Le Coeur's troika met in will-see: Lugar in Ganj Dareh with an office background of soft, yellowish wood; Thy on a remote rail siding with the night-shadowed curves of a freight car behind her; and Dain —
     Dain rode the night-sky flat on his back in the med-tek bay of his aircraft. He lay rigid, couched by mild sedative, but mostly nagged by the damage JDB had inflicted during a putsch that cost Dain precious seconds, a coup that went unpunished because JDB had disappeared.
     The sneering, hostile voice from JDB. The memories — of what? — controlled by JDB. The emotional sponge of JDB. Disappeared, these bulwarks of Dain's psychic fort, a fort already shaken by the demands of his dreams.
     Demands that raged over the lost time. Even now, on the fringes of his meeting panel, queue glyphs bulged with their loads of work, work required to finish the last steps of his takeover. And before then, he must change Lugar's direction in Ganj Dareh and wrest control of Pizi away from Thy's tardy ways. Both would take time, precious time. So much time lost.
     JDB's theft angered Dain. Anger? How to deal with anger when JDB was not around to engulf it. In a ploy to ignore it, Dain —
     — impatiently convened the meeting.
     Lugar immediately demanded, "Where have you been? I've been waiting!"
      Dain ignored that, too. "What's your staffing level?"
     "Ninety-three percent present, the rest accounted for as anshin detainees. We won't get them back."
     "At dawn, then," Dain ordered. "Send them out as planned, but triple the level of violence: three out of four triads authorized to injure people. The —"
     Lugar broke in: "The plan doesn't call for that level of violence for another seven days, and then, only if the campaign has not been productive."
      "Is it productive now?" Dain said, his jaw muscles tight around the words.
     "You cannot expect results after just one day on the paths! Those dreamsticks reduced our sortie ratio tremendously."
     "No thanks to your defensive kata." Dain noticed Thy's amused tracking of the exchange, her face ticking like a metronome. He glared at her. "So I solved the dreamstick problem." Thy flinched at the implied reprimand.
     Dain continued, "The anshin will refrain from dreamsticks for at least three days. By—"
      Lugar leered. "Very good, Dain!"
     Dain glared down the ass-licker. "By then, I will have produced a final solution. In the meantime, no unnecessary encounters with the anshin: don't strain Heejanus' obedience to her boss' dictates. So, the ollomani slide through the Beobachtung shadows. They slip through cracks in the patrol schedule. If you have to root harder in Heejanus' databases, do so! They strike and get out. They work the fringes of neighborhoods, on the river banks, on the bluffs — that pretty restaurant of theirs."
      Lugar didn't answer. His skull-like face blanched and flushed, piebald with fury and shame.
     Dain went on: "I came to Ganj Dareh. I saw Ganj Dareh. I know how things work there." If plans don't determine reality, change them. Why can't Lugar see that?
      "Dain—"
     "Move along, Lugar. Advance the plan by seven days. And remember: don't kill on purpose, and —"
     "Paradigm shift!" Lugar stuck in.
     "Lugar!" Dain ground out the name in protest.
     "We discussed this, Dain. Only Thy and I have dealt directly with the minds of our ollomani, but you should remember our plans about killing."
     Dain rooted through his memories, prodding them to produce a connection. He found nothing. Had JDB controlled it? Killing did fall within his purview ... didn't it?
     Lugar was talking: "Even these Yishmaelites, these Pariahs we recruited into the League respect some patterns, Dain. Those few include 'Protect Your Life Expectancy — and That of Others':
     "'Death is part of being Human: don't expect to live forever. Expect to — '"
     "Don't quote patterns to me," Dain growled. In the other corner of the will-see panel, Thy grinned her enjoyment over his discomfort.
     "'Expect to live,'" Lugar trooped on, "'0.378 Tenner. That's long enough to see your children grow up, and your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren. Thereafter, the Collective no longer ensures your life; you're on your own then. Therefore, take care of yourself: follow the Patterns for Healthy Life. Therefore, take care of others: follow the Patterns for Good.'" Lugar drew another long breath.
