She had no idea how long she’d been there, when the screen lit and began to flicker. Hours, minutes . . She’d already learned to negotiate the chamber, after a fashion, kicking off like Jones from the dome’s concavity. Like Jones. she caught herself on the thing’s folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers,knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist’s drill They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semiauton- omous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded into the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodesics to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box. Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past. A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rec- tangular segments of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat . . . Endless, the slow swarm, the spinning things . Jones tumbled up through the silent storm, laughing, grab- bing an arm tipped with a glue gun. “Always makes me want to laugh, to see it. But the boxes always make me sad . “Yes,” she said, “they make me sad, too. But there are sadnesses and sadnesses . “Quite right.” He grinned. “No way to make it go, though. Guess the spirit has to move it, or anyway that’s how old Wig has it. He used to come out here a lot I think the voices are stronger for him here. But lately they’ve been talking to him wherever, it seems like . . She looked at him through the thicket of manipulators. He was very dirty, very young, with his wide blue eyes under a tangle of brown curls. He wore a stained gray zipsuit, its collar shiny with grime. “You must be mad,” she said with something like admiration in her voice, “you must be totally mad, to stay here . . He laughed. “Wigan’s madder than a sack of bugs. Not me. She smiled. “No, you’re crazy I’m crazy, too “Hello then,” he said, looking past her. “What’s this? One of Wig’s sermons, looks like, and no way we can shut it off without me cutting the power . . She turned her head and saw diagonals of color strobe across the rectangular face of a large screen glued crookedly to the curve of the dome The screen was occluded, for a second, by the passage of a dressmaker’s dummy, and then the face of Josef Virek filled it, his soft blue eyes glittering behind round lenses. “Hello, Marly,” he said. “I can’t see you, but I’m sure I know where you are “That’s one of Wig’s sermon screens,” Jones said, rub- bing his face. “Put `em up all over the Place, `cause he figured one day he’d have people up here to preach to. This geezer’s linked in through Wig’s communication gear, I guess. Who is he?” “Virek,” she said. “Thought he was older. . “It’s a generated image,” she said. “Ray tracing, texture mapping She stared as the face smiled out at her from the curve of the dome, beyond the slow-motion hurricane of lost things, minor artifacts of countless lives, tools and toys and gilded buttons. “I want you to know,” the image said, “that you have fulfilled your contract. My psychoprofile of Marly Krushkhova predicted your response to my gestalt. Broader profiles indi- cated that your presence in Paris would force Maas to play their hand. Soon, Marly, I will know exactly what it is that you have found. For four years I’ve known something that Maas didn’t know. I’ve known that Mitchell, the man Mans and the world regards as the inventor of the new biochip processes, was being fed the concepts that resulted in his breakthroughs. I added you to an intricate array of factors, Marly, and things came to a most satisfying head. Mans, without understanding what they were doing, surrendered the location of the conceptual source. And you have reached it. Paco will be arriving shortly . . “You said you wouldn’t follow,” she said. “I knew you lied…” “And now, Marly, at last I think I shall be free. Free of the four hundred kilograms of rioting cells they wall away behind surgical steel in a Stockholm industrial park. Free, eventu- ally, to inhabit any number of real bodies, Marly Forever.” “Shit,” Jones said, “this one’s as bad as Wig. What’s he think he’s talking about?” “About his jump,” she said, remembering her talk with Andrea, the smell of cooking prawns in the cramped little kitchen. “The next stage of his evolution “You understand it?” “No,” she said, “but I know that it will be bad, very bad ..” She shook her head. `Convince the inhabitants of the cores to admit Paco and his crew, Marly,” Virek said. “I purchased the cores an hour before you departed Orly, from a contractor in Pakistan. A bargain, Marly, a great bargain. Paco will oversee my inter- ests, as usual.” And then the screen was dark. “Here now,” Jones said, pivoting around a folded manip- ulator and taking her hand, “what’s so bad about all that? He owns it now, and he said you’d done your bit . . . I don’t know what old Wig’s good for, except to listen to the voices, but he’s not long for this side anyway Me, I’m as easy for Outasnot. . “You don’t understand,” she said. “You can’t He’s found his way to something, something he’s sought for years. But nothing he wants can be good. For anyone ye seen him, I’ve felt it . . And then the steel arm she held vibrated and began to move, the whole turret rotating with a muted hum of servos