Parallel Universe 004 - An alternate Gatchaman II universe by Cal
Based on the works of Alara Rogers, Ennien Ashbrook and Kathleen
Coventry, notably "Radio Waves" and "Christmas Blight" by Ennien Ashbrook
All Gatchaman characters copyright Tatsunoko Productions
Brace Hoffman, Eric Waide and Ceiran Morag Maragorm (Kai)
borrowed from Ennien Ashbrook
Bergmann (just the name) taken from Alara Rogers



                    Friends and free lunches


The ill-matched couple were locked in a tight embrace. Joe found
his nose positioned even lower on her chest than usual as he fought
to move with her thighs clamped around his hips, her feet pushing
into the backs of his knees and her arms crossing over his
shoulderblades, pinning him down. So tightly were they intertwined
that any movement resulted in an almost painful friction.
   "Loosen up a bit," he gasped, finding even his breathing
hampered. Katze responded by relaxing her limbs, allowing most of
the veins in Joe's body to resume normal circulation, and he tried
to find back the rhythm that he had lost. She had kept her eyes
shut throughout the session, and the stiffness of her body as it
received each jolt was akin to rigor mortis. After a number of
jolts, Joe noticed this, and it worried him. With the climax safely
over, he asked:
   "Are you okay?"
   "Bit late to ask that now, isn't it?"
   Uh-oh.
   "Well, you might have said something."
   "Who cares. You never listen anyway."
   "I wasn't hurting you or anything?"
   "No."
   "So what is it?"
   "Nothing."
   "Want me to do it again?"
   "Look, you've had your fun now, so why don't we go to sleep and
get some rest? I have a lot to do tomorrow."
   "Hey, if you didn't want me around, why did you invite me over?"
   "I *did* want you around."
   "Then why are you mad at me?"
   "I'm not mad at you."
   "Berg, you're lying."
   "All right, I'm mad at you. Now can we go to sleep?"
   "No. Why did you ask me to come?"
   "Because I was lonely."
   "That's all?"
   "Isn't it enough?"
   "So why did you go to bed with me? Seeing as how you didn't want
to."
   "For my own peace of mind. Anyway, I did want to."
   "Doesn't look like it."
   "Look, I have to get up at *six* tomorrow..."
   "Do you love me?"
   "I don't know. Please, let's not argue about it."
   "`Let's not argue about it'? I'd say it's bloody important!"
   "Please, Joe..."
   "I'm sorry."
   "Let's not fight about this, okay?"
   "No. I'm sorry."
   "Fine. Now go to sleep." Curling up, she wrapped her limbs
around him and rested her cheek on his head. In the morning, he
knew, he would find the sheets wrapped around him as well, tight
enough to choke him. He felt like the unsuspecting mate of the
Black Widow spider.
   Her response hadn't satisfied him, but he knew better than to
press for a definite answer. Life with an unstable lover had taught
him patience and tact. She was aloof, disinterested and quickly
angered, but with him a cyborg and her a mutant, all they had was
each other, and he didn't want to lose her. So long as the feeling
was reciprocal, he felt safe; and most of the time it seemed to be.
But she had a way of making him feel very unwanted, usually in bed.
It was no good running to his friends or his mentor for advice;
they disapproved wholeheartedly of his relationship, and would only
point out that this was what you got when you shacked up with a mad
and dangerous criminal. They didn't know about her altered state;
they didn't even know about his own altered state. Unfriendly
though s/he might be, at least s/he understood.
   "Berg, I'm sorry."
   "Yes, I heard you!! Now go to sleep."
   But she pressed a kiss on his forehead by way of apology.

Working from home as an engineer for an ISO testing lab under a
false identity, s/he was at liberty to organize hir days as s/he
pleased. Joe dropped in whenever s/he called, or whenever duty
called, or whenever he felt like it. Duty prescribed that he should
keep an eye on hir to prevent hir from falling back into hir evil
ways, and he frequently chauffeured hir to and from the ISO complex
in the city's centre. S/he called because s/he didn't like to be
lonely. They didn't live together as yet because their lifestyles
were incompatible, because Katze erupted in a blind rage if
anything was mislaid - and Joe was not the tidiest and most house-
trained of mates - and because Joe didn't fancy disabling or
enabling whole systems of alarms each time he entered or left.
There was also the question of where he would leave his car.
However, in true Japanese fashion, he had vague marriage plans; but
s/he always rebutted them, and he wondered if the relationship
would even last long enough to see a marriage. He had his friends,
but they didn't know what he was, and must never find out; s/he had
hir friends and they all knew what s/he was, and accepted it. "The
roles are reversed!" s/he had mock-gloated at him in a not-so-
distant past, in the residence of a certain Doctor Rafael. "Now
*you* see what it's like."
   "It is at times like this," s/he had said later, on a more
pensive note, "that one comes to recognize one's true friends."
S/he had been male then, but, divested of the mask and uniform, an
ordinary human being in appearance, if a rather androgynous one.
Although s/he was more than ever in danger of discovery, hir fear
of being unmasked - in either one sense or the other - had been
replaced by a quiet confidence, and much of hir behaviour had
changed with it. He had hated hir, of course, as a matter of
principle, but s/he always managed to defuse his anger with a
quirky remark that left him baffled, even in a physical sense, as
if he had gone for hir throat but only ended up with a mouthful of
fur. More surprisingly, s/he even extended to him, implicitly and
in hinted form, sympathy and the admission of hir responsibility in
causing his predicament. S/he was not afraid of him, and s/he was
sorry. Hatred collapsed in the face of this.
   Once his body had fully recovered from the operation, and it was
time for him to find lodgings elsewhere, he even found himself
regretting that he would no longer see hir. They met occasionally
when he went to Rafael's for recharging, but although they treated
each other civilly enough, even exchanging stories and anecdotes
from their personal lives, there was nothing to ensure that they
would see each other again the next time. Then three things
happened which brought them together: he revealed his existence to
Nambu and the Science Ninja Team, s/he revealed hir existence to
the UN, and s/he Changed.
   It was Change that first drew them closer, giving him the excuse
he needed to seek hir company. The other two events had been the
result of coincidence. He had helped his team members several times
without giving away his identity, but had come out when his own car
was to be used as a weapon, claiming that only he had the right to
drive it; how s/he had managed to contact the appropriate members
of the UN was unknown to him, but he supposed hir omnipotent
"friends" to have had a hand in it. All three had turned out for
the best. He liked his new mate, both in bed and out of it, and
almost forgot at times that his lease on life was but a short one.
Maybe he didn't have the right to claim a lasting attachment from
her.
   "Berg..."
   She was gone.
   Looking at the alarm clock by her bedside, he saw that it was
half-past seven. Six o'clock she had said. He wondered where she
could be now. He also wondered how she could possibly have
extricated herself from the sheets without waking him up. "You
really are a master sneak," he smiled to himself.
   Joe remained where he was, basking in the lazy joy of not having
to get up. Unlike Jun and Ryu and, he reminded himself, Jinpei, he
had no fixed working hours. He had taken up racing again and,
unprofitable though it was, together with the remuneration he
received for guarding Katze, it was enough. He didn't have the kind
of money to buy her diamond rings, but she wasn't that type of
person anyway.
   He let his eyes wander over the moderate disorder of the room.
It was, he thought, probably the average working woman's bedroom,
with clothes hastily stuffed into wardrobe compartments or hanging
on chairs, books and papers trailing over the bed and floor and
make-up articles spilling out of a drawer. Some of her possessions
were under lock and key, in little safes in the wall that would
require more explosives than necessary to blow up the house, to
open them; he had no doubt that, in the event of extended shelling
during a fourth World War, only these safes would remain intact and
standing, to baffle future archaeologists. At a safe distance above
the bed hung a framed painting of a Sleeping Beauty in a long
dress, overhung with laden branches of roses, and over her
elegantly prostrate form the caption:

          "If I am asleep and you want to wake me

                         don't shake me


                              JUST *SOD OFF*"

It never failed to make him laugh. He didn't know who had painted
it or what it actually referred to, but it was close enough to
Katze's character to amuse him. Thinking back to last night, he
started worrying again. It might simply have been tension - a job
that needed finishing, an argument with a superior. Or maybe she'd
had something on her mind and had waited for an opportunity to tell
him, but he hadn't given her one. It might have been a technical
shortcoming on his part - although she was generally well satisfied
- or a nasty memory surfacing. Repeated brainwashing, traumatic
childhood experiences and the mere fact of being telepathically
linked to an alien life-form, who could meddle with hir mind as it
pleased, had left her with fragmented and missing memories. The
link severed and the most immediate danger passed, she was piecing
them together again, re-living the pain, or anger, or frustration
or whatever that was connected with them. If they were too much to
handle, she forgot again, only to remember them later. She could
tell him something and then be puzzled when he reminded her of it
a week afterwards. It was something they both had to live with.
   Downstairs, he found a thermos flask filled with coffee, some
sandwiches wrapped in plastic to keep them fresh and a note
scribbled in totally illegible handwriting. By holding it up and
examining it from all angles, he could just make out something
about feeding the cat, locking up after him ("Does she think I'm
daft or what?" he thought to himself in irritation) and meeting
again in the evening, as well as an obscure apology that centred
around the word "busy"; "I've been busy lately"?
   "You're a liar," Joe said aloud, replacing the note. "You just
don't want to tell me, do you? Okay, be that way. I'll feed your
damn cat for you." He felt sad. He knew that he was due for a visit
to Rafael soon and hoped she would come with him, even though she
wasn't helping Rafael any more. She had given him the most
important information he needed, the knowledge which had led him to
plant an antimatter bomb in Joe's heart. The rest he could do for
himself.
   Reclining on the sofa with a cup of coffee and a sandwich, he
relived a few memories of his own. Waking up in a haze of pain,
with the old man standing over him, speaking to him in his native
language. "Need a shot of this?" The syringe in his arm. "It's all
right, you're strong. You'll pull through." The same man again,
with a falcon on his gauntlet. "I used to work for Galactor. But I
don't now, not any more. I want to destroy Overlord X. Will you
help me?" Another operation. A white bed, invisible hands changing
his clothes, administering injections. And then, recovery. Meeting
others, like him. Meeting his enemy. Friends now, they sat in the
Doctor's living room and drank tea at his table. Rafael was out,
Joe was recuperating, Katze was taking a break. "You've changed a
lot."
   "Oh yes, at least once a year." Joe kicked him. He kicked back.
Not very hard, as he was mindful of not hurting Joe.
   "That's *not* what I meant!"
   "I know that."
   "So what happened?"
   Silence. Joe, having missed the final scene, didn't know what
had happened, beyond what his shuriken had done. He saw no reason
why the mutant should have defected. He knew that, sooner or later,
he would be told. Maybe next time.
   "And while we're on the subject... I'm due for my annual
transformation. So if, a few weeks from now, you see this funny-
looking woman hanging around, don't shoot, it'll be me. Either that
or I'll be at home, moaning and retching and feeling sick unto
death."
   Joe wondered where his home could be. "Why, does it make you
ill?"
   "It can be painful."
   He remembered his surprise, and awakening interest. An earlier
memory surfaced: rising from his bed, still weak, and taking a walk
down to Rafael's workplace. There, tall and thin in a white lab
coat with a long thick braid running down his back, a familiar
figure. With a cry, he leapt at his enemy. Katze put down his tools
just before the impact knocked him to the ground and curled up,
neither running nor defending himself. Reaching for the mutant's
throat, seeing the face, without the mask; grey eyes blazing with
anger, teeth bared, the sharp nose wrinkled like a snarling fox's.
Rafael shouting at him. The explanations.
   "Why didn't you fight?" Joe asked him later.
   "I knew you were still recovering, and I didn't want anything to
get broken. We've been working on these components for ages, Rafe
would kill me."
   "Why are you helping him?"
   Silence.

Maybe a telepathic link between the two of them would solve
matters, he thought to himself, although he wasn't sure he wanted
to share all her memories. From hints she had dropped, he had
deduced the following: s/he had always been afraid of hir
transformations, and threatened with the consequences of discovery;
s/he had rebelled more than once, insofar as hir attachment to hir
creator permitted it, and had been mindwiped to subdue hir; s/he
had been abused from an early age, severely and repeatedly to the
point of near death, although it was not exactly clear to him to
what purpose; s/he had been isolated from other humans and their
brutality had been impressed upon hir so that s/he might hate and
despise them, but still the odd friendship had developed,
necessitating eliminations and another mindwiping session. "I am
more lethal to my friends than to my enemies," s/he had said with
a bitter laugh. "If you'd tried to be nice to me instead of blowing
my head off, you would all have been dead long ago." For most of
hir life, s/he had been very, very lonely. S/he had put all of hir
energy into hir mecha monsters and derived hir satisfaction in life
from tricking people. There was no doubt about it that s/he was an
accomplished trickster.
   "And what would you have done if you *had* succeeded in
conquering the world?"
   "If I might have kept it intact - ha - I really have no idea. I
think I would simply have collapsed, the way some people collapse
when they retire. Life loses all meaning if you don't have a goal
to work towards, doesn't it?"
   "You mean you did all that work and you had no idea what for?"
   "Don't forget this wasn't *my* idea. I just found myself in a
cot one day and was told that I'd been created to conquer the
Earth. Well, as a zero-year-old, who was I to go against it?"
   "I love you," he said aloud. Placing the cup on the table, he
burrowed face down into the couch as if hoping to find her there.
He decided to spend his day here and wait for her return, then
remembered he couldn't; his car was due for a spot of repair, and
he was wanted for training. How peaceful his last days of anonymity
had been, with nothing to do but talk and sit and tangle with her
long limbs...
   Back to the grind of being a Science Ninja. He put out the dish
for Grey Hunter, and whistled. Nothing. Not a very trusting soul,
this cat of hers. Not her cat, technically; she said it was a
stray. Leaving the dish outside, he set about the task of locking
up after him, activating the alarms. Settling in his car, he
wondered how Grey Hunter would get over the fence, if she was
outside. Presumably she was used to the odd electric shock. She
hadn't set off any alarms yet, at any rate.

   "I don't think he really loves me."
   "Are you sure? I'd say he was head over ears."
   "No, he's just trying to please me."
   "Why would he do that, if he didn't like you?"
   "I don't know. To get something from me, I suppose."
   "Are you implying he's just being nice to you in order to get
laid?"
   "Mmm."
   "I think you're being unfair to him there. I mean, he was never
short of women."
   "I know. Don't remind me."
   "Oh dear. Competition?"
   "Not that I know of."
   Win and Katze were kneeling on a woven mat at Brace's apartment,
sipping green tea, while Brace was in the kitchen, working on some
culinary creation. Katze's presence in his house was a danger to
him, but he missed his little sister, he said, and no one was
likely to spot her in the busy conglomeration that was Tokyo city.
And his always travelling to her place wasn't without danger,
either.
   "In that case, my verdict is that he is indubitably in love with
you, and you'd better get used to it."
   "I'll never get used to it."
   "Well, it's no good pretending."
   "I know. He was mad at me last night."
   "Whatever for?"
   "For not wanting to talk."
   "Does he realize some things are difficult to discuss?"
   "I don't know. I mean, he's not exactly talkative himself. But
apparently different standards apply to me."
   "Do you hate him for it?"
   "I don't hate him at all. But sometimes I wish he would just
shut up and *sod off*." The last five words were emitted through
clenched teeth, and a little tremor passed through the cup she was
balancing in her hand.
   "Why don't you tell him? Phrasing it rather more tactfully, of
course."
   "Because he'd get mad at me, and leave me. And I can't really
live without him. Not for now, anyway."
   "And what if he gets mad at you for refusing to be honest with
him?"
   "He won't." Her narrowed, calculating gaze reflected perfect
confidence. "He's too keen on getting laid."

Joe turned up again at eight, having showered and carefully brushed
his hair. He opened the gate with the remote control mechanism he
carried in his pocket, left the car and walked in to the front
door. A stroll through one of Tokyo's many parks, an intensive
session of tae-kwon-do with Ryu and a few laps around the race
track had done much to relieve his tension, and he was in as happy
and relaxed a mood as it was possible for him to be. Not wanting to
disturb her, he walked round to the back, noting with satisfaction
that the dish was empty. He picked it up to take it inside with
him, and unlocked the back door. It let him into the kitchen, an
elongated space clinging to the side of the living room. He thought
he heard voices inside the sitting room. A visiting friend? Drat,
he'd hoped she would be alone. Still, he had always asked her about
her friends, and now was as good a time as any to meet them.
   "Who is it?" he called from the kitchen. There were pans on the
cooker, he noted. Whatever was in them smelled good. He lifted a
lid to see.
   "Just Brace 'n Eric!" the beloved saw-edged voice called back.
He wondered who Brace 'n Eric were, then remembered that Brace was
the sumo-type Norseman who sometimes dropped in to cook and clean.
Good. He didn't mind Brace.
   "Like I said, hon, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch,"
Katze said to the speaker in the opposite chair, knocking the ash
off a cigarette. She was still in "disguise", that is, wearing
make-up and a skirt, and sat on the sofa with her long legs
crossed, one heel pressed into the carpet. Brace sat beside her.
His features had the ambiguity characteristic of people of mixed
Asian/European descent, and although he was nearing middle age, he
showed no signs of balding. Katze had once explained to Joe why
this was so, and had promised to flay him alive if he ever brought
the subject up in public. But Joe felt no enmity towards Brace.
There was no vice in him, and he and Katze made quite a pair.
   The two men raised a hand to greet him as he entered, then
resumed their discussion. He shot a quick glance at them as he
seated himself in a vacant chair. Brace, the burly giant, he knew;
the other man was short and slightly built, with light ginger hair,
almost invisible eyebrows and a tendency to freckle. They were
chatting in, what was it, English? Gaelic? Not Greek, he knew the
sound of that by now; and occasionally throwing in a word of
Japanese. The conversation went mostly between Katze and the
stranger called Eric, with Brace, who sat beside her on the sofa
with one arm around her shoulders, agreeing to most of what she
said. She gestured as she talked with the hand holding the
cigarette, balancing it between two fingers. From time to time she
took a deep pull and blew smoke out through her nostrils. Katze did
not belong to that group of health-minded smokers who don't inhale.
   "I thought you were going to stop smoking," he launched at her
good-naturedly, dropping in a chair. She grinned at him as if to
say "Wanna make me?" and blew a puff of smoke in his direction. His
remark also drew the attention of the stranger Eric, who turned on
him a pair of chillingly light blue eyes. A shiver ran down his
spine as he reminded himself that this man had been a Galactor.
   "You don't know him yet, do you?" Katze was still addressing the
stranger. "This is Joe. Joe's a friend."
   "Delighted to meet you," Eric replied in too-perfect Japanese:
the Japanese of the accomplished foreigner. His face expressed only
reserve, and a certain degree of mistrust. Joe didn't know what to
reply.
   "Joe is at a loss for words," Katze correctly interpreted his
silence. "Say something, my darling. He won't kill you."
   "Uh, hi," Joe managed. He was feeling a great deal less
comfortable than when he had entered. Eric scrutinized him. "Are
you George Asakura?"
   "That's him. Galactor's number one headache." She blew him a
kiss.
   "In that case, I am more than delighted, I am honoured to meet
you." He rose, and firmly shook Joe's hand. "I, as you of course
know, am a former associate of Galactor; a member of our former
leader's private staff, in fact."
   "Meaning he was one of the people who covered up for me," she
winked at Joe. He remembered she had said something about that; a
small and select group of people employed to protect her secret and
keep her hidden from the eyes of the world. Like her own fighter
elite, the Masked Assassins, they were a cut above the average
Galactor; and, like her private elite, they had been discharged as
being too closely tied up with her personally after her supposed
death, and now faced persecution by their own former organization.
Unlike most Galactor members, the private attendants of the head of
Galactor were, on the whole, strictly civilian and guilty of at
most white-collar crimes.
   "`Honoured'?" Joe asked.
   "I understand you have achieved a stature close to that of the
late Ms. Maragorn, in taking on the forces of Galactor single-
handedly in our headquarters."
   "He means Cross Karakoram," Katze explained. "Almost died there,
too."
   "Only you told your men not to waste any bullets," Joe reminded
her.
   "Boy am I glad of that," she sighed, bringing the cigarette to
her lips and inhaling deeply. "It proves there must be such a thing
as Providence, doesn't it?"
   "But I was dying anyway. So I forgive you."
   Eric's brow creased in puzzlement. "He was suffering from brain
damage," Katze informed him. "Diagnosed as having ten days to live.
The team didn't know about it. Rafe fixed him up fine, though."
   "Ah. I'm pleased to hear it."
   Eric's face hadn't changed as he spoke, although his voice had
become more animated. Joe decided that his apparent coldness was a
matter of appearance, not of expression. All Katze's race of light-
eyed Nordic types had this cold, inscrutable appearance; looking at
their eyes, you could never tell if they were deceiving you or not.
It was a race thing, he impressed on himself. They weren't evil,
they were just... different.
   "What were you talking about just now?" he asked, addressing the
group in general.
   "Oh, all kinds of things," Katze said. "Loyalty, for one."
   "And the course that Galactor is presently embarking on," Eric
supplemented. "It seems that said organization is now working on a
weapon worse than that of Operation Black Hole. Of course, we
cannot as yet draw any definite conclusions."
   "Don't worry hon. The Science Ninja Team will save you."
   "True," Joe grinned. "That's our job."
   "So don't you stick out your neck. You've done enough. Settle
down and enjoy your life. Get married and have some kids. Heck,
marry a Devil Star if you don't feel safe enough."
   Eric smiled, shyly. It changed his whole expression, Joe
thought. As if his face lit up from within. It was a sight he
recognized from Katze's better moods. He was beginning to like the
small foreigner.
   "Just so long as you don't touch Number One," he joked. "'Coz
she's *mine*." He walked up to her to kiss her on the forehead,
then clamped her head to his chest with one arm.
   "Like fuck I am. Lemme go, Asakura."
   "She's going to marry me, too."
   "Oh, really?" Eric asked with interest. "When?"
   "No I'm not!" she exclaimed in a smothered voice, thrashing
about to try and free herself. Brace had withdrawn a few inches to
avoid being inadvertently hit. "Don't believe him, Eric, the man's
a fucking liar."
   "We're going to pick the rings tomorrow."
   "No we're not. Tomorrow's Wednesday."
   "What better time, my love."
   "Asakura, you are within an inch of *death*."
   "Okay, okay." He released her. "Never mess with the Queen of
Hearts. But won't you at least consider my proposal?"
   "I never dreamt I'd hear those words from a man younger than
myself." Brace grinned wryly, and Eric manifested a crooked little
smile. Another in-joke. "All right, my little butterfly, I'll think
about it. Meanwhile, my friend, do not presume upon my good nature.
Know you that under this friendly exterior lieth a heart blacker
than the deepest darkness!" She drew back her upper lip to display
her fangs, Miyu-style. The other two laughed. Joe laughed, too. He
loved it when she went theatrical. She gave his elaborately combed
hair a ruffle to reassure him that it had all been in a friendly
spirit, and smoothed back her own. Joe decided she looked great in
make-up. Not that he expected her to wear it every day, of course,
but from time to time it made a pleasant change. He wedged himself
in on the other side of her, slipping an arm around her waist. He
didn't know how long the others would be staying, but once they
were gone...
   She continued talking to Eric for another half-hour or so, in a
mix of languages totally incomprehensible to Joe. Leaning against
her flank, he neither heard no cared. When she rose to accompany
her visitor to the door, Joe almost fell sideways. Brace announced
that he had laid the table, and the three silently fell to
devouring the meal with chopsticks. Katze helped Brace to clear up
while Joe lounged in front of the television, and gave him a long
hug in the hallway before letting him out. She waved at him, closed
the front door, lifted the cardboard box that Eric had given her
off the hat rack and made to climb the stairs to her bedroom.
Outside, a car revved up and drove off. Joe came to the front door
to see what she was doing.
   "What's that?"
   "Just some stuff Eric brought me." She cradled the box as though
it were a small child.
   "Yeah, but what is it?"
   "Nothing. Just some old stuff." She spoke with tenderness,
gazing on the ugly brown cardboard surface as if it were the face
of someone she knew. "A few mementoes of my Galactor days. Eric
said I could have them when I remembered."
   "And you want to keep them?"
   "Yes, these particular items I want to keep."
   "Whose are they?"
   "Mine, of course." She bounced up the stairs. He followed her to
her bedroom, but not swiftly enough to be able to see where she'd
stashed her treasure. Never mind. Maybe he would come across it
later, just as he had come across some of her diaries at Rafael's.
She had never been riled at his reading them, for the simple reason
that she didn't remember them. She was like a squirrel, burying its
hoard of nuts and then forgetting all about them. Anyway, it wasn't
what he had come for. Embracing her tightly, he buried his face in
her bosom, allowing himself to become agreeably dizzy.
   "Can't wait, can you?"
   "For you, my pigeon, I would wait until the end of the world."
Feeling around her waist, he located the skirt's zipper and undid
it. With a rustle, the skirt slid down to her ankles.
   "Oh, what the heck." She allowed him to half-carry her to the
bed and submitted herself to his administrations of love, emitting
a single piercing shriek when she came.