     "Lugar correct," Thy took over. "Though long-winded. Why the recruits believe." She shrugged, dismissing all societal rules including this one. "We replaced patterns with League Rules, kept them hard and true. Then." She snapped her fingers crisply. "Changed the Rules."
     "That's right, Dain," Lugar said. "We've already moved on, just like we planned, from Tlaxtli League to the New Order. I don't know how Thy handled it. Personally, I took advantage of the backlash caused by your little stunt with 13'Sao-La, letting him kill 8'Issaw. Even my handpicked Propaganda Team yielded to your implication and committed eight collateral murders, cleanly, I might add, no trace back to the League. But I re-instated those killers, Dain; I did not punish them ... and the rest of the Propaganda Combine took the hint. They are primed to kill, Dain. I can't unshift that paradigm!"
     Dain cursed, his teeth locked together to dam the words. He cursed Lugar, Thy, JDB, and himself. Even suppressed, the venting siphoned off his anger enough so he could fold it away and get on with things. Still, he missed how JDB transformed the negative emotion into positive resolve.
     "Surely," he started, then swallowed to clear his voice. "Surely, as Governor Sigma, you can restrain your followers for another three days."
      "Why?"
     "In three days, the dreamsticks will fail the anshin." Now I must bend Pizi to that deadline. "In three days, the anshin will fail their customers by allowing incidents to sprawl unabated across the landscape. In three days, we shake power loose from Byukan-Hamil so that we can pick it up."
     Lugar cooly returned Dain's gaze. From ass-licker to challenger in a few verbal exchanges. JDB had stolen more than time! Ranting words plowed through Dain's mind, but he gave them no voice. He focused on Lugar's next challenge.
     "And what if Ganj Dareh's zhee-tely, in their own clumsy ways, manage to kill in the meantime?" Lugar said.
     "An accidental death or two will pale against your combine's effectiveness when unleashed, won't they?"
     "Of course!"
     "You can control your people, can't you, Lugar?"
     "Of course!"
     "Make sure they don't hang around if zhee-tely escalate things on their own." Topic completed.
     "Yessir."
     "Good." Dain stabbed Lugar once more with a glare of authority, then shifted his gaze. "Thy—"
     "I need more people," Lugar said.
     Dain hardly glanced back. "You have all the people you said you needed."
     "You don't want ollomani on rampage, do you, Dain? You want a surgical strike against Ganj Dareh's psyche, not just blunt trauma to their bodies, right? My people need rehearsal, practice on each other, before they sortie against these zhee-tely. Accelerating their learning curve requires more people.
     "And, neutralized now or not, those dreamsticks created unanticipated attrition. I want to avoid consolidation and re-alignment."
     Reluctantly, Dain yielded to the sense of these arguments. "Thy?" he asked.
     The woman shook her head, poked a thumb over her shoulder at the rail car. All her people were committed.
     Again zhuhndí prevailed. "Make do, Lugar."
     "Yessir."
     Topic complete. "Thy, your repor—"
     "I need more money."
     Dain cocked his head at Lugar's image. He fired back: "We're cutting days out of your schedule, Lugar. That should cost less!"
     Lugar narrowed his eyes, but replied with strength, "Quality, speed, cost, Dain, pick any two. You want speed now: it's going to cost you."
     Dain glared back. "If I agree, will you just get on with the job?"
     Lugar flashed his skeletal grin and inclined his head.
     "I approve the cost overrun."
     "Yessir." Somber acquiescence.
      Dain paused two heartbeats. "Thy?" he asked without looking in her direction.
     "Entire Power Combine loaded, at three assembly points, ready for transport as soon as I climb aboard. Route designed to scramble continuity, to misdirect Beobachtung surveillance, to enable training exercises en route, hence eleven days till arrive Ganj Dareh. This my final direct transmission. From now on, security demands poly-recursive indirect relay. That communication path precludes virtual meetings. End of report."
