. But that was none of her business, so she ignored the information and asked for any transactions specific to the Oksanen family.

That brought up a flood of data, probably enough to keep Federation lawyers happily employed for years picking holes in the Oksanen financial empire if only there were a legitimate way of sending the information to them. Annemari narrowed the search to the last four days and to transactions involving Tomi Oksanen personally.

There were none.

No credits, no flitter tickets, nothing.

Of course even an Oksanen had the power to drop off the net for a while; anybody sufficiently rich and discreet could achieve that by using only personal flitters and private landing zones, making no transactions, entering no controlled areas, staying on-planet. It would not be trivially easy on Rezerval, where half the planet was made up of Federation offices and other controlled zones where proof of identity and time of entry were automatically recorded. But it was possible, even if not exactly in the notoriously flashy Oksanen style.

The really interesting thing was that this wasn't the first blank in Tomi Oksanen's records. He had "disappeared," in the sense of leaving no traces in the system, for twenty days following his release against medical recommendations from the Med Center and into the care of Oksanen family physicians.

Twenty days in the Cassilis Clinic? With no charges recorded—from what looked like a luxury spa and plastic surgery clinic?

A chime from the deskvid announced that Jeppe was sending preliminary results directly to her. Annemari wished she had told him to sneaker-mail them; papers carried by hand left no record, e-transmissions were not as secure. Oh well, she'd asked for enough stuff to disguise her real interests; it took long enough to sort the mass of data and pick out the records relating to Cassilis Clinic.

Jeppe hadn't been able to get at a list of patients and treatments; an attached note indicated that he had some ways around the Clinic's security but wasn't sure he could get in without setting off alerts. Good judgment call, that. Annemari didn't particularly want anyone at the Cassilis Clinic to worry about being investigated—not yet, anyway. And she also didn't want to tell Jeppe or anybody else about the extra bits of code she'd inserted into most Federation database systems as a programmer.

Because the tax information was in public Federation databases, Jeppe had been able to do a thorough job on that without breaking any regulations at all. Annemari would not have been surprised to find that as far as the Federation knew nobody had drawn any income from the Cassilis Clinic—but no, that would have been obvious. The Oksanens were liars, cheats, and notorious tax evaders, but they weren't obvious; that was what made it such a pleasure to pit her wits against theirs. Jeppe's spyder had neatly sorted taxpayers reporting income from the Cassilis Clinic by amount, so that the list began with several blandly meaningless corporation names and ended with the pittances paid to daily scrubbers, groundskeepers and other low-level employees.

It was the ones in the high-middle part of the list that interested Annemari. These would be the top-salaried employees, the surgeons and medtechs. Lots of surgeons. You'd expect that. No, lots of surgeons, far more than it would take to staff the plastic surgery part of a clinic like that. Annemari randomly highlighted about ten percent of the names and set the spyder's parameters to pull up resumes; any licensed clinic was obliged to file resumes for all technical and medical staff, so those also had been available to Jeppe. She read the results, frowning slightly, then requested full resumes on everybody reporting income between—hmm, what did a Federation Level Five medtech get, 600,000 credits a year? Okay, make it everybody between 500,000 and 5 million; that would pick up some top techs and some of the smaller dummy corporations, but should cover everybody she was interested in.

And that list was very interesting. Annemari skimmed through it once, deleted the obvious and expectable entries—well, okay, maybe not so obvious. She had had no idea a "cosmetic consultant" could get paid that much, but right now she didn't have time to waste on the makeup people and the personal trainers and the groomers and buffers. With those culled out, she studied the list of surgeons and other specialists employed at the Cassilis Clinic with deep interest. The obvious cosmetic specialties were well represented, but there was another group whose areas of expertise seemed at first glance to have nothing to do with the clinic's public goals.

Time to activate another kind of data search, the kind she wasn't so good at. Annemari tapped her deskvid and sent a note to Nunzia Hirvonen asking her to respond when she had time.

Nunzia was on vocal almost before Annemari took her fingertip off the screen. The top half of her face, the liquid dark eyes and arching brows, showed over the spyder's resume spreadsheet. "Anni! What's up? You going to take up eating lunch? There's this new place on the Concourse—"

"Wow," Annemari said, caught off guard. "I didn't think you would be free right now."

"I'm not," Nunzia said. "Scrubbing for surgery, talking on voice control, thirty more seconds, slice and dice some poor guy's brain."

"Improving it in the process, I trust."

