SUPPOSE YOU COULD SWITCH BODIES WITH ANOTHER PERSON.

What exciting new experiences would you choose to explore? What forbidden desires would you indulge? Suppose someone stole your life—how far would you go to get it back?

A pure adrenaline thriller of hijacked identities, elusive motives, and deeply buried secrets.

HOPSCOTCH

KEVIN J. ANDERSON

Hopscotch

Copyright © 2002, 2011 WordFire, Inc.

Hopscotch Originally published by Bantam Spectra, 2002

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

The ebook edition of this book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. The ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share the ebook edition with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

EBook ISBN: 978-1-68057-251-3

Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-68057-250-6

Case Bind Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-68057-266-7

Cover design by Janet McDonald

Cover artwork images by Adobe Stock

Kevin J. Anderson, Art Director

Published by

WordFire Press, LLC

PO Box 1840

Monument CO 80132

Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

WordFire Press eBook Edition 2022

WordFire Press Trade Paperback Edition 2022

WordFire Press Hardcover Edition 2022

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Epilogue

Coda

Acknowledgments

About Kevin J. Anderson

If You Liked …

Kevin J. Anderson

DEDICATION

For Brian Herbert

Without his help and friendship in stretching my own creative abilities, I could never have managed such an ambitious project. Working with him has made me a much better writer.

CHAPTER 1

As night fell, the city fractured into a kaleidoscope of lights, like neon sparklers reflecting from rain-washed facades. Unabashedly garish, Club Masquerade hosted a dazzling assembly of humanity—new people, old people, everyone wearing a different body for the evening.

Outside the entrance to the Club, lighted sidewalk panels flashed patterns, numbers inside squares illuminated by each pressing footstep. A gimmick. Split doorways led into tailored environment chambers: a British Empire Safari Club, a discotheque with mirror balls and strobe lights, a rustic Sequoia Room, an Arabian harem with colorful rugs and sweet perfumes, a domed Martian colony chamber with red rock and thermal springs.

The specialized alcoves opened into the main interior of Club Masquerade, a wild environment of lights, music, exotic food, and unusual people. ID patches worked overtime to keep track of who was who, which mind in which body. Sometimes the people had trouble sorting it all out in the morning.

A person could be anyone or anything here, for a limited time—provided the desired body type was available. Pick a physique, swap with someone, wear it for a while, see if you like it.

Garth Swan’s home-body always looked the same, except when he was on the hunt for new artistic inspiration: broad shoulders, blond hair, blue eyes. Certainly nothing he’d want to change for the long term. His shirt bore paint stains, charcoal and chalk dust, a smear of still-moving glittergel. To him, the people in Club Masquerade were a catalogue of humanity. Inspiration.

He looked up at the Club’s chaotic Hopscotch Board, aglow with swapportunities, people wanting to rent a muscular body for a few days of hard labor, old men and women willing to pay for a week’s vacation in a young and healthy physique, the usual sex ads searching for a two-night stand, once as a male, once as a female, or a blur of alternations before, during, and after.

At first he didn’t recognize Teresa as she dodged across the floor. Today, her build was broad-hipped and Rubenesque, her hair was rusty auburn, her eyes green-blue. Her clothes were drab, loose fitting, as if they could have been worn by anyone … and probably were. She often joined small religious groups or philosophical communes, trying to find someplace to belong. Her latest group didn’t seem to value individuality. But Garth certainly did, and he hugged her warmly.

The third friend, Eduard, looked tired from the hell he kept putting himself through, making a fast buck by swapping his body to endure unpleasant experiences—surgeries, colds, dentist appointments—for people who would pay to avoid the misery. He came in late, as usual, but his expression lit up when he found Teresa and Garth.

All three of them had grown up together, fellow orphan “Swans” in the Falling Leaves monastery. Garth assessed him in an instant, using an artist’s eye for details. At least Eduard used his hard-won money to buy stylish clothes to fit his dark-haired home-body.

Eduard pounded Garth’s broad back, then he took Teresa into a softer, more intimate embrace. He touched a new bruise that seeped through the makeup and freckles on Teresa’s rounded cheek. “What’s this?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said quickly. “And it’s not mine, anyway. The last person who had this body got hurt.”

Eduard leaned across the table and brushed his lips to the bruise. “Better?”

“Always.”

They went to a private table Garth had chosen, surrounded by the white noise of conversations. Taking charge, he waved at the cybernetic bartender’s image on the table screen. “Hey Bernard. The usual here, please.”

A lump of flesh, all that remained of Bernard Rovin’s original body, remained inside a windowless control room at the heart of the building, but cybernetic substations kept the bartender’s eyes and ears and automatic hands wandering throughout the Club. By now, he was more than familiar with the preferences of his regular customers, and within moments their preferred drinks appeared from dispensers.

“I hate being predictable.” Eduard reached over to switch his usual drink with Garth’s foamy dark beer instead. “It could be dangerous.”

Garth looked dubiously at the slushy blue concoction Eduard usually drank, now that he was stuck with it. Teresa was amused by his discomfiture. “You’re always looking for new experiences, aren’t you, Garth? Drinking blue cocktail things will add to your artistic repertoire.”

On the floor of the Club, several dancers moved slowly, carefully, trying to adjust to new heights, new weights, new degrees of muscle control. On one of the floating platforms, a scarecrow-thin man stumbled backward and fell comically on his butt. The short, large-breasted woman next to him moved with awkward, marionette movements as she hurried to help him.

Eduard chuckled. “There should be a law against letting people dance unless they’ve had at least an hour to settle into their new bodies.”

Garth took another sip of his friend’s blue drink, tasted crackling sweetness that burned his tongue. “This is tolerable, once your taste buds go dead.”

Teresa turned to the blond artist. “So what do you find inspirational these days?”

Garth’s eyes lit up as he talked about his passion in life. “Still trying to understand it all, but there’s so much. For example, I’m starting to wonder what it would feel like to be pregnant and deliver a baby.” He pursed his lips, thinking out loud. “Of course, that would require a long-term swap for at least the last month to get the full experience. And it wouldn’t be easy to find a body I’d want to live in for that long.”

“Especially not a pregnant one,” Teresa said.

Eduard rolled his eyes. “Artists! Who can understand them?”

Teresa looked at him with amusement mixed with maternal concern. “This, from a man who gets paid to undergo surgery for other people? Who swaps bodies to sit through someone else’s dentist’s appointment?”

He sipped the beer he had taken from Garth, frowned, then traded drinks again. “Hey, I’ve got to make a living. It beats joining the Bureau, like Daragon.”

Teresa brightened at hearing the young man’s name. Daragon Swan had grown up with the three of them as wards of the Splinter monks, but he had joined the powerful Bureau of Tracing and Locations, the BTL. “He should be almost finished with his training by now. I should check on him to make sure he’s OK.”

“I wonder if he spies on us.” Eduard flicked his dark eyes from side to side in a comically paranoid furtive glance. “It’s what Beetles do.”

Teresa rested her chin in her hands. “Oh, I’m sure Daragon thinks of it as keeping an eye on his friends.”

“And lucky for us, if we ever get into trouble,” Garth said.

The music swirled into a new mix, and the surrounding conversation grew louder. Three effete faux-intelligentsia at a nearby table continued their argument with much gusto and little actual information. A narrow-faced young man waved a pungent purple cigarette back and forth.

