The chamber in the Vatican had much higher ceilings, though its marble wasn't quite as good. Magnificent red and gold tapestries hung down the walls. The hall was vast. That was what the papal mitre was all about, a tall, rocket-shape thrust up higher than the bishops' lesser helmets. The Pope's mitre wasn't about fashion, it was about architecture. He was the Church inside the Church, it said, and just as eternal, no matter that this frail flesh within will wither and die and rot beneath the ground; the man born Manuel Castillo, in the hills of Argentina, was almost irrelevant beneath this helmet, or the helmet tried to make him over like bread and wine made over in Christ's body; he was reborn Innocent the Ninth, which wasn't his name so much as a part of this building. The voice that pronounced 'Cedes' excommunication was Manuel Castillo's when it left his body; the chamber, its acoustics, bounced it back as Innocent IX's, and therefore God's.

'Cedes One, born natural occurrent, later replacemented, stood before them all, an almost respectable fifteen yards off, fascinated by the spectacle, arms crossed loosely across her bosom.. She wasn't allowed here, of course, but no one could remove her since she was a hologram, and how she'd projected herself into this chamber, no one knew.

She still held her mallets, loose between her fingers in her left hand. Sometimes she would unfold her arms to idly twirl one between her fingers, holding the other still in the same hand. She saw two especially fine resonating panels in the hall; she strolled toward the spot of their best conjunction. Her face gently glowed with satisfaction, and almost humor. 'Cedes disliked Manuel Castillo's voice, thought to herself that a Pope should always be a baritone. She decided, Yes, I will take these walls from him.

The Maestra's skin slightly tingled with stray flickers of light, the only giveaway that she was a hologram. This skin was flawless bronze even though she looked her age, forty-two and with many late hard nights in those years; it was a bronze so perfect it looked more like bronze the metal than just the color; it challenges your fingers the first time you reach for her, gives you that light shudder, instead of just inviting it like some women's skin does, the ones who, you almost can't help but stroke her cheek once with the backs of your fingers, because she seems like she's not really alive till you touch her, and then she blooms like flowers. That's a sweet thing to have, but then she ages, and you're stuck with what's left. 'Cedes One's was the right sort of beauty for forever. It was the sort that has a snarl in it somewhere.

There were still little beads of perspiration along her smooth collarbone, and in that little pit between throat and breastbones. Her eyes, the strong brick-red. She was a woman who, when you spoke to her you looked at her eyes, not her lips, because she was looking into yours,- but all the while you wanted to look at her lips. They were the rose soft spot in her whole demeanor. Very soft, very inviting, but you had to get to them, even struggled for a chance to get in a glance at her lips, the way those brick-red eyes held you. As colors, the bronze of her skin flowed inward into the brick-red of her eyes, perfectly. Her hair was short, fine curls of as dark as brown gets without being black. A curled lock dangled in front of each ear. In some 'Cedes,' the hair is alive.

Her body was just a little more than what she was wearing could reasonably contain, and not too much more. You can see her clothes slowly being worn through, an extra friction against the threads, from being worn by her body. It wasn't that the loose black blouse and slacks she wore didn't cover her; her whole effect wasn't about exposing her smooth skin. But her clothes against her skin made all these sudden hollows, where there might be nothing but ripe curving smooth skin till it disappeared in shadow behind some folding of her clothes; there were always little places where her skin wasn't so much covered by her clothes as shadowed over by her collar, or some strap, but beneath that shadow her skin was naked there, and you didn't think about it but you wanted to see that little spot of skin, bad. Her outfit was cool and dignified, but beneath it you could almost hear a full ripe woman's body swelling beneath the fabric.

A bead of perspiration glinted along 'Cedes' collarbone; others, tinier sweatbeads, trailed it. The bead swelled, then broke into teardrop shape, slowly rolling down her skin. Soon, its roll turned to a downward arc as it made slowly toward her cleavage. Then it was swallowed in the shadows.