"Honey, how could surgery not improve it? He's a guy." Nunzia's laugh was like warm honey flowing down into a pool.

"Fifteen seconds, now. Is that long enough for you to tell me if there's any reason a general health spa and plastic surgery clinic should need neurosurgeons?"

"Only if they plan to botch up customers' facial nerves on a regular basis, and want to do the repairs in-house," Nunzia said crisply, "in which case they shouldn't be in business anyway. Wait a minute—you said neurosurgeons? Plural?"

Annemari nodded, then remembered Nunzia had said she was on vocals only. "Right. Three at least, probably five—I'm not sure what some of these subspecialties mean."

"That," Nunzia said with her usual assurance, "makes no sense."

"That depends," Annemari murmured to herself.

"Now you have to meet me for lunch," Nunzia announced, "and Tell All. I want the full story. Gaetano's on the Concourse, twelve sharp. If you get there first, order us some bruschetta with lemongrass sauce for starters. See you there."

Before lunchtime Annemari dealt quickly and competently with three more requests for various statistical analyses, an attempt by the head of Data Entry to steal her best two nerds, and a complaint from Legist Kovalainen that the "girl" who'd asked him to join the meeting on the Information and Privacy Acts couldn't explain anything. She also comforted Vibeke— "Don't worry, nobody can explain anything to Kovalainen; he hasn't the basic equipment for understanding it. I just wanted him off Jeppe's back for the day, and now I owe you one. Okay, I owe you two. After lunch?"

While she handled data and personnel crises, the back of her head was turning over Tomi Oksanen's mysterious recovery and equally mysterious disappearance, the glorified health spa in Castelnuovo Province that kept three—or maybe five—highly paid neurosurgeons on permanent staff, and one puzzling little bit of data the transit-permits-search spyder had retrieved for her. Something she hadn't even been looking for, but it was a smart spyder program and remembered she'd previously been interested in this matter. Put together, these three matters weren't puzzling in the slightest; in fact, Annemari sailed off to her lunch meeting with Nunzia feeling that she had probably figured out almost everything she needed to know.

The one thing she hadn't thought of was the risk of encountering Evert Cornelis on her way out of the building.

"Annemari! Nothing wrong, I hope?" Evert looked toward the Med Center.

"No, no, I'm just going to lunch," she reassured him, and then realized she might have made a slight mistake.

"I have to see this," Evert announced. "You never take time off for lunch. What's lured you away from the delights of a fruitpak at your desk while yelling at your staff?"

"I don't yell at my staff," Annemari said.

"No, sorry, wrong word. You freeze them with a glance, of course. But what inspired you to take a break? Let me guess, you're avoiding Legist Kovalainen."

Annemari's pace quickened. "Is he looking for me?"

"I'd recommend a long lunch," Evert said obliquely. "Where are we going?"

"I'm meeting Dr. Hirvonen," Annemari said. "It's a business lunch. We have Federation business to discuss."

"Excellent! I love traditional Italo-Thai food."

"How did you—"

"Know you were headed for Gaetano's?" Evert beamed. "It's the only place on the Concourse that Nunzia considers serves decent food. She just doesn't appreciate the subtler pleasures of Franco-Mexican at Bistro Tapatia. No matter, I'll take you there another day."

"That would be lovely, Evert," Annemari said politely, "I'll look forward to seeing you then. Now, if you'll excuse me, I don't want to be late for this meeting with Dr. Hirvonen." It was as close to a brush-off as ingrained civility would permit her to go.

"Oh, I'm coming with you," Evert insisted. "Told you I like Italo-Thai, and as it happens, I've some business to discuss with you, too. That little matter you asked me about the other day, about your 'friend' on Kalapriya?"

After looking at the information the transit spyder had turned up Annemari no longer felt anxious about Calandra, but it would have been really rude to tell him so if he'd already gone to the trouble to contact his Aunt Sanne. She resigned herself to listening while Evert told a long involved story with a predictable ending, slowed her pace so that he could get the breath to tell his story in his preferred fashion, and wondered, while he nattered on, whether there was any way short of murder to shake him off before she met Nunzia at Gaetano's.

" . . . so, like you told me, and perfectly right you were, m'dear, as always, Sanne was only too happy to send me a long gossipy vid about all her social doings in Valentin. And I mean long!" Evert shook his head in wonder. "Gods, how that woman can rattle on. No idea where she gets it from. Rest of m'family can stick to the point and give you a straight answer to a simple question, but like my father always said—or was it Uncle Baar—anyway, one of 'em said, 'Ask Sanne if it was raining when she came inside and you'll have to hear all about the damage the water spotting would've done to her pricey new organic coverall if it had been raining, which is when you'll learn it wasn't.' " He paused. "Now where was I?"

