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  Since the metro relied on pumptrees and their enormous taproots for its water supply, there was immense pressure from the adminisphere to crack the case. So K-mart and I came down rather hard on the Incubators at the time. And what was worse, the misfits had been proven innocent, the

  cause of the new plague eventually being traced to a mutant smut that was able to prey on hematic vegetation.

  So when, a few days after Xuly Beth and I had had our morale-boosting talk and telefuck, an anonymous demon showing only bland metagrafix delivered a tip that the Incubators had recently done a big job for a secretive client, I was aware I wouldn't be welcomed back with open arms.

  But I was used to that.

  Sonny was wearing a Boston Scientific chassis shaped like a small tank with multiple tentacles and spray nozzles. I knew the unit was effective, but it looked ridiculous. Not that I cared, since the possibility of a real lead at last had me higher than a dose of Kiss-the-sky.

  "Hey, Dalek," I said, "let's go visit some pariahs."

  Sonny lumbered after me. "Certainly, Doctor What."

  "That's 'Who.'"

  "The advantages inherent in the fuzzy logic circuits of a Turing Level Four device necessarily involve the ability to compromise data in a creative manner."

  The Incubators had taken over an abandoned antique petroleum storage tank on the waterfront. The property was currently contested and in limbo, as the legal mess from the collapse of the petroleum industry was still being sorted out, some decades after the fall. Sooner or later, the new owners would find a use for the land and the squatters would be kicked out. But right now, it was all theirs.

  At the makeshift sphincter door in the side of the tank facing the harbor, Sonny and I paused. "Stay out here and watch my back," I told the kibe.

  "An instruction with contradictory semantics which I am fully capable of rationalizing."

  I shook my head ruefully.

  Cleaned up with Transcell Scrubbing Bubbles, the inside of the tank bore little residual scent. What it did smell like was a combination of mold, decay, dirty bandages, and sick breath.

  And one additional, puzzling underscent that I couldn't quite place, even with my enhanced senses.

  Dimly lit by scattered bioluminescent globes stuck here and there from floor to domed ceiling, the interior of the tank was filled with a mockcoral scaffolding.

  From the organically fractal scaffolding hung the Incubators, in their various slings and cocoons, like basal gypsy-moth larvae in their tents.

  I boosted my vision, but couldn't spot anyone down at my level. So I shouted up, "Protein Police! Is Smallpox here?"

  There was no answer, but I saw a shifting among the calcite girders. A figure began to descend.

  A lot of the members of the Incubators were immobilized by their perpetual, modified, nonconsuming diseases. That's why I had called for Smallpox, who had been one of the relatively active ones last time. (They were all noncontagious, though. Their propathogen ideology, however dogmatic, didn't extend to the point where they would have provoked a martyring backlash from the public.)

  At last the climbing figure reached the floor and began to approach, limping in rags. I could see that it was indeed the riddled and cratered Smallpox.

  "What do you want?" the pathogen-host demanded. "Can't you just let us cultivate our smallchain, low-gnomic refugees in peace? Isn't it bad enough that you high-gnomic imperialists have wiped the globe clean of so many innocent invisible lifeforms? Do you have to persecute our pitiful rescue mission too?"

  "Listen, Smallpox, I don't care what you and Leprosy and Syphilis and Measles and Mumps and Polio and all the rest of your sick crew do with your own lives. But when I hear that you might be supplying contaminants to a bigtime terrorist, that's when you've crossed the line."

  Smallpox cringed. "We didn't supply anybody with anything."

  "Oh, no? That's not what I heard."

  Smallpox turned to leave. "Go away," he muttered. "You can't prove anything."

  I grabbed the small man by his rags, picked him up, and stuck my face into his raddled visage.

  "Listen, my friend-how would you like to be cured?"

  Smallpox blanched. "You-you wouldn't!"

  "Try me."

  "You murderer!" He began to kick. "All right, put me down, I'll talk."

  I did, but kept alert for any funny moves.