"Oh, what the heck." It had been the first thing she'd ever said to
him in an intimate situation. Joe remembered: taking her back home
by a detour - "home", at that time, being any friend's address she
was lodged at, including, at times, Rafael's - which ran close to
a Buddhist shrine. They had stopped to admire the gate and temple -
 she had Changed not long ago, and to an unconcerned observer they
were simply an ordinary couple, tourists maybe - after which he had
led her off into the woods to sit and rest, and made a pass at her.
She had struggled at first, not very efficiently but just
energetically enough to leave him wondering if she meant it; then
she had suddenly gone limp. "Oh, what the heck." All had gone
smoothly from then on, but she had been unresponsive throughout the
contact and remained lying on her back after they were finished,
sad-faced. Concerned, Joe had stroked her cheek.
   "Whatsamatter... You didn't like it?"
   "No. It was fine. It's just..." She didn't finish, reaching up
over her head instead to pinch off and dismember an innocent frond
of fern. Joe, knowing little about her at the time, thought she was
being deliberately difficult.
   "Oh come on. It's not as if it was your first time or anything."
   "Oh, hardly. My first time was... let's see... about twenty-five
years ago. Maybe more."
   As he counted back on his fingers, his eyes widened. "But - that
would mean..."
   "But you don't want to hear about it, of course."

   "You didn't want to?" he persisted, later.
   "Yes, I did. Now shut up about it, please."
   "No, I have to know. Why were you fighting me?"
   "As a matter of principle. Can we drop this subject?"
   "And why did you stop?"
   "I decided the principle wasn't worth it. I knew it would happen
sooner or later, and I was rather relieved when it did."
   "Do you love me?"
   Silence.
   "I love *you*," he proffered.
   "Oh, it's easy for you."
   "Easy? For me??? I ought to strangle you where you stand."
   "That's not what I meant."
   His mind switched back to a strange story s/he had told him
about a woman before she Changed to her present form. It had been
very funny, but he remembered s/he had been in love with the woman
and unable to say so. What had hir past been like, to make hir like
that?
   Over the weeks that followed, he was able to piece out roughly
how hir childhood had been. Changing every year - and sometimes
oftener - s/he had been sent from one foster home to another,
amassing a pile of false identities, building up a new social role
every year. The roles s/he had adopted when female were different,
of course, from those s/he had learned when male; hence the
difference between the two. Onna-Katze was quieter, but she had a
rougher edge; otoko-Katze was nervous and peremptory, knowing the
eyes of the world to be always upon him. He could fight, and rather
meanly, too; but due to his upbringing he was rather shy of showing
it, just as onna-Katze was shy of displaying her brains in public.
As a girl, s/he had been permitted to form a few attachments with
other girls, and had known a number of older male protectors; hir
boyhood had been friendless.
   "Not to mention parentless - I was supposed to pay for my own
upkeep. And, young and unskilled as I was at the time, you can
guess what it was I had to do for a living. It was totally
ridiculous, come to think of it: doing my homework by day, going
through piles of books and exercises and simulations, and then
having these pigs breathe down my neck at night. Although I must
say my running away and living in the streets didn't help matters.
Nasty things can happen to little girls in the big city. Or to
little boys, if you happen to be both."
   Joe had expressed dismay at her fate, and the fact that no one
had raised a finger to save her.
   "Of course there were a number of people who tried to help me,"
she said. "There always are. But even when I trusted them - and
most of the time I didn't - they were usually discreetly removed,
and my memories of them were erased. Overlord X was very jealous of
my affections."

                            *   *   *

   "Now, if you bring your head slightly forward - like this..."
Another visitor. Joe, having walked round to the garden on the off
chance of catching a glimpse of Grey Hunter - whom he had seen only
once or twice, despite the fact that her dish was always empty -
saw through the gauze curtain of the window the fuzzy shapes of two
people in the living room. One of them was obviously Katze, sitting
straight-backed on a plain wooden chair, but who the person
standing behind her was, resting a hand on the top of her head, he
couldn't make out; and the voice that came through to him, muffled
by the glass, gave no indication of age or gender. Quickly, he
entered the living room through the kitchen.
   Katze flashed a hard, suspicious look at him as he came in, but
the person standing next to the chair was in no way discomfited by
the intrusion, calmly correcting the stance of her head. "How's
that?"
   "Better."
   "You notice the difference?"
   "Uh-huh. Guess I have a posture problem."
   "I wouldn't say so. Your posture is better than most people's.
Of course, being tall, you're more susceptible to posture problems.
And there is the added factor of mental blocks, causing areas of
chronic muscular tension. However, all in all..." He released
Katze, who seemed to sink from a straight position into a tangle of
limbs and vertebrae the moment he withdrew his hand, and turned
towards Joe.
   Joe found himself facing what was undoubtedly the most bishonen
boy he had ever seen. He had already spotted the slender limbs,
long white hands, and flowing black hair; to this was now added a
perfectly oval face with clear-cut, though unspectacular features
and huge eyes with silvery, scintillating grey irises. The boy
could not be much taller than Jun, and was possibly smaller, though
with his extreme slenderness it was hard to tell. Neither was it
easy to tell his age; though small and beardless, he had the poise
and gravity of an adult. He wore a closely fitting leather tunic
with a short cloak hanging over what looked suspiciously like a
hump, tight leather trousers, a belt with a knife hanging from it,
and high boots. His voice had been quiet and perfectly level,
sounding neither male nor female. It occurred to Joe's unbelieving
mind that this was not a human being.
   "No, I am not. But as you can hear, my Japanese is impeccable."
   Joe raised a finger to point at him. "You..."
   "Oh, don't tell me you don't believe in aliens," the boy chided
in his quiet and well-articulated voice. "You've been fighting one
for over two years, for heaven's sake."
   "Does he read my mind or what?" Joe thought, alarmed.
   "Yes, I am psychic."
   "Do I know you?"
   The boy smiled faintly. "I think you do."
   Joe turned to Katze in confusion. "Just who--" The boy slipped up
to him in one swift and gliding movement, and laid a hand against
his diaphragm. Instantly, a sensation of warm tranquillity filled
him, radiating from the point of contact. He looked at the boy in
amazement.
   "Your breathing was becoming shallower," the boy explained,
"thus upsetting your oxygen balance, and causing feelings of fear
and insecurity. Posture and breathing have far-reaching effects on
the mind. And vice versa, of course." Joe nodded, comprehendingly.
His mind felt wonderfully cleared. But he still had a question.
   "Just who the heck are--"
   "I should leave," the boy said to Katze. "We'll meet again at a
later date. I'll send you those pictures as soon as I find them."
He moved away from Joe, who experienced a kind of crash when the
hand was drawn away, and into the kitchen, from where he
disappeared. Joe followed him into the kitchen and even the garden,
but he was nowhere to be seen.
   "That was a quick exit," Joe remarked to Katze on returning. She
nodded, absently.
   "Just who the heck was that, anyway?" he said, finally getting
a chance to pronounce the whole question.
   "Oh, just a friend. A bit of a physiotherapist, as a matter of
fact. And a good one."
   "I noticed. Does he read people's minds?"
   "I honestly can't say. He's very good at guessing people's
thoughts, at any rate. You came to pick me up, right?"
   He hugged her affectionately. "Ready for it?"
   "As ready as I'll ever be."
   He returned to the subject as he escorted her to the Condor
Attacker. "You have some really weird friends."
   "Yeah, one of them's a cyborg... With a violence problem..." He
punched her. "See, I was right!"
   "Just get in, you."
   "Hang on." She turned and gave him a long, deep kiss.
   "What was that for?" he wanted to know.
   "Just paying in advance. 'Coz you're not going to get any
tonight." Of course. Never on Wednesday nights. And sometimes not
until Saturdays. Wednesday was shrink day, and the sessions could
be quite upsetting. More than once he had dropped her off at
Stanley's in a fairly good mood, to pick her up again three hours
later as a pale wraith with chattering teeth. Re-installing her
memories and helping her to deal with them was Stanley's
assignment, and there was much she would rather not have remembered
at all. Still, she had embarked on the therapy with that grim
determination with which she applied herself to all her personal
goals, and not just because her amnesty depended on it. She wanted
her mind back, and her freedom, and all those facets of her
personality that had been forcibly repressed because they didn't
fit in with the plans of her creator. And she wanted to do it
alone. She tolerated Stanley, and some of his aides; but to Joe she
refused to impart anything of what happened in that locked and
soundproofed room, leaving him to guess and wonder.
   Joe knew that he was not the only one being left out of things.
Even to Stanley himself she wasn't always frank, and he, in his
turn, had a professional discretion when it came to her secrets. He
probably knew more about her criminal past than Nambu himself, but
he kept his discoveries to himself, locking her files in his
personal safe and refusing to show them even to Anderson. This was
something he had insisted on: he said he acted in the interest of
his patient, not that of the UN, and had threatened to withdraw
from the contract if his wishes were not respected on this point.
He was a great name in the field of child psychiatry and post-
trauma therapy, and the only one who could handle her. With his
kind of success, he could afford to make demands. Also, Nambu
trusted him unconditionally. Joe was glad she had this little
enclave of famous scientists surrounding her to defend and protect
her; she always felt that the world out there was clamouring for
her blood. Not even on account of any crimes she had committed;
simply because she was what she was. A mutant.
   "You don't have to pay me for anything. ISO pays me."
   "Okay, just making sure you won't quit the job."
   "Why should I want to quit?"
   "If you get mad at me, maybe... Anyway, I don't want anyone
else, I wouldn't trust anyone else."
   "Does Stan know you're a mutant?" The question had suddenly
occurred to him. All things considered, it would be odd if Stanley
didn't know.
   "I don't know. I don't really think he cares."
   Joe liked Stanley. He had been invited in by Stanley at one time
for a cup of coffee while Katze was coming round from a dose of
morphine. It had been necessary to sedate her sometimes, especially
in the beginning. To Joe's surprise, Stanley had been as cautiously
suspicious of Joe as Joe had been of Stanley, and both were
relieved to get to know each other better. Older than Nambu,
Stanley was possessed of a youthful vigour and a headstrong, though
naturally unassuming character. The unflinching champion of all
things weak and vulnerable, he had that strain of integrity that
ran through Joe's character also, and had been responsible for much
of his violence; but unlike Joe, Stanley expressed this quality in
the form of total and fearless honesty, coupled with tact, wisdom,
and a sharp tongue when needed. "Someday the UN will have him
assassinated," Katze had predicted. "Not that he'd care; he's not
afraid to die."
   "I like Stan," he said on impulse.
   "I like him too, although sometimes I could kill him. I trust
him," she concluded her summary. This, Joe knew, was the greatest
honour she could confer on anyone.
   "Do you trust me?"
   "Joe, that's not fair. I don't ask you any personal questions."
   "But do you?"
   "I don't have to answer that." Resentment was creeping into her
face. Remembering what Stanley had said about not pushing her for
answers, he gave her a pat on the arm and started the engine.
   "I love you anyway."
   "I'm glad."
   Joe sighed as he swung the car onto the road. Unlike Stanley and
Rafael, he did care what she thought of him, and he did need to
make certain demands on her, even if they were unfair. In that
respect, at least, he was only human.
   "Who was the kid you were with when I came in?"
   "I told you. A friend. And he's not a kid," she added. "He's
older than you are."
   "Kinda cute, huh?"
   "Oh, is that what you think? I'll tell him, he'll be pleased. He
doesn't consider himself very attractive." No, come to think of it,
the boy had not been particularly attractive. Ethereal, rather. And
extremely unmasculine.
   "He's got long hair."
   "So do I. So do you, by some people's standards." Joe snorted.
   "You didn't seem to be too pleased to see me when I came in."
   "I wasn't. I was concentrating on something, and I didn't want
you to distract me with some snide remark."
   "I don't make snide remarks. You should trust me."
   "You certainly make snide remarks on hair length."
   "That wasn't a snide remark, that was an observation. Heck,
let's not fight about it," he said, seeing her face darken. "I was
just wondering what you were up to."
   "Typical choice of words... I told him about my headaches and he
said it might be a posture fault and he'd see to it. That's all."
She was angry at him now. Obviously she was trying to hide
something from him, and fretting because he kept touching on it. If
pressed further, she might resort to bare-faced lies. He decided
not to ask for the boy's name and origin. "Look, I *do* have a
private life."
   "And I thought I was part of it."
   "No, you *get* part of it. I don't have to tell you everything."
   "I have to tell *you* everything."
   She raised an eyebrow. "Do you?"
   "You get uptight if I don't."
   "I don't force you to do anything."
   "No, but you get mad at me if I don't, which is just as bad."
   She seemed genuinely surprised. "You're afraid because I might
get mad at you?"
   "Yeah. So don't try it," he mock-snarled. She laughed.
   "Get your head checked, you loony," she said, drawing an
affectionate hand through his hair. He smiled. Whatever he had done
to irritate her, it was all right now. Moving down the elevated
highway at a steady speed, he glanced sideways. Her face was
shining with joy. The same joy, he recalled, as when she had
cradled the box that the stranger had brought her the day before.
He wondered what had become of it.
   "Remember the first time you gave me a ride in this car?" she
asked.
   Joe remembered only too well. She had been holding a gun to his
neck, disguised as the Swan, while her companion, a maniacal little
dark-haired woman with green eyes and a diabolical weapon, had
denuded his wallet of cash. Caught sneaking in an high-security ISO
lab, they had broken out with him as a hostage. Of course, he'd had
no idea who she was at the time, although the little woman had
introduced her as Berg Katze during questioning. Nambu had
disregarded the statement as a bad joke. "Yeah, I remember."
   "So do I," she said happily. It was some time before he realized
the significance of this.
   "You mean... You got your memory back?"
   "Bits of it, anyway."
   "Do you still know what you called me after you got out of the
car?"
   "Heh... Lots of things, probably. Especially after you twisted
my arm."
   "Hey, you shot me in the foot. With my own gun," he added.
   "It was an accident. Anyway, it was your fault. You shouldn't've
snuck up to me from behind."
   Giving her a pat on the knee, he murmured: "You said I was your
most fun date ever."
   Her face softened as that part of the past came drifting back to
her. "Yes, I did."
   "And you kissed me."
   "Uh-huh."
   "First kiss ever."
   "You weren't pleased."
   "I didn't know who you were at the time."
   "If you had known you would have strangled me."
   "Or you would have strangled me." The presence of the little
woman had, he realized now, prevented any real unpleasantness from
happening. Katze could have used the opportunity to kill them all,
yet s/he had only taken the childish revenge of misusing Nambu's
credit card. Was s/he less harmful in hir feminine form, as Nambu
believed? Joe didn't think so. To his mind, s/he had, by posing as
an underling, managed to escape from the bloodthirsty role that
Galactor and ISO alike imposed on hir.
   "I'd never have guessed you could be like that," he said.
   "You don't always get to be how you want to be." The compelling
nature of social roles. Stanley had dropped a hint or two about it,
Katze had lectured him on it extensively. Looking at Ken and Jun,
he had to admit they were both right. The dark-haired woman had, he
surmised, tried to liberate hir from hir assigned role. To turn hir
away from a life of destruction. Not a madwoman after all, he
reflected; a very clever woman, possibly a genius herself. It was
her theft of the plans of Crescent Coral which had made possible
its destruction; yet, had that been her aim? Probably not. And
besides, she had been eliminated by then; possibly, to allow for
precisely the destruction of Crescent Coral. The pieces were
beginning to fit together.
   "I was just joking though."
   He looked up from his reverie. "When?"
   "When I said... You know." Both the mutant and her now deceased
friend had manifested a very raunchy sense of humour. When it
seemed as though he would be taken to the Galactor base, and he had
assumed it would be for questioning, bravely declaring that they
would get nothing out of him, the dark-haired woman had set him
right: "Nuh-uh. Berg Katze wants to fuck your brains out!" He
repeated the statement to Katze, grinning widely.
   "Oh, yes. I could have shot her for that." All the more grim had
been hir treatment of him once the shorter woman had been disposed
of. S/he'd had him beaten, tortured, gunned... No mistaking hir
intentions there.
   "She didn't mean it, did she?"
   "I don't know. She was precognitive, she could tell beforehand
when things were going to happen. Maybe it was a flash of insight
on her part. My guess is, she was just having a joke at your
expense."
   "You mean, like, she could see the future?"
   "In a manner of speaking."
   This was too wild for him to believe. Never mind. The little
woman had spoken the truth once, when he had thought she was lying.
Could it be that she had been speaking the truth all the time?
   "What are you thinking about, Joe?"
   The UN knew her as Artemis 666. Could she have been speaking the
truth when she said her real name was...
   "I'm thinking about what you did with Nambu's credit card."
...Ceiran Morag Maragorm?

