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By Root 1822 0

and completely isolated. They are perfect prey for mass hysteria. Gambling fever will hit them like an epidemic." He leaned back. "Support me, madame. I'll be your point man, your broker, your go-between. They'll never know you were behind their ruin. In fact, they'll come to you for help." He sipped his tea. It tasted synthetic. The old woman paused as if she were thinking. Her expression was very wrong. There were none of the tiny subliminal flickers of mouth and eyelid, the movements of the throat, that accompanied human thought processes. Her face was more than calm. It was inert.

"It has possibilities," she said at last. "But the Bank must have control. Covert, but complete. How can you guarantee this?"

"It will be in your hands," Lindsay promised. "We will use my company, Kabuki Intrasolar, as a front. You will use your contacts outside the Zaibatsu to issue fictitious stock. I will offer it for sale here, and your Bank will be ambivalent. This will allow the Nephrines to score a financial coup and seize control of the company. Fictitious stockholders, your agents, will react in alarm and send in pleas and inflated offers to the new owners. This will flatter their self-esteem and overwhelm any doubts.

"At the same time, you will cooperate with me openly. You will supply me with actors and actresses; in fact, you will jealously fight for the privilege. Your geishas will talk of nothing else to every customer. You will spread rumors about me: my charm, my brilliance, my hidden resources. You will underwrite all my extravagances, and establish a free-wheeling, free-spending atmosphere of care-free hedonism. It will be a huge confidence trick that will bamboozle the entire world."

The old woman sat silently, her eyes glazed.

The low, pure tones of the synthesizer stopped suddenly. A tense hush fell over the room. The girl spoke softly from behind her keyboards. "It will work, won't it?"

He looked into her face. Her meekness had peeled off like a layer of cosmetics. Her dark eyes shocked him. They were full of frank, carnivorous desire. He knew at once that she was feigning nothing, because her look was beyond pretense. It was not human.

Without knowing it, he rose to one knee, his eyes still locked with hers. "Yes," he said. His voice was hoarse. "It will work, I swear it to you." The floor was cold under his hand. He realized that, without any decision on his part, he had begun to move toward her, half crawling.

She looked at him in lust and wonder. "Tell me what you are, darling. Tell me really."

"I'm what you are," Lindsay said. "Shaper's work." He forced himself to stop moving. His arms began to tremble.

"I want to tell you what they did to me," the girl said. "Let me tell you what I am."

Lindsay nodded once. His mouth was dry with sick excitement.

"All right," he said. "Tell me, Kitsune."

"They gave me to the surgeons," she said. "They took my womb out, and they put in brain tissue. Grafts from the pleasure center, darling. I'm wired to the ass and the spine and the throat, and it's better than being God. When I'm hot, I sweat perfume. I'm cleaner than a fresh needle, and nothing leaves my body that you can't drink like wine or eat like candy. And they left me bright, so that I would know what submission was. Do you know what submission is, darling?"

"No," Lindsay said harshly. "But I know what it means not to care about dying."

"We're not like the others," she said. "They put us past the limits. And now we can do anything we like to them, can't we?"

Her laugh sent a shuddering thrill through him. She leaped with balletic grace over her deck of keyboards.

She kicked the old woman's shoulder with one bare foot, and the yarite fell over with a crunch. Her wig ripped free with a shredding of tape. Beneath it, Lindsay glimpsed her threadbare skull, riddled with cranial plugs. He stared. "Your keyboards," he said.

"She's my front," Kitsune said. "That's what my life is. Fronts and fronts and fronts. Only the pleasure is real. The pleasure of control." Lindsay licked his dry lips.

"Give me what's real,"