“There are other precedents in mental development. Way back at the dawn of time, the human race went through a ‘bicameral revolution,’ when our minds split into left and right hemispheres.” He sucked a long drag from his purple cigarette with finality and a smug expression. “This is simply another evolutionary step, our consciousnesses becoming detachable from our physical brains. The soul living by itself, interchangeable from physical host to host. I’d say it’s a leap forward for the human species.”

A second young man drained a flowery-scented drink to fortify himself before he launched into a response. “But it had to start somewhere. Think about the first person who could do it. All right, say the first two people—because the ability doesn’t matter unless you have someone to swap with.”

“And you want to know the biophysics? Does it matter?” The first man sucked delicately on his cigarette. “When you use a COM terminal, do you care about the network electronics? No. You simply tap in, extract the information you need, engage the communication link you want, access your accounts. You don’t need a degree in organic matrix management to use the thing. You don’t need to understand the dirty details about hopscotching either.”

The second man looked rebuffed. “Is there something wrong with asking questions? Makes sense to me that the whole hopscotch thing was triggered by generations of people uploading and downloading to old-style computer networks and virtual reality environments. That’s how personalities first became detached from the body. Now we can do it all the time.”

The third man had already finished his drink. “Indeed, but the amount of data that needs to be transferred is so enormous, and to be done so quickly—”

The purple cigarette interrupted the argument with a puff of sweet smoke. “Yeah, but at the root level, it all boils down to a form of telepathy. No one’s ever accurately clocked the telepathic transfer rate. There’s no benchmark.”

Eavesdropping on the pointless debate, Garth, Teresa, and Eduard smiled as they shared the same thoughts. They’d heard all the theories a million times before; the Splinter monks often had similar discussions, equally without resolution. None of them knew the true explanation, nor did they care.

Eduard rocked back in his chair, raised his voice so that the posturing faux-intelligentsia could hear him. “Yeah, right—what if it was just from too much astral projection without using proper precautions?”

The whip-thin intellectuals looked sourly at him for squelching their continuing argument, then turned to debate matters even more esoteric.

Garth chuckled with Eduard. Teresa put her chin wistfully in her hands. “Oh, it wasn’t so long ago when we were just as fascinated. Remember?”

A year earlier, after demonstrating their adulthood by proving their ability to hopscotch, the three orphan Swans had finally been released from their sheltered upbringing at the Falling Leaves. Club Masquerade was the first place they had gone after the maternal monk Soft Stone and the other Splinter monks had bid them farewell—not far to walk, but a universe away in actuality.

Drawing strength from each other, Eduard, Garth, and Teresa had approached the mysterious Club, intimidated and anxious. “Let’s go,” Eduard said without taking a step forward. “I want to see it after all this time.”

As children, they had watched this place from the safety of the monastery, which huddled amidst the modern city that had grown up around it. Club Masquerade was refreshing, alien, unlike anything they had ever experienced.

The frenetic club was a haze of body swapping, a confusing blur of shifting identities, a human exchange. A swirl of eager customers flowed in and out, some furtive, others totally open. And the people who went in were not necessarily the same people who emerged again.

Soft Stone had always encouraged her beloved wards to discover new intellectual things, to experiment with their bodies and minds. Splinters were open and relaxed about sex, too, seeing it as a prelude to the far-more-intimate swapping of physical bodies as soon as the teenagers reached maturity. But the monks offered very little true life experience. It was the Splinters’ blind spot.

With a few stipend credits in their pockets and new opportunities before them, the three made their way into the city, as adults. Teresa looked behind her, and the old brick monastery seemed far away. Directly before them, the facade of Club Masquerade fascinated and lured her. Where did all those arches go? Why so many separate entrances? “Which door should we try?” she asked.

Raising his blond head, Garth took a deep breath, steeling himself. “Follow me.” He marched across the numbered squares on the sidewalk, making them illuminate under each footstep. “This one.”

With Eduard and Teresa following, he stepped onto a floor strewn with dried redwood needles and tiny fir cones. The walls were made of massive knobbed trunks of sequoias with warty bark that oozed sweet-smelling pitch.

Garth stood with his arms outstretched, his head craned upward. High above, in the imaginary upper levels of the conifers, rafts of cool mist clung to the branches. The trees seemed to reach as high as tall skyscrapers, until he realized that the ceiling was the holographic equivalent of a matte painting, projecting an illusion of vast height within a normal-sized room. “Look at this!”

“Oh, smell the air,” Teresa said, discarding her expectations of a hedonistic chamber of pleasure. She hadn’t imagined this at all.

“Told you it would be amazing.” Snooping around, Eduard found a doorway in the side of a massive sequoia trunk. “Let’s get to the central room.”

At the heart of Club Masquerade, the sunken floor was surrounded by lights, girdled by a neon bar. Seats and floating tables appeared in convenient spots of light and shadow, depending on whether customers wanted privacy or spectacle. Lights and decor, sounds and smells bombarded them: perfumed steam, colored incense, musical vibrations, and the drone of conversation.

Garth couldn’t drink it all in fast enough. “Doesn’t this sum up … everything you imagined the rest of the world would be?”

They climbed to a mid-level table and sat down. Teresa looked at the numerous patrons, overwhelmed by the pressing responsibility of establishing herself from scratch. The monks had secured each of their Swans with a low-level job, but for the first time in their lives, Teresa, Eduard, and Garth were independent. Here, even with the comfort of her two fellow orphans, she felt herself to be at the heart of a cyclone, a central calm. She could understand why Daragon had decided to join the rigid fraternity of the Bureau.

“Let’s make this our special place. Club Masquerade.” She was afraid of losing Garth and Eduard, too. “I want to keep us together. No matter what happens, wherever we go or whatever we decide to do with ourselves, let’s promise to meet here on a regular basis. We can do that, don’t you think?”

“No problem,” Eduard said.

“It’s a plan,” Garth said, alarmed at the suggestion that they might not always be together, all the time, as in the monastery. “In a changing world, some things never change. Those things become our anchors.”

The music continued to throb. They ordered drinks, sampled new concoctions, tasted flavored stim-sticks. For long spaces they just looked at each other across the floating table, until all three of them knew it was time to go.

Then, with the whole world awaiting them, they went out to embark on a great adventure—the rest of their lives.…

Now, from a substation in their table, the bartender’s remote eye popped up. “Sorry I didn’t say a personal hello as soon as you three came in. I got caught multiprocessing a large crowd. Can I get you a second round?”

“Yes you can, Bernard,” Garth said immediately. He glanced at Eduard’s slushy blue drink, now in front of Teresa. “And give us each something we’ve never had before. New experiences. Variety—the spice of life, right?”

When the fresh drinks arrived, Teresa looked at her two best friends in the world. They had been inseparable since they were children, abandoned by their biological parents, taken in and tended by Soft Stone and the other Splinters.

She held up her glass in a toast, not daring to ask the contents of the new cocktail. “To friends,” she said.

They all drank.

CHAPTER 2

In the Bureau of Tracing and Locations, all training was vital. The BTL instructors had hammered that into Daragon Swan from the day he’d entered their ranks. Since his old life had ended at the Falling Leaves monastery more than a year ago, training filled the void.