For a change, she was in a good mood when he picked her up again.
   "How'd it go?"
   "Fine. We were laughing all the time."
   He took her out to dinner so she wouldn't have to cook, then
drove her back again to her own house. The sun was still very far
from setting, but the light had been infused with the softness of
evening.
   "Want to come in, Joe?"
   He wondered what exactly she meant by this. It was usually an
invitation to spend the night together, but he knew Wednesday
nights were out of bounds. Was she testing him? Or maybe she felt
so good about last session, she just wanted to talk about it. She
could talk to him for hours and not care whether he listened or
not, more to clarify her thoughts to herself than to get any
specific response from him. When she did want him to listen, she
told him sharply enough. He decided to come in. No harm in a chat,
and he liked listening to her voice.
   "Want a drink?"
   "No, thanks."
   "Coffee?"
   "Coke if you have any. I still have to drive, babe."
   "Oh, yes, of course, I hadn't thought." She walked into the
kitchen to fetch a bottle and a glass, then passed by a cabinet in
the living room to pour a small glass of port for herself. She
downed it in two gulps. Joe sipped his drink in a more leisurely
fashion.
   "I guess that means we'd better hurry," she said.
   He raised both eyebrows. "Hurry? Why?"
   "Well, if you still want to leave this evening..."
   Dangerous ground. She had invited him in for a roll in the hay.
How would she take it if he refused? And he did want to go to bed
with her. To stay in bed with her all night, if he could. Despite
its discomforts, sleeping together was becoming an addictive habit.
   "I don't have to leave. I don't have to go anyplace. I just
thought you might want to be alone."
   She mulled over this for a while. "No, I don't really want to be
alone right now."
   She poured herself another drink and he finished his, they
watched TV munching crisps - she had an insatiable appetite, and
the meal she had just eaten in no way diminished it - and he coaxed
her into resting her head in his lap, so he could draw furrows in
the smooth surface of her hair with his fingers. She arched her
neck like a cat having its throat scratched, and sighed in
satisfaction. Joe found himself unexpectedly and thoroughly happy.
If only their relationship could always be as uncomplicated as
this.
   "I wish it could always be like this," Katze murmured, rolling
over to press her face into his belly. Part of what was in there
was organic, and part of it wasn't. She knew rather more of Joe's
anatomy than he did himself, having aided Rafael in his
reconstruction.
   "How do you mean, baby?"
   "I mean, just lying here like this. Not having to *do*
anything." He supposed she meant her work, which took up a great
deal of time.
   "We have busy lives, you and me."
   "Actually, that's not what I was referring to." He hoped he
hadn't upset her by misinterpreting.
   "So what *were* you referring to?"
   Instead of answering, she unbuttoned his fly. It was party time,
Joe thought. On a Wednesday evening. He could hardly believe it.
   "Are you sure you want to?"
   "Well, you bought me dinner."
   "That doesn't mean you have to repay me or anything. I just
wanted to do you a favour."
   "Even favours have to be repaid."
   "But not by doing something against your will."
   She dropped her head on his knees in defeat, face down.
   "Look, if I took a woman to a restaurant just so I could go to
bed with her, wouldn't it be much simpler, as well as more honest,
to pick up a prostitute?"
   "I'm sorry, Joe. Please don't be angry."
   "I'm not. You should be. I shouldn't even have come in."
   "You're not going to leave, are you?"
   "I'm not going anywhere unless you tell me. But I don't want you
to feel obliged, okay?"
   In the end, he gave in anyway. After all, it was one of the
things he craved most in life, and he supposed she had her drives,
too. But this time he made sure she would not escape him. He wanted
her body and soul, and it hurt him if either was absent. Tonight,
it seemed, the feeling was mutual. He knew he shouldn't ask the
vital question, but he couldn't stop himself, he was too full of
it.
   "Do you love me?"
   Her eyes, which had been ardent and wistful, instantly blacked
out and became guarded. Joe cursed himself.
   "Never mind. I shouldn't have asked."
   "Why do you keep asking?"
   "Because I love you."
   "What difference would it make if I did?"
   "I'd be happier."
   "And if I didn't?"
   "Then I'd wonder what I'm doing here, and if maybe it isn't time
for me to leave."
   "In that case, yes, I love you."
   "That doesn't sound very sincere."
   "I'm not a very sincere person."
   "I think you are. And I love you."
   By unspoken mutual concensus, they left it at that and curled up
in each other's arms to sleep. Joe was sad, rather than frustrated.
He had come so close, only to drive her away again. This was not a
matter of personal gratification, but of communication. No matter
what it took, he would get through to her somehow and win her
confidence. Even if he had to spend every night in her bed, or live
a life of celibacy. Yes, even that. If his pleasure drove them
apart, he would forgo it. Far better to dive into the rich sea that
was her soul.
   He understood that a similar sentiment had kept Katze and the
dark-haired little woman apart. The more he thought about it, the
more he became convinced that the mad hacker and Katze's mystery
lover were the same person, and that they both listened to the name
of Ceiran Morag Maragorm. The woman who had braved Sosai X in an
attempt to rescue and salvage Katze's ravaged mind. Why had she
done it? Had she glimpsed the same spark as he had, and realized
its value?
   And where did hir aides fit in? He now knew two of them, and
they showed none of the mindless loyalty to Galactor that he was
used to. Yet Brace, at least, was very loyal to his leader, and the
man called Eric had shaken his hand for no better reason than that
Katze thought highly of him. They might easily have betrayed her,
and could still do so, but she had never mentioned the possibility.
He decided he wanted to see more of them, if he could.
   Stroking her cheek, he was surprised to discover moisture.
   "Did I do anything wrong?"
   She rolled her head away. She also pushed his hand away, when he
tried to touch her cheek again.
   "Look, whatever it was I did, I'm sorry."
   "It's got nothing to do with you."
   I shouldn't have come in, he told himself.
   "I love you."
   "That doesn't mean anything. It just means you want something
from me."
   "It means I want you to be happy."
   No answer. A small, suppressed sob.
   "Do you want me to go?"
   Chafing movement under his fingers indicated a furious shaking
of the head. He hugged her close, trying to think of something he
could say to comfort her. The usual charm had already lost its
efficacy.
   "I wish I could do something to make you feel better," he said
helplessly. If all else failed, he could always resort to the
truth.

                            *   *   *

The buzzer rang three times. "Wonder who that might be," the
bishonen boy said with a suppressed smile. His hair was now tied up
at the nape in a bundle which ran down over one shoulder like a
river of ink. Keeping his back straight with ease, he was typing at
a small and inconspicuous desk in a cramped living room where the
TV set and the hifi installation vied for space with the sofa that
had been put there to enjoy them. On this sofa, with a remote in
hand, sprawled the silvery apparition who listened to the name Win.
"Well, it can't be the postman, 'coz The Postman Always Rings
Twice!" she pealed at him. He crumpled up a leaf of paper that he
had been jotting on and aimed it at her head. She avoided it with
not so much as a glance, and picked it up after it hit the ground
to chuck it in the wastepaper basket. "Angel, be a darling and
answer the door for us."
   "Blehh," Angel responded as he stamped out of the kitchen with
a dishcloth over his shoulders. He was the same size, and
apparently the same age, as Ken, and as handsome, though in a
different way; his hair was a shade of blond not far removed from
Katze's, and his eyes were of the fishy pale blue sometimes found
in people of Gaelic descent. His mother had been the daughter of
Irish immigrants. Fortunately, she had lived a long time ago. He
wasn't at all surprised to see the visitor.
   "Hi, Sharkey."
   "Can I come in?"
   "Of course. Jaana said you'd probably be dropping in this
morning."
   "How did he know? I didn't tell them anything."
   Angel shrugged, helped her to take off her coat and guided her
to the sofa. "Tea?"
   "I thought Americans always drank coffee... You wouldn't happen
to have mineral water, would you? I should stay away from caffeine
for the time being."
   "It's some kind of herb tea, it doesn't have any caffeine in it.
Supposed to be good for the nerves, too. Why, those headaches still
bothering you?"
   "In that case, tea's fine. No, I have a problem. And this time
it's not a hormone problem, either."
   "Tell us all about it," Win encouraged. Katze, who had not
noticed Win on entering, jumped. Win giggled.
   "I'm almost done with the letter," the boy said from behind the
typewriter, "so if you've got a moment..."
   "I've got all morning and all afternoon. How did you know I was
going to come, anyway?"
   "Just a presentiment. How's things with Joe?"
   "Bloody awful," Katze said. She rested her face in her hands,
and sighed. "Which is not to say there's anything wrong with him,
he's doing his best. It's just that sometimes I can't stand him.
And it seems to have gotten worse lately."
   "And your re-recalling of our beloved Unicorn Progress wouldn't
have anything to do with that?" Win put in.
   Of course, she'd forgotten, they had listened in to Galactor
frequencies as part of their work, and so had discovered the
underground radio station. Most of the old jokes and parodies must
have been even funnier to them, as they had heard many of them in
the original era.
   "I don't know, really. Maybe."
   "Do you miss her?" Win wanted to know.
   "Sometimes. I haven't really got round to missing her yet. I
keep remembering so much things, it's as if she was being reborn.
Sooner or later I'll get to the point where she dies, and I'll
probably have a fit and commit suicide. But for now, I just
remember the good times."
   "Would you say your present lover compares rather unfavourably
to your late idol?" Win pursued.
   "Don't go putting words in her mouth," the boy said with a frown
of displeasure. "I'm sure there's more to it than that."
   Katze was spared the necessity of having to answer immediately
by Angel's reappearance with a tray. It contained not only a teapot
and cups, but also a plate of steaming chocolate-coloured squares.
   "Want a brownie?" Angel proffered, bringing the tray down to her
level and angling it so she could pour herself a cup. She lodged
one of the steaming squares on the saucer and lifted the cup away
so he could move the tray to Win. "Yummy. Can I have two?"
   "No you can't!" the bishonen boy called out sternly. His
features were an exact copy of Win's. He pulled the finished letter
from the typewriter, put a scribble under it, folded it and
inserted it into an addressed envelope, which he licked shut.
   "Did you make these?" Katze called to Angel, who had made his
way to the desk to present the tray to the boy. "Jan?"
   "Yes, thank you."
   "Yep," Angel said, returning to Katze's question. "Made 'm from
instant powder, though."
   "Just add water," Win added, "boil in a large cauldron, toss in
a couple of toads and a black cock sacrificed at midnight, and then
dance around the cauldron on a broomstick chanting `Ugga-bugga-
bugga!'"
   "Ooo yuck!" Katze said, eyeing the dark square on the rim of her
saucer with alarm.
   "You don't want it?" Win said instantly, holding out an eager
hand. Her brother threw another crumpled-up piece of paper at her.
"Stop littering, Jon."
   Katze sipped her tea, enjoying the harmless domestic discord.
Both twins had various nicknames, necessitated by the fact that
their real names could be pronounced by no human tongue. For a long
time, s/he had known them only by their handles.
   "Okay, now for the problem," said Win.
   "Well, it's like this..."
   She paused. Three pairs of eyes were trained on her, making her
feel distinctly uncomfortable. Moreover, she had no idea of what
she was going to say. Her confused emotions defied definition. She
fell silent.
   "He's shy now," Win said to Angel, while keeping her eyes on
Katze. "Maybe we should just scram, okay? Then you can talk to Jon
in private."
   "Well, I... I wouldn't want you to think..."
   "Don't worry, I won't be thinking anything. I know it's hard to
bring up a personal matter before a three-head audience. And don't
worry about us missing out on anything, either. We'll be keeping
our ears glued to that door the moment we're out." She was gone in
a flash, Angel following more slowly in her wake.
   "Let me guess," the boy started her off. "The hot Italian stud
is rather more active at nights than you would like."
   "That's part of the problem. And I don't mind most of the time,
but..."
   "Well, I won't ask why you don't just tell him to screw off from
time to time, I'm not that stupid. Have you considered
disconnecting the phone on your off days?"
   "I don't really have the nerve. I just have to hope he stays
away. And the worst thing is, he expects me to agree with all of
it. He's always asking me if I love him."
   "And do you?"
   She was silent for a while.
   "You can tell me. I won't pass it on to him."
   "And even if I didn't, you'd still know... Yes, I do. But not as
much as I should."
   "`As much as you should'?"
   "I hate him when he starts talking about it. I wish he'd just
shut up and accept things the way they are. I mean, he's got
nothing to complain about, does he?" Her voice had become
aggressive.
   "What does he complain about?"
   "Well, it's not really complaining, it's more like nagging. He
says he wants me to love him. As if it made a difference."
   "Would you say it makes a difference?"
   "I... I don't know." Her face hardened. "No, it probably
doesn't. He just wants to get laid, plus the ego boost of not
having to pay for it." Her features softened again. "No, that's not
true. Please disregard what I just said."
   "Your feelings on the matter seem to be mixed... Or am I stating
the obvious?"
   She smiled.
   "Have you ever brought this up in his presence?"
   "No. I don't want to do anything to make him hate me."
   "So far, it seems you've only achieved the opposite. That should
give you confidence."
   "Especially if you consider our respective pasts," she said with
a little laugh. "Well, you know why. Ken once said to me Joe goes
brainless before anything with tits. It's not the whole truth, but
a sizable chunk of it, I'd say."
   They both finished their tea and poured another cup before
continuing. Katze munched on a second brownie. She couldn't help
it; she was hungry.
   "Does he love you? Which may be a more important question."
   "No," she said without any hesitation. Then, reconsidering, she
added: "Maybe. He's been kind to me, though I can't tell why. I
suppose he wants something from me. Something more than the usual
deal, though. He's certainly the most exacting partner I've ever
had."
   The boy knew from both his sources and her accounts that all the
previous male partners s/he'd had could be ranged under the
headings of "pimp" and "client". And of the two female partners
that he knew of, one had spared the mutant intercourse, and the
other had given it freely with no strings attached. Neither would
serve as a model for dealing with Joe.
   "`The usual deal'?" he prompted. She didn't answer, lost in
thoughts. He filled up the pause with stirring and drinking.
   "I'm scared," she suddenly said. "What if he finds out how I
feel about him and uses it against me? What if he gets too close to
me and sees me as I really am? He doesn't really know me, he has
all these notions of me that I have to live up to. I'm always
worrying he'll turn against me. Heck, I don't need these problems,"
she said, opening her bag and fishing for cigarettes in nervous
irritation. She brought herself up short, and closed the bag again.
"I wish we could just have a fight and split up."
   "And what if you did?"
   "I'd kill myself," she said, again without hesitation.
   His mouth corners twitched in a brief, bitter smile. "The term
`stalemate' springs to mind."
   "Yes, he's really got me cornered. He's got me where it hurts
me. Oh, cosmic irony." She smoothed back her hair with an abrupt,
jerking gesture, as if intending to hit herself. "Imagine me going
soggy like that. I must be the most brainless goon in the universe.
Joe must be so happy."
   "No, I don't think so. I think he would be most upset if he
heard you."
   "Why would he be? He hates me."
   "He does?"
   She made a wide gesture. "Everybody hates me. That's just the
way it is. That's how it's always been."
   "Then why does he continually seek your company? If it's not a
stupid question."
   "It's a very stupid question. To get laid, of course."
   "But you already stated he wants more than that."
   She sighed. "I can't explain... I think he wants to humiliate me
completely, it's so much more satisfying. No, he doesn't," she
contradicted herself. "He's never tried to humiliate me. If
anything, he's been unusually tactful."
   "To turn the question back to you once again: why do you seek
his company? Because you undeniably do."
   "I don't want to be lonely."
   "And?"
   "Joe's the only one who understands. Apart from you lot, that
is."
   "But he hates you. Or at least that's what you tell me."
   "Not if I do as he wants."
   "Sounds like an exchange to me."
   "Well, you know how the saying goes. There ain't no such thing
as a free lunch. He's not going to hang around with me if there's
nothing in it for him."
   "Let me summarize to see if I've understood correctly. Axiom:
everybody hates you. But, for a price, some people may agree to
suspend their hatred for an unspecified period? Is that it?"
   "I don't know... I guess so."
   "So, logically, a declaration of love would mean nothing more
than a temporary absence of hate, for an uncertain period, at a
price fixed by the other party, and no opportunity for bargaining."
   "I never thought of it like that, but now that you mention
it..."
   "Sounds vaguely unfair, wouldn't you say?"
   "I suppose so."
   Silence. Not even a sound from the couple behind the door, if
indeed they still were behind the door. Win must be missing her
brownies, Katze thought remorsefully.
   "Not a very constructive framework to express your own feelings,
either."
   "Insofar as I've a right to."
   "Because a declaration of love on your part would amount to the
same, thus running the risk of angering your partner."
   "Logically, yes."
   "So Joe's asking you to split up and take the blame for it."
   "No, I don't think that's really what he wants... but..."
   "It's what you think would happen."
   "Precisely."
   "And is there any way out of this?"
   "None. I just have to sit tight and wait until he explodes. Or
until Change rolls round again, which would have the same effect.
But I think I can keep him for another six months, judging by the
depth of his infatuation."
   "And you're convinced he doesn't love you enough to come to some
sort of working agreement."
   "He doesn't love me at all."
   "What do you base your conviction on?"
   Bowing her head low, she said in a barely audible voice: "If he
loved me, he wouldn't have abused me." Instantly she shook back her
hair, which had tumbled forwards, and said: "No! That was a lie. He
never did anything to hurt me. It was my own fault, and anyway, I
didn't mind. I liked it." She composed her face. "Please, don't
listen to me. I'm talking garbage."
   He sighed. "You wouldn't believe how often I hear this. Don't
worry, you are *not* alone. Did you discuss this with Stanley yet?"
   "No, I didn't mention it to him." They turned to less painful
subjects, and chatted comfortably for hours on end. Win and Angel
re-entered the apartment's living room, and Win and Katze fought
over the remaining brownies while Angel finished washing up. Both
Win and Angel hugged her at the door when she left, and the boy
shook hands with her.
   "Thanks," she whispered to him. "You've been a great help."
   "My pleasure," he responded. "And don't forget. We love you."