To some men there was the added accent that she was a woman who could, physically, smash you to pieces. This does it for some guys. There was one man who'd had enough of life, and decided as his own mode of suicide that he would just leap on her, hell-bent on rape--and he tried this, threw himself on her, one night, after a party-- committing all his strength to throwing 'Cedes down and violating her, all the time giggling for the moment her anger broke, for the moment she plucked him by his heel out of mid-air and dashed him into the floor, to his hard fast death. 'Cedes attracts these guys like flies. She erased his brain instead. He hadn't thought of that. One minute, he's tumbled on top of her on the floor, surprised he got so far. Next moment, he's a vegetable, which is what he is today.

There are stories and stories and stories about 'Cedes.

Her outermost aura, a sheath of energy, almost an outward skin, was the word itself, Maestra.

Pope Innocent IX intoned. His voice had a slightly tremulous quality, the better for the acoustic effect. 'Cedes looked at the walls, the angles they made, and the way the Pope's voice sounded at various spots as she paced slowly back and forth, like a leopard at her leisure.

The Pope read from above a podium, off a page. When she zoomed in on it, seeing the inked handwritten script through the blank white back of the page, it was obvious to her that he'd remembered these words, probably this morning, and scribbled them down so he could read them straight when he had to. The words were virtually his, then.

"'It is not unknown to you, with what lenity and carefulness the Church, by private and public admonitions,'" he said, and could've at least put an accent on and to make it sound more like he was involved in the words, but didn't, "'has sought Mercedes Incarnacion to satisfy the Church, and to declare herself penitent for her grievous crimes and rebellion, by which she has offended God's Majesty, blasphemed His holy name, and offended His Church: in whom to this day we find nothing but stubbornness."

The words themselves were the sort which, if you read them off a page, you don't really read them, you just glaze over them with your eyes, and say to yourself, Yeah, there they are. It starts to go wrong right around "'by private and public admonitions.'" Just the way it sounded, 'Cedes knew it was going to be bullshit.

She interjected casually, but in voice shining off the chamber's acoustically best panels, "I am disappointed in you, Manuelito. The same old story, the oppression of art by a mob of frightened little munchkins who sold themselves out long ago. Led by you, of all people. A minor poet." The Pope had published three well-received books of poems. It had been the first two, more than anything else, that had won him the papacy. "It isn't easy to be a minor poet..."

Thanks to the spot in which 'Cedes stood, her voice cut through the Pope's words like a plane of glass. He stopped, looked at her. There was just a quarter flash of anger across his tanned lightskin face before settling back into stern authority's darksome glower. 'Cedes thought she saw the hat move.

The Pope continued. "'We cannot, therefore, of conscience, wink any longer at the disobedience of the said Mercedes Incarnacion, lest that her example infect and hurt others. We are compelled, therefore, in the fear of God, to give the said Mercedes Incarnacion into the hands and power of the devil, to the destruction of the flesh,'" This, he put his voice into it a little, and leaned forward some, "'if that by these means she may be brought to the consideration of herself, and so repent and avoid that fearful condemnation that shall fall on all disobedient in the day of the Lord Jesus.'"

"Tell me more about being 'in the hands of the devil,' Manuelito," she said. "Tell me more."

"The precept of God given under the law, to expel from the midst of God's people such as were leprous, is to us an assurance that we ought to expel from the society of Christ's body such as are stricken with spiritual leprosy; for the one is no less infected and dangerous than the other. For, as it were a work both uncharitable and cruel to join together in one bed persons infected with pestilent or other contagious and infectious sores, with tender children, or with such as were whole,'" and 'Cedes got excited, and yelled out,

"Who made all that up! Was it you? Who writes for you? Children in bed with lepers, with oozing pus sores?" She looked around the chamber, at all its broad walls, its high frescoed ceiling. "I have loved being Catholic..."