  "We have to earn a little eft somehow, you know," Smallpox began to whine. "And not many people will deal with us. So when we were approached with this assignment, we could hardly refuse. And besides, it was a technical challenge right up our alley."

  "How's that?"

  "This character-now, understand, I never actually saw him, so I couldn't know he was a baddie-kibes conducted the whole business-anyway, this plug wanted us to create a fast-acting, orally administered prion-based vector that would take up residence in the thalamus and upset the Llinas function."

  I couldn't believe my ears. The Llinas function was the evolutionarily designed means whereby the thalamus, the brain's master clock, bound all sensory input and cortical responses into a coherent second-by-second gestalt of the universe. Even the big cricks hesitated to mess with such a core function.

  "You're telling me that you've created an agent that will basically destroy a person's timebinding facility?"

  "More or less. But all lifeforms are equal, and the prions will flourish without actually killing their hosts."

  Sonny must have been reading my vital signs and detected my nervous concern, because he burst in like a mechanical octopus.

  "Peej, what's to be done?"

  "Wrap 'em."

  Sonny's nozzles came alive, and within thirty seconds the Incubators were all enmeshed in sticky tangles. I called for a pickup and relayed what I had learned to Chief Priestly.

  And that was the end of the easy part.

  ***

  The entire complement of the UPCM, as well as hundreds of representatives from a dozen other bioregional and continental

  agencies, were now on the track of the Kat. The next day, after receiving Chief Priestly's faint praise (and implied condemnation for not somehow suspecting the Incubators sooner), I, too, was back on the streets.

  The night of my discovery, I had met Xuly Beth in Cockaigne for what felt like the last time. The candyland had never seemed shallower. Postsex, as we were silently resting, she said, "Be careful, won't you?"

  "Sure. Don't I have Sonny to watch over me?"

  She laughed. "Turing is spinning in his grave!" Growing serious, she asked, "You still carry a poqetpal, even after your upgrades, right?"

  "Of course. It's always smart to have a backup connection to the metamedium."

  Xuly Beth fingered her bumps. "Good, good… "

  The Incubators had all been thoroughly interrogated without revealing any further clues about where Krazy Kat was hiding. Sonny and I explored a half dozen random possibilities without success. And all the time, something in the back of my mind was tickling my efferents.

  Back at HQ, I took precious downtime to stare at the tornado-mandala.

  And that's when it surfaced.

  The odd scent in the tank.

  I recognized it at last.

  It was the scent of the Mats.

  "Holy loas!" I said. "Sonny, come on!"

  I didn't tell anyone where I was going, in case it turned out to be a wild virus chase.

  And as Doctor Varela would later show me, maybe I unconsciously wanted a one on-one confrontation with the creature who had caused me so much frustration.

  The UPCM kept a boathouse on the harbor. I signed out a swath-small waterplane area twin hull-and was soon zipping out to se a a t a good speed.

  "We checked out the Mats when our assignment was first given," protested Sonny, wearing a Hughes chassis today that resembled a multilegged Hallucinagenia out of the Burgess Shale.

  "I know. But that's not to say that Krazy Kat wasn't elsewhere then, and on the Mats now." />
  "Possibly. I wish I had been able to confirm your hunch as to the origin of that smell."

  "There was no time. Do you want to risk having those prions loosed on the human populace?"

  "Then kibes would rule Boston."

  I stared at the robot, but on this model there was no expression to interpret.

  "A joke. Of the type that partners make to each other."

  "Oh. Ha– ha."

  It took an hour to reach the Mats, out around the Georges Bank, but I could smell them before I could see them.

  The vast collection of cyanobacteri a a nd diatoms carpeted several thousand square kilometers of sea, looking like a mushy ectoplasmic rug, floating meatloaf. Source of multipurpose biomass, home to a flourishing ecology of both basal and biofabbed useful and edible creatures, the Mats were cultivated for humanity by special-purpose, low-intelligence kibes.

  One or more of which the Kat must have subverted and sent to do his bidding.

  At the landward edge of the Mats, a small floating station anchored to the seafloor served the rare human visitors: an OTEC power plant, a beacon, an emergency habitat.