"Sanne's news from Valentin," Annemari prompted.

"Oh! Right. Well, of course you didn't want me to ask a simple question anyway, so it's not her fault, but I just wish you had listened to the vid instead of me, Annemari."

"So do I," Annemari murmured against the protests of her better self.

Fortunately, Evert didn't take the comment as she had meant it. He patted her shoulder. "There, there, noble of you, but Sanne's a family misfortune—I mean, member—and I wouldn't really want to inflict her conversation on anyone else. Anyway, first word out of her mouth was about some grand banquet and dance they'd planned on having for the visiting Diplomat, so of course I thought I'd get to hear then whether Calandra had shown up or not, but no. First the woman has to tell me all about her new dress for the ball, and I give you my word, Annemari, I didn't know anybody could say that much about one dress—specially on a restricted planet where they're only allowed to use organics and native manufacture. Then all the gossip and matchmaking before the ball, and after all that it turns out . . ."

"Calandra didn't show?"

"Why, no!" Evert was startled into plain speech. "That's what I've been trying to tell you, Annemari. Calandra was there and she's perfectly all right. Sanne's husband, Pledger, was seated at the head table with her for the banquet, and he seemed quite taken with her. So did the young man they assigned as her escort, according to Sanne. She said they were having altogether too much fun at the ball and Calandra ain't dignified enough by half for a Diplomatic envoy."

Annemari stopped in front of the green pavilion outside Gaetano's. "Evert, that's impossible."

"What, for a Diplo to lighten up? Unlikely, maybe, but surely possible. I even have hopes of seeing you let your hair down, Annemari. Been meaning to tell you, it's high time you stopped spending every Joy Luck Fortune night home with a glass of milk and an old holovid."

Annemari devoutly hoped Evert didn't know the title of the last holovid she'd rented, presently flashing across the inside of her head in neon-pink lettering with little hearts attached. Not that there was anything wrong with watching something called With All My Heart. It would just be . . . embarrassing. And after the unauthorized searches she'd recently pulled off, she couldn't help thinking how easy it would be for anyone who knew his way around Federation computer systems to bring up a list of the last ten holos she'd rented.

But that somebody wouldn't be Evert, who called Tech Support when the cleaners disconnected the power to his deskvid. He was guessing about her habits . . . more or less correctly.

Unfortunately, he interpreted the pause as permission to continue dissecting her personal life. Or lack of one.

"It was one thing when Kaarle—when you were widowed and left alone with Niklaas to raise. I know you didn't want to leave him in the creche anytime you weren't working. But Kaarle's been dead for years now, Annemari, and Niklaas—"

"Still needs me," Annemari cut him off. "No, Evert, that's not what I want to talk about. Are you sure your aunt Sanne said she saw Calandra?"

"Just told you so," said Evert. "Said she danced all night. Calandra, I mean, not Sanne."

"And exactly when was the ball?"

"On the fourteenth."

Annemari frowned. "I suppose that's just possible. I should have checked the time on those transit records."

"You found records showing she was someplace else at the time?"

"Or just after . . . Is Tasman on Federation time?"

Evert shrugged. "Dunno, but that's easy enough to check. But I'll trust a live person over a computer database any day, and so should you, Annemari—you know how easy it is to hack into those things. If somebody tried to fake a journey for Calandra to some other place, you need to be looking into who'd want to do that, not questioning my family's eyewitness information!"

"I would," said Annemari abstractedly, as she tried to figure out what this latest twist could mean, "except it wasn't Calandra Vissi's travel plans I found."

"Then what—how—"

"Come inside and sit down, you two!" Nunzia Hirvonen swept up beside them, hugged Annemari and pushed Evert toward the door. "I'm starving. Order first, then gossip."

Gaetano's might serve traditional Italo-Thai food, but the décor had been managed by a thoroughly modern aura consultant, from the collage of antique coins over the door to attract wealth to the trailing red cords that dangled from beams to dissipate negative energies. The entire north wall was covered by a screen of falling water dropping onto rounded stones, and the rounded lines of chairs and tables supported a smooth flow of energy from the fountain through the entire room.