The Pope stopped, and looked at her quizzically. He thought for a moment.

"I suppose we should talk now, even if it does break this proceeding's...momentum," he said. "It would be awkward to speak afterward, wouldn't it?"

Then he added, "I don't know who wrote it. It doesn't matter."

'Cedes stepped forward, into him though he was twenty feet off, and surrounded by bishops. They instinctively drew tighter inward around the Pope; he smiled, and said to them teasingly, "She's just a hologram, brothers and sisters. She won't bite."

"Nor do I care for Pope-meat, if I did," whispered 'Cedes. "Unlucky for you, Manuelito."

"At least the Lord has granted me this one pleasant conversation, my child," he replied. "May I continue?"

"Please, Your Eminence," she waved to the sheet. "Do."

"'...so it is no less cruelty to suffer among the flock of Jesus Christ such other obstinate rebels; for true is that sentence of the apostle, "A little leaven corrupteth the whole mass.

"'Because thou hast promised thyself ever to be with us, we most humbly beseech thee so to govern and assist us in the execution of this our charge, that whatsoever we in thy name do here pronounce on earth, that thou wilt ratify the same in the heaven. Our assurance, O Lord, is thy expressed word; and therefore, in boldness of the same, here I, in thy name, cut off, seclude, and excommunicate from thy body, and from our society, Mercedes Incarnacion, as one person scandalous, proud, a contemmer, and altogether corrupted and pernicious to the body.'"

"I have tried my best, Your Eminence. Would you like to hear my counterproposal?"

The Pope looked up from the page, slightly exasperated. This was taking all day.

"What is it now, my child?"

'Cedes' face lit up. "I will write an opera with you as its subject. Manuel, the Argentine boy, who became a Pope, but only a minor poet." She raised her voice till it would have strained an n.o.'s throat some to get that loud, and then too she stood in that sweet acoustic spot, so her voice made quick razor-slashes on the reverb off the walls.

"And when I'm finished with you," she said, "you will have been remade for all the world, and forever, as a fool."

"'We declare her with one voice, excommunicate'." The Pope's rose, against 'Cedes, in his clean tenor. "'Cast out, from the body of Christ and His Church, exiled to the dominion of the devil, and his dark angels, to join with the company of the damned, eternally...'"

"You, yourself, will die in a few short years, and what will be left of you, is what I will have made. Then, your eternal life will begin. You will be mocked by schoolchildren for a thousand years, and longer."

Then 'Cedes very suddenly calmed, like an explosion on rewind,

while he meanwhile sang out, "...to suffer your flesh to his torments, and to those cruel torments of his innumerable minions in the teeming bowels of Hell,"

and she coolly said, "Your line will end with nine..."

while he said, "Where you shall face an eternal life, of everlasting pain."

and she finished, "for no one will ever want to be Innocent again."

They looked at each other for a long time, 'Cedes in anger tipped with humor, the Pope in anger tipped with wonder. 'Cedes broke the silence.

"I'm excommunicated. You're not allowed to speak anymore," she laughed. "That means I win! Goodbye, Manuelito. Oh, and I'll never die, either. Remember that. Your devil and his minions, will have to wait a long, long time."

"Senora," he answered, "We have long favored the more figurative reading of Scripture."

"You mean, you don't really believe in anything you just said? There won't really be any fires of hell, and you know it."

"I mean, you don't suffer them when you're dead, you suffer them while you're alive."

A sour look washed over 'Cedes. She found herself a little bit worried, despite herself, and was also disappointed in herself for being worried; and she could see that the Pope recognized this in her, which was worse still. At the end of it, she was angry.

"You will suffer, too, and there will be a sort of eternity to your suffering, even if you will be dead in under thirty years. I promise you, as a major artist to her minor."

The Pope sighed. He didn't think about this, didn't let it be real to him right now, but he knew he would. No page he sat before would ever be quite blank again, or quite thin. Next time he started with a good fragment of a line, or a clean image, its very success would remind him of a power, greater than his, focused malevolently upon him. But he wasn't writing now. He was being Pope, and he had things to do.

