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By Root 1947 0

trips. Lindsay, knowing the nature of the case, had agreed to meet the representative of the breakaway group on neutral ground in Dembowska. His entourage consisted of his chief lieutenant, Gomez; three of his postdoctoral students; and a diplomatic observer from the Queen's Advisors. Dembowska had changed. When they debarked into customs amid the sparse crowd from the liner. Lindsay was struck by the warmth. The air was at blood heat and smelled faintly of Kitsune's skin. The smell brought seeping memory with it. Lindsay's smile was melancholy. The memories were eighty-five years old, as thin as paper; they seemed to have happened to someone else. Lindsay's Lifesiders checked their luggage. Two of the graduate students, Mechanist types, murmured first impressions into their lip mikes. Other passengers waited at the scanning booths.

Two Dembowska agents approached their group. Lindsay stepped forward in the faint gravity. "Harem police?" he said.

"Wallchildren," said the first of the pair, a male. He wore a thin, sleeveless kimono; his bare arms were covered with authority tattoos. His face seemed familiar. Lindsay recognized the genetics of Michael Carnassus. He turned to the other, a woman, and saw Kitsune, younger, her hair shorn, her dark arms stenciled in white ink.

"I'm Colonel Martin Dembowska, and this is my Wallsister, Captain Murasaki Dembowska."

"I'm Chancellor Lindsay. These are cliquemembers Abelard Gomez, Jane Murray, Glen Szilard, Colin Szilard, Emma Meyer, and Undersecretary Fidel Nakamura, our diplomatic observer." The Cicadas bowed, each in turn.

"I hope you weren't distressed by the bacterial change aboard ship," Murasaki said. She had Kitsune's voice.

"A minor inconvenience."

"We are forced to take great care with the Wallmother's skin bacteria," the Colonel explained. "There is a considerable acreage involved. I'm sure you understand."

"Could you offer us exact figures?" asked one of the Szilard brothers, with a Mechanist's dry craving for hard data. "Reports in Czarina-Kluster are clouded."

"At last report the Wallmother massed four hundred thousand, eight hundred and twelve tons." The Colonel was proud. "Have you anything to declare? No? Then follow me."

They followed the Dembowskan into a confidential clearance office, where they left their luggage and were provided with sterilized guest's kimonos. They floated barefoot into the hot air of Dembowska's first mall. The cavernous duty-free shopping area was paved, walled, and ceilinged in flesh. The Cicadas padded along reluctantly, their toes just brushing the resilient skin. They looked with hidden longing at the shops, safe islands of stone and metal. Lindsay had schooled them to be tactful and was proud of their masked reactions.

Even Lindsay felt a qualm when they entered the first long tunnel; its round, gulletlike design tapped a deep well of unease. The party boarded an openwork sled, propelled by peristaltic twitches from the sinewed tracks beneath it.

The slick wall was studded periodically by sphinctered plugs for predi-gested pap. Light glowed gently from translucent bladders swollen with white phosphorescence. Gomez, at Lindsay's elbow, studied the architecture with a trancelike intensity. His attention was sharpened to a cutting edge by a drug known in Cicada circles as "Green Rapture."

"They've gone for broke," Gomez said softly. "Could there be personality behind this? It must take half a ton of backbrain to manage all this meat." His eyes narrowed. "Imagine how it must feel."

The Carnassus clone, in the sled's first compartment, touched the controls. A seam parted wetly in the floor, pitching the sled into vertical free-fall. They catapulted down a multitrack elevator shaft, broken periodically by dizzying vistas of plazas and suburbs.

Shops and offices flashed past, embedded in billows of dark satiny skin. The heat and smell of perfumed flesh were everywhere: intimacy on an industrial scale. The crowds were sparse. Many were young children, running naked.

The sled braked to a halt. The group disembarked onto a furred