Joe was in when she came home. She wasn't sure whether she wanted
to see him. Part of her did, that was for sure. Another part
yearned for solitude in which to digest the thoughts that were
milling around in her head.
   "Hi, Joe."
   "Hi." He walked up to her and kissed her. "Someone came at the
door while you were away."
   "Anyone important?" she said with affected casualness.
   "A friend. At least that's what he said. An Asian guy with short
hair and a funny name."
   "Sounds like Wu. What did he want?" She threw her coat on the
couch, and then collapsed on it herself. Joe sat down by her side,
stroking her neck. His hand was pleasantly warm.
   "To see you. I said you were out, and he said he'd be back."
   "I'd better give him a call tomorrow. Joe, if I give you a few
wads of cash, will you pick up some takeaway for me? I can't bear
the thought of cooking right now."
   "I can cook," he offered.
   "You can??"
   "Only Italian food, of course..."
   "Doesn't matter. So long as it's edible."
   "Where were you all this time, though? I've been waiting for
ages."
   He'd been waiting. For her. "Visiting friends."
   "I'd like to meet these friends of yours sometime," he said.
   "No you wouldn't."
   "How do you know? Stop telling me what I'm supposed to like."
   "Yes. Sorry, Joe."
   "And stop apologizing. You're beginning to sound like Jun."
   "All right, that's it. Prepare to die, Asakura."
   "That's my girl." He gave her a pat of encouragement, and went
to the kitchen. "I take it I'll have to wash up afterwards?" Katze
called after him.
   In just under an hour, Joe managed, with the supplies he found
in the kitchen, to produce quite a passable pasta dish, which Katze
attacked with relish. She complimented him on his unexpected
cooking skills and gave him a kiss that tasted of Parmesan and
oregano. Foreseeing the inevitable outcome, he decided he would let
her take the initiative. She seemed rather nonplussed by his
initial lack of response.
   "Did I make you wait *too* long?" she inquired. "Or are you
currently involved too deeply in digestion to spare your energy for
anything else?"
   "I leave it to you, hon."
   Smiling, she picked him up in her arms - a feat she was capable
of, although, with her length and his weight, it made her keel over
- and laid him out on the couch, unlacing his sneakers for him and
loosening his clothes. He extended his arms to her.
   "You don't mind being underneath?"
   "We can change places once in a while."
   Disengaging his T-shirt from his trousers and pushing up the hem
to disclose olive skin, she decided she needed him to relieve more
than just her loneliness. She was glad. It was so much easier when
she didn't have to force her feelings. He raised his shoulders off
the couch so she could draw the T-shirt off over his head, and
softly moaned when she started to apply the rims of her teeth to
his collarbone. For some reason, she liked biting. While she was
nibbling the various ridges on his torso, her hands were engaged in
undoing his trouser belt. Little explosions were taking place in
his nerve endings. At some point, he thought, he would have to take
a more active role.
   "I want you," she sighed against his chest.
   "And?"
   "I need you..."
   "And?"
   "Don't push it, Asakura."
   "Wanna go upstairs? You can carry me, if you think you can do
it."
   "Is that a challenge? All right, here you go." He grabbed the T-
shirt as she heaved him up in her arms and commenced the unsteady
journey up the stairs.
   "Don't drop me!"
   "I won't drop you if you'll just stop squirming. Heavens, *I*
was never so much trouble."
   "You're *light*."
   She stopped at the top of the stairs to kiss him. It would make
a nice role-reversal romantic movie, he thought. To complete the
reversal, he slipped his free arm around her neck and hoisted
himself up to bring their faces closer together. This upset her
precarious balance, and they collapsed in a bundle on the bedroom's
threshold.
   "Are you okay?" She had absorbed most of the blow.
   "Ouch. Yes." She picked him up again and lifted him as far as
the bed, where she dropped him on the mattress with her last
efforts. "God you are heavy. Or I'm turning to flab. Whichever it
is."
   "Must be 'coz I'm made of metal now," he joked.
   "Plastics, actually. And the odd copper wire." She continued
stripping him, her breath deepening and her hands trembling
slightly. Joe's head was spinning. This was going to be one of
their livelier nights.
   Eventually she wound up underneath after all, because with their
respective sizes, it was the logical place to be, and she could
deliver a harder thrust with her knees drawn up and her feet firmly
planted on the mattress. Joe lay between her raised knees like a
bridge between its supports, heaving and groaning as they rocked
madly against each other, hurling themselves towards the climax.
   A memory flashed across her mind of lying in the same position,
with the organs and the leg positions reversed, under a perky
little woman whose pale, washed-out head barely came up to hir
chest. It had been one of the first things to knock hir out of hir
apathy. She had offered hir to stay with her if s/he wished; s/he
would have to share with another partner, but at least s/he'd have
someone to take care of hir. S/he declined on the grounds that s/he
felt no real attachment for the woman, outside of friendship. "Oh,
I don't mind. I love you, but I can live without you. I don't need
you to make me happy."
   Joe remembered nothing. He was completely in thrall to the
moment. He didn't even think of bringing up the eternal question;
as far as he was concerned, it had been answered.

Late on Friday morning, Joe was woken by two voices in the living
room, one of which he thought might be Katze's. The other he had
never heard before. It sounded neither male nor particularly
female, but he was positive it wasn't the black-haired boy.
   "Did you get what I wanted?"
   "Yes, sweety pie."
   "Good. Hand over."
   "Wait a minute. Didn't you forget that little word?"
   "What do you mean, I forgot a little word?"
   "What does one normally say to a kind favour?"
   "Cut the crap and just give me the photographs." Yes, that was
definitely Katze.
   "Say please."
   "Give."
   "Not unless you say please."
   "This is ridiculous."
   "No it isn't. You should pay attention to your manners."
   There was the sound of dancing around. Apparently she was trying
to snatch whatever it was she wanted, and the other person was
dodging her.
   "C'mere, you..."
   "Say pretty please."
   "Give!!!"
   "No you don't." More dancing and stamping. "Just say the little
word."
   "Do I have to get down on my knees and beg??"
   "Well, a blow job would be nice." Whack. "Ouch. Okay, I deserved
that."
   "All right, let's get this quite clear. That's *my* property
you're holding. I want those photographs, and I want them NOW!!"
The word NOW echoed under the roof.
   "I yield to your eloquent persuasion, o gentle maiden. Sheesh."
   Joe grinned, visualizing the visitor blown against the wall by
the blast, eyes wide and hair standing on end. Driven by curiosity,
he rapidly dressed and made his way down. In the hallway, he was
startled by two shadows flitting past him. He ran after them into
the living room, where Katze stood with a large envelope pressed
tightly against her chest and an unknown youth of approximately
Ken's stature leaned against the wall, his hair dishevelled. Joe
grinned again at the correctness of his prediction. The shadows, he
saw after some looking round, now sat side by side on the couch.
One was the black-haired boy, the other a girl - he thought - of
the same height. Looking more closely, he noticed that they had
exactly the same cast of features; only the girl's hair and
eyebrows were platinum blonde, giving her skin a peachy hue, while
the boy, with his inky black hair and eyebrows, had a vampire's
pallor. Four dazzling pearl-grey irises sparkled at him.
   "Just who the heck are we?" the boy supplied.
   Joe nodded. The youth backed against the wall was strikingly
good-looking, as well as very Caucasian, but, unlike the two on the
couch, definitely human.
   "I'm Rayek from Sorrow's End," the boy introduced himself.
"Don't worry, no resemblance to the real person - insofar as a
fictional character could be called real."
    "I'm Blue Lagoon of Waveworld," the girl said in her turn.
"That's Gravity's Angel, and this, of course..." she pointed at
Katze, "is Sharkey, the Mutant of Mayhem." Joe stared. He knew
those handles - three of them, anyway. "`Sharkey'?"
   "I have different handles," Katze said apologetically.
   "She used that one only on Darkest Heart," the boy said. "Most
people wouldn't take it seriously, of course, but it takes only
one..."
   "Darkest Heart was our personal PAG-server," the girl
forestalled Joe's next question. "It was protected, in more ways
than one. Overlord X couldn't enter it, for instance."
   "`Pagserver'?"
   "Persons of Ambiguous Gender," Angel spelled it out to him.
"Darkest Heart was PAGs only. We thought he qualified."
   "I thought it was a joke, at first," Katze said. "They invited
me in and told me these incredibly weird stories of being aliens
sent to observe the Earth. Very bad B-movie stuff. So I thought,
what the heck, I'll tell them the truth about myself. I mean, it's
much in the same genre. Turned out they were speaking the truth,
too."
   "Give or take a few exaggerations," the girl added.
   "I didn't believe them until I met them in real life."
   "We believed you though," Angel said to Katze with a warm smile.
She returned it. "We knew who you were."
   "Too right," the boy said. "We were just waiting for an
opportunity to get in touch with her."
   Joe tried to remember what he knew about them. He knew the
handles, all right, but they had rarely chatted with him much,
usually dragging off this incredibly witty and disturbed maniac
that he now knew had been Katze with them. Rayek had struck him as
a fount of wisdom, Blue Lagoon - of whose gender he had always been
unsure - as totally demented; a suitable partner for Bald Cougar.
Gravity's Angel had been Blue's sidekick. For some reason, he had
always thought of Grav as female.
   "You sure have weird names. What do I call you in real life?"
   "By all means call me Rayek," the boy said courteously.
   "Most people call me Win or Winnie," the girl said.
   "I'm just Angel," the good-looking youth said.
   "And my current name is Hunt," Katze added. Joe kicked her.
   "He's wondering where the corny names come from," the girl he
had known as Blue Lagoon forestalled another question. "Do we show
him? Sharkey, do you still have those sound files?"
   "No, I don't," Katze said, embarrassed. "They're probably still
on XAX somewhere, confounding Sosai X... I kept the tape you gave
me, though." She went to a chest of drawers and opened one,
displaying rows and rows of tapes with their contents printed out
or hand-written on their jackets. "Here it is. Mister Heartbreak."
   "Down in the heart of darkest America/Home of the brave/Listen
to my heart beat," Win chanted.
   "It was a record from our time by an experimental artist called
Laurie Anderson," the boy called Rayek explained. "Win and Angel
took their nicknames from two song titles, `Gravity's Angel' and
`Blue Lagoon'. Win was going to opt for `Langue d'Amour', but on
second thoughts she found it too biblical." Still chanting
hypnotically, Win recited: "Full fathom five your father lies/Of
his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his
eyes/Nothing of him that doth fade/But that suffers a sea-
change/Into something rich and strange/And I alone am left to tell
the tale... Call me Ishmael."
   Joe, who had never heard of either Shakespeare or Melville, was
impressed.
   "You should hear the Sharkey songs," she said. "There's
`Sharkey's Day' and `Sharkey's Night'. We downloaded the sound
files to Sharkey when he asked us what the names meant. We thought
it was highly appropriate." Katze slid the tape into the cassette
player and pressed the play button. Jagged sounds came out of the
speakers.
   "It's structured around the sound of a heartbeat," Rayek said.
"Quite an irregular heartbeat, too. Another appropriate detail."
Yes, Katze suffered the odd palpitation, Joe knew. No heart
trouble, just over-medication. A low, cynical-sounding woman's
voice issued from the speakers:
     `Sun's going down
      Like a big bald head
      Poking up over the grocery store
      It's Sharkey's day - it's Sharkey's day today
      Sharkey wakes up and Sharkey says:
      There was this man - and there was this road
      And if only I could remember these dreams, I know they're
trying to tell me - something
     Strange dreams'
Katze was listening intently, her eyes narrowed to slits. If he
touched her now, she would probably jump.
     `I look around - and it's fear
      I look around again - and it's love
      Nobody knows me
      Nobody knows my name'
Yes, Joe thought, it was uncannily appropriate.
     `And the little girls sing: Sharkey
      He's mister heartbreak
      Sharkey
      He's a slow day - by the side of the lake'
It was weird, but, he thought, he liked it. He decided to ask Katze
for a copy.
   "I can copy it off the master for you," Win said.
     `All of Nature talks to me - I've just found out what it's
trying to tell me
      Listen - trees are swinging in the breeze
      They're talking to me
      Insects are running up my legs - they're talking - talking to me'
This is pure angst, Joe thought.
     `All of life comes from some strange lagoon...
      It rears up, it bucks up to its full height from a boggy
swamp on a foggy night
      It creeps in your house - it's life it's life'
   Katze stopped the tape. "No need to listen to the whole thing
now, I want to see my photographs."
   "`Sharkey's Night' is sung by male vocals," Win added. "Either
that or the singer used a vocoder. Suits him pretty well, huh?" Joe
had to agree.
   "Is that where you got the chatserver's name from, too?"
   "Partly," Rayek said. Angel had seated himself beside Win,
crowding the couch. He kissed her on the top of the head and put an
arm around her in the way that normally indicated partnership. Joe
recognized the gesture. He frequently did the same with Katze when
circumstances and her mood permitted it.
   "Plus there's a proverb in our language that literally
translates as `Truth only lives in the darkest heart'," Win added.
"It's about honesty and the subconscious. Very Freudian. Jungian,
rather."
   Katze had opened the envelope carefully and was now shaking the
content out on her knees.
   "What is it?" Joe said, craning to see.
   "Yes, Sharkey, show us."
   "You already saw them."
   "I haven't. Angel has. And Jon saw some." Win stood up and
seated herself on one of the armrests of Katze's chair. This was
the cue for everyone to cluster around her.
   "Look, they're only photographs..."
   They were, indeed, photographs. A pile of small black-and-white
portrait photographs, and some larger coloured ones which showed
groups. The topmost photograph was of a pale little boy with very
short hair, looking into the world with wide eyes and a serious
expression.
   "Remember the photographs Nambu showed you of my odd years?"
Katze said softly to Joe, who was leaning over her shoulder to
look. "These are my even years. This is when I was four. The next
one's missing, because I'd run away, and they didn't catch me again
until a year later. This is me at eight..." The same boy, the same
cropped head, but thinner and with an older face. On the next
photograph, the uncertainty of the boy's expression had given way
entirely to superciliousness. As the photographs progressed further
into adolescence, the eyes narrowed, the face lengthened, the
general expression became more shifty. It was the same face Joe had
seen on Nambu's photographs and even on the person now sitting next
to him, but for some reason it inspired antipathy. Katze at twenty
was a gangling youth of ambiguous and untrustworthy appearance, a
natural backstabber.
   "Quite the evil genius," Angel remarked.
   "Yes, and I had incredibly low marks at that time! I remember
being totally fed up. Everyone hated me, my hormones were acting up
like crazy, and I still had years of training to go. The goon in
the tube had me electroshocked by way of, er, encouragement... God
I was ugly," she said, gazing at the last photograph.
   "Not really," Win said. "You just look chronically bad-tempered,
which I gather you were at the time."
   "Hell, you should see what I looked like at that age," Angel
said. "I wasn't always this sweet-tempered, either." Katze knew
that Angel had been embroiled in a life of crime and, likewise, had
almost met death by fire.
   "You look like Steerpike without the bulging forehead," Rayek
said. Katze examined the photograph critically. "Darn, you're
right."
   "Who's Steerpike?" Joe asked, supposing it to be another handle.
Katze handed the photographs to Win and rose. "A fictional
character," Rayek said. "And, like our beloved mutant, an evil
genius."
   "Only much uglier," Win added. "Else he would have got the
girl."
   "Oh, she wasn't exactly a raving beauty either."
   Katze had taken a thick paperback from one of the black
bookcases. "By the way, didya finish them?" Win asked her.
   "I'm halfway into the first volume. It's pretty thick. Page
count, I mean."
   "Every subsequent volume gets thinner. What do you think?"
   "It's strange. Very strange." She seated herself again with the
book in her lap, and started to leaf through it. Some pages showed
crude, but expressively drawn caricatures in ink. One of them was
a boy with a sharp, fox-like face, thin hair plastered over a
rounded forehead and small eyes, set very close together. It bore
an undeniable likeness to Katze in his college years. She gave the
book to Angel, who reached out to put it on the table, and put away
the small photographs to look at the larger ones. The topmost
showed a whole class of boys in navy blazers and ties, most of them
flaxen-haired. "That's me," Katze said, pointing at a boy in the
back row whose face was turned away from the camera. His hair,
though short, was naturally springy, and stood out like the spines
on a porcupine. The second one was of three girls, two dark and one
light, facing the camera with guarded eyes. No need to ask who the
light one was. A family photograph, the beanpole girl in the back
averting her face. A row of babies in their cots. Even at this age,
he could pick her out easily. Another family photograph, a
different family this time. An action snapshot of a tall girl
sitting in the back of a canoe somewhere on the rapids, with
another blonde girl in front; this photograph was slightly blurred.
Two girls of about fifteen, laughing and hugging each other. A boy
of sixteen in a Galactor uniform, with a coldness of expression
that didn't fit his age. "How Aryan," Rayek commented. Five girls
of different heights and ages making goofy faces at the camera, the
tall blonde one raising two fingers in a V-sign behind the head of
a shorter one, who seemed unaware of this. A very young girl of
thirteen or fourteen, her huge, hungry eyes only emphasized by the
heavy make-up she wore. She was in a tight evening dress with an
elegant jacket slung over one shoulder, her arms impossibly thin.
Katze shivered and quickly tucked the photograph behind the others.
The last one: a boy of twelve or thirteen in a blue sweater,
hugging his sides with his arms, the plaintive face half turned to
look into the camera. The photograph had been taken in bright
artificial light, and behind him was a white wall. All of the faces
had been remarkably alike; the only clue to hir gender was hir hair
length.
   "I love you," Joe said, and kissed her on the temple. She
remained staring at the photographs, then briskly put them together
in a neat little bundle and slipped them into the envelope.
"Thanks," she said to the group of three. Angel gave her a pat on
the shoulder. "Our pleasure."
   "For you, cara mia, anything." Win twisted round to give her a
kiss on the mouth. Joe raised an eyebrow. Katze, likewise, was
quizzed.
   "I thought you said you felt funny kissing a woman."
   "I got over it," she declared, and engaged in a longer kiss.
Angel cleared his throat, and tentatively said: "Mrs Addams... The
baby?"
   This elicited high, ringing laughter from Win, suppressed snorts
and wheezes from Katze, and a little smile from Rayek. Joe didn't
get it.
   "The New Addams Family! Featuring Sharkey as Morticia Katze! Joe
as Gomez! And Brace as uncle Fester! Yeeeeaah!" Win flung her arms
about in a fairly convincing Kermit imitation, causing Katze to
duck sideways.
   "He's not bald," Angel pointed out.
   "And not likely to become so, unless you attack him with a razor
blade," Rayek said, smiling faintly. "Who did you fancy for Lurch?"
   "I wanna be Wednesday!" Win squealed, bouncing on the armrest.
"Can I be Wednesday, can I be Wednesday?"
   "You can be Pugsley," Katze said heartlessly, hitting her on the
top of the head with a fist. "Pheep," Win responded.
   It was the best imitation of a rubber duck being squashed that
Joe had ever heard. Katze, too, was surprised. By way of
experiment, she cautiously hit the girl again. "Pheep," said Win.
   "Watch this," Rayek said. He reached over and tweaked her nose.
"Guk," she went.
   "Are you sure she's not made of rubber?" Joe asked.
   "Not that I noticed," Katze and Angel answered at the same time.
They turned to each other, struck dumb, and suddenly burst out
laughing. Angel hugged her from behind and pecked her on the cheek,
a gesture which did not go unnoticed by Joe.
   "Listen to this." Win sang a song to demonstrate her amazing
powers of imitation. "I bet you they won't play this song on the
radio, I bet you they won't play this new <biiip> song. It's not
that it's <toot> or <honk-honk> controversial, it's just that the
<ding>ing words are awfully strong. You can't say <raah> on the
radio..." 
   It was only a short song, but it had Joe rolling over the floor.
She faultlessly imitated all kinds of mechanical sounds with a
perfectly straight face, so much so that he wondered if she were
hiding some sort of advanced vocoder on her person. Win then
continued with a partly sung declamation in fake Spanish about "las
llamas", translated into English by a bored-sounding Katze. Joe,
who could understand English well enough to follow it, listened in
growing disbelief.
     "La llama es una quadrupedo," - "The llama is a quadruped,"
     "Que vive en las grandas rios como el Amazone" - "Which lives
in big rivers, like the Amazon."
   The declamation ended in a serenade, accompanied by a little
dance and a loud "Ole!!" Rayek clapped appreciatively, while Angel
hooted and whistled. Both women bowed their heads modestly, and Win
blew a few kisses at her audience. She would be very pretty, Joe
thought, if only she wasn't so totally bonkers. He also noted that
Angel, unlike his companions, didn't really speak Japanese very
well; he mostly spoke in English with a strong west-coast American
accent, and Katze also reverted to English when addressing him.
"Courtesy of Monty Python Inc.," Win said with a final bow.
   "Monty Python?" Joe asked. The name sounded vaguely familiar to
him. "Wasn't that last century?"
   "Yep," Win nodded.
   "We drop in every hundred years or so," Rayek clarified.
   Joe looked at her in still greater disbelief. "Are you that
old?"
   "Naah... It's just that, each time we come back here, you lot've
jumped another century. There's just no keeping up with you," Win
said reproachfully.
   "How old are you, anyway?"
   "In Earth years? Jon, how old are we? About thirtyish, wouldn't
you say?" Rayek did something strange with his eyebrows,
straightening them out and rapidly pulling them away from each
other while dropping his eyelids. It was a momentary gesture, but
it caught Joe's attention. "I think I'm twenty-five," Angel said.
"I've lost count." "I haven't, but I like to pretend I have," Katze
remarked. "You're ancient!" Win yelled at her, earning herself
another thump on the head. This time she made a sound like a plate
breaking in two.
   "Anyway," she continued, unfazed, "We like to preserve, for the
new generation, the gems of our time... Spawn... Ranma... Bubblegum
Crisis... I mean, there's just no *quality* nowadays..." Angel was
choking.
   "I like Codename Blenny," he managed to get out. Codename
Blenny. Oh yes. Joe picked up an instalment of that from time to
time. Rather cheesy, though.
   "Blenny the shootup girl! Yes, you *would*," Rayek said
derisively.
   "A whole new concept of babes with guns!" Win exclaimed,
stretching her arms in a wide gesture. "Big tits, fishy names and
plot holes big enough to suck in the Galaxy!"
   "Oh, I wouldn't know about that," Katze said thoughtfully. "Joe
reads them, though." "Oh, you *do*?" Win asked him.
   "Elfquest wasn't bad," Rayek said, "although the spinoffs were
downright sad. What do you read in the way of comics?" he asked,
turning to Katze.
   "Nothing, really, except what you've shown me... I thought
`Fragments of yesterday' was quite good." This was one Joe hadn't
read. Reputed to be a classic, to him it just looked plain boring.
   "A typical intellectual's choice," Win said, leaning over and
giving Katze a pat on the head. "Did you show it to our old friend
Wu yet?" "He's meditating over it," Katze assured her.
   "And does your house ape have any intellectual pursuits?" Win
continued, nodding towards Joe. Katze, shocked, whacked her, then
broke out in an embarrassed giggle. "None whatsoever, actually. He
spends most of his time in his car. Or under it, as the case may
be."
   "Kinky!" Win commented with widened eyes and ditto grin. Joe
wondered what kind of ideas she was getting. "But, no deep
conversations? No witty repartees? No communal attempts to define
the ultimate nature of the universe?"
   "It's lonely, being brilliant," Katze sighed. Joe leaned on the
armrest opposite Win's, and pulled her ear. "Complaints, big-
brain?"
   Rayek shook his head and patted Joe on the shoulder. "What do
you do with a 280 IQ mutant, eh?"
   Adopting the deep, hollow, mournful voice of Marvin the Paranoid
Android, Angel responded: "What do you do if you *are* a 280 IQ
mutant? No, don't try to answer that, I'm fifty thousand times more
intelligent than you are and even *I* don't know the answer. It
gives me a headache just trying to think down to your level." Win
shrieked like a revving chainsaw, while Katze started gasping and
wheezing. Joe didn't get it.
   "So what keeps you two together?" Win wanted to know, when the
laughter had died down. Katze raised her eyebrows thoughtfully and
turned to Joe. "Uhhh... Sex?"
   "I should hope it's more than that!" Joe returned. He felt more
hurt than he cared to show.
   "Yeah, Sharkey, is that all you want him for?"
   "Me???"
   "At least you bagged a nice specimen," Win commented, looking
Joe up and down. "Hey! Whoa!" Angel exclaimed. She blew him another
kiss. "Although Ken's the really dishy one."
   "Jun'll be mad at you if you touch him," Katze told her. "And
she's the explosives expert. You have been warned." Laughter. This
time, Joe laughed too.
   "How about you?" said Win, turning to Joe with a shamelessness
that was disarming.
   "Uh, I uhh..."
   "Think about it. We'll be coming back to you in fifteen minutes.
Yes, Sharkey, you were going to say?"
   "I wasn't going to say anything! Alright, I stick with him
because I'm lonely. And he's good company. Better than most,
anyway."
   "Hear that? Very well, Asakura, what's your answer? You have
five minutes."
   "I stick with her because I'm sorry for her," Joe responded. It
was the first reply that came to his mind. "She's had a raw deal."
   "You're *sorry* for me? What kind of condescending treatment is
that?"
   "Well, at least it shows I care about you!" he defended himself.
"You're just being egotistic."
   "Your suitor hath a point, sweet mutant," Win remarked astutely.
Katze grabbed the nearest thing that came to hand, which happened
to be a discarded sweater, and threw it at Win. It caught on her
forehead, dropping over her eyes. Instantly she started to wave her
arms about. "Eek! Ack! I've gone blind! Who turned off the lights?"
   "Isn't anyone hungry yet?" Angel asked.
   "And now for something completely different," Win said in a
well-articulated masculine voice, drawing away the sweater. "Isn't
anyone hungry yet?" Laughs all round. Joe didn't get it.
   Rayek instructed Win to go out for some shopping that still
needed to be done, and pick up a few helpings of KFC on the way. He
suggested Joe drive her.
   "Why me?" Joe asked.
   "Because I'm sick and tired of driving, and it's Sharkey's day
off," was Angel's reply. "And neither of us have the nerve to
drive," Win added. Katze nodded understandingly. "Driving in Tokyo
is *not* for the faint of heart." Joe acquiesced. Katze reached for
her bag and dug up a wallet.
   "Nuh-uh. This one's on us."
   "Are you sure?"
   "Hey, you're treating us to dinner, why shouldn't we treat you
to lunch?"
   "And what about the other stuff?"
   "Don't worry, we'll be visiting you often enough to even the
score. Coming, Joe?"
   Joe let the little white-haired girl with the oddly bulging back
into the car by holding open the door to her as he always did for
Katze. The thought of taking her out to shop was actually quite an
interesting one. She was not his idea of a date, but he had not
been blind to the constant innuendo going on between her and Katze.
His curiosity had been sparked, and he considered getting to know
her better.
   "I don't think Katze shares," Win said pointedly.
   Of course. She was psychic. In confusion, he stammered an
apology.
   "It's all right, I know how you intended it. Just bear in mind
he's dead scared of losing you, okay?"