Over the bruschetta con limone Annemari gave up on discretion and decided to tell everybody everything. It didn't take much decision; Nunzia's warm pressure was almost impossible to resist. Besides, she didn't want to wait until after lunch to explain to Evert why Calandra couldn't have been at the banquet on Kalapriya.

First she had to fill Nunzia in on the background—the offer of a bacteriomat implant for Nikki from an anonymous source, her dispatching of Calandra Vissi to look into the possibility that somebody was stealing bacteriomats from the Barents Trading Society's stock, her subsequent loss of contact with Calandra and request that Evert check on her discreetly through his family contacts on Kalapriya. "But while I was waiting to hear from Evert," she explained, "just this morning, in fact, one of my spyder programs came up with transit records for Thecla Partheni, leaving Tasman the day after I lost contact with Calandra, returning to Rezerval that same day. Or . . . I need to check what time Tasman is on; it could have been the equivalent of really late at night on Kalapriya, which would explain your aunt seeing Calandra at the ball, Evert."

Both Nunzia and Evert looked blank.

"Look," Annemari said, "this is really seriously classified information, and I never said anything, okay? But Thecla Partheni is one of Calandra's spare identities. Obviously her cover was compromised and she had to switch identities. Also obviously, she found some clue that sent her back here to Rezerval. And I would have thought, from the timing, that it all happened on Tasman. She couldn't have been on Kalapriya more than a few hours at most."

"But she was there," Evert pointed out. "Damn it, Annemari, you've talked with the Tasman officer who escorted Calandra to the Kalapriya shuttle, and I've just had a vid from m'aunt Sanne going on and on about what Calandra wore to the ball in her honor. Did your spyder show Calandra returning to Tasman? No? Well then, most likely one of those Tasman thieves lifted Calandra's spare ID and used it to get off-station."

"The spare identities aren't stealable," Annemari explained. "Nunzia, you know how they're done for Diplos, can you explain to Evert why we know nobody stole the Thecla Partheni ID?"

"It doesn't exist," Nunzia said promptly. "Not physically, not outside Calandra's brain. One of her neurochip implants allows her to activate a signal that will cause Federation computers and any system drawing on their databases to recognize her retinal scans and DNA as belonging to—what did you say the alternate name was, Annemari?"

"Thecla," Annemari said. "Thecla Partheni. We had to pick something that would be ethnically compatible with her general physical appearance. Calandra's small and dark; she might be able to convince a computer her real name was something like Katrijna van Alstyne, but no human being would believe she was from Barents. Oh, why am I going on about this, it doesn't matter; the point is that the retinal and DNA scans confirm that Calandra left Tasman for Rezerval as Thecla Partheni. And I haven't found any records showing Thecla—or Calandra—returning from Kalapriya to Tasman."

"That just means they're misfiled," Evert said, "because she was definitely in Valentin on Kalapriya the evening of the fourteenth. And if you don't believe me, I'll drag you to my rooms and force you to watch m'aunt Sanne going on and on about the damned ball."

"I just might take you up on that," Annemari said absently. "Does Sanne say anything about seeing Calandra after the ball?"

"No, but she wouldn't, would she?"

"She might say something about the surprising early departure of the Diplomat . . . Evert, could you check with her again and find out if she knows what Calandra has been doing since the day of her arrival?"

Evert groaned.

"Or maybe you could ask somebody else?"

Evert's brow furrowed. "I've got a young relative in the Guards . . . no, that's no use; Moylen's only a leutnant, he wouldn't be in on high diplomatic doings. It'll have to be Sanne. But is it really necessary? I thought you had settled that she went back to Tasman."

"Maybe. The timing's funny. And . . . Kalapriya is technology-restricted; they wouldn't be checking bio-data the way the space stations and shuttles do. It's just barely possible that Calandra found out something at the ball that made her return to Tasman at once, without reporting to me. But it's also possible that the shuttle taking this person from Tasman to Kalapriya didn't run the passengers through proper security and ID checks. An impersonator might be able to make herself up to look enough like Calandra to fool some Tasman officer who'd only seen her once before, if that. And if somebody is impersonating my Diplomat on Kalapriya," Annemari said firmly, "I'd really, really like to know about it."

"Then look for Calandra and ask her. And why do you suppose she hasn't checked in with you already?"

"Possibly," Annemari said, "for the same reason that she chose to use an alternate identity. Perhaps she doesn't want somebody to know that she's a Diplomat. In which case she'd hardly be walking in through the front door of a Federation office building, would she?"

