is a universal entity or interaction of the same order as electricity or gravitation, and that there exists a modulus of transformation, analogous to Einstein's bask equation, which equates mind stuff with other entities of the physical world…'
The superimposed image abruptly vanished, leaving the floor to a triumphant Renard. 'The programme can't cope, you see. Old Karal should have stuck to his physics.'
'He didn't expect sabotage.'
'What did he expect? People come here for some free booze and a bit of discreet lusting after Silvia — not to be lectured by a miserable bloody apparition. Come on, old son, you look as though you could use a drink.'
'It's been one of those days.'
'Yeah.' Renard paused, his gold-freckled face looking uncharacteristically solemn. 'I've only just heard about your wife and kid.'
'I don't want to talk about that.'
'No. It was just that I… Ah, hell' Renard led the way into the room from which he had emerged and went to a long sideboard which was serving as a bar. Dallen asked him for a weak Scotch and water, and while it was being prepared took the opportunity to look around. There were about two dozen people in the room, most of them men, who were standing in groups of three or four. He recognised several faces from various City Hall departments, but was unable to see Silvia.
'She's around somewhere,' Renard said knowingly, flashing his narrow bow of teeth.
Dallen concealed his annoyance over having his screens penetrated so easily. 'Why are these people here? They can't all be theoretical physicists.'
'Metaphysicists would be more like it. Karal claims there are special particles called mindons which are harder to detect than neutrinos because they exist in what he calls mental space. It's all a bit abstruse for a mere botanist, but apparently our brains have mindon look-alikes in mental space — where most of the physical laws are different — which enable us to survive death. Karal doesn't talk about dying — he refers to it as becoming discarnate.
'It's all supposed to be very comforting and uplifting,' Renard added as he handed Dallen a clinking glass. 'Personally, I prefer this stuff or an occasional dab of jinks.'
'Felicitin?' Dallen was only mildly curious. 'Can you get it right here in Madison?'
Renard shrugged. 'A dealer comes through from the west coast once a month, so somebody in town must be really hooked on the stuff.'
'Who's got that kind of money?'
'Dealers don't talk. Felicitin isn't illegal, as you know, but heavy users generally get up to some highly illegal activities sooner or later. You can sometimes spot them, though, if you know what to look for.'
Dallen sipped his drink and was a little surprised to find it had been mixed exactly to his specification. Renard was on his best behaviour. How, he wondered, would you pinpoint a person who was really dosing up on felicitin? Look out for someone who was always cool and calm, exuding that air of serene confidence…? A memory picture flickered briefly behind his eyes — tall young man with Nordic good looks, expensively tailored, relaxed, smiling. Dallen concentrated until he had identified the image as that of Gerald Mathieu, the deputy mayor, then frowned and peered into his glass as a coldness developed in his stomach.
'I hope this isn't super cooled ice,' he said. 'I've heard this stuff can be bad for you.'
Renard smiled. 'It's always the ice — never the booze.'
Dallen nodded, becoming aware of a man and woman purposefully moving closer to him. He turned and saw the rotund figure of Peter Ezzati, the city's salvage officer, accompanied by his equally plump wife, Libby. While they were shaking hands he noticed that the woman's eyes were following his with a kind of melting intensity and he guessed with a sinking feeling that she was a tragedy buff, a professional sympathiser.
'Is this your first time here, Carry?' Ezzati said. 'Are you enjoying it?'
'I'm a bit vague about what fm supposed to enjoy.'
'The talk, mainly. Karal can be quite convincing about his mindons, if you follow his argument right through, but it's the conversation I like. You get guys here whose minds aren't limited to sport and sex, who can talk about anything. For instance, what do you think about these green flashes they're getting on Orbitsville?'
Dallen was baffled. 'I’m afraid I…'
'You're the first policeman we've had at the meetings' Libby Ezzati put in, her gaze still a channel for moist compassion.
'I'm not a policeman,' Dallen explained. 'I work for the Deregistration Bureau.'
Libby shot an accusing glance at her husband, as though charging him with having told her lies. 'But you can arrest people, can't you?'
'Only lor things like being on land where there's an exclusion order in force.'
'That's another thing' Ezzati said. 'Is it true they're pulling the deregister line in to a forty kilometre radius of Madison?'
Dallen nodded. 'The population here is shrinking. There's enough good farming land within the radius.'
'I don't like it — it's all part of a process.' Ezzati considered what he had just said and appeared to raid it significant. 'All part of a process.'
'Everything is part of a process' Dallen said.
'I'm not talking philosophy — I'm talking people.'
'You're talking piffle, darling,' Libby told her husband, and having allied herself with Dallen decided it was rapport time. 'You know. Carry, Kipling had a vital message for all of us when he pointed out that God never wasted a leaf or a tree…'
'Rick is the botanist around here.' Dallen walked away quickly and went back into the hall where the rematerialised holomorph of Karal London was addressing two new arrivals… discarnate mind composed of mindons interacts with matter only very weakly, but that doesn't call its existence into question. After all, we have yet to detect the graviton or the gravitino… Coming out of the beam of sound, Dallen went into the room opposite and found it populated like the one he had left, small groups standing and talking earnestly in an ambience of low-placed lights and amber drinks.
He worked his way through them and went into the extension where yesterday morning, which seemed an aeon ago, he had first seen Silvia's incredible glass mosaic screen. The studio was empty. Diffuser lamp’s were shining behind the trefoil panels, providing a patchy illumination which obscured the design of the three universes, shading them off into a mysterious darkness suggestive of the vast tracts of the cosmos beyond the limits of human vision. Dallen found the entire construct beautiful beyond words, and again he was awed by the sheer amount of labour that it represented. His appreciation of art was untutored, a chief criterion being that a piece should appear difficult, to have taxed the artist's powers, to have been hard work — and by that standard alone the screen, with its hundreds of thousands of varicoloured glass chips, had to be the most impressive and soul- glutting creation he had ever seen.
'It's not for sale,' Silvia London said from close behind him.
'Pity — I was going to commission a dozen.' He turned and found himself warmed by her presence. Everything about her seemed right to him — the humorous intelligence in the brown eyes, the determination of the chin, the strength combined with the utter femininity of the fuli bosomed figure sheathed in a pleated white dress.
'Perhaps I could make you a little suncatcher,' she said.
'It wouldn't be the same. Being little, I mean. It's the size of this thing — all those separate pieces of glass — which helps make it what it is.'
Silvia's lips twitched. 'You're a dialectical materialist.'
'Step outside and say that,' Dallen challenged. Silvia laughed and this time his arms, unbidden, actually opened a little to receive her. He froze in a turmoil of guilt and confusion. Silvia seemed to catch her breath and her eyes became troubled. 'I was talking to Rick a little while ago,' she said. 'He told me what happened to your family. I'd heard about it before, but I didn't realise… I didn't connect you…'
'It's all right. It's my problem.'
She nodded thoughtfully. 'I’ve heard of people making a full recovery.'
'It depends on how close they were to the gun. If only the memory cells are affected it's possible for a person to be re-educated, recreated almost, in a year or so, because all the connecting networks that person built