In the Hunt residence, Win's departure had slightly dampened the
atmosphere.
   "So, what're you onto these days?"
   "The subs. No hurry, though."
   "I see you're becoming less of a workaholic," Rayek observed.
"Are you taking more time off for Joe?"
   "That, and I'm relaxing a bit. I've built up a small fortune by
now, I can take it easy."
   "I'm glad to hear it."
   "How are you and Joe these days, anyway?" Angel asked.
   "On the whole, not too bad. Anyhow, now that you've seen him,
what do you think of him?"
   "He seems to have ditched his violence problem," Angel said.
   "He looks like a reliable type to me," Rayek said. "If not too
cerebral. But I suppose he makes up for it with sensitivity."
   "He's dreadfully macho. But he holds back when he's around me,
because he knows it won't work with me. And, of course, turning
into a cyborg has been a bit of a shock to him. He thinks he's sub-
human now, which doesn't work wonders for his self-esteem."
   "Do you think he's sub-human?" Rayek asked.
   "I'm not in a position to call him that." She smiled wryly. "And
it's my fault, too... But, no, I wouldn't say so. He has some very
human qualities."
   "Do you value them?"
   "Not always. Humans aren't all nice." Rayek and Angel nodded
understandingly.
   "I'd say he really loves you," Angel said.
   "He's stuck on me. I don't know if you could call that love."
   "Part of it seems to be solidarity," Rayek said.
   "If that's true, why didn't he want to know me until I was a
woman?"
   "Maybe he was just looking for an opening," Rayek proposed. "You
told us he was very macho... A man, seeking the company of another
man... Doubtful, eh?"
   "In that case, I hope he snaps out of it before I Change.
Because if not, I've just been wasting my time."
   "You really do love him," Angel said.
   "I'd like him to stay with me, if it's at all possible."
   "Why?" Rayek asked.
   "Because I know what he is, and he knows what I am, and that's
a situation I'm comfortable with. We're safe with each other."
   "I see a pattern emerging," Rayek said.

Coming in after Joe with the second shopping bag and a white
plastic bag full of packages, Win was loudly singing an old
Meatloaf ballad:
     `I want you
      I need you
      But nothing's ever gonna make me say I love you
      Don't be sad
      Two out of three ain't bad.'
   Rayek frowned. "I thought the lyrics went `There's no way I'm
ever gonna love you'", he said.
   "Just adapting it to present circumstances. Hey, guys, mochi!"
She dumped both bags on the table and started to empty out the
plastic one.
   "Yum yum. Whose idea?"
   "Georgy-Porgy's." Katze kissed him. "You're a darling. Here,
give me the bag." He handed over the first one, and she lugged it
off to the kitchen.
   "I hope driving my sister around has not been too great an
ordeal for you," Rayek said politely.
   "Hey, no problem. She's very musical."
   "Did she sing that Spanish Inquisition song?" Angel wanted to
know.
   "Yes, and I did the gorilla sketch," Win said happily. Angel
sighed and shook his head.
   After lunch, they played cards. That is, they played something
like whist with a Waveworld deck of eighty cards, four decks of
seventeen and twelve "pictures". Joe didn't play, because he
couldn't remember all the values of the cards. Katze tried to
explain the game to him, saying that the pictures, which
represented the twelve divinities of the Waveworld pantheon, were
like the trumps of the Tarot deck; when it turned out he didn't
know what that was, she gave up on him and concentrated on the
game, leaving him to watch. The point seemed to be to collect
certain cards while discarding others, and the first to collect a
specific amount of sets was the winner. Katze, having just won a
set, took the topmost card from the pile on the table. She slapped
it on the table face up to start a new round.
   "Typical you should draw the Janus," Rayek remarked.
   "The Janus?" Joe asked.
   "Just our name for it, the real name is different... The Janus
is the sign of great potential, to be used for good or for evil. I
thought it was rather appropriate. Still, we're playing, not
fortune-telling. Win, your turn."
   Joe examined it. It was a picture of a boy - or girl - with long
hair in many braids, big eyes and a demure smile. Whatever it was
wore a long gown, not unlike a kimono, that gave no indication of
gender. Like an actor, he - or she - carried a mask of a writhing,
red, devilish face. It was the only discordant note in an otherwise
pretty picture. "Wait. You use these for fortune-telling?"
   "The cards you know are also used for fortune-telling," Rayek
said. "As are the Tarot cards, from which the modern deck evolved.
In fact, divination was their original purpose. The idea of playing
with them followed not long after, of course."
   "Do you think you could show me how it works?"
   Win picked up the pile from the table and presented it to him
fan-style. "Easy. Pick a card."
   He chose one and turned it to look. It shocked him. A naked red
boy with huge leathery wings spreading over his head, his face
malignantly contorted. His hair seemed to be on fire, and in one of
his long-nailed hands he held a mask of a sweetly smiling face; the
face of the Janus. It looked out of place in the lurid picture.
   "Now that *is* interesting," Rayek said.
   "Can you explain what it means?"
   "Well, it's a picture," Win said, "so it says something about
your personality. The Devil, as we privately call this card, is the
sign of thwarted passions, uncontrolled emotions, and, in general,
violence. It reminds us what happens when feelings are not balanced
with intellect."
   "And it's the polar opposite of the Janus," Rayek said.
   "Sort of like yin and yang," Angel added. "Except they're both
male."
   "They are?" Joe peered at the Janus again.
   "Concepts of masculinity differ from planet to planet, Asakura,"
Katze told him. "In fact, they differ from culture to culture, and
frequently from day to day." She plucked the card from his hand and
shuffled it back into the pile.
   The game was concluded with Rayek as winner, Katze as second,
Win as third, and Angel as loser. "Aw, shucks," was his comment.
Katze gave him a kiss on the cheek to console him and left for the
kitchen. Joe could hear the sound of paper wrappings being torn.
Win kissed Angel too, and left for the kitchen also. Rayek inquired
politely into Joe's racing successes, although Joe could tell he
wasn't really interested.
   "So, what do you do for a living?" he asked, turning the
conversation away from himself.
   "My sister and I breed horses," Rayek said. "Or, rather, our
planetary equivalent thereof. But the similarity is striking."
   "Didn't Berg say something about your being planetary
observers?"
   "A big name for a little thing," Rayek said modestly. "We come
here occasionally to read up on the state of affairs, and transmit
the information to such authorities as are interested on our
homeworld. We are frequently called on because through some fluke
we are well acquainted with the different cultures here, and our
size makes us more humanoid in appearance. If our authorities
wanted to contact the authorities here, we might be ambassadors.
Fortunately, they don't."
   Joe felt that a potential was being ignored here. "But don't you
want to contact life-forms from other planets?"
   "For that, I refer you to a certain Doctor Rafael."
   Joe bit his lip.
   "Of course, but for his fateful action, you and I would never
have known this amazingly intelligent and fascinating person who is
currently employed by ISO. And, knowing humanity, the killings
would have taken place anyway." This cheered Joe up again.
   "And you?" he asked Angel.
   "I'm a hit man. I shoot people."
   "You *were* a hit man," Rayek said. "Currently, you are a stable
boy, and the love slave of a lecherous alien female."
   "Who's complaining? I ain't."
   "Are they all like her?" Joe wanted to know.
   "Well, there's worse. But I don't recommend you to try anything
on any of them. Waveworld females start to froth and bubble when
sexually excited." The last sentence was pronounced in a perfectly
serious voice. Angel turned two raised eyebrows and a dropped jaw
on him. Joe, too, wasn't sure whether he should believe this.
   "They do *not*," Angel said, after recovering from his first
surprise. "I'd know it if they did."
   "Yes, I think you'd be the first to know," Rayek gravely agreed.
Joe was amused and befuddled. Did the bishonen boy have a comic
streak, too?
   "Froth froth, bubble bubble," Win said, coming out of the
kitchen followed by Katze. "I heard you. And by the way, I do
*not*." Katze was wearing a very wide grin.
   "Just keeping you out of temptation's way," Rayek answered to
Joe's quizzical stare. "And where have you been hiding, my sneaky
sister?"
   "In the kitchen! doing unspeakable things," she added gleefully,
while Angel and Katze exchanged meaningful glances. Rayek affected
a look of terror.
   "Oh, no!" he gasped. "Please, tell me you were having sex on the
kitchen table."
   "No, we've been..." she paused for effect, "COOKING!!" Rayek
cried out in horror and hid his face in his hands. Katze and Angel
were hugging each other in silent paroxysms of laughter.
   "So what's the big deal?" Joe asked, puzzled.
   "Before you," said Rayek through his hands, "stand C-Ko and
Akane. You figure out which is which."
   "Uncute tomboy," Katze shot at Win between laughs.
   "Raaaaahh! Hentai pervert! Remind me to hit you with a table
after your upcoming gender change," Win returned. Joe didn't get
it.
   Rayek swiftly and efficiently laid the table, and Win and Angel
carried in pans of rice and sauce-steeped meat and vegetables.
"Brought to you from Akane's Kitchen of Pain," Win announced, "the
Instant Meal! consisting of Instant Meat, Instant Gravy, Instant
funny little green beans and Instant just-add-water-and-simmer
Rice! Presented to you on Instant Dishes, which can be dried to a
fine powder and reconstituted again Whenever you Need Them! Don't
eat the dishes, by the way, they'll give you a tummy-ache."
   "And what will the food itself do to us?" Rayek asked
apprehensively.
   "My sweetest brother, thank you for biting. Well, you saw
Project A-Ko, didn't you?" Katze had obviously seen it, because she
was laughing so hard she had to support herself on a chair. Angel
was thumping her back. Joe didn't get it.
   "That's our function in life," Win confided to Joe. "Making
Sharkey laugh."
   "And we're not the first ones, either," Rayek added.
   After the meal, there was a brief squabble about who should do
the washing up.
   "Angel?" Win said, jogging him with an elbow. Joe had already
made his escape.
   "No fair! I always get to wash up!"
   "Yes Win, you do something useful for a change."
   "Hey, I cooked!"
   Katze rolled her eyes. "I'll do it." She rose.
   "Yes, Sharkey, go sacrifice yourself," Win encouraged her. Angel
dropped into his Paranoid Android role again: "Here I am, brain the
size of a planet, and they tell me to go wash the dishes. Call that
job satisfaction? 'Cause I don't."
   "Can it, Marvin!!" the twins called out in unison. Katze howled
all the way to the kitchen. Joe didn't get it. He was beginning to
feel left out.

They were discussing a woman called Kai.
   "Do you know what strikes me about the whole resurgence of the
clan system?" Win said. She had been serious for the last half-
hour. Apparently she was capable of being serious, too. "It's a way
of rebelling against anonymity, of asserting individual rights and
negating state authority. And yet, at the same time, it's terribly
collective."
   "Yeah," Angel put in. "Like, Kai, she was this super-
individualist, but she stuck to her clan even though she hated
them. And then she goes and joins something like Galactor, which,
even if it has the same sort of glam group appeal as a clan or a
street gang, is completely anti-individual."
   "She didn't join," Katze corrected him. "She was forced to join
because some stupid relative of hers forgot to change his name when
he signed on, so they did a trace on him and recruited his whole
clan. Even Asakura here," she indicated Joe, who was leaning
against her in a stupor of love, "had his name changed because
daddy Asakura wanted to protect his mafioso family from Galactor
interference."
   "So Asakura isn't his real name?" Angel asked.
   "It's not his original name. But of course we have no way of
finding out what his original name was. Or mine. Or Jinpei's, for
that matter."
   "And it's Galactor policy to forcibly involve the whole family?"
   "Was in my day, anyway. And friends. That's how we assured
loyalty, you see. Make sure these people know no life outside of
Galactor."
   "Starting with you," Win said. "I mean, who did you know outside
of Galactor, before you met us? And we're *aliens*, ferchrissake.
Heck, even your mate's a Galactor."
   Katze giggled. "True. He doesn't like to be reminded, though."
   "If you'd said that a year ago, he'd've sliced you," Angel
added. Joe smiled at her sleepily.
   "Anyways, to get back to Kai... It's funny how she can't seem to
break free of big organizations. First ISO, then Galactor. Either
she's fighting them, or she's enrolled in them. Preferably both at
the same time, as I can see. Why couldn't she just live quietly
somewhere and stay out of trouble? She had the intelligence."
   "Maybe that's precisely why," Rayek said. "She had potential.
She may have felt she had to use it."
   "I don't think so," Katze said. "In her hacker days, yes,
definitely. But she did disappear from view, and she's been living
anonymously since - at least, until that idiot who signed up
without changing his name. In Galactor, it was something else. She
was loyal. She had to be loyal to something. She couldn't live just
for herself, she wasn't selfish enough for that. She had a lot -
brains, savvy, dedication - and she needed something to give it
to."
   "In other words, she was looking for an opportunity to realize
her potential," Rayek reaffirmed.
   "If that's how you mean it, yes, but it's not simply a question
of using talents to achieve something. You could do that alone. She
wanted to be sure it would *go* somewhere. She needed a partner."
   "A receiving party, more likely. It sounds very one-way," Win
said.
   "Yes, I suppose I've never been fair to her. She was always
there when I needed her, but I never gave her anything in return."
   "I don't think she wanted you to give her anything in return,"
Rayek said. "I think she wanted to try and show you, as many tried
before her, that some things are actually free. Friendship, for
instance."
   "I don't think friendship is free," Katze said uncertainly.
   "Friendship comes from two sides," Win agreed. "There has to be
input from either side, else the system collapses. But it's not a
service you pay for. It's something you get from people who, for
whatever reason, enjoy your company. And usually your company is
the only price demanded. Other than that, it's free."
   "Why would anyone enjoy my company?" Katze asked with a shrug.
   "'Coz you're the greatest," Joe murmured snoozily from somewhere
near her left armpit.
   "Shuddup, Asakura. If I want your opinion, I'll ask for it."
Angel laughed.
   "And because you're incredibly funny," Win said. "Though not, of
course, anywhere near as funny as I am. BTW, that's a challenge."
Rayek laughed, too. "Let's face it, Sharkey. Everyone likes you.
You are an intrinsically likeable person. Why else would a grand
total of thirteen people have snuffed it in an effort to get you
out of this stupid organization? Not to mention all the little bits
of help you got along the way. I mean, look at Kai. She was
basically trying to get you away from Galactor. Same's us, only the
goon in the tube couldn't wipe your memories of us, simply because
he didn't know about us. If you remembered more, maybe your trust
in humanity would be restored."
   Katze smiled briefly, then reverted to the sadness that had been
creeping up on her since dinner.
   "There's one single thing I could have done for her." The twins
remained silent, encouraging her to continue. "I could have told
her the truth. I could have told her I loved her. Because I did.
And she never knew it." Joe's mind snapped to attention: it was
Ceiran Morag Maragorm they had been talking about. She drew a hand
over her face. "Just because I was a coward. I was afraid she'd use
it against me."
   "She had precog and empathy, and you're telling me she wouldn't
have known?" Rayek responded. "I think she knew. I think she
realized what your motives were, and respected them."
   "At least, someone who respected me," Katze said, rubbing her
eyes. "Makes a change."
   "I respect you," Joe said.
   "Not at the time you didn't."
   "Didn't she always say she respected you totally?" Win said.
"And that Radio Free Galactor stuff - I bet she did that just for
you. She knew about your all-nighters, didn't you?"
   "Yes... yes, maybe. I don't know." She smoothed back her hair,
distraught. Joe was worried. He touched her cheek, but she turned
her head away.
   "What was she, anyway? Scottish or Scottish-Canadian?"
   "Scottish," Katze said, her voice brittle with repressed
emotion. "Didn't live there though. At least not when I met her. I
don't know where she spent most of her life."
   "She might have been Irish," Win said. "She sounds Irish to me."
   "Can't have been. Ireland was nuked off the face of the Earth in
World War III. And serve them right," Angel added.
   "It certainly solved the land rights question," Rayek commented.
"Pity for Galactor, though - the IRA would have made an invaluable
ally."
   "Wasn't the IRA about fighting oppression?" Katze said. Her
voice was steadier now.
   "Originally, yes. But the same applies to the Mafia, the ETA,
and the Union Corse. It may even apply to Galactor - Sharkey, do
you know anything about Galactor's origins?"
   "As far as I know, it's always been a criminal organization.
Close connections to the Mafia, but I don't know who set it up. Had
its own scientists, its own resources, sometimes its own shops and
factories... I can't imagine what their actual aim was. If it was
simply crime, they certainly took their job seriously."
   "And it was like that even before the Selectran came?"
   "Yes."
   "Sounds like a sect to me," Rayek said quietly. "That would
explain why they tried to contact creatures from outer space."
   "Not to mention the crummy name," Win added. "Galactor, indeed."
   "A sect? What would sects have to do with crime and terrorism?"
   Rayek laughed wryly. "If this had been last century, I would
have asked: have you ever heard of Scientology?"
   "Here's a more contemporary example," Win said. "These Second
Coming loons. And they're not new, either. Only with Galactor
causing so much damage, there's little room left for other people's
nasty activities. One could say that Galactor serves to centralize
evil."
   "Certainly makes our job easier... To come back to Scientology,
they had a centre for drug addicts - supposedly to cure their
addiction, in fact to brainwash them - called Organon. Apart from
the original meaning of the name, does that sound like anything you
know?" Katze shuddered.
   "And what did they tell you? That it was part of your training?"
She nodded. Joe could feel her muscles tensing. Rayek rose to put
a hand on her head, and she relaxed.
   "I suppose you're right," she said. "I... I never thought about
it like that."