  We docked. I wasn't attempting to be quiet, since there was nowhere for the Kat to go or hide.

  ''Watch the boat," I told Sonny.

  "Until otherwise needed."

  I climbed onboard the gently rocking deck of the lonely, midocean outpost.

  In the north, I could see curious stormclouds massing in a previously clear sky. But I couldn't spare any thought or attention for the weather. My whole being was attuned to picking up the presence of the Kat. But so far, nothing.

  That was why I was so surprised when, as I approached one side of the platform, his paw burst from the water and clamped around my ankle.

  He yanked, I went down, but not in, as I grabbed onto a stanchion. Feeling resistance, the Kat exploded out of the water and onto the deck. He kicked, I rolled, found my feet, and confronted him in a fighter's crouch.

  "Sonny!" I yelled.

  "Coming, Pee-" said the kibe.

  Then there was a splash.

  Two harvesters had clambered aboard the swath and dumped Sonny overboard. My partner had gone to swim with the fishes. And he couldn't swim.

  That left me and the Kat.

  I suppose I should have been honored to be one of the few humans ever to directly confront the legendary splice. But instead I was scared into almost a Blankie-wearing state. After the way he had so easily brought me down, I had to run an emergency mantra just to stay cool.

  Even dripping wet, fur plastered to his noble body, ears flattened to his skull, Krazy Kat looked every bit the Byronic antihero. There was something regal and wild about him and, I could see how his image had captivated so many to his doomed cause.

  "Give it up, Kat, and I promise you won't get hurt," I bluffed.

  His voice mixed purr and snarl, his whiskers twitched. "No, just imprisoned and reviled, made to kiss my inferior's boots!"

  "Better to live than to die."

  "Not on those terms!"

  "Your call," I said, then held my palm out to him in a gesture like a traffic kibe's.

  Antipersonnel spray-blistering, blinding, stifling-lanced out from my exocrine glands and caught the Kat in the face.

  Roaring, he launched himself at me despite the pain. We hit the plates, and I felt his teeth in my neck, piercing my imbricated skin. My grip on his shoulders meant nothing to him.

  I guessed I was about to find out how good neo-goretex veins were.

  Things started to get black, and I thought my vision was going.

  But it turned out to be the clouds above.

  And as I looked in disbelief, all hell broke loose.

  Lightning, thunder, rain in buckets, then the final punch: a microburst of wind similar to the kind that could and had leveled whole tracts of forest in pre GEF days.

  The Kat and I were sluiced off the bucking station and into the sea. Beneath the waves, I finally managed to break his hold-or did he release me? In any case, I was free.

  I fought my way to the surface There was no sigh of the Kat.

  Instead there was a fleet of approaching swaths, into one of which I was soon unceremoniously hauled.

  We searched for the Kat with eyes and instruments and remotes for several hours, but of that bad, bad splice there was no sign. He had gone to feed the hungry sea, or perhaps not. Though escape seemed impossible.

  Before we left, we even managed to track clown Sonny and raise it from the ocean floor. The kibe had been heading back on the bottom under its own power and probably would have made it, if its brick hadn't run down.

  The first call I took after getting patched up was from Chief Priestly, who dished out her usual mix of puffery and abuse.

  The second one was from Xuly Beth.

  "Isn't Global Positioning wonderful?" she said, joyfully teary-eyed.

  "And aren't I lucky to have a friend in high places?"

  "The stratosphere, to be precise," said Xuly Beth.

  McGregor

  1. The Tale of Peter Rabbit

  Peter Rabbit stubbed out his cigarette on the rock upon which he sat, sent the dead butt spinning with a flick of a stubby claw, and sighed.

  It was night. The fragrant country air around him carried cleanly the noises of noncultivar life, poignant cries, lonely calls, sly rustlings.

  Frogs, but no Jeremy Fisher.

  Owls, but no Mr. Brown.

  Badgers, but no Tommy Brock.

  Hedgehogs, but no Mrs. Tiggywinkle.

  These, his fellow splices, were penned, not free to roam as was he.