Many of the Bureau’s recruits washed out in the first few weeks, but the BTL officials had no intention of letting Daragon fail. He was too special, his “inner vision” too rare. The coaches reminded him of this often, used it as an excuse to push him harder. He had finally completed the first phase of indoctrination.

Three stony-faced coaches climbed into a hovercar and punched in coordinates. Daragon settled in beside them, small in stature and wiry. He had dark hair, almond eyes that flashed in the light. Now, he squared his shoulders, kept his face expressionless. He didn’t know where the instructors were taking him, and he didn’t dare ask.

The emerald-green vehicle raised up onto its selected impedance path, and official COM override codes kicked in as it coasted toward the nearby bayshore.

“Are you ready for this?” one coach asked him, his gruff voice suddenly loud in the white noise.

“I don’t know what to expect.”

“Be ready anyway.”

Daragon clung to his hopes. This was part of becoming a crucial member of the BTL, a group that appreciated him for his special abilities and skills. The Splinter monks had sympathized with his unusual handicap—unlike virtually everyone else, he was completely unable to hopscotch—but the Bureau didn’t belittle him for that. Instead, they saw it as an advantage.

Daragon had the potential to be a great Inspector, perhaps the best, thanks to his quirk, his ability to see identities. He compared it to a blind man having highly sensitive hearing. Craving acceptance, he could not disappoint them.

The BTL used a broad spectrum of methods for locating and tracking people as they moved through a society where physical appearance and identity could be made meaningless by body swapping. Some of the Bureau Inspectors were slightly telepathic; some were gifted database surfers who had a particular rapport with COM—the pervasive computer/organic matrix—and some were just intuitive detectives. Daragon had to learn everything.

Be ready anyway. Always.

The hovercar left the main traffic patterns behind, cruising high above malls and pedestrian streets. They wove through a complex of warehouses and cranes and launch platforms on sprawling docks that extended like pseudopods into the Pacific. Daragon looked at the scrambled Brownian motion of commerce, bustling workers, small and large craft skating like water striders across the ocean, bullet-boats tugging barges into port.

Far out on the water, towering high enough to be an artificial island, stood a massive offshore drilling rig. It had been abandoned in place, modified into a new sort of building. The platform stood on stilts, a citadel above the waves. Daragon knew the main complex itself was protected under the sea. BTL Headquarters. They headed directly toward it.

The hovercar landed on a metal-plated dock that extended to the edge of the calm water. The emerald doors raised up like an insect shrugging its carapace, and Daragon emerged, standing straight in his dark trainee jumpsuit. The fresh wind struck his face, laden with salt and iodine.

The man who met him on the platform was well muscled, his stomach like a washboard beneath his tight shirt, the tendons in his neck like cords. The man seemed to occupy a much larger physical space than his actual body required. His chestnut hair was short and dark, just beginning to speckle with gray. His eyes were wide-set, an olive-brown. “My name is Mordecai Ob. Perhaps you’ve heard of me?”

“Certainly, sir!” Ob was the Bureau Chief, a powerful man who kept himself isolated, ambitious but rarely seen except by those in the inner sanctum of the BTL. Why would a person of such importance waste time greeting a mere new trainee?

“Walk with me to my offices, Daragon. I’ll be going to the mainland soon, but over the next few days I intend to show you more of how the Bureau really works.” Ob shook his hand with a muscular grip. “We expect great things of you, young man.”

CHAPTER 3

Each weekend, Garth arrived at the artists’ bazaar at dawn just to secure himself a decent spot. The pedestrian square was always crowded with other aspiring artists, craftsmen, and vendors.

At first, he had been delighted to discover that the Splinters had arranged for him a beginning-level job as a “painter.” Unfortunately, Garth spent hours painting polymer coatings and shifting phase-films on walls inside new offices, without a shred of creativity—not exactly what he’d expected or hoped.

Long ago in the monastery Garth had discovered his heart’s calling to be an artist—and now he tried to make the rest of the world see it. Luckily, Soft Stone’s years of chores had toughened him to getting up early and working until late. He had his drive and his goal, and no one was going to discourage him from following his dream.

On his days off, he bustled out of his small private quarters, carrying a case of drawing supplies into the stillness of sunrise. Once he had picked his spot at the market, he set up his blanket, burlap seating pads, and working easel. Garth greeted the other craftsmen and merchants as they came into the bazaar, dragging stalls, chairs, cooking equipment.

A portly man sold potent coffee from a thermal chalice. Since Garth was such a regular customer, the caffeine vendor knew him by name now. Garth drank the coffee hot and black from his own large mug. He savored the acrid richness, closing his eyes, breathing in the aroma. Afterward, he felt awake, ambitious, and excited for what the day might bring. Inspired.

Garth was amazingly prolific, unable to move his hands as fast as his imagination bombarded him with ideas. Everything about the world was new, a universe of glittering images everywhere he turned. And he wanted to paint them all.

His first attempt, though—when he’d been only thirteen years old—had been a disaster. The Splinters had never understood his artistic passion.…

The Falling Leaves was an ancient building embedded in the modern city like a fossil in limestone. Newer buildings with connecting atriums and cliffs of mirrored windows had grown up around the monastery like younger trees engulfing a deadfall. In simpler times the place had been a brewery.

An exuberant young teenager, Garth had found a hidden spot in the basement of the old monastery, behind thick, long-unused pipes. Inside the shadowy, timeless room, Garth used his imagination to envision chambers crammed with giant beer vats, boilers and fermenting containers, malting bins, roasters, and bottling lines.

Here, Garth could smell the past, mystical odors that reminded him of the complex Charles Dickens novels he read to Daragon and another orphan named Pashnak. He had so many ideas, and the paintings in his head were so vivid. Garth decided to keep this spot secret even from Teresa and Eduard. Until he was ready, until his project here was completed.

He found paints and charcoal sticks and surreptitiously carried them into the basement utility closet. To conjure his vision, he sketched outlines on the walls, he dipped his brushes into swirls of color. Ignoring the unevenness of the mortar and bricks, he painted a winter scene like a classic Currier & Ives print. Horse-drawn carts pulled up to the brewery’s loading dock to receive kegs of Trappist ale brewed by brown-robed monks. Wagons dodged automobiles on cobblestone streets. Portly men in top hats sang Christmas carols under a gas street lamp next to an elevated railway. He made each detail as real as he could, his painting exuberant but unrefined.

He worked on the mural for weeks. At first he attempted only a small idyllic scene, but as he worked, he thought of secondary characters, interesting buildings, thinly disguised renditions of the high-tech skyscrapers he could see from the monastery windows. He kept intending to add finishing touches, to call his painting complete, then he thought of just one more idea, and another.

He became engrossed in bringing to life the panorama he saw in his imagination. He could almost smell the wet snow, the horses, the rich ale pouring into the oak-slatted kegs.…

“I cannot believe my eyes!” a firm male voice said, startling Garth so badly that he dropped his paintbrush. “Young man, what have you done?” He turned to see a stern monk named Hickory. “I noticed the light down here, but I never expected to see this! Who gave you permission?”

Garth had never dreamed of asking permission. “I was going to show everyone when I was done.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have started in the first place.” Hickory crossed his arms over his chest. “Don’t we give you enough chores to keep you busy? It’s easy to see what sort of mischief idle hands can work.”