Despite the fact that she had spent most of the day laughing, she
was down-hearted as they settled between the sheets. Joe decided
not to bother her that night.
   "So now you saw my friends.
   "Weird bunch."
   "We freaks tend to stick together."
   "You're not a freak."
   "Yes I am." Yes, in the eyes of the world, s/he was. No good
arguing the point.
   "Will I be seeing them again?"
   "Probably. They're staying for another month or so. Did you like
them?"
   "Uh-huh. That Angel guy was all over you, though."
   "That's just his way of being friendly. Take no notice."
   "What's the matter? You look down."
   "Nothing. Memories."
   "Her name was Kai, right?"
   "Yes. So now you know." She curled up in her habitual position,
but, he noticed, did not wrap her limbs around him as usual. He
strongly sensed that she wanted him to go away so she could indulge
in some private memories. Part of him was sympathetic, another part
balked angrily at being kept out: first her in-jokes with her
fellow ex-Galactors, and now all these last-century gags with the
aliens, or whatever they were. Underlying both was a deep fear of
losing her. The vital question lay urgently on his tongue, but he
know that now, of all times, was not the moment to ask. Finally
giving in to his anxiety, he asked it in a modified version.
   "Did you like her better than me?"
   Silence. He hadn't really expected a reply. He pulled the
blankets up to his chin and prepared to sleep. Her answer caught
him by surprise.
   "She had a brain."
   "Hey, I try."
   "I know."
   He prepared to go to sleep again. After a while, she startled
him by convulsively doubling up and turning away from him. He
reached out to take her arm. She shrank away from the touch, but he
held firm. He could hear her teeth chattering. Pulling her against
him, the ridges of her spine sharp against his chest, he stroked
her neck and shoulder until she relaxed a little, and the
chattering became less and disappeared.
   "What is it?"
   "It's nothing. Just nerves."
   He resigned himself to the lie. She would tell him in her own
good time. He lay his head against the back of her neck.
   Unexpectedly, she started talking, in a voice thick with hate;
she had decided to let him in on this particular secret. "The first
time they wanted to kill me, I was knifed in the throat. So then I
Changed into a girl, with all the possibilities that that offers.
Next, I was gutted, and I turned back into a boy. When they tired
of that, they broke my ribs to make me Change again. They had
endless fun with me," she concluded bitterly.
    Joe's blood ran cold.

                            *   *   *

Joe decided to call Stanley. Stanley was out. Of course. Monday
morning. He left a message on the answering machine to the effect
that he wanted to talk about the Hunt case and hung up. He'd have
to wait for Wednesday, or see if he could find Brace. What he
really wanted was to see her files, but he knew that the
possibility of that happening was about as great as the possibility
of Nambu joining Galactor.
   Katze, too, was out. Or she was simply not answering the phone.
His suspicion of the latter was confirmed when he called in at
Design and Construction and found she had recently submitted some
work. She didn't want to see him. Possibly her last confession had
frightened her. He considered returning the diaries to her. After
all, they were hers by right.
   There was nothing much of interest in them. Mostly moans and
bitches about the unfairness of X, the stupidity of subordinates
and the impossibility of fulfilling the task set to hir, with the
occasional hint of wanting to throw in the sponge. A total and
chilling disregard for any suffering caused, but, Joe thought, in
view of what he had just heard it was barely surprising. Some
surprisingly mundane matters, frequent mention of drugs and
medicine. Repeated references to a woman who was the only efficient
person in the whole bloody organization. These references had
fascinated him at one time, but now it was nothing he didn't know.
He would have liked to draw out from Katze every little detail
about her. One thing was quite clear from the diaries: the leader
of Galactor had not been a happy person.
   He sighed and called the other number, intending to leave a
final message and then just give up. Yes, the answering machine
again: "...not here at the moment, so if you'll leave your name,
number and a message..." He waited for the tone and launched into
his message without introducing himself. "Where the hell are you?
I've been hanging around and calling you for three days now. You
don't have to hide from me. If there's a problem, we can just talk
about it, okay? Dammit, I love you." He hung up.
   He was absent-minded during the workout, almost to the point of
failing; fortunately, his fighter's reflexes were strong. Without
thinking, he mowed the dummies down, crushed them. "When they tired
of that, they broke my ribs..."
   "What's the matter with you, Joe?" Jinpei asked impatiently.
"You missed five times in a row, and now you're taking ages over
the hand-to-hand combat simulation."
   "Am I? Sorry, didn't realize," Joe said unthinkingly, quickly
finishing off his remaining opponents.
   "Now I really wonder what's the matter with him," Jinpei mouthed
sideways to Ken. Ken nodded. "When did you get into the habit of
apologizing, Joe?"
   "When I found out that not apologizing means a night on the
couch," Joe quipped. He sniggered at the queer look Ken gave him.
Katze would have been proud to hear him, he thought.
   "All right, that'll do. Try to be a bit sharper on the mark next
time. If those had been real Galactors..." Ken didn't finish the
sentence.
   Joe was glad to leave the team and collapse in the trailer. His
mind was in a turmoil. He had intended to wait until she re-opened
communication, but found he couldn't. He'd go to her house tonight,
and enter regardless of whether she answered the door or not. And
if she was absent, he would wait for her. And if she was crying,
hysterical or simply catatonic, he would bear with it. Just so long
as he could see her again.
   While he was driving towards his objective, Katze sat on the bed
hollow-eyed, undergoing flashbacks. Some of these had never been
wiped from hir mind. After all, they served to keep hir docile.
S/he had repressed them hirself, because to remember them in full
would mean insanity. S/he shook under their impact, gritting hir
teeth with pain.
   The memories of violence receded, and gave way to the other
memories elicited by the hand-written pages under hir hands. These
were happier, but more insidious, poisoned by the knowledge that
the end would not be a happy one. The radio. The futile attempt at
flight, but at least someone had helped hir. Clinging to a cold
body that curled up tightly under the blankets like a sleeping
dormouse. The crowing, insane laugh and the maniacal eyes when she
was onto one of her little schemes. Not truly insane; to Ceiran
Morag Maragorm, the whole world was one big joke, and she wasn't
going to yield it the satisfaction of taking it seriously. Her
quiet efficiency and supportiveness. Her public workaday
expression, bland and unexpressive with a repelling stare from
those big eyes, swimming behind the lenses. Nothing could faze her,
not even the Overlord. And yet, the warm smile she gave hir when
they were alone, the choked little cries she made in her sleep,
asking for protection. "If you wanted protection, you should have
stayed away from me..."
   And then, finally, the memory broke through that s/he had been
waiting for, digging for it and trying at the same time to hold it
back. Of Kai, upright and unmoving, with a small round hole in her
forehead, her face blank and reproachful as it had been in life. As
if she could open her mouth at any minute. As if she could live
again. Katze doubled up in the agony of remembrance, hitting the
mattress with one fist. "If you knew... Why didn't you tell me...
Why didn't you tell me..."
   Joe drew up outside the gate. Dusk had fallen, and he could see
clearly that the bedroom window was lit. Suspecting that she might
not open to him if he rang, he unlocked the door and entered
quietly, listening for signs of life.
   Blind and deaf to all except the overwhelming image of Kai with
the hole in her forehead, dead, horribly and undeniably and
permanently dead, s/he heard neither the engine switch off, nor the
gate clang, nor the key turn in the lock. Now other memories were
being released of similar deaths, other faces superimposed
themselves on hers, with other names and other histories. All they
had in common was that, at some point in their lives, they had
meant more to hir than life itself. "I am more lethal to my
friends..."
   Joe stiffened as the muted sobbing overhead changed to nerve-
shattering screams. Diving into the kitchen to grab the pills from
the drawer, he ran upstairs, memorizing Stanley's number and hoping
there wouldn't be a fight.
   He found her convulsed on the bed, her face pressed down against
the mattress. The cardboard box lay opened on the bed with two
handwritten volumes beside it, one opened; more diaries of hers?
The handwriting looked illegible enough. A necklace of glowing
stones trailed from the box. Dropping to his knees by the bed, he
carefully touched the back of her head.
   Electrified, she bounded to the other side of the bed, snarling.
Red with crying, her eyes blazed through the tangled hair that hung
over her face as if lit from inside. Not sure of how rational she
was, Joe extended a hand to her without speaking.
   "Go away!!" she shouted at him hoarsely, her teeth bared and her
fingers flexed like claws. He was not frightened, although he knew
he had to be careful; instead, a deep pity welled up from inside
him, and he reached across the bed to embrace her. Instantly, he
was pushed into the mattress by the weight on his shoulders as she
vaulted over him and ran off to the computer room. He ran after
her, but she had already locked the door. He knocked.
   "Go away!!" a voice yelled on the other side. She was starting
to cry again. Joe considered breaking down the door, but refrained
because of the effect it might have on her. Resigned, he returned
downstairs to see if there was anything in the fridge. His nerves
had been too tense to allow him to eat before he came, but now his
stomach was raging. He passed the telephone and noticed the light
on the answering machine was still blinking. After warming up some
leftover rice for himself, he went back to the door of the computer
room with two blankets and a pillow. He heard nothing now but a
quiet, subdued sobbing. Tentatively, he knocked. As he had
expected, no answer. The door was still locked, too.
   "Look, when you're feeling better we'll talk about it, okay?" he
said to the door. "I'll be waiting outside." He made himself as
comfortable on the floor as he could with the pillow and blankets
and fell asleep through the sound of crying, confident that he
would wake up when she emerged.
   When he awoke next morning, the sun was shining in through the
windows, the door was standing open, and the computer room was
empty.

She wasn't at the lab. Or with any of the others, who expressed
horror at the suggestion anyway. Nambu hadn't sent her anywhere. In
desperation, he called Stanley. The answering machine went through
its little routine. "...not in right now, but if you..." He waited
impatiently for the tone, and started off:
   "This is Joe Asakura and you know my number. Have you seen Hunt
lately? Because I haven't, and I'm worried. She's--" "Yes?"
Stanley's voice interrupted him.
   "Stanley?"
   "I just came in and happened to hear you. I have to leave again
straight away, but what is it you wanted to say about Hunt?"
   "She's going off at the deep end," Joe said desperately. "She
had a fit yesterday, and locked herself in a room. This morning she
was gone."
   "I wouldn't worry if I were you. She's managed to survive for
over thirty years in adverse conditions, she'll live. Do you know
where she is right now?"
   "No. And neither does anyone else."
   "In ISO, you mean. Her life isn't restricted to the ISO, you
know."
   "Please, can you help me? I have to find her."
   "Why?"
   "Because I'm worried something'll happen to her... and..." It
was no good lying to Stanley. "I'm afraid she's going to dump me."
   "Well, if she is, your running after her won't prevent it."
   "All the same, I want to see her. If she's in a bad way, I want
to be with her. Even if I can't do anything for her. I don't want
her to be alone..."
   "Joe. Can I trust you?"
   "Yes."
   "I can give you three addresses. They belong to people in
hiding, and must never be passed on to Nambu or anyone else. You
might find her there."
   "Thanks, Stan."
   "And don't identify with her too closely. Don't forget she has
her own life, and you have yours. Don't run away from your own
problems by obsessively focusing on other people's. Can I rely on
you to do that?"
   "Yes."
   "Good. Now listen..." Stanley gave him the addresses, which were
all somewhere around Tokyo, bade him goodbye, and hung up. He had
scribbled them on the handy notepad which always lay beside the
phone. Tearing off the top leaf, be noticed that the light on
Katze's answering machine was no longer blinking. That meant she
must at least have heard his message.
   If it still mattered to her. Carefully he locked, bolted and
activated all the necessary mechanisms, before tearing off in his
car.
   The first address led him to a little apartment somewhere in the
centre of Tokyo. Whoever was occupying it was out. Joe swore.
   The second address was of a house in the suburbs. Two children,
Asiatic-looking but definitely not Japanese, were playing with a
baseball bat in the scruffy garden. When he walked up to the front
door, they stopped and stared with guarded eyes; a boy and a girl
of approximately eleven and thirteen. They had round faces, flat
noses and swarthy skins.
   "Mum's out," the girl said in a voice both hesitant and hostile.
Joe decided to try anyway.
   "I'm looking for someone called Hunt," he said. "Someone told me
she might be at this address."
   The children exchanged looks. "He's looking for Hunt. What do
you want from her?" the girl asked with a surly expression. She was
tightly gripping the bat she held, Joe noticed.
   "I'm a friend. I'm from ISO," he tried. "My name's Joe. She
might have mentioned me."
   At the mention of his name, the children relaxed. "She hardly
ever comes here. But if you leave a message, mum'll pass it on to
her."
   Joe thought for a moment. "Just tell her that Joe called, and
would she please get in touch. Okay?" The children nodded. As he
left, he could hear the game starting again.
   The third address led him back into the city centre. He parked
his car and walked up to the appropriate floor to get rid of his
nervous energy. As he rang, he prayed that someone would be in.
   The door was opened by Rayek.
   "Come in, Joe. You want to know where Sharkey is, I suppose?"

   "How did you know I would be coming?" Joe asked. Win and Angel
were absent; Rayek had stayed behind on purpose to receive the
expected visitor.
   "Well, when Sharkey said she'd given you the slip, it needed no
precog to know you'd be following. Let me guess - Stanley gave you
the address, right?"
   "Gave me three, actually. Told me not to show them to anyone
else."
   "Too right," Rayek said, looking at the scribbles on the note.
"We don't have much to fear, but the other two are in the
unenviable position of being wanted by both the UN and Galactor.
More tea?" Rayek had prepared some sort of herbal brew for him. It
had a very soothing effect. Katze was out with Brace somewhere,
but, Rayek had said, she would be home again in the evening. Having
got over the worst of his anxiety, Joe found that he was tired.
   "What was she like, when you saw her?"
   "Upset. She had a good cry, and we calmed her down a little. You
know what this is all about, don't you?"
   "I know she killed this Kai woman," Joe hazarded. "She gave the
order or something, without knowing."
   "She actually gave the order to Kai herself, to be passed on to
the Assassin squad. Kai faxed her a letter just before she was
shot. She rushed out to the station, just in time to see Kai's
corpse. That's what she's currently remembering."
   Joe stared into his teacup. "I think I know what she feels
like."
   "Yes, I'd say you do." Rayek finished his own tea, and poured
himself some more. "You're fond of her, aren't you?"
   "I love her."
   "Despite the fact that she killed your parents?"
   "She didn't."
   "Well, I'm glad that's cleared up at last."
   "I hated her because there were a lot of things I didn't know
about her," Joe said. Music played softly in the background. Joe
suddenly noticed the lyrics: `Don't answer me - don't break the
silence - don't let me win... Don't answer me - stay on your island
- don't let me in... Run away and hide from everyone... Can we
change the things we've said and done...'
   Seeing his interest, Rayek said: "That's a recording of a live
concert, last century, by a sympho-band, an old favourite of
ours... Sharkey likes it. The quality's quite good, want a copy?"
   Joe nodded. "Tell me... How did you get involved with her?"
   "Purely by coincidence. Our fellow-observers reported the
appearance of an alien life-form travelling by quantum leap, and,
since there are numerous natural quantum gates between our world
and Earth, we had to know if there was any chance of it coming to
us, and if so, how to defeat it. As it turned out, we had nothing
to fear, but in the course of our investigations, we hit upon this
poor mangled human programmed to act as a go-between. We contacted
it, and found that, despite its twisted nature, it was actually
incredibly intelligent. Not to mention delightfully witty. So we
decided that we would sustain the contact."
   "On a chatserver called Darkest Heart."
   "Not actually a chatserver, but it convincingly posed as one.
Yes. We tried to offer her an environment outside of Galactor,
hoping that the element of choice, and the chance to display a more
natural behaviour, would give her the impetus needed to free
herself. Unfortunately, it took a failed suicide."
   "What was it named after again?" Joe said. "Your sister told me,
but I forgot."
   Rayek emitted a number of floating vocals interspersed with
throaty sounds and chittering; it was a few moments before Joe
realized he had been listening to speech. "Literally translated:
truth only lives in the darkest heart. A more correct translation
would be something like: there are no lies on the level of the
subconscious. Because the subconscious can't handle lies," Rayek
said. "If you impose lies on it, the result is insanity."
   "In vino veritas, eh?" Joe tried. He did know some Latin.
   "Actually, that's not a bad comparison. Yes, you're quite right.
It's the same principle as the truth serum."
   Joe sipped tea and thought. He'd been doing a lot of thinking
lately. "So... you were actually trying to help her."
   "As were many others. Sharkey is the kind of person who attracts
helpers. Unfortunately, the metaphor of the moth and the candle
flame also applies."
   Joe didn't get it.
   "Most of the people who tried to help her, died trying."
   "I know. She told me."
   "Creating in her mind a strong conviction that she was harmful
to people. Which she was, up to a point - I'm not blind to what she
did. But I knew who, or rather what, was behind it."
   "And as long as that thing existed, it was useless to try and
help her," Joe responded gloomily. "I know."
   "Of course, if you get your heart blasted out trying to destroy
it, that would only reinforce her belief," Rayek said calmly. Joe
stared.
   "What *don't* you know?" he demanded.
   "I don't have to investigate much. I'm psychic. People usually
tell me what I want to know of their own accord, frequently without
being aware of it."
   "You mess with other people's minds?" Katze had explained to Joe
what X could do to people's minds.
   "Preferably not. I just tune in," Rayek smiled. "I can, however,
stabilize the bio-energetic field of a person, which does much to
balance the psyche. Incidentally, the worst thing about rape is
that it leaves the bio-energetic field in tatters. Even if there is
no visible physical damage."
   Joe shivered. The remark of that fateful night four days ago
came to him. Just what had happened to her?
   "You want to know what exactly happened, don't you?" Joe nodded.
"She'll tell you when she's ready for it."
   "That's more or less what I thought." Joe yawned. Before going
to her house tonight, he was definitely going to take a nap.
   "Brace was there. Still, you wouldn't get anything out of him if
you tortured him." Joe grinned.
   At Joe's request, Rayek played some old Monty Python to him - he
had all the records, and some related things that Joe had never
heard of. He laughed at the Gorilla Sketch in its original form,
and Rayek turned off the tape briefly to explain the reference to
"Life of Brian", a Monty Python film parodying the life of Christ,
- "a concept I'm sure you will be familiar with, being Italian," -
in a sketch where fictitious Python-worshippers protested against
the supposedly scurrilous film "Life of Christ". "Do you know hard
it was? How often the sketches failed?" Murmurs of sympathy and
assent. "I mean, this man *died* for us! Frequently!"