"Being damned to Hell is no excuse for rudeness," he said. "Shouldn't we end this before it gets ugly?"

'Cedes thought a while, and answered with a curt nod.

She said, "It has been an honor being an unwelcome guest of the Vatican. Good health."

"Where will you go? Where are you now?"

"On a spacecraft headed...out. Titan, I think. I'll have some peaceful distance from this nonsense, and I have a husband there. He's not the devil, but he'll do." She fingered the thin gold band that weighed lightly round her finger.

She continued, "Well? Do I get some sort of prayer out of you now, a 'Go with God' or a 'Christ be with you,' or are we done with all that?"

Innocent replied. "Which would you prefer, Maestra?"

'Cedes smiled amiably, if just a bit stiffly, toward the Pope, then turned-and-faded, her image shimmering then winking out.

The

Lou Douglas Network

A Novel in Progress

by

Todd Jackson

Copyright Todd Jackson 1999

All Print Rights Reserved

We should straighten out a few basic things up front.

There are fifteen thousand men, maybe fifteen thousand and one, who are many selves of the same man, and they're flung out wide across space.

They can communicate with each other, and also with the database they all share, through a chip the size of a dope-pipe's copper screen, that's grafted on at the base of the bottom neckbone. They can communicate across tens of thousands of light-years before degradation in the signal makes it break up into just static. Within this range, their signals are precise to where one of them can wrap around a superstring, like a vine, and, through a process we won't get into just now, can make lightspeed look like standing still.

Once there, on the other side, the signal will grab hold a wheelbarrowful of local dust and debris, and remake it grit by grit into dedicated universal assemblers. These universal assemblers begin to grow; first they grow in generations of complexity and specialization. Then, at a certain point, they begin to grow in numbers.

Eventually they build the next Lou Douglas, out of themselves, and in this new place--whatever new place it might be. He's made of human tissue like any human, when in repose; but his cells are built from nanobots, not naturally occurring molecules.

In the manual, (not included), he's called a "Von Neumann Probe Series G." The relationship any Probe has with other selves is known as a Network. Lou Douglas is no longer the name of simply a man, but of at least fifteen thousand, and growing.

There aren't as many of 'Cedes Incarnacion; she's a bit new at this. Still, The Lou Douglas Network and The 'Cedes Incarnacion Network are married. Any Lou, any 'Cedes, any time, any place, forever.

Here's what we can't do.

While signals can pass through hyperspace, and while with these signals we can even build as nuanced a material form as a living human being, and even from tens of thousands of ly away, we can't actually move matter from one place, through hyperspace, to another place. There is no hyperspace travel, in short. Starships, forget all that. Only communication, and remote construction, can be done through hyperspace. For any material object, and that means anybody, to voyage just from one near star to another is an affair of years.

That'll do for now. If you want, you can think on this a while before getting started, but otherwise, here we go.

Autorepair is like any machine. Unless it's wearing out, which in Lou 12132's case it wasn't , it tends to become cleaner, sharper, more effective with heavy use. That's why Lou's was so good just now. He still had 15001's autorepair, which, true, was a pretty significant upgrade from his own, but what really made it so good is that finally it was 8840's; and 8840 had been living eleven years, his reckoning, in an unending hail of radiation spewed out a black hole, constantly burning and deforming his body at the molecular level. It was as if there was a continuous wildfire raging inside him.

Most often in 2154 a probe's autorepair was a glorified injection of nanobots; the difference was that the repair nanobots were already inside the body, making up the bone's periostum when at rest, and only a hundred or so assembler generations deep; whenever the body fell ill or was injured they swooped in like a fleet of fighter jets, guided by the brain's computer-augmented autonomic function to perform the most intricate surgeries.

