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  Somehow, Sovay’s face in the monitor actually managed to get paler. “No, don’t come back to Sir Larry’s,” he said, leaning forward. “That’s the first place your Escort service friends’ll go looking after Some Very Nice People.” He paused, looking pained. “I’m going out the door now. Meet me at home in an hour.” He gave me his address and disconnected before I could tell him I already knew it.

  I raised the privacy hood and took a careful look around the tube station. Other than a few stragglers who had missed the late afternoon rush, a security guard relieving her boredom by zapping cockroaches off the wall with her prod, and a forlorn-looking hypehead who couldn’t seem to relieve his boredom at all, there was nobody around.

  No matter how far uptown you got, the tube stations were all alike, little branches of life in the Downs. The only difference was, the uptown stations closed at midnight and the security force cleared the stragglers out by putting them all on the last tube going downtown.

  It wouldn’t take me an hour to get to Sovay’s by tube—he lived at the lower edge of what was officially an uptown district, though the property values said midtown—but I didn’t want to stick around here until the evening trade started coming out.

  I left the phone kiosk and went out to the platform, feeling conspicuous. The guard gave me a once-over, but apparently decided I wouldn’t be as diverting as cockroach electroshock. The hype was slumped on a bench, asleep with his eyes open or having an out-of-context experience, I couldn’t tell which and didn’t care.

  I leaned against a tiled pillar and tried to smooth myself into a state of alert calm. There was nothing else I could do, until I saw Sovay. Marceline was thoroughly dormant again for the time being. Sleeping deeply; maybe what she dreamed came to me as memory, I thought idly. Maybe on some level, she wanted her old life back as much as I wanted mine. I wondered how she thought she could have pulled it off. A persona overlay from a franchise was never as deep and substantial as the franchiser wanted you to believe; eventually, it would need to be renewed. But with me completely out of the picture, Some Very Nice People wouldn’t be able to do that—there wouldn’t be an original to provide the feel of growth and change that was part of the state of continued existence, and you couldn’t get that from a template, no matter how richly detailed an artificial reality you kept it in. So how had any of them expected to continue any of my personas?

  The mirror, I realized. She must have gotten the mirror when she snatched me.

  But the mirror still wasn’t the original. And maybe Some Very Nice People didn’t care about that. Maybe they were just going to use her to grind out whatever personas she came up with on her own, and so what if they weren’t exactly top of the line? An outfit that would steal someone’s life probably wasn’t working in terms of a standard of excellence, I reflected, feeling dour. They just wanted to sign Marva on the work, with or without my cooperation.

  A small movement caught my eye. Someone was peering around a neighboring pillar at me, a ragged skinny guy with the face of an urchin who’s been stricken with progeria. I stared back at him boldly. Something told me he was more nervous about me than I was of him and there was a sour satisfaction in being able to intimidate someone else for a change.

  He circled his own pillar, glancing around furtively and pushing at the uneven shock of dull, sand-colored hair falling down over his forehead. I turned away and watched the dark hole of the tunnel for the tube.

  Why had this snatch worked so well, I wondered. Why had the Escort slid into my persona with such ease, why didn’t she think she needed to draw on me anymore? And why wasn’t she ever confused and disoriented? Even people who bought top-of-the-line persona overlays from haute operations like Power People would get some identity problems …

  I looked at the aging waif again to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up on me. He had his back to me, busily writing something on the pillar with a marker. I had to press my fingers against my lips to keep from laughing. The Age of Fast Information, they called it, the crown of creation—technologically speaking—with a myriad of nets that would accommodate almost any form of communication and expression from facsimile calligraphy to detail holo that would fool your mother (or a pimp’s hired help), and none of it had managed to displace the urge to kilroy. The virtual still couldn’t hold a candle to scribbling on the walls.

  The tube slid into the station with a hushed, windy roar and the waif looked up, startled. He zipped past me to board the last car. I strolled along the platform to the next one so I could sneak a look at what he had felt so compelled to leave as a trace of himself.

  The letters were a little shaky, like a child’s attempt at script: Jerry Wirerammer lives!

  The name meant nothing to me, but I felt a sudden, strong surge of empathy.

  Me, too, Jerry. Me, too.

  “It’s not a bootlegging or a body yysnatching,” Sovay said wearily, leaning back on an untidy pile of pillows. Pillows were what passed for furniture in the softly lit living room. At least, I was assuming it was a living room.

  “Then what is it?” I said, trying to punch a cushion into a support for my back.

  “Marva told me about it, until I made her stop telling me.” He insisted on referring to me in the third person and it was getting on my nerves, but I didn’t say anything. After he spat out whatever grotesque lie that woman had told him, I could bite his head off if I wanted to. He gazed at his bleached-out hands. The skin looked fragile. “I’m due at the colorist’s in the morning. It’ll take a few days to set the pigmentation evenly.”

  “That’s really fascinating. And what did that Marva tell you?”

  He ignored my emphasis. “She said she’d discovered she had a … an aberrant persona mixed in with her characterizations. She didn’t give me many details about how she found it, or what she’d already tried to do about it, if anything. Just how she was going to get rid of it.”