With the old diaries tucked under his arm, he flew over to her
house in Birdstyle. He didn't feel like taking the car, and after
the past few days, he didn't expect to see her; he would just leave
them in the living room with a note and wait for her to call him.
It was dark, being about eleven - he had slept longer than he
intended - and to a casual observer he would be no more than a
black form flying; a bird, maybe. He flew as the crow does - in a
straight line - and was considering, in a moment of humour,
alighting at her bedroom window, when he noticed a number of cars
standing around her house. His stomach tightened. UN officials
visiting? It had to be, as he couldn't imagine Galactor breaking in
like this, and there was no sign of a fight going on. The
downstairs windows were lit, and the gate was open. At night, this
was most unusual.
   Worried, and knowing she was in no state to receive visitors, he
descended over the roof and dropped down to the level of the living
room window, noticing the white enamel of Grey Hunter's empty dish
below him as he did so. He balanced himself on the narrow upper
lintel and, using his powers of levitation to steady himself, bent
down to peer through a chink between the gauze curtain and the wall
to get a clear view.
   Inside, he saw a group of nine or ten people of Asian and
European descent sitting in a rough circle formed by the chairs,
the sofa and a mattress that had been conveniently dropped on the
ground and covered with a blanket. Glasses, plates and bowls of
crisps covered the table and floor. He recognized Brace and Eric,
Angel and the twins. Standing their midst, like a princess
surrounded by her court, was Katze, talking and smoking and
laughing at the remarks of her listeners. She was wearing make-up
and a sleek black dress with lacy cutouts on the arms and
shoulders, and she seemed to be in a good mood.
   "I hear a Condor hovering at your window," Win said, without
looking up. Katze glanced round and up until she saw him. She
smiled, motioning him round to the front door.
   He had not yet detransmuted when the door opened. "Joe! You
came!" She hugged him, almost making him drop the books.
   "I've been looking all over for you," he said, entering. "What's
going on? Who are all these people?"
   "It's my birthday, silly."
   "Your birthday??"
   "Yep," added Win, who had followed her. "This is the day our
beloved mutant slithered out of the test tube."
   "Oh, I never! I passed through gestation the normal way."
   "I always love the way you bite. Need any help getting the hook
out of your mouth?" Katze whacked her. "Oooo, that was nice! Do it
again!"
   "Your *birthday*?" he repeated in amazement, while Win scampered
off. Her birthday. Of course. He had never thought of that.
   "Come in, my little piglet, so I can introduce you. What's that
you're holding?"
   "`Piglet'?"
   "It gets weirder all the time, doesn't it? I'll be calling you
amoeba next. Do you want to come in like this, or change first?"
   "I'll change. Just a sec." He detransmuted, and she led him by
the arm into the living room, where all faces were now turned
towards him.
   "Bonjour, cochonnet," Win said innocently. Angel smacked her.
Joe took stock of the other visitors. In addition to Brace and
Eric, there were three women: a Japanese woman kneeling on the
mattress, a tall, imposing Sicilian with jet-black hair drawn back
tightly into a ponytail, and a short broad woman with a round, dark
face, heavy red make-up and a don't-fuck-with-me expression whose
nationality he could not guess. They were all dressed in their
respective Sunday best, the Japanese woman even wearing a kimono.
Katze introduced them as Ms Nekobi, Ms Conti and Lenore. The only
other man in the room was an inscrutable Chinese type with wrinkles
around the eyes and cheekbones; the man she had referred to as
"probably Wu". Briefly she pointed out what their functions had
been: Nekobi, Conti and Wu had been members of her private
entourage, as had Eric and Brace, although Conti had received
Assassin training; she had been a high-ranking Galactor official
generally, due to her father's position, and one of Katze's foster
sisters during hir training on B.C. Island. Together with Brace,
she was one of the few members of Katze's escort to have committed
acts of violence in the course of duty. Lenore was a former Masked
Assassin who had signed on voluntarily, worked her way up to the
top and then escaped; apart from Brace, she was the only friend of
Katze's to be currently living in Japan. All the others had come by
boat or aeroplane.
   "Oh, by the way, I got your message," Katze said to Joe, and the
woman called Lenore winked at him. He frowned, then recalled the
children at the second address. Hers? She looked thirty, possibly
thirty-five - with that flat, foreign face of her, it was hard to
tell - and the eldest of the children had been at least twelve. Joe
counted back, and found that they might be.
   "So now you saw my garden," she grinned. "What a mess, eh? I get
no end of dirty looks from the neighbours."
   "Stuff your neighbours," Katze supported her. "Stupid Japs."
   "And who's this?" Conti said, turning her attention to the now
detransmuted Joe. Standing almost as tall as Katze, but far more
generously endowed, she was the only ex-aide present not oozing
with discretion, emanating instead the arrogant self-assurance of
those born and raised in higher circles. Eric opened his mouth, but
Katze shushed him. Standing behind Joe, she smoothed down his hair
in an imitation of a short haircut with a parting to one side.
"Guess."
   The Sicilian woman fixed him with a thoughtful, penetrating
stare. Joe had thought her to be twenty-five or so, but now,
spotting the fine lines on her forehead, he cranked up his estimate
to at least thirty. Still, with her flashing eyes, full lips and
coal-black eyebrows, she was a resplendent sight. He judged her to
be single. A look of comprehension spread over her face as her
brain made the connection, and with a wide smile she rushed
forwards to embrace him.
   "It's Giuseppe's kid!!"
   "You knew my father?" Joe asked, almost dropping the books for
the second time.
   "Did I know him? Who didn't know him? He was one of the top! And
what about you, do you know me?"
   The name Conti stirred vague memories, but he couldn't place
her. "Never mind. It was a long time ago. You were probably too
young. Conti, Asakura and Catalina - what a gang. Those were the
days." Katze grimaced. "Oh, sorry, I forgot - you didn't get on
with him very well."
   "He wasn't too bad... No, the one I really hated was Bergmann."
Her eyes narrowed dramatically, and her voice dropped to a low and
venomous tone. "He *used* me."
   "Made him think he was his real father," Win slipped to Joe by
way of explanation.
   "Everyone and his *dog* used you," Lenore affirmed in the same
tone, and Angel put an arm around the short woman to express his
solidarity. There was nodding all around.
   "Who was your father, anyway?" Joe tried.
   "Some lab rat. Never mind." She made a dismissive gesture. "This
is supposed to be a party. Care to drop your stuff and join us?"
   She led him into the circle and seated him on the couch between
Win and Wu. The Japanese woman rose, bowed to him and asked him
what he wanted to drink.
   "What have you got?"
   She rattled off a list of beverages, mostly alcoholic, and he
settled for beer. While she walked off to the kitchen, Win
continued her conversation with Wu. She was clad in her usual tan
leather bodystocking plus baggy jacket to obscure her hump, even,
Joe noticed, with the customary knife dangling from her belt. Wu
was wearing the same three-piece suit as Brace and Eric, but
somehow it looked odd on him. "So how did a Taoist monk get to be
a Galactor?"
   "It's a long story," the wrinkled face replied, modestly
inclining itself. Joe received his beer and took a sip, taking care
not to spill a drop on the diaries laid across his knees. It
appeared that the government of former world power China had
decided, at some point after the Third World War, to come down
heavily on the small, but independent Taoist communities spread
throughout the country. His monastery had been destroyed and great
numbers of believers taken off to political camps to be "reformed".
He had escaped from a transport and been enrolled in a group of
revolutionary guerrillas called "The Path of Light".
   "Which was, of course, a cover organization for Galactor," Win
supplied. "It's just the Jupiter Ninjas all over again, isn't it?"
Wu - his nickname was taken from the Taoist motto "to do by not
doing" - was too philosophical, as well as too highly trained, to
be put to combat uses, reserved instead for the training of new
recruits, to whom he was to transmit his fighting skills, though
not his wisdom. This was a frustrating position - although he
accepted it with his usual stoicism, and calm faith that balance
would reassert itself - and he gladly accepted Katze's offer of a
place in his personal escort, when Katze discovered he was
discrete, trustworthy, and unaffected by material considerations.
"Couldn't believe it at first," Katze put in. "I thought he was
either kidding me or stark raving nuts. Which went well with my own
state of mind, of course."
   Eric and Nekobi - Katze called her Neko - had joined
voluntarily, though not entirely without reason. Eric grew up as
the third child of a formerly upper class family in the
impoverished post-war Lowlands of Scotland, trying to reconcile an
education with constant threats of eviction and an eternally
gnawing stomach. "We didn't feel the UN was doing much for us," he
explained with an apologetic smile. Totally unsuited to military
occupations, he worked his way up in the civilian ranks, catching
Katze's eye by the unassuming and inconspicuous way in which he
tried to maintain his public school values within the organism of
Galactor. A brilliant student in engineering, Nekobi - it was her
maiden name - had been forced to interrupt her studies to be more
or less married off to a husband who was less than attentive to her
desires. Galactor had basically offered to take care of the
divorce.
   "Made her fetch and carry like a slave, him and his brats,"
Katze said contemptuously.
   "You have children?" Joe wanted to know.
   "Two," Nekobi replied with lowered eyes and the politest of
smiles, using all the humblest forms of address. "They were
eliminated by Galactor along with their father. I didn't miss
them." Joe shivered.
   "I didn't want mine either," Lenore agreed with her. "But
they're here now, and I like them. As long as they don't piss me
off, I won't hold it against them." "I don't want children," Conti
said, confirming Joe's suspicions. "I hate them." "Oh, me too,"
Katze seconded her. None of the men commented.
   "I'd like children," Joe ventured hesitantly. Katze laughed, and
pinched his cheek. "In that case, you've got a problem. Don't
worry, so does Brace."
   "You want children??" Joe asked the towering hulk with the
neatly combed thatch of black hair. Brace shrugged, replying in a
voice that, as always, seemed far too diminutive for his size.
"Wouldn't mind one or two."
   "Unfortunately, his wishes were not taken into account when he
was marked up for the position of harem bodyguard," Katze said in
a wry tone. "Galactor was never an organization to pay much
attention to personal wishes."
   "We were the luckiest by far," Conti agreed.
   "What about you?" Lenore asked, with a forwardness he would have
found disconcerting in a woman, if he hadn't been Italian and used
to Katze. "Weren't you the Condor?"
   "Still is," Katze said, running a loving hand through his hair.
   "Currently fighting the new mutant," said Rayek in a voice so
perfectly level and controlled that its height could barely be
established. Joe had listened carefully this time, and decided that
the boy had a deeper voice than Brace; but not much deeper. "And
saving Sharkey's butt," Win added. "In a sense, he's back where he
started. You're all behind the same line again."
   Lenore looked blank. "He was a Galactor," Conti explained in her
deep, sensual, sardonic voice, casting an amused glance at Joe. "I
knew his parents. Ironically, he ended up with Gatchaman, vowing,
I believe more than once, to destroy us, and being very nasty to
Katze-sama in the process. However, he befriended Galactors at
least twice without knowing it - young Assassins, of course - and
now he's back with us again, returned into the very arms of
Galactor's number one; who, ironically, ended up with Gatchaman. A
beautifully structured tale, don't you think?"
   "Not to mention the fact that the Assassins he was thick with
usually wanted to escape, too," Katze added. "Yes, he was always
caught in the crossfire. Still, he was never an actual Galactor. He
was too young when his parents died, although I remember la
Catalina was ordered to kill him along with them. A very careless
job, fortunately. Not that I was any better," she added. "No matter
what I did, I never quite succeeded in killing him; and I had ample
opportunity. I suppose I didn't really want to. Maybe Fate intended
us to be together from the start."
   "You two were definitely made for each other," Win agreed.
Brace, Eric and, surprisingly, the Japanese woman nodded. Joe
finished his beer, and grinned at her. "I guess you had a crush on
me all along, huh?"
   "Even before I Changed," Katze said airily, and activated the
stopwatch function on her heavy wristwatch. There was a brief
silence.
   "Katze, you pervert!!!" Joe burst out. She punched the stopwatch
button and twisted her wrist to look. "Fourteen seconds. Very good,
Asakura." The whole room laughed.
   Bemused, Joe turned his mind back to the past. No, he had never
liked Katze in hir Galactor days, in either form; the Galactor
woman captain had struck him as a heartless bitch, whereas the
alternately whining and gloating leader of Galactor had woken only
a blind fury in him that was almost intimate in its intensity. But
it had nothing to do with love. He hated Katze for having killed
his parents, but, more importantly, for being a coward with no
self-respect, a prey to the fluctuations of his moods, an idiot, a
petty tyrant with no dignity. What little poise he had resided in
his physique, his breath-taking jumps out of risky situations, the
way he streaked down corridors towards hidden escape hatches to
save himself. There was beauty there. But it was dumb and wordless,
and the moment he opened his mouth all the hatred returned.
   How different he had been when they met at Rafael's. The usual
girl - also a cyborg, he found later - being absent, it was the
tall man with the long face and the braid who carried the tray to
his sickbed. Joe resolved not to take a single bite while Katze was
there.
   After putting the tray on his lap, Katze leant against the door,
arms crossed. "What are you waiting for? Why are you looking at
me?"
   "I want to see how much of that you'll keep down." A grin. Was
he serious? There was no telling. "Of course, I poisoned the whole
lot first. Anyway, you're not hungry, so I'll just take it away
now." Joe, who was very hungry, grabbed Katze's wrist as he made to
pick the tray up. "No you don't!!" Somehow Katze had ended up
feeding him. When the plate was empty, he gave Joe's hair a quick
ruffle. "Good boy." Joe glared at him, he smiled back with the
satisfaction of a fox who has just succeeded in carrying off a
chicken, and Joe broke into a laugh that hurt his newly operated
insides. His face twisted with pain. Concerned, Katze put a hand on
his stomach to calm him.
   "So you liked me even when you were still in Galactor?" Joe
pursued.
   "Ain't tellin'! Especially not after the way you just reacted,"
she returned. The whole room laughed again. "Well, if you really
want to know, I thought you had guts. Pity most of them had to be
replaced."
   "I thought you were a right bastard until I read these," Joe
said softly. "I found them at Rafael's. Here, they're yours. Take
them." He held out the old diaries. Her eyes widened in surprise,
then narrowed in scrutiny.
   "Mine?"
   She took them and opened the top one. "Yep, illegible. Must be
mine." More laughter. She shut it again, and pressed both volumes
to her chest, closing her eyes. "Thanks, Joe. That's the best
present you could have given me."
   "Um, we still haven't given you our presents yet," Win said.
   "Yeah, Win, why didn't you give her the presents yet?" Lenore
challenged her.
   "Hey, gimme a break! We only just got here before the Condor
barged in!"
   "I want my prezzies!!" Katze said in a deliberately childish
voice, stamping one foot. "I want my *prezzies*!!" Win imitated
with the same intonation, but with the voice of Gel Sadra. Everyone
laughed.
   "Yeah, catch anyone throwing a party for Gel Sadra," Conti said
contemptously. Lenore and Eric nodded in support.
   "I feel sorry for her," Katze said in a low voice. "I shouldn't,
I know, not the way she's been carrying on. But I do. I know how
she must be feeling."
   "At least she skipped training, ma'am," Brace reminded her.
   "Yes, it shows..." Her head dropped. Brace and Angel
simultaneously rose to put a consoling arm around her. Win
approached her with a flat, wide cardboard box. "Prezzies?" she
inquired.
   Katze lifted her head, smiling again. "All right, let's see what
you've got. That's a big box," she remarked, taking the box from
Win.
   "That's because there's lots inside. Go look."
   The box contained a total of five framed portraits, done in
oils. She lifted them out one by one. The top one was a portrait of
otoko-Katze without the mask, and with a serious, abstracted
expression that lent a strange beauty to his face. Mountains rose
behind him, and the long hair cascading over the shoulders seemed
to catch the sunlight.
   "I love oil paint," Win said to Joe, who was standing at Katze's
side to view the picture she was holding. "Gives great effects.
Pity it takes so long to dry. He's always moaning about how ugly he
is, so I thought I'd set him right. What do you think?"
   "You did this?" Joe asked in amazement.
   "I did all the pictures in this house. Hey, check out the rest."
   Katze held up the second one to look at it. It was Brace, with
the same lofty expression, against a background of white houses and
a wide blue bay. Joe stole a glance at the real thing; he had never
thought of Brace as handsome, but the picture was a very flattering
one. Next came Lenore, with her hair braided in a crown on her
defiantly raised head, radiating a hostile pride. Once again, he
was struck by the beauty that the painting brought out in her.
Eric, a Gaelic saint with luminous eyes and a translucent face, set
against a dreary church in a street. And lastly, himself, in all
his brooding magnificence, each wavy hair on his dark head
seemingly painted separately.
   "This one's definitely going to be in the bedroom," Katze
sighed, holding it up at arm's length to admire it.
   "Sorry to have missed you out," Win apologized to Nekobi, Conti
and Wu. "I didn't know about you yet. I'll get round to it before
I leave." Angel came forward to present his gift. Katze unwrapped
it: two copied video tapes labelled "Hot Shots" and "Hot Shots II".
   "We had to convert them to the new format," Angel explained.
"But the quality isn't too bad. They're both parodies of twentieth-
century movies and there's all sorts of topical references which I
guess won't mean anything to you, but I'm sure you'll find a lot to
remind you of Galactor. Also, Jaana made a list of references for
either one, with explanations - they're inside the jackets." She
thanked, hugged and kissed him, and they exchanged smiles. Joe
wasn't sure he liked that. She didn't smile at him like that, not
unless she was under medication. Rayek advanced, bearing a box that
was even bigger than Win's. Katze lowered it to the ground and
knelt before it to open it. All eyes in the room were on her as she
twisted back the flaps of cardboard and revealed rows and rows of
cassettes, their backs all bearing the inscription "Radio Free
Galactor" and a number. She raised her eyes to Rayek, moisture
collecting on the eyelids. Joe could see the beads welling through
her lashes. "These... These are..."
   "Yes," Rayek said. "Unicorn Progress was Win's favourite. We
always listened in. We didn't catch all of the shows, due to bad
reception at times, but what we did, we recorded. These are the
master copies. They even include the final broadcast, put all the
way at the bottom of the box and closed with sellotape, so you
won't pop it into the cassette player by mistake if you don't want
to listen to it yet."
   "Kai..." Tears rolled over her cheeks as she embraced the box
like a living thing. "It was the closest we could do to bringing
her back to life," Win said. Rising from her kneeling position,
Katze lifted the box in her arms and carried it to the dining
table. When she stepped back into the circle, her face was
composed, and her eyes were dry.
   "Kai was deejay on an underground radio station," she explained
to Joe, who had been watching in surprise. "Unicorn Progress was
her nickname. She was rather critical of Sosai X, and he ordered
her to be eliminated. She knew it would happen, but she didn't
run." Joe nodded thoughtfully as the last pieces fell into place.
And this was the woman who had been responsible for the destruction
of Crescent Coral?
   "I never thought she would be like that," he said.
   "Shows what you know, doesn't it?" Katze countered, but not in
a hateful way. "Win, Rayek, thanks a bundle. You don't know how
much this means to me... No, actually, you do. Thanks."
   "Credit also goes to Angel for proposing it," Rayek added. Katze
extended her thanks to Angel.
   "No sweat, Sharkey. I love you." They exchanged looks of
tenderness. Joe was not thrilled.
   "I love you too," Win added. "So do I," Rayek said, with a hard
stare. "But, unlike some, I don't demand sexual favours on the
force of it." Surprisingly, his stare was directed not at Angel,
but at Win. Joe felt uncomfortably culpable, too.
   Win returned the stare. "That's a very crass thing to say at a
moment like this," she quietly replied. Katze rallied to her side
with a concerned expression, and Rayek made a gesture to express
that the subject was dropped. The guests sat down in their various
clusters, Katze placing herself on the mattress between Nekobi and
Lenore. The digital clock read 01:00, then 02:00 as discussions
sprang up in various languages between the different parties. Katze
involved her complete attache in an anecdote about the time s/he
had wilfully ignored an order by Sosai X; quite a courageous thing
to do. "So then I remembered the motto of my Taoist friend," she
indicated Wu, who instantly responded to his cue: "It is best to do
by not doing," "fortified by which excuse, I made my way down to
the audience chambers... and was bawled out." "Never ask the advice
of a Taoist monk," Win counselled her amidst the laughter that
followed. Joe couldn't think of any anecdotes from his personal
life that would interest anyone present, so he merely lounged in
his chair, listening, sipping his beer and wishing Katze would sit
next to him. When at last a hand slid over his shoulder, he
discovered it was Conti's.
   "Lonely?" she asked him, addressing him in his native tongue. He
found himself drawn into long reminiscences of his homeland, the
villages, the songs, the way the sea curled round your toes when
you walked on the beach barefoot close to the waterline. It had
been Katze's homeland for a year, when she had been Emilia Conti,
sister of Paola, Miranda and Vicente. Paola had been closest to her
in age and character, and they had enjoyed roughing it together on
solitary camping trips in the wild natural setting of the island.
Emilia had fallen to her supposed death while scaling a rock face
that proved too steep for her, but when Paola climbed down to
recover the body, she found instead an unconscious, but unharmed
"bello bellissimo" youth who bore an uncanny resemblance to Emilia.
Being right in the middle of hir female cycle, s/he had, of course,
soon Changed back, but from then on the two girls had another
secret to share.
   While listening to Conti, Joe caught occasional snatches of the
dialogue going on between the other guests. Win and Rayek were
involved in a deep discussion with Wu on the nature of Chi. Lenore
was discussing, of all things, decorative candles with Katze and
Eric. Apparently she was building up quite a collection. Nekobi
preferred ikebana, and offered to show them some of her folded
animals at a future visit. Brace had found a way to sit at Katze's
side without crowding everyone else off the mattress, and supported
her with one arm. From time to time she yawned. Angel was also
yawning. Leaning towards Brace, he started to talk about children
and the responsibility of raising them. An illegitimate child
himself, he had unwittingly made a girl pregnant at his first
contact, hearing about it only after she had moved out of town
after a violent break-up. "Hell, I was only sixteen, and she
probably had it aborted anyway, but sometimes I just wonder..."
   Katze had lowered her voice and spoke in rapid tones to Lenore,
who replied in what Joe thought might be Spanish. Whatever they
were saying was apparently of a very personal nature, for although
Lenore's broad countenance revealed nothing, he saw Katze's face
change from sad to wickedly gleeful, and back to sad again. No
wonder s/he'd had to wear a mask, he thought. Nekobi had slipped
into the kitchen to replenish everyone's drinks, and as she kneeled
on the mattress again, he saw Win and Rayek slip away in the same
direction. Katze excused herself to Lenore and followed them, and
Angel did the same with Brace. Joe decided to follow them, too;
Conti was chatting with Eric, anyway.
   "...crappy thing to say with everyone listening," he could hear
Win on entering. They were speaking too quietly to be heard in the
adjacent room, but their pronunciation was viciously clear and
distinct. Closing the door, Joe found himself next to Angel and
Katze, both with anxious faces. "God knows he's been humiliated
often enough."
   "Exactly my point," Rayek replied coldly. Joe couldn't guess
what they were talking about; something that had happened before he
and Katze had met?
   "Oh for Christ's sake!" Win snarled. "He's a consenting adult."
   "Victims of child abuse are *never* consenting adults. As you
*very* well know." There was a bite to his voice that Joe hadn't
heard before.
   "Look, I didn't force anything on him! He had a choice!!"
   "There is no choice except when based on self-respect."
   "Which is *exactly* what I was restoring."
   "Oh yes, by getting l--" Katze interposed herself, laying her
hands on Rayek's shoulders, while Angel similarly placated Win. Joe
had nowhere to move. Between the five of them, the kitchen was
becoming uncomfortably crowded. "Please, don't fight. It's all
right. Honest," she pleaded, looking Rayek straight in the eyes.
"It wasn't the usual deal." Rayek gazed back for a moment, then
finally said: "Very well. I respect your point of view."
   The tension relaxed. Grinning wickedly, Win prodded her brother
under the collarbone with her finger. "Yeah, you should trust me."
   "Jaana never trusts anything with tits," Angel grinned along
with her.
   "Makes a change to Joe," Katze remarked, reaching over Win to
grab Joe by the shoulder and pull him towards her. Win dodged
sideways as if pushed away by a current. Catching him in a
strangling embrace, Katze murmured: "Joe has a blind faith in
anything with tits - don't you, my darling? Especially if they're
on the side of the enemy..." She tangled her hands in his hair and
pulled his head back for a long, intoxicating kiss. Angel and the
twins smiled.
   Filing back to the living room, they were startled by the sound
of the doorbell. Looks were exchanged, and Conti drew a gun from a
holster on her hip that Joe hadn't even noticed. Caution was still
their rule number one.
   "Brace, would you please answer the door?" Katze said calmly.
   "Yes ma'am." He left the room, followed by Conti. When they
returned, they were accompanied by a stout woman in her fifties
wearing sensible clothes and shoes, her hair drawn into a tight bun
that showed silver strands among the brown. Like Lenore, she was
short and broad, with faintly Asiatic features; unlike Lenore, she
had a light, parchment-coloured skin, and prominent cheekbones.
Ethnically, Joe couldn't place her. "Ms Harkaanen, ma'am," Brace
announced.
   "Bell!!" Katze cried out, almost jumping over her other guests
to embrace her. "Oh, Bell, I'm so glad you came... I thought you'd
be mad at me for getting you into trouble again."
   "I wouldn't have missed this for anything in the world," the
woman called Bell replied, smiling until her face was as wrinkled
as Wu's. Joe couldn't place her accent, either. "You've changed,
Katze-sama."
   "Do you think so?"
   "You should have seen yourself only a year ago." Katze hugged
her again and led her to a chair, tossing a widely grinning Angel
out of it first. Win scrutinized Bell for a while before saying:
"You're from Finno-Ugria, aren't you?"
   "What used to be the Baltic Union - yes. They still call it that
in the Lithau area, for racist reasons." Bell, nicknamed after an
administering angel in a popular old anime soap, had been picked up
in a razzia at the age of sixteen while visiting a friend, and
forced to join Galactor. Miraculously escaping death and the
atrocities that sometimes befell new recruits, she had signed on as
a nurse and followed medical training in order to give some scope,
at least, to her nurturing talents. Ironically, she was transferred
to a Galactor base which was open to outsiders, a kind of brothel
for the rich, where she had to nurse the "employees", many of them
under age, back to health after they had undergone whatever
brutality had been practised on them. She was under orders to obey
blindly without interfering, but when, one day, employee number 26
was carried in screaming and bleeding from what was called the
"slash'em/bash'em" department, she had waited for the orderlies to
leave and then slipped behind the curtain to give him a shot of
Dimorfin. To her surprise, the fatally wounded boy changed under
her hands into a girl with not a scratch on her, who coolly
informed the nurse that this was part of her training, and thanked
her for the injection. The next day, Bell was called to a back room
and severely beaten for insubordination; she was beaten again when
number 26 escaped a few months later together with number 103,
under the suspicion of having aided their escape. Katze had hired
her as a personal aide as soon as he was in a position to do so,
and she became the most elusive member of his escort, avoiding his
presence as much as possible and usually travelling ahead of him to
the bases he visited to see that all was in order. She was
currently hiding in her own country, knowing that Galactor was
unlikely to come and look for her there. J. Hunt, testing engineer
at Design and Construction, had taken the risk of sending her a
letter which stated, among other things, that she now had an
employee number again, "a longer one this time."
   "If it wasn't for that stupid Gel Sadra, the overlord would have
forgotten all about me by now, and you could live in safety," Katze
said. "So what did you bring, Bell-chan?"
   "Knowing how much you like knives..." Bell extended a leather
sheath with a knife in it towards her, the protruding knife handle
richly carved. "A little souvenir from my birthplace. The handle is
made of reindeer bone." Katze drew out the knife; the blade was
sharp and flawless. "It's beautiful," she said, testing the blade's
edge. Balancing the knife in her hand, she practised a few stabs.
Joe followed the movement with his eyes as the hand darted like a
bird, graceful and deadly. The blade glimmered and shone like
mercury.
   "It's beautiful," she repeated, reinserting the knife in the
protective sheath. "Thanks. Well, you must have had a long journey.
Want anything to drink?" As Nekobi rose to do the honours, the
knife was passed around to Lenore, who liked it, Conti who went
orgasmic over it, Brace who approved it and Eric who didn't really
know what to think about it. Wu admired the craftsmanship, as did
Win and Angel.
   "This is a good knife for throwing," Win said. "Do you have a
dartboard?" Of course, she had no such thing in her house. "Never
mind. Do you have a square piece of board you can stick on the
wall? Or styrofoam or something?"
   "I've got a bit of board from the lab," Katze offered. "Just
packing material, so it's kind of soft. Want me to get it?"
   "And a felt tip, if you have one." Katze left. Joe could hear
her mount the stairs, unlock a door, rummage a bit and return. She
had not only fetched the board, but also pushed a hook into the
back of it. "Great." Win took both the board and the fat black felt
tip from her, and drew four concentric circles on the board, the
smallest one the size of a bullseye. On top of the outermost arc,
she wrote in block capitals: OUCH, on the next one ACK, then AAGH
and, curving over the bullseye, URGHHHH. At the top of the empty
space surrounding the circles, she added OOPS.
   "Just exactly *what* are you doing?" asked Katze, looking on
with raised eyebrows.
   "Making a Galactor dartboard, of course! Now, where do I hang
it?" Katze took down the picture of herself in "Rambo" mode that
hung over the dining table and hung the board on the nail instead,
then walked backwards as far as she could and took aim. She scored
one ack and two aaghs, but didn't hit the centre until her fourth
throw.
   "You're out of practice, bambina," Conti commented. "Here, let
me try." She hit the bullseye five times in a row, and when Brace's
turn came, the centre was mashed with cuts. Brace wasn't very
skilled with knives, but Lenore did better. Her score was almost as
high as Conti's. Angel declined, but Win hit the bullseye every
time.
   "She's cheating," Rayek said. "She's using psi."
   "Anyone aiming at something uses psi," Win countered. "It just
so happens that my abilities are rather more highly developed than
most people's." Katze and Conti both raised an inquiring eyebrow.
Offering to demonstrate, Win turned her back to the hanging board
and tossed the knife up into the air. It pointed itself forwards in
mid-air and flew straight into the bullseye as if drawn by a
magnet. "Madre mia!!" Lenore exclaimed, and Conti crossed herself.
Eric, too, looked shaken.
   "Voila, the magic knife trick," Win said modestly. "Anyone else
care to try? How about the shuriken expert?" Katze dragged Joe
forwards, and he willingly obliged. He, too, hit the bullseye five
times in a row, although the first throw was a little off centre.
Conti hugged him exultantly.
   The party broke up not long after, when the dark of night was
already beginning to fade with the first hints of dawn. Nekobi, Win
and Angel rapidly cleared up, while Brace helped all the ladies
into their coats. Katze offered to put Bell up for the night, but
Bell declined, saying that she had already arranged to stay with
Brace. "And don't forget to write," Katze added. Eric, Wu and Conti
would be leaving with Lenore, although Wu hoped to catch a night
flight to America. "Two Catholics and a Protestant!" Lenore
grinned. "We'll be praying `Hail Mary' to him until he pukes." They
all embraced on the doorstep, Katze nearly breaking Eric's ribs,
and she waved at each car as it drove off. Angel and the twins left
last, Win blowing a final kiss as they departed.
   "Well..." Katze said, left behind on the doorstep on a very cold
and early morning.
   "Yes..." Joe supplemented, beginning to shiver.
   "We could go inside, for starters..."
   "Suits me fine..."
   "And get some sleep."
   "Mmm."
   "Or we could just stay up and crash sometime at noon."
   "I say we get some sleep and have a long lie-in."
   "Suits me." She closed and locked all entrances with the remote
control. Putting their arms around each other's waists, they
mounted the steps together and quickly went through the routine of
washing, undressing and brushing teeth. Once under the covers, they
assumed their usual positions, Joe sucked into Katze's tentacle-
like embrace. She rested her cheek on his head, and closed her
eyes.
   "Berg..."
   "Yes."
   "If this is your birthday, how come you didn't Change?"
   "I didn't get into a regular cycle until I was... oh, four or
five."
   "And before that, it didn't happen?"
   "Before that, it happened just about every other day. Doctors
didn't know what to make of it."
   "That must have been painful. I remember you telling me it
hurt."
   "Not at the time. There wasn't much to change then, and anyway,
I was still growing. It really became painful after my bones
started to set."
   "Your bones started to set??"
   "Children don't develop much bone mass until they're about eight
or nine. That's why little kids can tie themselves in knots." He
thought this was very funny, and kissed her on the throat. There
was a minor recoil. He hadn't intended to bring up the subject, but
now might be a good time.
   "You don't really like sleeping together, do you?"
   "You mean, as in copulation?"
   "Well, yes."
   There was a brief pause. "Not always."
   "You don't have to, you know."
   "I feel better if I do. That way, I don't owe you anything."
   "You don't owe me anything anyway."
   "I owe you my life."
   This startled him. "I never did anything to save you."
   "You were kind to me."
   "Well, so were you."
   They were both silent for a while.
   "Do you love me?
   "I'm going to hit you in a minute."
   "Never mind. I know you do."
   "Then why keep pestering me about it?"
   "Because it's something I like to hear from time to time. I'm a
human being too, you know."
   "All right then, I love you."
   "Now you're just humouring me."
   "Are you asking for a punch in the eye? What do you want,
anyway?"
   "Never mind. I love you."
   She sighed, and twined her fingers in his hair. "I won't always
be like this, you know."
   He knew what she was referring to. "We'll cross that bridge when
we come to it."
   Silence. Squinting up, he was not surprised to see a tear run
over her chin and drop soundlessly on the pillow. She didn't turn
her head away; maybe she wasn't aware he could see it.
   "I'm a mutant, Joe."
   "So? What difference does that make?"
   "All things considered, a very great difference. Remember what
you said to me the first time I lost the mask? When Nambu told you
what I was?"
   Joe remembered. "I was mad at you then. I just said the first
thing that came to mind. Heck, you called me a gutter rat."
   "You despised me for being a mutant. Not for capturing Nambu,
not for trying to kill you. Just for not being human."
   "Is that why you don't trust me? Because of what I said then?"
   "I don't trust anyone."
   "Yes, but it's not just anyone who gets to sleep with you.
Anyway, you *are* human. You're just as human as I am. Or was."
   "You still are. You've just had a lot of parts replaced is all.
Nambu's due for a hip replacement any day now, but if he got it,
would that make him less human?" Joe chuckled. Nambu was hardly a
doddering old man, but it was their private joke to depict him as
such.
   "Would it help if I apologized now?"
   "For what?"
   "For what I said. I wasn't thinking."
   "Oh, that's all right, I understand. I'm used to it." The
familiar tough and bitter tone had returned to her voice. Joe had
a sudden flash of insight.
   "Are you afraid I'm going to turn against you? Is that why you
keep humouring me?"
   Verbally, the question remained unanswered. There was the
slightest of sobs. Edging his hand upwards, he found that her cheek
was wet, and probably had been for some time now. She turned her
head away, then, surprisingly, rolled it back to its former
position. Joe shifted his body so that it came to rest against his
shoulder.
   "It's all right. You don't have to hide from me. I love you."
   Through her tears, he could see her smile. "You stupid git."
   "Well, you always were brighter than I was."
   "And you had more guts than I did."
   "Don't they always say there's a thin line between courage and
stupidity?"
   "If you can come up with something like that, you can't be all
that stupid, can you?" They both laughed.
   "Learned that from you," he said. "I never was much of a thinker
before I met you. At Rafael's, that is."
    "I used to like you even when I was in Galactor," she confessed
to him. "I wasn't in love with you or anything, because I wasn't
supposed to have a private life and I knew you just wanted to bash
me anyway, but I always looked forward to seeing you again. Even
though I was seriously trying to kill you - stupid, isn't it? I
remember I was always wondering how much you could take, and hoping
you wouldn't give in. That time you hit me in the face..."
   "I was dying then. I didn't have anything left to lose."
   "All the same... I wasn't pleased at the time, but when I
thought about it later, it was so hilarious it cracked me up...
Bang, right on the shnoz... I thought, well, it'll teach me to be
more careful next time..." Her body shook with mingled sobs and
laughter. "Nothing could get you down, eh? I could have killed you
then, and you wouldn't have cared... But I wanted to keep you as
long as possible..."
   "And I wanted to take you with me. All in all, I'm glad I
missed."
   "You hated me."
   "I didn't really know you then. You were always acting like an
idiot."
   "And trashing the odd city... Just a minor detail, of course..."
   "Not to say that I wasn't pretty frustrated myself. I can't
believe how I acted the last few years. I must have looked like a
real fool."
   "You always look like a fool, Asakura." They laughed again.
   "And you loved it."
   "I wasn't supposed to have any feelings on the matter, but..."
Her grip on him tightened. "You were everything I wanted to be. Of
course I hated you, because you were in my way and you always got
me in trouble with the boss, but when X told me he'd just been
lying to me and he was going to blow the place up anyway, I stopped
caring about all the things I was supposed to feel... And when I
saw you at Rafael's, all messed up, I saw myself in you, and it
occurred to me that you might die... People's lives don't mean much
to me, normally, and I'm used to regenerating each time I die, but
then I realized that you couldn't... That if you died, it would
really be the end, and you wouldn't come back again... I didn't
want that to happen."
   "So you saved my life."
   "Rafael saved your life. I just helped."
   "After everything I did to you... Even calling you a bastard for
no reason."
   "Yes, that hurt me more than I thought it would. I was always
wondering how you'd react if you saw me without the mask... Well,
after that, I knew." Joe felt a lump rising in his throat. "At
least it gave me the strength to escape."
   Swallowing back his tears, he rocked her gently in his arms.
"I'm sorry. I love you. I love you." With her face still pressed
against his shoulder, she brought up one long hand to his cheek,
and touched him just under the eye. He could hear her laughing
softly through the sobs.
   "Who's hiding now, Asakura?"
   Recognizing it was useless to hold back, he released the tears,
burying his own face in her hair. To his relief, he found it wasn't
that bad; it wasn't anything like the attacks she suffered, and it
left him feeling better. She had wrapped herself all around him
again, and one of her hands stole up to the back of his neck to
comfort him.
   "And all you did in return was ignore me until I became female
and then jump me in the woods."
   "I never meant to jump you."
   "You did, though."
   "I loved you. I couldn't think of any other way to say it."
   "Why?"
   This was something he had never thought about. His emotions
always justified themselves, he never attempted to analyse them.
There was a reason why, and it didn't even have anything to do with
their nightly activities; they were just a pleasant extra. Well,
no, he admitted to himself, they had moved into the realm of
essentials by now. But there was something else, something he had
briefly glimpsed in their time at Rafael's, like a spark lighting
up; a depth that enticed him, a sensitivity that marshalled all his
nurturing sentiments, and a dry sense of humour that delighted him.
No matter what she did or said, he was always impressed. A quote
sprang to his mind. Running a hand through her hair, he said
softly: "Because you've got a... a brain the size of a planet..."
She remained silent, waiting for more. "And because you were kind
to me when no one else was, you understood... And because I was
sorry for you... I mean, none of this was really your fault, and
yet you had to pay for it... You must have had a rotten life.
And... because you were lonely. I never realized how lonely you
were. I wanted you to know you had a friend."
   "Joe, you dickhead... I love you."
   "You do?"
   "Yes. Now don't make me say it again."
   "Even though you don't trust me?"
   "I told you before, I don't trust anyone. If you can live with
that, so can I."
   "You trust Angel, don't you?"
   "Yes. But he used to be like me, so he knows what it's like.
There's nothing I could say that would shock him." She wrangled him
back into his usual position, with her cheek resting on his head,
and re-enveloped him.
   The time had come to verify his suspicion. He plucked up his
courage.
   "Berg."
   "Mmm."
   "Those friends of yours."
   "Mmm?"
   "You slept with Angel, didn't you? Before we met."
   "Hee hee. No. Actually, I slept with Win."
   Joe stared at her wide-eyed, exclamation marks issuing from his
speechless mouth.
   "You never," he said, when he had recovered speech. "Win??"
   "I was a guy at the time," she said apologetically. "A tall,
skinny guy. Guess what? She *likes* tall skinny guys. And I wasn't
feeling very liked at the moment, so I thought, what the heck. She
even offered to take me in," she added.
   "Isn't Win with Angel?" Joe asked.
   "He was looking forward to it, too. Where she lives, it's not
unusual for the female to have more than one mate. And we get along
fine. Of course Rayek wasn't too pleased about it, what with his
equal rights sentiments."
   "Then why didn't you accept?"
   "She didn't really need me. At the time it was just fine, but
now I need to know I make a difference. I want someone who'll miss
me when I'm gone."
   "I miss you when you're gone."
   "I know."
   Joe hesitated a while before asking his next question.
   "What was it like?"
   "Win, you mean? It was fun. She's a great lay." She pressed her
cheek tightly against his forehead. "Actually, she's more than
that. When I - when we... She did something to me. I've always been
afraid of... of people, of everything, but mostly of myself. I used
to think I was some kind of monster, and I feared myself. After she
- after we slept... I lost that fear."