8840's autorepair, on the other hand, reacting to the radiation shower pouring out of Jelly Roll, was itself a continuous, steady counter-drizzle inside the body, a counter-drizzle of MIRVing tasked nanobots, the nanobots tens of thousands of generations deep.

Lou 15001 was actually had a third more mass than most Lous because of 8840's autorepair, and, now, so too did 12132.

He had his arm back, too. As it turned out, one of the spare spacesuits was an older, high-class model originally designed for rich Earth tourists seeking out the thrill of spacewalking. Never mind what the velvety inner lining of the suit was specifically composed of; what mattered to Lou was that it was composed of organic compounds. This made it quite easy to strip it and turn it into a new arm.

Lou decided he wasn’t even going to say anything to her once these doors finally opened. He’d just take her right up in both arms and after all these years find out what it really felt like holding ‘Cedes. Next time that scent was going to be real. The way other women try to smell like flowers or spices or anything but their pussies, and ‘Cedes doesn’t. The way when he fucked her he wasn’t going to have to be safe about it for her sake. The way she was his wife, so she was his. Soon as this goddamn door opens.

Open, god damn it! As the sterilization went through its motions Lou knew he’d be damned lucky just to be let back into Saturn City at all, but he thought he could talk to Collins about that since ‘Cedes was here. He wouldn’t even try to get his job back. What he needed was his apartment.

The doors opened into the Bay. Anxiously, Lou stepped out and saw Uhuru Blue and Snow Killa, ten feet in front of him, assume cat stances. At the same time, Collins’ riflemen burst into the far end of the Bay, running in from the mezzanine.

They didn’t wait for the fistfight between Lou and the Crips, but swiftly levelled their rifles and opened fire, bullets whistling around the Crips and into Lou’s chest: six bullets zipped right through him, splintering his ribs and splitting his sternum, popping his lungs and his heart, knocking him backward into the craft so he was all sprawled out across the pilot’s console.

Surprised, the Crips relaxed their posture and looked at each other, Uhuru Blue a little disappointed that the fight had been aborted when, behind them, the riflemen ran forward, one yelling, "Get on him and keep firing till we’re out of ammo! They’d blasted him back through the doors into the craft, where they couldn’t site him to fire on him.

Lou slumped off the console and splashed in a pool of his own blood. This made it easier for the blood to stream back into his body. All at once, he was in pain again. Lou worried about whether anything had happened to ‘Cedes; then he figured out at once that fast as he’d been soaring, to Earth, round Earth, and back out, he’d probably beaten her here. She wasn’t even here. Suddenly the pain felt worse.

Of course now that he’d been shot his autorepair would make him stronger as a byproduct of healing his body. Still caked with blood, Lou stood up, then charged back outward. His bones and tissue were already repaired, his body hardened. Lou didn’t know he’d been hit by semiplasma rounds, and underestimated his own strength. In two steps he was moving at thirty-five miles per hour, shoulders squared and head low. He hit the riflemen right at the doors’ opening. They flew like bowling pins, whirling feet-over-head. Each of them landed hard enough to bounce upon impact, and one guy bounced off a wall. None was good for much but a hospital bed after that.

Knocked off-balance, Lou fell right between Uhuru Blue and Snow Killa. Snow Killa kicked Lou hard in the ribs, but he was wasting his time: ribs autorepaired after six semiplasma bullets weren’t going to be bothered much by a kick, even a cyborg’s. Lou took the blow and got up on one knee. Uhuru Blue punched him in the side of the face. Nothing. A punch that would’ve caved in an n.o.’s skull and snapped his neckbone, leaving his head hanging just by the skin. Nothing.

Lou said Fuck you motherfucker and punched Blue in the gut. He ruptured every organ and sent a shockwave up his spine, which only barely held, knocking him out cold. Snow Killa he just slapped across the face with the back of his hand. Killa’s head spun round and round, facing backward by the time it stopped, and it was Killa’s good luck that it’d been built to do that. But Snow Killa dropped, too, out cold.

