groans mixed in with pounding. I thought about it -- ifI wanted to kill someone on the Mansion, what would be the best place todo it? The attic staircase-- the next sequence -- seemed like a goodbet. A cold clarity washed over me. The elf would kill me in the gloomof the staircase, dump me out over the edge at the blind turn toward thegraveyard, and that would be it. Would he be able to do it if I werestaring straight at him? He seemed terribly nervous as it was. Iswiveled in my seat and looked him straight in the eye.
He quirked half a smile at me and nodded a greeting. I kept on staringat him, my hands balled into fists, ready for anything. We rode down thestaircase, facing up, listening to the clamour of voices from thecemetery and the squawk of the red-eyed raven. I caught sight of thequaking groundkeeper animatronic from the corner of my eye and startled.I let out a subvocal squeal and was pitched forward as the ride systemshuddered to a stop.
"Jules?" came Dan's voice in my cochlea. "You all right?"
He'd heard my involuntary note of surprise and had leapt clear of theBuggy, stopping the ride. The elf was looking at me with a mixture ofsurprise and pity.
"It's all right, it's all right. False alarm." I paged Lil andsubvocalized to her, telling her to start up the ride ASAP, it was allright.
I rode the rest of the way with my hands on the safety bar, my eyesfixed ahead of me, steadfastly ignoring the elf. I checked the timer I'dbeen running. The demo was a debacle -- instead of shaving off threeseconds, I'd added thirty. I wanted to cry.
#
I debarked the Buggy and stalked quickly out of the exit queue, leaningheavily against the fence, staring blindly at the pet cemetery. My headswam: I was out of control, jumping at shadows. I was spooked.
And I had no reason to be. Sure, I'd been murdered, but what had it costme? A few days of "unconsciousness" while they decanted my backup intomy new body, a merciful gap in memory from my departure at the backupterminal up until my death. I wasn't one of those nuts who took death_seriously_. It wasn't like they'd done something _permanent_.
In the meantime, I _had_ done something permanent: I'd dug Lil's grave alittle deeper, endangered the ad-hocracy and, worst of all, the Mansion.I'd acted like an idiot. I tasted my dinner, a wolfed-down hamburger,and swallowed hard, forcing down the knob of nausea.
I sensed someone at my elbow, and thinking it was Lil, come to ask mewhat had gone on, I turned with a sheepish grin and found myself facingthe elf.
He stuck his hand out and spoke in the flat no-accent of someone runninga language module. "Hi there. We haven't been introduced, but I wantedto tell you how much I enjoy your work. I'm Tim Fung."
I pumped his hand, which was still cold and particularly clammy in theclose heat of the Florida night. "Julius," I said, startled at how muchlike a bark it sounded. _Careful_, I thought, _no need to escalate thehostilities._ "It's kind of you to say that. I like what you-all havedone with the Pirates."
He smiled: a genuine, embarrassed smile, as though he'd just been givenhigh praise from one of his heroes. "Really? I think it's pretty good --the second time around you get a lot of chances to refine things, reallyclarify the vision. Beijing -- well, it was exciting, but it was rushed,you know? I mean, we were really struggling. Every day, there wasanother pack of squatters who wanted to tear the Park down. Debra usedto send me out to give the children piggyback rides, just to keep ourWhuffie up while she was evicting the squatters. It was good to have theopportunity to refine the designs, revisit them without the floor show."
I knew about this, of course -- Beijing had been a real struggle for thead-hocs who built it. Lots of them had been killed, many times over.Debra herself had been killed every day for a week and restored to aseries of prepared clones, beta-testing one of the ride systems. It wasfaster than revising the CAD simulations. Debra had a reputation forpursuing expedience.
"I'm starting to find out how it feels to work under pressure," I said,and nodded significantly at the Mansion. I was gratified to see him lookembarrassed, then horrified.
"We would _never_ touch the Mansion," he said. "It's _perfect_!"
Dan and Lil sauntered up as I was preparing a riposte. They both lookedconcerned -- now that I thought of it, they'd both seemed incrediblyconcerned about me since the day I was revived.