                            *   *   *

The cast of Darkest Heart, plus one, were sitting as comfortably as
they could in the crowded apartment of the twins. Joe, their recent
addition, sat wedged together with Katze in one chair, while Angel
had taken Win on his lap. Katze was smoking a cigarette, regularly
tapping off the ash into the ashtray that was perched on Joe's
knee. Soothing piano music, intermingled with the sound of a
flowing fountain, created a mood of peace and elevation.
   Win was speaking. "Let me tell you about something that happened
to me over a century ago, when I was growing up. We were stationed
in Edmonton at that time, a place somewhere in Canada, and I was
just getting back from school by bus - the school was in the middle
of the city, insofar as you could call that over-sized trading post
a city, and our house was somewhere on the outskirts. Anyway, I was
sitting there at this bus stop, feeling mighty peckish, and what
should I see but a bit of plastic wrapping sticking out from the
waste bin. I pulled it out and, praised be Providence, it was two
sandwiches wrapped in plastic foil. My guess was, someone couldn't
finish them and stuck them in the bin. They looked fresh enough to
eat, and the foil had stopped them from getting dirty, so I could
just peel it off and tuck in. Salmon paste sandwiches, too." She
ran her tongue over her lips at the memory.
   "So you see, there *is* such a thing as a free lunch. You just
shouldn't come to depend on it."