Garth didn’t know how to respond. “But … look at it. This is art.”

“When you paint all over a wall you don’t own, without permission, it is called vandalism. Come with me to Chocolate’s office. We’d better see the administrator right away.”

Unfortunately, Chocolate didn’t know what to do with him, either. All the “Swan” children in the Falling Leaves were wards of the state, given up by parents who felt no obligation to babies born from bodies not their own, or impregnated during flings, after which the original minds had hopscotched to someone else. The monks received government stipends to teach and raise these young charges, and they took their obligations seriously, considering such children to be entirely new souls, new flames, and therefore something special.

The chubby, soft-spoken administrator seemed flustered, his brow creased with worry. “Oh, why don’t we just let him paint scenes on all the walls? Maybe then the BTL won’t want to take over the monastery after all.”

“Sir!” Hickory said. “We can’t encourage this sort of—”

The other monk waved his pudgy hand. “This is really not a very good time, Hickory.” He sighed, looking at the papers on his desk. “I suggest we merely have this young man repaint the walls so the room can be usable again.”

Garth’s knees grew weak at hearing the devastating punishment. “Don’t you even want to look at what I’ve done, sir?”

“I’m sure it’s wonderful,” Chocolate said, already engrossed in an official-looking document on his desk. “You’re a very talented young man, Garth, but you must learn to respect certain boundaries.”

Later, the beige paint smelled sour as Garth swathed it on with a thick, inelegant brush. Horse carts vanished under a layer of drab tan. Rosy-cheeked monks continued to gulp foamy brew as he painted right over their faces.

He dipped the heavy brush into the bucket again, swabbed more paint across the rough bricks. Garth wished he’d been able to at least show Eduard, Teresa, and Daragon before erasing his wall. He managed to keep the tears balanced inside his eyelids, not letting them spill down his cheeks.

“That’s very good, from what I can still see of it,” Soft Stone said. The bald female monk was a mother and a teacher to her wards.

Garth took a moment to compose himself before he faced her. “You should have been here before I covered all the good parts. Now it’s all gone.”

“Not gone—your mural is still there, behind the paint.”

The motionless brush dripped beige droplets on the floor. “But no one can see it. I can’t show it to anybody. Isn’t that what art is for?”

The old woman nodded her smooth head. “Art is about sharing and communication, yes, but that’s not the only thing. There is process as well as product. Did you learn from doing this project?”

He swallowed hard. “You told me to learn from everything I do.”

“And?”

“And … yes, I learned from it, I suppose. I enjoyed doing it, too.”

“Then it’s not a total loss, little Swan.” Soft Stone smiled as she turned to leave. “An artist needs to do more than create pleasant scenes. Use your art as a lens for viewing all facets of life. You can’t just imitate what you see, you must first understand the thing. This understanding gives your art a life of its own.”

He glanced with dismay at his half-defaced mural, and he thought hard about what she had said. With two strokes he covered a street that had taken him hours to paint.

Now, grown up at last, he had the freedom to pursue his creative vision. Among the aspiring artists, Garth wandered the stalls to glean new ideas, to study techniques. He saw polymerized butterfly wings, clouded crystals carved into prismatic shapes. Some artists worked with fabric, others with string and thread, one with satin spiderwebs. Each medium was a tool to capture life and its possibilities, and he wanted to experiment.

The streets came alive with shoppers and curiosity seekers. A few haughty spectators were sourly critical of everything on display, commenting how they themselves could create far superior art “if only they had the time.” Garth had no patience for all their talk; they were irrelevant.

He sat back on his cushion, doodling while he watched the people. With only limited income from his daily job, Garth lived austerely. He couldn’t afford high-tech creation and conceptualization gadgets, but he made do with the materials artists had used since the first paintings on cave walls.

A gorgeous woman strutted beside a bronzed, muscular young man, arms linked in an old-fashioned way. The couple anticipated each other’s steps, smiling at half-spoken phrases, as if they had been together for decades. Garth wondered if they were an elderly pair vacationing in younger bodies, rich bluebloods who had rented new forms for themselves.

Garth tore off another sheet of sketching paper and rummaged in his box for colored chalk. His hands a blur of motion, he scraped dusty colors across the surface, catching the mood, the shapes. He tried to illustrate two old and comfortable souls in fresh and energetic young bodies, the love they shared, the advantages that wealth and privilege had brought them. Charcoal sticks added shadows and stark definition. With the forgiving medium of chalk and charcoal, he could work quickly, the better to capture his impressions and ideas.

Unlike restless Eduard and constantly-searching Teresa, Garth had always known what he wanted to do with his life. He drew anything and everything that caught his eye. His art became a user’s manual for his life, a way to sort through and understand and put his own perspective on everything he saw.

Like a ripple on a placid lake, two uniformed Beetles walked through the market, escorting a trim man with dark hair, sunken eyes, and a bushy mustache. The BTL officers deferred to him, so the man was obviously not a prisoner, though his gaunt face and pale skin made him look wrung out. They followed the trim man as he looked at the various trinkets on display.

“Chief Ob, may I remind you that a meeting is scheduled soon back at Bureau Headquarters,” one of the uniformed men said.

The tired-looking man rubbed his mustache. “Another few moments, let me finish looking here.” He stopped in front of Garth’s sketches, appraising them. Garth looked at the Beetles, remembered the problems they had caused at the Falling Leaves monastery, and concentrated on his work.

“Some of these attempts are really quite inept,” the man said tactlessly, as if Garth had begged for his opinion. “Have you had any training at all?”

The intimidating presence of the BTL officers made him flush, and Garth accepted the insult. “No formal training. I just … like to do art.”

“Well, you’ve got more enthusiasm than talent.” Then the man’s expression softened. “Sometimes, though, sheer persistence may be enough to let you rise above the rest. I always wanted to be an artist myself, but I just didn’t have the drive. Somewhere along the line, I lost my inspiration.” He seemed distracted for a moment, then turned an intense gaze back toward Garth. “You’re a Swan, aren’t you? Raised by the Splinter monks?”

Garth was astonished. “How—how did you know that?”

The man just smiled. “I run the Bureau of Tracing and Locations.”

Garth thought of Daragon, but couldn’t believe this powerful man would recognize the name of a mere new recruit.

“Sir, we really must get back to the hovercar,” the BTL officer persisted.

Chief Ob set the chalk sketch back down. For a moment, Garth hoped the man would buy something, but instead he met the artist’s eyes. “You need a lot more practice, but keep at it. Don’t give up, like I did.” He strolled away, the two Beetles trying to hurry him along.

Garth looked at his work, viewing it objectively. Of course he’d had no training, no focus, but he did have a burning desire to create. He could learn.

He plunged into his work with a greater vehemence than ever before.

CHAPTER 4

Eduard lay on his narrow bed, cocooned in damp sheets, his pores seeping a feverish sweat from someone else’s illness. All alone, he shuddered, pulling up the blanketfilm. He hadn’t expected the symptoms to be this bad when he’d sold his services, but he would get through it. He would survive. After all, he had agreed to this.

He had already spent four days in a stranger’s body, enduring a miserable round of the flu just so some businessman wouldn’t miss his stockholders’ meetings. Unglamorous, maybe, but it was one way to make a living without going to work every day.