  I blew out an impatient breath. “And what was that?”

  He looked at me. “Hiring you. That is, hiring an Escort. It just happened to be you, and you just happened to be … a quick study.”

  I sat up straight, pushing both hands into the small of my back. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You imprint fast. And I have to say, it looks thorough. You’ve got her mannerisms, her vocal inflections, even her posture. Everything. It’s a complete impersonation. You’d probably make one hell of an actor. I don’t know what you really are, other than an Escort.”

  I wiped my hands over my face. “The reason it’s such a complete impersonation is because it isn’t an impersonation. She switched places with me.”

  Sovay gave a short laugh. “Nobody’s ever done that. Switching’s probably impossible, all the experts say so.”

  “Not this kind. Not the kind where you have yourself altered to look like the persona, and then have the original altered to look like you. Which is what she did, with Some Very Nice People’s, help. Then she tried to send me off with a covering imprint while she took over my life, but apparently, the imprint didn’t take, so they picked me up again and—” I had to stop. The look on his face said he thought I was wallowing in some cheap delusion, probably bought from a street vendor in smelly leather armor and a mouth full of glitter.

  “And just how could she do all that?” Sovay said. “Escorts make good money, but they don’t get to keep it. Their pimps take most of it. For her to rig something like that would have cost her all of the take on half a dozen jobs. So how could she have paid for it?”

  “Some Very Nice People did it for her on the condition that she go to work for them afterward,” I said. “When she snatched me, she must have gotten the mirror as well. She can work off the debt for the surgeries by churning out cut-rate personas. The mass-market formulaic stuff, knockoffs of knockoffs, stereotypes. Doesn’t take any real talent to do that. Besides, she’s used to working off a debt. That’s what she’s been doing for her pimp. She was over her head in debt to him b
ecause of her addiction to memories. Selling memories is one of his other businesses, the man is a regular conglomerate.”

  Sovay blinked at me. “Marva was the only person I ever knew who called it ‘the mirror.’ ”

  “Yah, I know that. Since I’m Marva.”

  “But Marva sold out to Some Very Nice People before she found out about this aberrant persona,” he said, shaking his head. “We were in the middle of rehearsals when she told me she was taking Some Very Nice People’s offer to become a persona hack. I should have forced her out of the production as soon as I knew she was going to do that, but I didn’t.” He gave me a strangely searching look. “I liked her, you see. I liked Marva a lot and I was hoping that she might get so caught up in the play we were doing that she wouldn’t go through with it.” He paused. “I did everything I could to get her to change her mind.”

  “She got her mind changed, all right,” I said darkly.

  “The only reason I’m talking to you at all,” he said, sighing again, “is, I can’t help thinking there might be more than just an imprint of Marva in there. You remind me too much of the way she was before Some Very Nice People shook a fortune under her nose. I guess she was always wavering between art and the Big Score, and the part that wanted the Big Score won. While you got imprinted with the other part.”

  I wanted to throttle him, but this time, I managed to control myself. “I am Marva. Not part of Marva, the only one there is. Unless you think I’m the aberrant persona she called the Escort to get rid of.”

  “No, I know that was somebody else. I, uh, saw that for myself. Marva told me you managed to get rid of it for her. Which was when I told her I didn’t want to know anything more, and she didn’t have to bother coming back to Sir Larry’s. She informed me that she hadn’t planned to come back but there was just this smallish problem with the Escort. A problem of a delusional nature.”

  “And what was that?” I asked.

  He looked hard at me. “The Escort seemed to believe she was Marva, and no matter what she or the Nice People did, the delusion just wouldn’t go away. Even a solid week of custom dry-cleaning wouldn’t get rid of it.”

  I felt the goose walk over my grave, but I ignored it. “So what did they do with the Escort?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t really know, I hung up on her. It was all very disappointing and sordid, but I didn’t know how sordid until I saw you at Davy Jones’ Locker. Some Very Nice People had brought you there, with Marva. For imprinting, I believe; they were debuting her that night as their latest persona hack and they couldn’t put it off. So I imagine they’d decided to use you as an example of what great work she could turn out. If they couldn’t rid you of the delusion, then they’d use you as a walking advertisement. You know—‘See, folks? Even a downtown hypehead can be a star, another satisfied customer.’ Except a full-blown delusion won’t take an imprint. You came out of the back room wearing her clothes and passing yourself off as the real thing. But when you saw the real Marva face-to-face, you switched over and became the Escort again. The delusion’s way of protecting itself from the truth. I did what I thought was the right thing and got you away from them by having you thrown out.”

  “And what inspired that bit of altruism?”

  “I felt sorry for you. You looked so … at sea. If you could get home as yourself, I thought, maybe the delusion would stay buried and you could go back to your life.”

  I tried to think. It was all too preposterous, but those were the times we lived in. “I don’t know how to prove to you who I am. Who I really am. Which was why she did it this way. It’s complicated, but it’s the perfect crime. If I just turned up blank with my features carved off—or dead—there might have been a police investigation. Because you knew. You could connect her with me.

  He looked confused. I didn’t blame him; I was starting to confuse myself.