  Peter reached up to the tip of one long ear, the left. That ear had been illegally docked two years ago, shortly after Peter's escape from the Garden. This had been the only way to remove the silicrobe owner-tattoon, the Warne licensing mark, which had been injected at the Schering-Plough biofab facility, on behalf of McGregor's gembaitch,

  before Peter was shipped. Afterwards, the ear had been regenerated. But the new part had always felt foreign. Peter had a tendency to finger it when he was nervous, as he was now.

  His perch was high on a hill in the Lake District, near the village of Sawrey, in the western bioregion of the European Community. Below, the village was lit by the delicate glow of low-photonic reradiants. To the south Peter could see the grounds of the Beatrix Potter epcot, otherwise known as the Garden.

  How long ago his life there seemed… He had spent only thirteen months in the Garden, but it had felt like forever. The silly skits, the gawping EC, NU, and CoPro tourists, the tasteless food-Through kinky proteins or rebel peptides, he had found himself totally unfit for his servitude.

  The two years-a fifth of his warrantied lifespan-since his flight into the arms of the CLF had been packed with activity. On death's very doormat from lack of diet-supplements, he had stumbled upon the London nucleus of the CLF just in time. After the docking and the standard course of trope-training and soma toning, he had been ready to play his part in transgenic liberation.

  He had participated in the infamous Corrida de la Muerte massacre in Madrid during the first part of '31. He had helped slag the board of directors of Hedonics Plus, the greedy human prokes, at their annual meeting in Geneva. He had been trapped in a shootout with the Brazz branch of the IMF police in the Jibaro maximall, barely escaping with his life. He had even assisted the CLF's leader, the legendary Bad

  Splice, Krazy Kat, in Chicago, as they sought to turn the Big Eaters against the municipality.

  In short, Peter had lived a full life in the past two years. The things he had seen and done had made him a hardened rabbit.

  Yet now, contemplating the notion of facing McGregor again, remnants of his old factory conditioning surfaced, nearly rendering him helpless as a kit.

  He had asked for this assignment. But that didn't mean he had to relish it.

  Peter reached inside the pocket of his tarnished-brass-buttoned blue coat for a dose of angst-banger and sw
allowed it dry. Tugging at a whisker, he sought to focus his mind on the task at hand. As the renegade splice watched, the big holosign outside the epcot winked out, and the last tourbus skimmed off.

  Now the only human (mere 51 percenter that he was, he still legally merited that status) left in the Garden was McGregor.

  Now McGregor would begin to indulge in the "perks" of his position.

  Now the splices had cause to fear.

  Peter repressed his anger at the thought of what would be starting down in the Garden at this moment. The blocker was kicking in, and it helped him to be calm. He could not enter the Garden until McGregor retired for the night, some hours from now. Till then, there was nothing to do but wait.

  Peter lit up another cigarette.

  Filthy human habit.

  But he would never live long enough to get cancer.

  2. The Tale of Two Bad Mice

  McGregor leaned on his cane, waving to the departing tour-bus in his creaky, lovable-irascible, old farmer way. When it had rounded the curve, he verbed off the holosign.

  Then he straightened.

  Standing erect, McGregor no longer radiated an air of cantankerous decrepitude. He seemed to bulk out, filling his suit of simulated brown homespun with limbs and torso powerful as one of the Deere-Goldstar autoharvesters that reaped the surrounding fields. The big white beard cascading to his shirtfront looked completely incongruous now, as did his spectacles and cane.

  Of a sudden, with an uncanny howl, McGregor tossed his cane skyward. It soared higher than the chimney pots on Hill Top Farmhouse. Off came the glasses and beard, as well as the clothes and hat. (The animatronic beard crawled a few inches, then halted.)

  Revealed was a body whose torso was plated ventrally and dorsally with tough overlapping armadillo-like scales. McGregor's arms and legs were wrapped with muscle, like those of a dock-ape. His skull was hairless; silicrobe patterns pulsated just under the scalp, synced electro-myographically with his extra cortical matter. His genitals, retractable, were hidden.