He squeezed his puffy blue eyes shut, seeing technicolor explosions behind his lids, throbbing in time with the pounding in his head. He clutched the middle-aged potbelly as his intestines knotted up, then swung off the bed and lumbered toward the bathroom.

He could have hurried faster in his own young physique, but this guy had trouble just moving about, and the flu didn’t make it any easier. If the man who owned this body had kept himself healthier, he might not have been so susceptible to getting sick in the first place.

The man was a busy executive, with more credits in his account than he could spend. Such an important person couldn’t afford to be laid up for days. He had board meetings to attend, fundraisers to throw, decisions to make. After only one day of the flu, the exec had become desperate.

So he’d hired Eduard, who would be sick for him.

For an exorbitant fee, Eduard had agreed to inhabit the exec’s body until he recovered. In return, the exec lived in the young man’s body, doing his business as usual. His wife probably didn’t mind him coming home to her in a virile physique, either.…

In the exec’s ailing body, Eduard staggered into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. The cheeks and skin felt oily, soft from the extra fat padding his jowls. He looked in the mirror and saw a stranger staring back at him.

It was only pain and physical discomfort, after all. With the amount of money he’d get paid for this, Eduard wouldn’t have to work a real job for weeks, perhaps even months, if he scrimped. He loved the freedom and independence. He could endure it. No problem.

Eduard’s stomach clenched, and he vomited into the sink. Holding himself and shaking to get over the wave of nausea, he splashed more water, rinsed the facilities, then lumbered back to bed, breathing shallowly.

Only a few more days, then he could be back to normal once more. It was just a minor nuisance, hardly worse than a bad cold. He took another full dose of medications, waited for them to take effect.

He slumped onto the sheets, tossing and turning feverishly for hours as this weak body struggled to fight off the illness. Eduard muttered to himself, all alone in the small, stifling room—glad it wasn’t his day to meet at Club Masquerade, since he didn’t want to see Teresa or Garth like this.

Even after drinking copious electrolyte-enriched fluids, he vomited twice more that night, then eventually fell into a deep sleep. By morning the fever had broken.

He showered twice, trying to overcome the unwashed feeling in this body. He took appropriate medications, rested, recovered as quickly as possible.…

The following day he swapped back with the body’s original owner. After synching ID patches on their hands, Eduard drew a deep breath, flexed his arms, and looked out the office window.

The exec was glad to have the flu over with, though he did seem a bit reluctant to give Eduard his young body back. Without potent, and illegal, drugs, it was impossible to force an unwilling person to swap, but Eduard wouldn’t need to take such drastic measures. He looked at the exec sternly. “Our contract has been consummated, the appropriate waivers signed, and I take it both parties are satisfied?”

The exec relinquished his hold, and the two men hopscotched. Eduard took a deep breath into his own lungs, glad to be home again.…

Grinning, he walked out into the streets, his credit account fat now. He decided to pick up a small bunch of flowers that he would deliver to Teresa in her dwelling. She would like that.

CHAPTER 5

Beneath the ocean on the once-abandoned offshore drilling rig, Bureau Chief Mordecai Ob leaned across his desk at Daragon. Overhead, thick windows looked out on an underwater world of fish and waving kelp. The young man had been assigned to the BTL Headquarters for several weeks now, and Ob still took him under his wing, grooming him.

“From here, we’re linked to the mainland through computer and energy conduits,” Ob said. “And that’s how we do our work. Unobtrusively, if possible.” He flexed his thick arms, as if relishing the feel of his own muscles.

“COM infiltrates every aspect of our lives from finances to entertainment to the national infrastructure. Therefore, information about everyone’s daily activities can be found somewhere in all of those databases. You need only look for it.” Unlike the rest of the undersea facility, Ob’s office was plush and warm. An ornamental gas fireplace shed a cheery natural light.

Daragon stood completely rigid in front of the Chief, impeccably dressed in his new uniform. “COM is a vast place to search, sir.”

The other man smiled at Daragon. “Ah, now you begin to see!”

Like a computerized sympathetic nervous system, the computer/organic matrix performed the functions that everyone saw and used but never noticed: turning on street lights, circulating the air in buildings, monitoring impedance paths through the airways so that traffic flowed smoothly and safely, maintaining stable weather patterns via climate-control systems.

With each mental engram added, COM had grown geometrically in processing power, designing new additions to itself. No one understood the entire network; no complete map had ever existed. The computerized matrix did not spy on people, but the Bureau of Tracing and Locations knew how to use the network to monitor anyone they chose.

Daragon nodded dutifully. “In the past year, sir, I’ve been taught how to take advantage of COM, but there’s so much available data that finding anything in particular is like finding a needle in a world full of haystacks.”

Smiling, Ob stood from his desk and led him into a metal-walled corridor. “Yes, and our people are those most adept at searching for those needles.”

The Bureau Chief took him through humid biological reconstruction labs, frigid computer galleries, humming offices, dazzling map rooms, image libraries bursting with information.

Inspectors, guards, tacticians, apprehension specialists, saboteurs, data archaeologists … rank after specialized rank. Some operatives, skilled in evidence analysis, could detect infrared footprints or pick up DNA tracings, compiling physical clues to build a trail for Inspectors to follow. Medical technicians could unravel brain scans, the mental fingerprints of a specific person regardless of the physical body it inhabited.

Finally, his mind numb with everything he was seeing, Daragon turned to Ob. “Can I inquire which section I’ll be working for, sir?”

The Chief’s olive-brown eyes shone. “With your gift, you are a true wild card. If you can see people’s personas just by looking at them, without consulting an ID patch, without using special scanning and analysis techniques, you’ll perform a function none of these others can, despite all our technology.”

Daragon’s heart fluttered. When all of Soft Stone’s mental training had failed, leaving the boy unable to hopscotch, he had felt worthless, a freak. He didn’t know who his parents were, or why he had turned out this way.

Now, though, because of that ability, the BTL had considered him valuable enough to make a deal with the Splinter monks. Daragon alone had saved the monastery from ruin.

A long time ago, the day it had all changed, Daragon remembered looking up into Soft Stone’s concerned face, an intensity that frightened him. She was sinewy and bald, with blunt features and a large heart. “Look at me, child. Through my eyes, into my mind. Imagine yourself here.” She tapped her forehead. “Forget your body. For a person your age, hopscotching should come easily and naturally. I’m willing and ready to swap with you. It can’t be completed without mutual consent, but you have that now.”

Daragon tried, as he had tried for years. Others described it as a floating sensation, shucking ethereal chains to the body, exchanging yourself with another. Touching foreheads, an exchange of souls. He waited for the drifting sensation, the disconnection. Nothing.

“I can see you. I can watch your … aura when you swap with someone else,” he said, tears brimming in his dark eyes. “But I can’t do it myself.”

She looked at him abruptly, a different set of thoughts plain on her face. “You can see me? How?”

“It’s obvious, your individual persona. I don’t know how to describe it.” He shrugged. “Can’t everybody?”

She held up the back of her hand, showing her personal code number on the tiny swatch of polymer film. “You mean my ID patch?”

“Isn’t it just …obvious? I never need to see an ID patch.”