Dan's gait was odd, stilted, like he was leaning on Lil for support.They looked like a couple. An irrational sear of jealousy jetted throughme. I was an emotional wreck. Still, I took Lil's big, scarred hand inmine as soon as she was in reach, then cuddled her to me protectively.She had changed out of her maid's uniform into civvies: smart coverallswhose micropore fabric breathed in time with her own respiration.
"Lil, Dan, I want you to meet Tim Fung. He was just telling me warstories from the Pirates project in Beijing."
Lil waved and Dan gravely shook his hand. "That was some hard work," Dansaid.
It occurred to me to turn on some Whuffie monitors. It was normally aninstantaneous reaction to meeting someone, but I was still disoriented.I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie; respect garneredfrom people who shared very few of my opinions. I expected that. What Ididn't expect was that his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lentextra credence to the rankings of people I respected, was also high --higher than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more. Respectfrom the elf -- _Tim_, I had to remember to call him Tim -- would carrya lot of weight in every camp that mattered.
Dan's score was incrementing upwards, but he still had a rotten profile.He had accrued a good deal of left-handed Whuffie, and I curiouslybacktraced it to the occasion of my murder, when Debra's people hadaccorded him a generous dollop of props for the levelheaded way he hadscraped up my corpse and moved it offstage, minimizing the disturbancein front of their wondrous Pirates.
I was fugueing, wandering off on the kind of mediated reverie that gotme killed on the reef at Playa Coral, and I came out of it with a start,realizing that the other three were politely ignoring my blown buffer. Icould have run backwards through my short-term memory to get the gist ofthe conversation, but that would have lengthened the pause. Screw it."So, how're things going over at the Hall of the Presidents?" I askedTim.
Lil shot me a cautioning look. She'd ceded the Hall to Debra's ad-hocs,that being the only way to avoid the appearance of childish disattentionto the almighty Whuffie. Now she had to keep up the fiction of good-natured cooperation -- that meant not shoulder-surfing Debra, lookingfor excuses to pounce on her work.
Tim gave us the same half-grin he'd greeted me with. On his smooth,pointed features, it looked almost irredeemably cute. "We're doing goodstuff, I think. Debra's had her eye on the Hall for years, back in theold days, before she went to China. We're replacing the whole thing withbroadband uplinks of gestalts from each of the Presidents' lives:newspaper headlines, speeches, distilled biographies, personal papers.It'll be like having each President _inside_ you, core-dumped in a fewseconds. Debra said we're going to _flash-bake_ the Presidents on yourmind!" His eyes glittered in the twilight.
Having only recently experienced my own cerebral flash-baking, Tim'sdescription struck a chord in me. My personality seemed to be rattlingaround a little in my mind, as though it had been improperly fitted. Itmade the idea of having the gestalt of 50-some Presidents squashed inalong with it perversely appealing.
"Wow," I said. "That sounds wild. What do you have in mind for physicalplant?" The Hall as it stood had a quiet, patriotic dignity cribbed froma hundred official buildings of the dead USA. Messing with it would belike redesigning the stars-and-bars.
"That's not really my area," Tim said. "I'm a programmer. But I couldhave one of the designers squirt some plans at you, if you want."
"That would be fine," Lil said, taking my elbow. "I think we should beheading home, now, though." She began to tug me away. Dan took my otherelbow. Behind her, the Liberty Belle glowed like a ghostly wedding cakein the twilight.
"That's too bad," Tim said. "My ad-hoc is pulling an all-nighter on thenew Hall. I'm sure they'd love
to have you drop by."
The idea seized hold of me. I would go into the camp of the enemy, sitby their fire, learn their secrets. "That would be _great_!" I said, tooloudly. My head was buzzing slightly. Lil's hands fell away.
"But we've got an early morning tomorrow," Lil said. "You've got a shiftat eight, and I'm running into town for groceries." She was lying, butshe was telling me that this wasn't her idea of a smart move. But myfaith was unshakeable.
"Eight a.m. shift? No problem -- I'll be right here when it starts. I'lljust grab a shower at the Contemporary in the morning and catch themonorail back in time to