Juxtaposition

'I'm not prejudiced against-' He paused. 'Damn it, now I know I could love you, Sheen, if I didn't have the Lady Blue. But my cultural conditioning... I would prefer to give up life itself, rather than lose her.'

'Of course. I feel the same about you. Now I know I have enough of you to make my existence worthwhile.'

She was happy with half a loaf. Stile still felt guilty. 'Sometimes I wish there were another me. That I had two selves again, with one who was available for Citizenship and who would love you, while the other could roam forever free in Phaze.' He sighed. 'But of course when there were two of me, I knew about none of this. My other self had the Lady Blue.'

'That self committed suicide,' she said.

'Suicide! By no means! He was murdered!'

'He accepted murder. Perhaps that is not clear to your illogical and vacillating mind.'

'My mind was his!'

'In a different situation. He had reason.'

Accepted murder. Stile considered that. He had marveled before that the Blue Adept had been dispatched by so crude a device - strangled by a demon from an amulet. It was indeed a suspicious situation. No magic of that sort had been able to kill Stile; why had it worked against his other self? And the Blue Adept's harmonica, his prized possession, had been left for Stile to find, conveniently. Yet suicide-could that be believed? If so, why? Why would any man permit himself to be ignominiously slain? Why, specifically, should Stile himself, in his other guise, permit it? He simply was not the type.

'You say he had reason. Why do you feel he did that?'

'Because he lacked enough of the love of the one he loved,' she said promptly.

'But the Lady Blue gave him the third thee,' he protested. 'In Phaze, that is absolute love.'

'But it was late and slow, and as much from duty and guilt as from true feeling. Much the same as your love for me. I, too, tried to suicide.'

Indeed she had, once. One might debate whether a nonliving creature could die, but Sheen had certainly tried to destroy herself. Only the compassion of the Lady Blue had restored Sheen's will to endure. The Lady Blue, obviously, had understood. What a hard lesson she had learned when her husband died!

'Somehow I shall do right by you, Sheen,' Stile said. don't know how, right now, but I will find a way.'

'Maybe with magic,' she said, unsmiling.

They arrived at the site of the message-tracing team. Stile was glad to let this conversation drop. He loved Sheen, but not consistently and not enough. His personal life in Proton seemed to be an unravelable knot.

They were in one of the public lavatories for serfs, with rows of sinks, toilets, and showers. The message cable passed the length of its floor, buried but within range of the detector. Passing serfs, seeing a Citizen present, hastily departed for other facilities.

There was a serf technician with a small but complex machine on two wheels. The machine blinked and bleeped in response to the serf's comments. No, Stile realized, it was the other way around. The serf commented in response to the device. It was another self-willed machine, with a subordinate serf. A neat way to conceal the real nature of the assistance being provided. The self-willed machines had considerable resources but did not want to betray their nature to the Citizens, lest the machines be summarily destroyed. There was a difference between being programmed to mimic personal volition, as Sheen was presumed to be, and actually possessing that volition, as Sheen and her kind did. The makers of these most sophisticated robots had wrought better than they knew, which was the reason these machines wanted legal recognition as people. They were people, of mechanical nature. With such recognition they could not be dispatched without legal reason, lest it be called murder.

The signals from the machine were more or less continuous and were ignored by the Citizens who joined Stile's party for the betting. Thus the real nature of the communications was not obvious. Only Stile, with his private knowledge of the special machines and his Game-trained alertness for detail, was aware of it. 'What have we here?' he inquired of the serf.

'Sir, this is an electronic device that can trace the route of a particular message at a particular moment,' the serf said. 'Each message modifies the atomic structure of the transmission wires nominally. This change is so small that only a sophisticated instrument can detect it, and the range is quite limited. But it is possible to trace the stigmata by examining the wires at close range, provided we know precisely what we are looking for.'

'Like a hound sniffing a scent,' Stile said.

The machine bleeped. 'Yes, sir,' the serf said.

'That's a new one to me,' Waldens said. 'But I never did concern myself with machines. I think I'll buy me one like the metal lady here, if I don't win this one in a bet.'

Both Sheen and Stile reacted, startled. Neither was pleased. Waldens laughed. 'Stile, you don't have to bet anything you don't want to. But you should be aware that this lady robot is now a piece worth a good deal more than she was when new. If you lose a big one and have to have a new stake, she is it.' He glanced at the message-tracing machine. 'Now let's see this contraption operate.'

'You have programmed the specific message and time of transmission?' Stile inquired. 'Why are you unable to continue?'

Again the bleep. 'Yes, sir. We have traced the message to this point. But ahead the cable passes through a juncture associated with the estate of a Citizen who denies us permission to prospect here.'

'Ah, now the challenge comes clear,' Waldens said. 'What Citizen?'

'Sir, serfs do not identify Citizens by name,' the serf said, translating the machine's signals. 'But his designation is at the gate.'

Waldens strode out of the lavatory and down the hall to examine the gate. The others followed. 'Circle- Tesseract symbol.' He brought out a miniature mike. 'Who's that?'

'Sir, that is Citizen Cirtess,' his contact answered.

'Cirtess. Circle-Tesseract. That figures. Same way I have a forest pond on my crest. I know him.' Waldens considered. 'Stile, I'm ready to bet. You won't get into that dome to trace your line. You'll have to go around and pick up beyond.'

'Is that feasible?' Stile asked his technician serf.

'Not feasible, sir. This is a major cable junction. Billions of impulses have passed through it. We can trace the stigmata only by setting up at the junction and reading the routing there.'

'Needle in a haystack,' Stile said.

'Sir?'

'Never mind. I grasp the problem. We shall simply have to get to that switchbox.'

'That's my bet, Stile,' Waldens said. 'Let's put a reasonable time limit on it. Shall we say half an hour for you to get the job done?'

Stile looked at the message-tracing serf. 'How long to pass this junction without impediment?'

'It is merely a matter of getting to it, sir. The readout is instant.'

Stile looked at Mellon. 'How much may I bet?'

'The amount is settled,' Waldens protested. 'One kilo.'

Mellon was unhappy. 'Sir, this is extremely chancy, incorporating virtually no element of predictability, and the amount is large. Have you any reasonable expectation of obtaining permission to enter Citizen Cirtess' dome in the next half hour?'

'No. But that's not the bet. It's whether I can get the job done.'

'Oho!' Waldens exclaimed. 'You intend to go in without permission?'

Stile shrugged. 'I intend to get the job done.'

'Cirtess has armed guards and laser barriers,' another Citizen said. 'Almost every year some foolishly intruding serf gets fried. It would take a mechanized army to storm that citadel.'

Waldens smiled. 'Sirs, I think we have a really intriguing wager in the making. What do we deem to be the odds against Stile's success? Remember, he is a canny ex-serf who recently won the Tourney; he surely has some angle.'

'Thousand to one against, for any ordinary person,' the other Citizen said. 'Hundred to one against, for a Tourney winner. And a good chance he'll get himself killed trying.'

'No, I saw him play,' a third Citizen said. 'He's a slippery one. If he thinks he can do it, maybe he can.'