When Soft Stone touched Daragon’s head, her fingers trembled. “I had begun to suspect as much. Wait here, little Swan.”

She marched out the door with a swish of sky-blue robes, intent on an experiment. The first monk she found was dour Hickory in the garden. He sweated in the sun, hacking at the ground with his hoe. He bent over a tomato plant and plucked off a fat green hornworm.

As she approached, Hickory scrutinized the caterpillar, then crushed its head between his fingers. “All things must fertilize the earth.” He cast the dead worm onto the ground and rubbed his hand on the front of his work robe.

“Swap with me,” Soft Stone said without preamble.

“I hardly think this is the time or the place. Perhaps tonight?”

“I need your body for training purposes.” She reached out to take the hoe from him, prepared to let him work in her body. They swapped without synching their ID patches. Hickory seemed nonplussed, but Soft Stone strode off. “I’ll be right back.”

When she returned to the training room, she smelled of sweat and dirt and warm sunshine. The ache in her male muscles came from exertion rather than age, and Hickory’s eyes were sharper than her own.

Daragon looked up at her, still dejected. She spoke in Hickory’s gruff voice. “Soft Stone has asked me to continue your training.”

“But … you’re Soft Stone.” Daragon gave her a puzzled frown. “Are you trying to trick me?”

It was true, then. He did have the ability, an incredibly rare skill. There was something fundamental missing in Daragon, but also something present. “No, little Swan, I was testing you. Go out to the garden and help Hickory. I’m sure he can find more chores for you to do. I need to talk with Chocolate.”

For weeks, the Falling Leaves had simmered with tension and uneasiness, a battle the Splinter monks could never win. The Bureau of Tracing and Locations wanted to acquire the monastery building for their own operations, and the monks had no way of fighting against the government order, no bargaining chip that would buy their continued existence.

But the BTL would be desperate to have what this young man could do. Quite desperate. Soft Stone knew they could use Daragon to save the monastery.…

Days later, an anxious Daragon had waited in the Falling Leaves front office. He wished his friend Eduard were here. Eduard was always so cocky, so confident, never worried.

“Don’t worry, child. You’ll do fine,” Soft Stone said, trying to comfort him. “It is just a test.” The lie was plain in her voice. The monastery’s corpulent administrator Chocolate paced behind his carved desk.

Footsteps came down the hall, a soft whicker of sandals and robes as counterpoint to the staccato drumbeat of bootheels. A flushed monk led two BTL officers into Chocolate’s office, an Inspector and a Sergeant. Both wore neat uniforms; their demeanor suggested confidence and efficiency.

Soft Stone placed her hand on Daragon’s shoulder. “Sirs, we have something you may find interesting. Something we believe the Bureau will value highly.”

Chocolate bustled forward, grinning with relief. “Yes, he is quite the rarity. While this young man is incapable of swapping bodies, his mental abilities have turned inward. Quite the rarity. But he’s not a throwback—he’s … different.”

“That remains to be seen,” the Inspector said as the Sergeant withdrew several pieces of scanning equipment.…

In the end, after the amazing results of the test, the BTL officers promised to take care of Daragon. He had reached the age of adulthood, but remained young enough to be malleable, to be trained in their ways. The Bureau had a rigorous curriculum already designed for talented people like him.

Soft Stone hugged Daragon, trying to crush away the young man’s fear and uncertainty. She mouthed the words, telling him that the Bureau did vital work in society. No other person from the Falling Leaves could hope for such a remarkable opportunity, she said; no one else had ever passed the tests.

Beside him, the Beetles promised similar things. The main difference was that the uniformed men seemed to believe what they said.

In the monastery the others gathered in shock at his sudden departure. Young Garth, Teresa, and Eduard stood together in the hall, unable to believe what they were seeing, or understand what Daragon had done.

He pulled away from the grim Beetles standing next to him. “I need to say goodbye to my friends.” Daragon came forward to hug Teresa while the officers looked on in disapproval. Garth and Eduard also embraced him, trying to look excited for him.

“Enough,” said the BTL commander. “This projects the wrong image.”

“Consider it your first lesson in the Bureau,” said the sergeant.

As young Daragon was led away from the protection of the monastery, Soft Stone watched sadly. She had become accustomed to seeing her children leave, one by one, out to a wider life. But the loss of Daragon was quite different. And she herself felt responsible for it.

Bureau Chief Ob beamed at him like a proud father. “In all the years I’ve been in the Bureau, you’re only the second one I’ve found. There are no more than a few known examples in any one generation.” They stood together, deep underwater, surrounded by girders and walls, curved windows that looked out into the sea. Murky sunlight battered its way into the depths. “Having you with us gives the Bureau an extremely valuable tool.”

Now that he thought about it, Daragon realized just how important it would be for an Inspector to glance over a crowd and spot the mind he was looking for—in the same way anybody else could look at faces and recognize someone.

“I want you to be my special assistant.” Ob patted him on the shoulder. “The world will be under your watchful eye, young Daragon.”

CHAPTER 6

When she’d been a girl in the Falling Leaves, Teresa had been enthralled with delving through COM databases, considering the stored thoughts of humanity. But now, in her day-to-day job in front of the COM gateway, the tasks were pure drudgery.

The computer/organic matrix was the circulatory system that ran through society, a worldwide database of monitoring routines, financial accounts, personnel records, statistics, and information libraries. But someone had to sift through all that data, make assessments, offer interpretations.

“Information and knowledge are two different things,” Soft Stone had often told her. In the monastery library, the Splinters had imposed a regimen that for every hour spent exploring COM, students must spend another hour contemplating and digesting the new facts they had learned.

Now, though, in her drab work environment in front of a milky-white touch screen, Teresa felt like a tired bee in a hive. A few drooping flowers valiantly tried to cheer her, an arrangement Eduard had given her a week ago. She splayed her hands on the induction-pressure input pads that took impulses from her fingers and turned them into commands. The translucent interface shifted to mother-of-pearl, then opened into a complex data/subject map.

She wished Soft Stone could be there with her, looking over her shoulder. The old monk had been named because she could be as soft as butter, or hard as granite. “Is your mind ready, little swan?” she would say. “Ready for more knowledge?”

“I wish you would help me find some answers, instead of more questions.” Teresa had always been searching, asking, wondering.

Soft Stone chuckled. “You’re assuming I have answers to give you.”

“Can COM give me the answers to why I’m here? What does it all mean? What should I do with my life?”

With its thinking power equivalent to billions of minds, with eyes that could watch over even the smallest sparrow, the Splinters saw the computer/organic matrix as a manifestation of God come to Earth—a neural network peopled by the numerous souls who entered and never came back because it was too tempting to stay there. Even Soft Stone looked at it with awe.

“Of course, little swan. Inside here you can find Heaven.”

But there was no Heaven in her daily job. Teresa had spent the past two months working for a survey group as an information sifter who dug through daily records of pedestrian traffic patterns and hovercar movements, trying to ferret out nuances of the way people traveled through the city. An advertising firm needed the information to determine where to best place formscreen billboards and public-service information displays.

Not quite the grand questions that fascinated Teresa.…

After the day the Beetles had taken Daragon away, Soft Stone withdrew to her quarters and did not emerge. Under the pretext of searching for advice and guidance, Teresa rapped on the old monk’s door frame, then drew the curtain aside and entered unbidden. Two candles lit the room, shedding warm light.