Lou looked down on them and laughed. The laughter felt good, bad as space had been, and now this. Cyborgs could never get but so strong, since their org had to survive the impact of whatever their cy did. Lou never respected any of them.

Through all his anger and pain, Lou felt a real satisfaction. The fact that here were all these guys sprawled everywhere, and that right out in the Mall were thousands who thought they’d gotten rid of Lou Douglas, was suddenly very funny to him. Lou walked through the door out onto the mezzanine, a spring in his step. He ignored the people right there in front of him, flinching back on sight, and walked right over to the railing. He looked down into the Mall, packed with a thousand and a half or so of them. He stared at them till they saw him-the children tugging their parents sleeves and pointing upward, lone young men prowling for girls catching sight of the slim black man at the mezzanine railing, impassively looking down. Lou thinking, I could do this. Oh fuck yes I could. This autorepair...

Then, a little around the edges, the Saturn Citizens started getting an attitude back at him. Everyone knew he had been banished-Saturn City was a small town with small-town ways-and no one missed him. They’d been getting used to not having a superhuman among them, and they liked the feeling.

No one said anything to him, nor did he speak to them. Lou was just as glad for that. He needed the time to let his autorepair cool off some, and get his body back toward base-state. A few looked about themselves, expecting Collins and his men. A few of the shopkeepers started shutting down.

Below Lou, one old man didn’t keep moving, but stopped where he was and stared straight up at Lou. Lou didn’t notice him for a moment, but then picked him out and stared him in the eyes.

"Pete Kennedy," Lou called down. "Where is he?"

The old man just looked at him, stupid-like. Lou thinking, Yeah you’re stupid but at least you’re gonna die. Not today, though. Today you’re just gonna wish you were dead.

Now a white middle-aged woman with her arms full of shopping bags stopped and scowled upward at Lou. She’d half-heard Lou talking to the old man.

She said, "You mean your little mousy friend Pete Kennedy? Him? Oh, Collins had him put out. Get it? You piece of shit? Put out. You could take the hint, Lou Douglas."

It was unreal. It was like she was running for office. She would not shut up. The little smirk on her face didn’t make things any better.

And now the people around her took fire from her tart remark. They too stopped and taunted Lou, till there was a small knot of them.

Lou was cold mad now. He thought to the computer, -That sailcraft, docked outside? Get its computer to release the ship, let it drift out some, then ram it back hard into the docks.-

-You want to disable the Bay?-, the computer replied.

-Yeah.-

The computer tried to anticipate what Lou’s end might be, just in order to better assist, but found it couldn’t. It still thought the action through, though.

-Apparently, ‘Cedes hasn’t arrived yet.- it thought to Lou. -You’ll block her access.-

-She’ll get in.-

The computer was quiet for a moment. -Love conquers all.-

-Don’t try to be funny. Just do what I told you to do.-

It did. The electromagnetic locks released the unfurled Kon-Tiki 12, which drifted out away. No one inside had any idea. More and more now stopped their promenade stroll to stare back at him. They’d never been this bold with him. And what did she mean, Put Out?

Lou leaned forward, hands on the rail. The space between him and the Citizens was so electric they flinched back, but then went back to eyeballing each other. By now, a couple of them had started yelling challenges up at Lou.

Crash!

The whole city felt the jolt as the Kon-Tiki 12 smacked hard into the docks, and a crushing metal-on-metal sound made a few people cover their ears.

-Docking complete.-, quipped the computer. -I can’t tell whether the Bay is now disabled, but it probably is.-

Lou nodded; the computer read the affirmation in the nod.

Lou was very calm, but quietly illuminated by joy.

His body was calm, his tissue having forgotten the bullets.

He called out to the crowd down below, his voice booming louder than any n.o.’s could. Everyone in sight heard him, his voice drowning out their own conversations.

"Now I’m gonna straighten out all you motherfuckers."