  “You could connect the Escort, the bodysnatcher, to Marva, the actor. Do you see? So the Escort had Marva the actor—me—made over to look like her. Then she and her Very Nice People could just send me back to the Downs to get my brains blown out by an angry pimp. That would take care of the evidence, no one would have wondered about another Downs garbagehead biting the dust.

  “But now the pimp’s got her instead of me, and the game’s changed. When he runs barefoot through her head, he’ll know everything and more.”

  “What are you going to do about it?” Sovay asked.

  I gave a short laugh. “Nothing. Why should I? She’s back where she belongs and I can reclaim my own life. Game over.”

  He raised his eyebrows but said nothing.

  “What would you do about it?” I asked.

  He mumbled something about the police.

  “Then you call them. You don’t believe me anyway. It’s easier for you to believe I’m some kind of greedy, venial … bitch … who’d turn her back on a career in legitimate live theatre—and you—for a pile of easy money in the franchise business.”

  He was gazing at his fragile-skinned hands again. Maybe he was thinking about how long it was going to take for the pigment to set evenly.

  “you and I were lovers once,” I said. “Sort of lovers. Closer than lovers. Does that describe the person you knew?”

  He looked up. “It describes one of the persons I knew,” he said evenly.

  “Touché.” I sighed. “Well, I’m out of ideas.”

  “Then try this idea: Once there was an actor, a married man, who became infatuated with another actor in the troupe. He controlled the attraction very well, until it came time for the two actors to create characters to play opposite each other in some production that is best forgotten now. The two actors found that their mutual attraction was a stumbling block to the creation of the characters and decided they should resolve their real-life emotions toward each other so that they could get on with the business of acting. As well, she was about to do something he thought was foolish and wasteful of her talent, and he thought he might be able to get her to change her mind. So they hooked in together mind-to-mind—” He paused and took a breath. “It was not a good idea. He discovered that she wasn’t the person he thought she was … and unfortunately, she discovered that, too.

  “She was doing exactly what she was supposed to do, you see. This foolish and wasteful thing was all part of a plan that had nothing to do with him or his feelings. His interference messed everything up in the worst possible way, because he went barging in with that idea of the person he thought she was. It set up a conflict in her, between the person she really was and the person she wanted to be.” He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Are you lost yet?”

  “Close,” I said. “Yah, what the hell. You lost me.”

  “I sure did.” He gave that laugh again. “Funny how that works, how you can lose someone by finding her.” He made a face. “Okay, straight out: Marva was a persona for someone else. I inadvertently helped her achieve escape velocity. At the same time, her … mirror … created the reflection of what I saw in her. That’s what it was there for in the first place—to create characters. So she ended up with two aberrant personas to jettison instead of just one. One of them is you. Or rather, it’s who you think you are.”

  “And who’s the other one?” I asked warily.

  “It’s her.”

  Rowan was standing in the doorway holding a shopping sack. She’d put on a little weight since I’d last seen her in person and the few lines in her face were slightly deeper. I braced myself for a confrontation and then remembered she wouldn’t recognize me as Marva.

  “This is the one I told you about,” she said, coming over to Sovay, “the one who called and left Marva’s number.”

  “It’s all right,” Sovay said, “I know her.”

  “But who is she? And how does she know me?” Her gaze went from Sovay to me and back again.

  I groaned. “Don’t even try to explain it to her.”

  Rowan’s face hardened. “I knew it. I knew this would happen.”
She turned to Sovay. “So, what shall I do now—set up an appointment schedule for you, install a revolving door and a waiting room? How many do you think we’ll get, anyway—a dozen? Two dozen? Maybe all of them! Won’t that be something!”

  Sovay got up and tried to put his arms around her but she shoved him away.

  “Marva sells out to a persona mill and all the hypeheads and wannabees get a little bonus with their overlays, they all get the experience of being my husband’s lover! Tell Some Very Nice People they should advertise it as a special—free with every Marva, your own personal Sovay-fuck! You could collect royalties, then it might even be worth it!” She swung the shopping sack at him. He caught it and held on, his gaze never leaving her face. For a long moment they just stood there as if they’d been frozen in the middle of a tug-of-war. Then her shoulders slumped as all the fight went out of her.

  “Sorry,” she said in a flat voice.

  He turned to me. “You’d better go.”

  “At the risk of getting an answer,” I said, “where?”

  “If it were me,” he said slowly, “with Some Very Nice People on one side and an Escort service on the other, and no one but me in the middle—I’d have my memory wiped and hope I wouldn’t be fool enough to want it back again.”

  “Forgive and forget?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Forget first,” he said. “Then there’s nothing to forgive.”

  * * *

  Night was falling after the longest day of my young life—my young stolen life—and I was standing on a sidewalk in lower uptown with no idea what to do next. Hello in there, who’s got the survival instincts?

  No answer, not even a How good an actor are you?

  Well, hell, I decided, I’d go home. No one would expect me to show up there. I could even remember the address. East midtown was closer to the Downs than I wanted to be, but it was better than wandering around on the street until a van pulled up at the curb next to me.