Soft Stone was hunched over her cot. “I did not ask to be interrupted.”

“I’ll meditate with you, then.” Teresa hunkered down beside her, waited a few painfully long moments, then finally ventured, “I’ve been trying to think of what name I should use when I take my own Splinter vows.”

Soft Stone’s voice held a tone of rebuke. “We fervently hope our trainees will not stay with us. Only our failures remain here, those of us who could not fulfill our life’s work outside. Your goal is to make this life as kind as possible for as many people as you can. And you can’t do that from within these walls.”

Teresa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But you’re not a failure.”

“I never achieved my potential. I lived outside for years, experimenting, hopscotching. Call it the brashness of youth, the pain of foolish love, but I fled back here, and I’ve felt like a coward ever since. My only success comes from knowing that the students I teach will go out and do greater deeds than I ever managed. I have failed in so many things.”

She looked down at Teresa, her clear blue eyes moist. “I don’t want you to take my way out. You are a new soul, a special child. Many important things are in store for you. Find your answers elsewhere, Teresa Swan.”

“But where?” she asked. “Where will I find other people who need to know? I want to join a community, be a part of it. I’ll never belong the way I do here, with my friends.”

“We rarely have that choice, do we?” Hot tears came to Soft Stone’s eyes, as if a wound had been reopened. “For Daragon … it is too late. I sacrificed one of my own swans to the Bureau. Whatever will he do with them?”

Teresa heard the dismay in the woman’s voice. “Probably the best he can, don’t you think? Daragon always tried very hard.”

“They’ll make him one of their own.” The monk’s once clear blue eyes now looked cloudy and old. “He was our ransom, and we … sold him. I couldn’t think of any other way to save the monastery.”

Teresa touched the monk’s wrist, below her ID patch. “What do you mean?”

“The BTL wanted to oust us so they could have a headquarters on the mainland. Chocolate tried everything, but we were going to be evicted. Eminent domain, a ‘greater societal need.’ The Splinters had no way to challenge them.” She looked Teresa directly in the eye. “Until I discovered what Daragon could do—and how much the BTL was likely to want it. So they made a deal with us. We now have our title, free and clear. Daragon was worth more to them than the Falling Leaves.”

One of the candles flickered, as if a ghost had just walked by.

“The Beetles see COM as a sweatshop of souls, rather than a congregation of blessed lives, as we do.” Soft Stone shook her head. Gray bristles had begun to poke out of her smooth scalp.

Teresa shifted her position. “I think it would be terrible never to swap with anyone, to experience only your own life and nobody else’s. I’m so sorry for Daragon.”

“Not just that, little swan. His soul is anchored, unable to separate from his body. What if that means he is unable to move on in the Wheel of Life? Did I fail him?” Soft Stone’s body surrendered to wracking sobs.

Teresa had no answer for her.

Two days later a pale and stoic Soft Stone went to see Administrator Chocolate. The community of other presences inside COM beckoned to her. She had searched her mind and soul and come to a decision.

“I can hear their whispers behind the glimmering phosphors on the interactive screens.” Soft Stone repeated her well-rehearsed words, as if they were a poem. “I can see snatches of nirvana within the vast thinking sea. I want to be part of it, join those myriad others. I will drink the wine of knowledge, bathe in the milk of unending community.”

Behind his desk, Chocolate drummed his pudgy fingers on a desktop. “I cannot refuse your request, though it saddens me deeply.”

“We should view this as a time of celebration, Chocolate. You of all people must treat it that way. You must believe in what COM offers to us all.”

The administrator remained flustered. “But, is your work here done?”

“It will never be done. But I am done with the doing.” She turned to leave the office and said with finality, “I intend to upload myself tomorrow at noon.”

The following day they all gathered in the library/database room, Splinter monks as well as their charges of all ages. Some sniffled and looked sad, a few whispered, others blinked with wonder and anticipation. Teresa didn’t know what to feel. After the recent loss of Daragon, too many things were changing. Soon, Soft Stone was going to vanish, willingly uploading her soul into the vast computer matrix that was COM.

Since humans could swap from body to body at will, and because COM was organic and multi-layered, it was possible through hardware and uplink cables to hopscotch into the network itself. Soft Stone would transfer her consciousness into the labyrinth of data, leaving her body behind, empty and lifeless.

Incense burned, pine needles and cloves—Soft Stone’s favorite mixture. Candles sparkled next to the glowing data terminals, adding a warm light like starshine. Teresa tugged at Garth’s arm, pulling him and Eduard forward so they could stand at the front of the crowd. Tears brimmed in her eyes.

Soft Stone emerged from the rear of the library, passing between her favorite paintings and sculptures. A hush fell on the gathered crowd. Barefoot, the lean woman walked with grace and confidence, shoulders square, chin high. Her sky-blue robes were adorned with brass bangles that tinkled as she moved. Her newly shaved scalp glistened as if she had waxed it.

She walked toward the main interlinks in the center of the library. She reached out to brush the hands of her students in a benediction. The old monk paused in front of Teresa, Garth, and Eduard, and suddenly her expression crumpled. “It’s not dying. It is living on a higher level. A much higher level.” She reached out to enfold the three friends in a deep hug. “I’ll try to watch over you. Remember, COM has eyes everywhere, and I will be part of COM.”

She kissed Chocolate on both cheeks, and the beatific smile on the administrator’s chubby face flickered for just an instant. Then he backed away, leaving her alone with the computer network.

Soft Stone reached out with calloused hands to touch the inputs. All other monitors in the library chamber flared to life. Three-dimensional interactive portals painted an artificial sky with fluffy white clouds on the ceiling of the library. The monk closed her eyes and drew a deep breath.

Living lights swirled like comets along the walls. Chimes sounded in the virtual distance, a resonance that hummed in Teresa’s bones. She wondered how much was real, how much miraculous … and how much was staged.

Soft Stone’s trembling fingers tapped the edges of the milky screens. Then the scenes changed, crackling images replaced by a different construct. The library was transformed into a great vault, an immense cathedral far larger than the monastery building, with stained-glass windows and a thousand different passages. Her mind could spend eternity in here, wandering among all knowledge, all recorded history.

As Soft Stone’s brow wrinkled with concentration, she mentally connected herself to COM and prepared to upload her soul. Surrounded by the illusion, the others in the room held their breath. The behind-the-mind music was like crystal; the light was like gemstones.

Glowing images appeared in the air, luminous beings that swirled like angels come to greet her. She raised her hands, then her eyes. The escort presences engulfed her like a safe cocoon, and a shadow of Soft Stone floated with them, younger and stronger. The spirits vanished into the unexplored stained-glass passageways, and the old monk left her body behind forever.

Then the images faded, and the library came into focus again. Soft Stone’s body slumped to the library floor, an empty husk.

Teresa stood in the candle-lit room, feeling cold and alone even with her friends Garth and Eduard beside her. Chocolate knelt next to Soft Stone’s body, cradling her bald head in his hands.

Garth was awed by the beauty of it. “Someday I’ll make something that beautiful, something as moving as we just saw.”

