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didn t already.
Damn.
You re always showboating, said Ho Ng, standing now at Conrad s elbow. His
voice was quiet, more amused than menacing. Imagining we re all, like,
waiting to see what you ll do. Like we give a shit. So you ll be dead and
frozen while the rest of us pull things back together. How dramatic. Is that
supposed to make you a hero?
Ho s wife, looking on from the sidelines, seemed rapt at his words. Or maybe
just honestly in love.That couldn t be a bad thing, could it? Even if the man
she felt it for was a shitheel? She seemed so young, so innocent. Maybe she d
be good for him.
I may last longer than you think, Conrad told Ho, and surprised himself by
sounding amused. Apparently I m made of brickmail.
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Ho sneered. Join the club, fuckwipe. I can see in infrared and breathe
carbolic acid. You could shoot fifty holes in me without breaking my stride.
And you re charming, too, Conrad told him.
Oh, Conrad, Xmary said, touching him on the arm. Don t be like this,
please. I want you safely stored, and not just for your sake or mine. It s the
right thing to do. Youare important to the colony.
He may be stored already, Brenda said, sidling up around a knot of chatting
youngsters. I wasn t in the room when the cables went live, but Conrad s
image was in the fax machine s buffer. If they flushed it rather than
scrubbing, then he d ve gone straight to the Data Morgue. Then she addressed
Conrad directly: I don t know what the fuss is about, anyway; you ve never
been deleted off the original personnel core.Some copy of you is kicking
around down there, younger and snottier than you are today.
See? Ho chimed in gleefully. Showboating. Thinks he s something special.
Better than the rest of us, certainly, when really he s just some old fuck
hiding out in the countryside. Counting snowflakes.
And thatwas rather an artful jab for someone as coarse and uncomplicated as
Ho. Conrad felt he should choose his next words carefully. But just at that
moment, the other end of the table rang with the clear, bell-like tones of
dinner spoons on wellstone mugs, and a knot of admirers around Princess Wendy
were shouting Ten thousand years!Taha mano ta u! Ten thousand years! and
hauling her in the direction of the fax machine.
Wait, she laughed. I have to relieve my bladder; I have to fix myhair .
But her friends were having none of that. Fix it in the future! they teased
her. You need some flaws to break the symmetry; store the real you! And with
a slingshot hold on her arms, they hurled her forward against the print plate.
No! Not so hard! Brenda shouted at them, but it was too late; the princess
had gone ballistic, still on her feet but stumbling forward with one arm
stretched out before her and the other trailing behind. To her credit, the
last expression on her face was one of simple joy: the birthday girl enduring
her mandatory ritual punishments in the spirit with which they were delivered.
The fax, alas, was not so accommodating. Accepting Wendy s careening mass, it
flashed and sparked and groaned and then went dark; and with a smell of
scorched meat the back half of that young, royal body rebounded from the print
plate, flailed upright for a boneless moment, and then collapsed in a
squirting heap upon the floor.
The sight of it was, for a moment, too alien for Conrad s mind to process. He
did not, in that first second or two, have any idea what had happened, and all
he could think literallyall he could think was that young women really did
shriek in horror, like extras in a bad movie, when something hot and red was
splashed upon their gowns.
chapter twenty-one
till death do us park
Five days later, after the public funeral procession hadwound its way through
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the streets of Domesville, those same dinner guests almost the exact same
collection of people found themselves on a tuberail car together, with Wendy s
freezer coffin placed conspicuously at its center. Some of these men and women
were crying; some were stoic; but most displayed that brittle, funereal
cheerfulness which, as the years ground on, all of them would learn all too
well.They might be immorbid emphasis on the might but given enough time,
nearly everyone else they knew would end up in one of these boxes.
The accident was freakish and bizarre, but so was every accident. Such was
their nature in a world of mature technology. It was shocking enough that the
princess had died; did her archivehave to be corrupted in the process?
This is much harder than I expected, Bascal was saying to Conrad, as they
sat together on a bench across the aisle from the coffin. It occurs to me,
belatedly I suppose, that the brunt of this fatal recession will fall on our
children. You and I are freshly scrubbed; these bodies will hold together for
centuries. With proper care, perhaps a good deal longer than that. But if the
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