"You know, Annemari," Evert murmured, "your eyes go more grey than blue when you're being sarcastic. It's not becoming. We both know there are plenty of ways your pet Diplomat could reach you without 'walking in through the front door.' If you really think Thecla Partheni is Calandra and that she returned to Rezerval four days ago, you ought to be worried sick. Why aren't you?"

"Because I have reason to think she's following up the clue that brought her back here," Annemari answered.

"How can you think that if you haven't heard from her?"

"She left the Rezerval main port by the Garibaldi gate," Annemari said, looking at Nunzia rather than Evert. "Most of the public transit from there runs south . . ."

"To Castelnuovo Province," Nunzia nodded. "Let me guess. That's the location of the clinic you were asking about?"

Then it was Evert's turn to listen while Annemari described Tomi Oksanen's mysterious recovery, the visit to Niklaas in which he'd mentioned the Cassilis Clinic, and his subsequent disappearance. "On the public nets it shows up as a combination health spa and plastic surgery clinic for the rich and beautiful who want to stay that way," she concluded, "but they're paying a lot of surgeons, and they're not all reconstruction men. At least three neurosurgeons that I know of. Maybe more—Nunzia, what's stereotactic injection?"

"A technique used, among other things, for implanting neuronal cells," Nunzia said. "If they've got a specialist in that on staff—"

"Two," said Annemari with a brisk, satisfied nod.

"Then they're doing something in the way of rebuilding neural networks," Nunzia said. "And either it's something very complicated, or they're doing a lot of it, because 'mat insertion is actually a fairly simple procedure."

"Really?" Evert asked. "Personally, I'd as soon have as many highly paid surgeons as possible helping out before anybody puts a hole in my skull for therapeutic purposes."

Nunzia smiled slightly. "You're safe from 'mat reconstruction, Haar Cornelis. Even now, we can't repair what was never there to begin with."

"I do believe I've just been insulted," Evert said. He grinned at Nunzia and she returned his smile more warmly than her words would have suggested. Annemari began to see a solution to one of her long-standing problems. Not exactly one of the most urgent ones, still . . . But the possibility of Evert and Nunzia getting together was pleasant enough, and surprising enough, to divert her for a moment from everything else.

"Anyway," Nunzia said when she finally broke eye contact with Evert and dove into her pappardelle al cinghale, "cutting holes in the skull is hardly cutting-edge surgery. They've been doing it since the Stone Age to treat everything from epilepsy to osteomyelitis." She gestured largely with her fork. "Difference is, we know what we're doing and why it works. They just drilled a hole and hoped it would let the demons out."

"Whereas modern surgeons," Evert said with exquisite politeness, "do just the opposite—drill a hole and poke a demon in. Or am I behind the times? Does modern neuroscience have an explanation for exactly how the bacteriomats of Kalapriya work their wonders?"

"One point to you," Nunzia said without malice. "No, we don't know exactly how they work, and yes, before you say it, surgeons of the forty-first century probably will look pityingly upon us poor ignoramuses of the Plastic Age. What they do know is that they're a major advance on primitive stem-cell therapy. Back in the twenty-first century surgeons had found that stem cells injected into an adult brain would somehow figure out what kinds of cells were missing or damaged and grow themselves into replacements. That took care of a lot of problems."

"So what do Kalapriyan bacteriomats have over stem cells?"

"One word. Structure!" Nunzia jabbed her fork at the plate and pushed her food around into an undifferentiated mess. "Nobody ever did succeed in persuading stem cells to grow long enough axons to repair severely damaged spinal cords. But biofilms, like the 'mats, aren't just one species but a collection of microbial species working together. So when you get a biofilm that likes to live in human brains and nerves, it doesn't need to grow single supercells; it can create a whole community of linked, cooperating cells to bridge the gap." She pushed individual bits of pasta into a line across her plate. "And the 'mats mimic whole structures in the brain, the way stem cells mimic individual cells—which allows them to do repairs far beyond what was accomplished with stem-cell therapy. Bottom line, your chances of surviving demyelinizing infections, brain tumors, or latent Fournier Syndrome—not only surviving, but walking away—are better than ever before."

"Only if you can get on the list," Annemari murmured, blinking rapidly.

"Gods. I'm a tactless idiot," Nunzia said, putting her fork down. "Anni, can you forgive—"

"Annemari, I'm so sorry—" Evert began.

Annemari managed a smile, and a moment later had command of her voice. "Help me check out the Cassilis Clinic, and you're both off the hook. Otherwise, I'll make you feel guilty and miserable forever. Deal?"

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