Teresa wept, never expecting to see Soft Stone again.…

Now, grown up and on her own, Teresa’s thoughts wandered through the droning monotony of her work day. This wasn’t what Soft Stone had wanted Teresa to do with her life, with her philosophical inquisitiveness. She felt lost and discouraged, wasting her time on this pointless job.

Then the data matrices displayed on her screen blurred and went out of focus … and Teresa thought she saw an image, the ghost of a human form. A woman’s bald head, blunt features, and clear blue eyes stared straight out of the information matrix. At her.

Soft Stone!

Startled, Teresa sat straight, but stopped herself from calling a coworker over. She leaned closer to the barrier of the screen, her heart pounding. Her throat went dry. “Hello?”

From behind the milky wall of the network, the bald woman’s image smiled at her—then flickered and vanished, like a fish going back underwater, to be replaced by swirling data again.

Teresa saw nothing, no shadow of the apparition. What did it mean? Lumps of numbers floated before her, shifting patterns that held no significance.

Like this useless job, an irrelevant rearrangement and secondary interpretation of information. It was a waste of her time, a waste of her life and abilities. Soft Stone must be so disappointed in her.

Angry at herself, Teresa dumped the numbers and spent the rest of her workday searching along her own paths, finding the works of great philosophers, studying thought-provoking passages. This was what she wanted to do.

Ignoring the assignment her employers had given her, she found new postulates, random expressions posted by more recent thinkers who considered themselves great sages. Sometimes the concepts were moving and timeless; some postings were mere drivel, error-filled rantings that the would-be philosophers hadn’t even bothered to proofread.

Engrossed in the search for meaning, Teresa occupied herself for hours. It was just like what she had enjoyed so much in the Falling Leaves library.…

Unfortunately, her employers did not appreciate her new passion, and Teresa didn’t manage to keep that particular job very long.

CHAPTER 7

Eduard’s first regular job outside of the Falling Leaves had been high up on the outside of the mirrored skyscrapers. Wearing a mag-lock harness that attached him to support struts between windows, he hung far above the pavement. The swirling crowds and hovervehicles far below looked like colored pixels on a grid of the city.

Having fun, Eduard spent his days with a repair kit, zipping up and down one structure after another, sealing windows, patching cracks, strengthening blocks that showed signs of wear. Dangling so high made him feel alive, in stark contrast with his safe and calm childhood. For a while, he had felt happy and fulfilled … until his restlessness kicked in again.

His work partner, a lanky and unambitious man named Olaf Pitervald, had big-knuckled hands and scarecrowish arms and legs. His freckled skin flushed easily, and his pale hair was a colorless mass that covered his pink scalp. He had worked this job for years and never planned to change.

By himself, Eduard could cover the side of a skyscraper faster than the two of them could do it together, but Olaf liked to hang beside him in his harness. The lanky man spent more time in conversation than actually doing his job. “We get paid the same, no matter how hard we work.”

While Eduard diligently used his polysteel compound to patch chinks, Olaf would spy through the windows, hoping to catch sight of attractive female bodies. Safely anonymous, he made catcalls, emboldened because he knew the women could never hear his words through the glass. He was single, probably because he’d never found the nerve to date.

Olaf pushed his face close to the glass, where a buxom teal-haired woman sat in a lobby area directing visitors. “How do you like that one, eh?”

Eduard had no idea whether a woman or a man inhabited the receptionist’s body. Some corporations simply rented sexy female bodies to act as living artwork in the reception areas; then they hired pleasant and competent employees to swap into those beautiful bodies during the workday. Before important meetings, some executives might even hopscotch with their secretaries, always careful to hide their ID patches, so they could eavesdrop on what their business partners might say before negotiations began.…

Suspended in his harness, Olaf loved to leer, letting his imagination run wild. Eduard laughed at his ineffectual work partner. “So save up your credits, rent yourself the body of a stud, and go date one of those women.” Olaf balked. He was stingy with his money and preferred imaginary conquests to risking actual failure. With a bemused smile, Eduard went back to work.

One day Olaf had hung in his harness next to Eduard and didn’t seem to want to talk, offering only occasional surly comments. Finally, Eduard said, “Either tell me what’s wrong or leave me alone.”

“Facial surgery. Dental prosthetics. I have to get three teeth replaced.” Grasping the harness with the crook of his arm, Olaf jabbed his fingers along his left jawline. “In here. They’re going to laser-cut some molars and install organic prosthetics. Too much enamel damage, easier to replace than to fix.”

“So?”

Olaf fretted in the harness. “I don’t like the idea of somebody cutting up my mouth … taking pieces of me out.”

To Eduard, minor surgery didn’t seem a terribly pleasant prospect, but nothing to be terrified about. “Are you worried about the operation itself? Or is it that you just don’t want to be there when it’s happening?”

Olaf moaned. “I want it to be all over with, and not have to sit through it and feel what they’re doing to me. What if it … hurts?”

Eduard looked over at his partner as they both swung high, high above the streets. He began to smile as an idea crystallized in his mind. “Hey, how many spare credits do you have?”

Olaf looked suspicious. “You need a loan, eh? I don’t lend money.”

“As a payment. You pay me, and I’ll swap with you. I’ll sit through your dental surgery for you. No fear, no pain. You won’t feel a thing.”

Olaf stuttered, swinging in the harness. “I don’t think so. I couldn’t ask that of you.… Uh, how much would I need to pay?”

“A thousand credits,” Eduard said, making up the number.

“What? I can’t afford that!”

“Yes, you can. Besides, if you swap into my body, you don’t need to miss a day of work. I’ll do it for you. No problem.”

Olaf looked sorely tempted, but torn. Eduard found this amusing and said in a teasing tone, “Hey, if you’d rather sit there all alone while they go into your mouth with their lasers, chopping up your teeth, ripping them out. Have you ever smelled burning blood? Smoke drifting from your mouth and into your nose?”

“I can spare you five hundred. That should be enough. It’s only going to be a few hours.”

“For five hundred, you can put up with it for a few hours. Or, for nine hundred, you won’t have to feel a thing until it’s all over.” He flashed a winning smile.

Sweat broke out on Olaf’s brow despite the cool breezes. In Olaf’s bleary eyes he could see that the other man desperately wanted to make the deal, and Eduard refused to haggle further. Nine hundred credits. Finally Olaf agreed.

The next morning, Eduard swapped with him, spent the afternoon in a stainless-steel polished office with all the high-tech surgery necessities: anesthetics, quiet music, scent-synthesizers that masked medicinal odors, and a competent dental surgeon with robotic assistants. It wasn’t so bad.

When it was over, after he’d been paid and they hopscotched back into their home-bodies, Eduard didn’t have the heart to tell Olaf that he hadn’t felt a thing. The nerve deadeners had worked perfectly, the surgery went exactly as planned, and Olaf still had to endure the miserable throbbing pains as his body healed.…

Afterward, Eduard realized the possibilities. He went by himself to Club Masquerade and stared at the complex Swapportunities Board, reading down the want ads, the requests for alternate bodies or partners.

Eduard simply listed himself and his services, and word got around.

CHAPTER 8

Daragon had not set foot on the mainland in six months. The Bureau and its concerns had become his life, twenty-four hours a day, with every breath, waking or sleeping. He immersed himself in the databases, studying old cases, absorbed in the nuances of law enforcement.