The crowd sort of half-laughed till Lou leaped over the rail, smoothly shifting his body during the fifteen-foot drop. He landed light on his feet. He looked around.

The ones in front of the crowd, on all its front faces, got scared and pressed back, digging out a retreating semi-circle into the pack. But behind them the crowd was thick, and far off enough that they weren’t afraid yet, so they pressed inward, half-lying to themselves that they wanted a piece of Lou. The outer people pressing in on those inward pressing out to get away, here and there seams opened up in front and someone from the middle of the pack got spit out like a wet seed, falling forward right in front of Lou. Billie Haskins, the same woman who had sassed him about Pete, was first. Lou thought that was great. She sprawled out on her hands and knees and there was Lou, hands on hips, and she flushed red and bolted up and tried to run away, but Lou chortled "Heh" and shot her a hard left jab in the back just as she turned; the blow spun her around counterclockwise as she wheeled wildly out into the crowd. Lou turned to his right and there was another guy, Woody Riley the dentist, and Lou remembered he was a dentist so he punched his teeth in, and he went into shock and dropped where he was.

By now the ones in front were like salmon fighting up and over the whitewater, desparate to get out. Every time Lou stepped in any direction the crowd right in front of him pushed back away.

He yelled all around him, "Where do you think you‘re going? There’s no way outta here. Might as well stay put!" The next half-minute was delicious. Lou broke a man's rib-cage high on the sternum and he fell away, and when Lou rebalanced and was ready to throw another blow someone was right there ready to be hit and for thirty good seconds that’s how it was. No looking around impatiently for who’s next, everyone right there, and nowhere to run away. Lou pounded down and into bodies to his heart’s content, and worked up a good sweat doing it. The younger kids were a nuisance because it broke his flow having to punch downward; most often he just kicked the little bastards.

Everything went his way, every break. Even when he finally went breathless and hunched over, hands on knees -he’d die for a beer- by the time the crowd got it that he was tired, and a few thought to turn on him, his autorepair had reoxygenated his muscles so he just nailed the first three up, pop pop pop, right in a row. There’s nothing like the crunch of nose-bone when you punch it square on. Lou was getting to where he could make people’s heads snap straight back, without any spin. That meant he’d hit them straight center. It got like a game to him.

Eventually, the crowd managed to find ways to run from itself. Lou felt the burning feeling along his nerves that told him, even though his muscles were still oxygen-fresh, that he was burning himself up and he had to feed himself something. The bar was over to the left; Lou strolled over while the ten or twelve guys who’d been hiding behind it saw him turn their way and started to scramble out. A couple of them tried to be cool about it. Freddie Morris, the postmaster, even finished making himself his brandy sour before he slowly marched out on Lou’s approach. Lou walked straight up to it, then hopped up on the bartop and flipped around in one motion so that he landed on the small of his back and arced his whole torso backward behind the bar, head upside-down; upside-down, Lou saw the beercoolers’ aluminum doors, and then saw the four taps hooked up on their little rack. All strong microbrews, variously the burnt-over taste of a stout, the high, almost champagne-like bright lagers, the thick dark sweetness of the barley wine. Lou lifted the tap that marked Arean. Lou squeezed the nozzle and just poured it down, past where an n.o. would fear he’d drown himself in it, then poured it all over his face to wash off the sweat and the blood-spatter. Arean was s sharp lager with an almost metal aftertaste, but it was light, and wouldn’t leave him feeling bloated. Those Martian racist white crackers did know their beer. Lou wished they were all here with him now, so he could kick all their asses just like he was gonna kick all these people’s asses, soon as he was done drinking.

Still upside-down, and now maybe a little less inlined to right himself, Lou looked across and saw the hard liquor, rowed in proud tall bottles. Dripping with beer, cooling off but still quietly determined, he sighed at the sight of them. So tempting. On the one hand, he ought to drink a lot of hard liquor because with his autorepair whirring like this it would be hard to keep a good buzz going. On the other, he was almost afraid if he got too drunk it might be so much fun he might kill somebody.

