shopping before going to the clinic to visit Mikel.
'Bern has been delayed for a while, so I offered to fill in for her,' Picciano said, his smile showing the gold fillings which had again become fashionable. He was a bushy-haired, tanned man of about fifty whose preference for lightweight sports clothes created the impression that all his professional appointments were sandwiched between rounds of golf.
'Thanks, Roy.' Dallen stepped back to let the doctor come in. 'I could have walked, you know.'
'It's no trouble. Besides, I wanted to have a look at my patients ‘’
Dallen noticed the use of the plural. 'I'm all right.'
'You look tired, Carry.' Picciano appraised him candidly. 'How long are you going to go on like this?'
'As long as it takes. We've been through this before, haven't we?'
'No! I have been through it — you won't even begin to think about the problem.'
'It's my problem. I'm responsible for Cona being the way she is.'
'That's a perfect example of what I'm talking about,' Picciano said, not hiding his exasperation. 'You have no responsibilities to Cona, because Cona no longer exists. Your wife is dead, Carry. Your only responsibility now is to yourself. There is always some uncertainty about the progress of erasure cases, but there's one thing I can tell you for sure — the stunted, half-personality which is going to develop in that human shell in the next room will have nothing, nothing to do with your former wife. You've got to accept that, for your own good.'
'For my own good.' Dallen made the words sound like a phrase from a foreign language. 'How long are we going to stand around here in the hall?'
Til look at her now.' Picciano opened the nearest door and went into the long living room, bis heels clacking on the polished composition floor. In his early attempts to deal with Cona's incontinence Dallen had tried putting her in diapers, but she had disliked them intensely, and he had found their appearance grotesque and degrading. He had then settled for removing all carpets and cleaning up after her, a chore which had almost ceased to exist now that she was using the bathroom. She was lying on a blue pneumat, chin propped on her hands, engrossed in watching the swirl of colours and shapes above a nursery imager. Her legs were bent, bare feet circling aimlessly and sometimes colliding. In spite of the loose smock in which Dallen had dressed her she was noticeably plumper than she had been a month earlier. 'Look who's come to see you,' Dallen said, kneeling beside Cona and putting an arm around her shoulder. She glanced up at him, eyes bright with window reflections, and returned her attention to the glowing airborne patterns. Dallen took a tissue from his pocket and tried to dab a smear of chocolate from her chin, but she whimpered in irritation and twisted away from him.
'We only got the imager yesterday,' Dallen explained. 'It's still a novelty.'
Picciano shook his head. 'Do you know what you're doing, Carry? You're apologizing because the subject — I refuse to call her Cona, and so should you — didn't greet me with polite chitchat and a choice of coffee or sherry. This is what I've been…'
'For God's sake.'
T'm only…' Picciano sighed and stared out of the window for a moment. 'Did you get her to take all the fifth week medication and tracers?'
'Yes. No problem.'
'In that case I'm going to carry out some tests and make notes.' Picciano opened his flat plastic case and began to activate an instrument panel incorporated in the lid. 'This is all routine stuff and I don't need any help,' he added significantly.
'Thanks.' Dallen pressed his face against Cona's for a moment without getting any response, then stood up and left the room. A minute later he was out on the street, breathing deeply to cleanse his lungs of the smell of chocolate and urine which in his fancy pervaded the house at all times. He lived near the outer edge of the inhabited strip of Madison, an area which straggled northwards for about five kilometres from the city centre to accommodate a population of several thousand Metagov and local administration workers. For the most part the dwellings were large, stone-built and well screened by trees — evidence of the district's former affluence. The far-off drone of a lawnmower served only to emphasise the mid-week, mid-morning stillness, creating the impression he had strayed into one of the thousands upon thousands of deserted suburbs which migrating families had left to dreams and decay.
Windows and doorways, never aglow, Dallen thought, recalling one of the most popular songs of the last two centuries. Everyone's gone to Big O…
Dismissing the mawkish lyric, he decided to walk into town and use the time to work on the problem of Derek Beaumont. The tragedy that had befallen Cona overshadowed everything else in his life, but he appreciated a certain irony in the fact that the one man he knew to bear responsibility also provided his only distraction. When not grieving over his wife or coping with the despairing drudgery she now represented, Dallen fantasised about being alone with the young terrorist, about making him name all the relevant names, about hunting and capturing and killing. Part of him, even in lurid visions, drew the line at coldblooded execution, but another understood only too well that confrontations could be manipulated. It was a technique boys learned at school. Give the enemy a gentle push, encourage him to push back, respond with a harder shove, escalate the violence and keep doing it until suddenly all thoughts of guilt can be discarded and it's time to cut loose and go in hard. When it's merely a matter of temperature, Dallen knew, the blood can be very obliging. And the man or woman who pulled the trigger on Cona and Mike! was going to know the same thing… in the final passionate, exultant moment that person was going to know… and that person was going to be sorry… in the end…
Walking south through slanting prisms of sunlight and green shade, Dallen heard his own footfalls change note as frustration hardened his muscles. Although his job occasioned him to think and act like a policeman, he held no official responsibility for local law enforcement. He was a Grade IV officer in the Deregistration Bureau, and as such his prime concern was with surveying tracts of land that had been declared empty and making sure they remained unoccupied for one full year, after which time Metagov was longer legally accountable. Madison City itself, thanks to the artificial mix of its population, had virtually no crime, and the police department consisted of an executive and a handful of officers who were mainly concerned with regulating tourist accommodation. In spite of the overlap in their jobs, Dallen had always maintained an easy working relationship with Police Chief Lashbrook. Consequently he had been surprised to find himself not only denied access to the terrorist, but made distinctly unwelcome in the downtown police building.
'It was a sickening thing, what happened to your wife and boy,' Cole Lashbrook had said, eyeing him severely over pedant's spectacles. 'I'm deeply sorry about it, but I've made every allowance I can. If you persist with your attempts to see Beaumont I'll be forced to take appropriate action against you.'
Dallen's fists clenched as his sense of outrage returned, 'Against me' he had almost shouted. 'Are you crazy?'
'No, but sometimes I think you are. Beaumont has made a formal complaint about what you did to him in back of that store, Carry. The dust hasn't settled over that business of the pursuit fatalities a couple of months back, and now there's this… And on top of it all you come round here and expect to be let loose on my prisoner!'
'Your prisoner?' Dallen had refrained with difficulty from pointing out the police department's past willingness to allow onerous duties to be performed by his own force.
'That's right. He was in possession of an explosive device and that makes it a criminal matter, and I intend to deliver Beaumont for trial in good health — a condition he may not be in if you get near him.'
'Exactly what does that make me?'
'Carry, you're a man who has been known to go too far — even when you weren't personally involved in a case — and I’m not going to help you land yourself behind bars.'
Thanks a lot, Dallen repeated to himself, immune to the blandishments of the placid sunlit warmth through which he was walking. In the two centuries since the discovery of Optima Thule, to give Orbitsville its constitutional name, there had been a general and steady decrease in traditional crime. Most crimes had involved property in one way or another, and as the race had been absorbed by a land area equivalent to five billion Earths — enough to support every intelligent creature in the galaxy — the basic motivations had faded away. Keeping pace with that change, many vast and complicated legal structures had become as obsolete as barbed wire, and progressively fallen into disuse.
Even on Earth, where there were historical complications, a community the size of Madison operated on a