Lou decided to be sure this didn’t get much beyond being just a good, clean beating. He’d let the liquor go till afterward. O to be a man. Lou snapped back upward. He landed just in front of the bar.

Nobody. Lou looked around himself, into a completely empty Mall.

"Oooooh," he smirked, "You’re hiding."

But then before long, Lou heard a mob echoing down the corridor to his right. They showed up: a couple thousand people, and this time they’d brought their steel shovels and pickaxes, and the relatively few Martians had brought their guns. Lou backed up a step when he saw them, mixed among the surging crowd, level their barrels at him. He figured the very worst thing he could do was stand right there like a bullseye. Lou charged, and the riflemen opened fire. It hurt, especially the buckshot-blasts in the face that kept shredding his black skin, and a few of them with the high-powered rifles were good shots and kept hitting him with heart-shots and tearing that up, too. Lou kept his charge, right through being staggered or knocked sideways now and then, his blood-trail gathering itself up and following close behind. He could tell there was no plasma in these rounds; he was staggered, and he wouldn’t get but so much stronger from it.

In the crowd of Saturn Citizens, armed with shovels and pickaxes, and with big guns, a hundred times one Citizen looked into another’s eyes, just to check that everyone else was as in this as he was; this exchange happened hundreds of times over about a minute. On the other side of that minute, the Citizens had become a kind of an army. Each one of the couple thousand of them had passed through caring about whether I live or die, and were in one spirit. Each one meant to the other they’d had it with running from beatings.

They shouted and charged Lou, fighting through the gunfire up front, and fending off the random Citizen leaping into the middle swinging down her pickaxe on him, and sometimes getting winged by her own riflemen from behind. But from behind even them came the freshest of them, new hundreds slipping through the center of the pack; they slipped past the riflemen, enough of them that the riflemen had to cease fire, and raise their hot barrels ceilingward. The quick communion that had made them an army now reassured each other that the gunfire had only been slowing Lou down anyway. Maybe the steel shovels would do better. And as this new wave came on Lou they raised their dozens of steel picks and shovels high overhead; and then they all swept down on Lou with a single awesome whang! to his head and upper body. It rang sharp in all their ears. Lou dropped to one knee, and then dozens of them took to pounding him down with a mad flurry of strikes. He tried a few swings but never hit anything but the odd shovel, knocking one out of a guy’s hands but to no real point; another moved right into place and started whanging-except this one had a pickaxe, and kept splitting holes in Lou’s skull. The axemen’s rhythm was generally slower than those with shovels’, since they had to spend that extra moment wrenching their pick-tips out of Lou’s body. Shovels had the opposite problem; once it’d careened off Lou’s head it flew out and it was hard to pull back down into the arc you needed to whack at Lou again. Riflemen poked for openings with their long barrels and sometimes got to squeeze off a shot at close range. "Go for his legs! Go for his legs!," cried several.

The inner ring of them was red with bloodspray, mostly Lou’s.

-May I assist?- thought the computer. It knew not to wait for an answer. It linked with autorepair and together ordered the bloodspray to attack the flesh of those it was spattered on. Blood molecules broke down and recomposed into acid. The Citizens on the inside found suddenly that Lou’s bloodspatter was burning them. That slowed them.

Lou meanwhile didn’t have enough blood left in him for autorepair to help much by oxygenating it. He used this pause to catch his breath and heal up as best he could. He only did get a second though, because then all the riflemen stepped back in and opened fire, tearing up the inner organs that’d mostly been left alone in the pick-and-shovel attack.

By now the others up front had got it that once the blood had sizzled through their dermal layers there just wasn’t enough of it left to go much deeper, not unless you were standing in a puddle of it. Smoking, skins burned off and gagging on the smell of it, they renewed their attack.