     "Got that, Lugar?" Dain said.
     "Yes." His brow crinkled over puzzled eyes.
      "Run along then."
     The other chief executive hesitated, balancing, Dain knew, the imperious tone against his own pride and curiosity. "Yessir," Lugar said finally and broke out of the will-see. Dain allowed relief to relax him some.
     Thy's face hung itself in Dain's holoscreen. "Yes?" she snarled.
      Sure of his dominance here, Dain waited.
     "The gleest," she said. "Right? I'm negotiating with him now. Working out means of payment. Wants stock purchase as cover. Wants too much."
     Nice touch, Dain admitted: the patois implies she's comfortable and in control, when I can tell she's not. "Safeguards?" he said calmly.
     Thy sniffed with confusion.
     "Safeguards?" Dain repeated. "You are hiring a criminal to perform crimes. How have you safeguarded against him attempting extortion or going ahead and using our contract to barter clemency with the authorities or even just defaulting after he's taken our money? I know you wouldn't miss your overt role in society — master of an obscure sports league — but I would."
     "Said I'd kill him and told him how, in pain-filled detail."
     "And how will you find this person's zhuhndí body to work your 'magic' on?"
     Another sniff, doubt mixed with regret.
     Dain bypassed his exasperation. "What kind of meetings are you having with him?"
     "Encrypted sidebar in will-hear, in that sewer I told you about."
     "Connect me."
     "I—"
     "Connect me."
     Her gaze dropped. Her jaw muscles worked behind lips pressed flat together. A panel opened, carving rectangular space from the image of her cheek. He spoke, knowing Kär would convert his words to text and pipe them to the sidebar.
     "I am Jik Dain Bedlip. I authorize funds, not Sous Thy. I want to get on with this work. Let's talk." He barked, "End Message," and the panel shifted to sepia tone as the text became a permanent part of that meeting/will-be-heard. Then Dain commanded, "Add that attendee to my Priority List for Incoming Requests." A glyph flashed with update-complete.
     Dain made eye contact with Thy again.
     "Bah!" she spat in dismissal, then said crisply, "My teams will need work to do when we get to Ganj Dareh."
     "Be prepared, Thy. Lugar will get his job done."
     "I am," she retorted. "He'd better."
     A ribbon panel unfolded in the middle of the picture, its thin box censoring the flint in her expression while showing the name of a Priority Requestor.
     "Pizi," Dain explained mildly. "I have to go."
     "Bah," Thy repeated even as her image withered.
     Alone in that instant, before he could proceed confidentally to the next one, Dain asked himself the same question: Safeguards?
     jDub answered with the frenzied whine of a medulla modem in use. Like a pack of crazed rats devouring each other inside his own skull. A glyph popped into existence in the center of his holoscreen: a cartoon bomb, black sphere with a piece of fuse jutting out, its tip fuzzed with sparks.
     Having answered his own question, Dain commanded his new meeting to start: "Talk to me."
     The llevar erected another vision. Dain could see a scruffy background of streaked walls. In front of that, a homunculus made from a collection of mismatched legs, torso, and arms, while the head showed a gyrating pattern of tiny rectangles, each one carrying a different face. One might be Pizi's real face, but Dain didn't even wonder about it.
     "The money remains to be seen." The voice came across like smoothed gravel, filtered to deceive — or meant to seem that way.
      "How do you want it done?"
     "Buy this stock." A linked text panel blinked into overlay. A prospectus summary unfolded within its borders.
     "I invite your patience," Dain said politely, then barked, "Kär," knowing the word would not leave the llevar. He then gave instructions for the stock purchase, with confirmation copied to Pizi. "End Kär," he ordered to sever the off-line session. "I return," he addressed the image.
     "Very nice," Pizi said, acknowledging the purchase. "Very quick. Very responsive." And he stopped talking.
     "Thank you. Please attend to one other thing." Dain poked jDub's bomb. It slow-dissolved for a second or two, then flared with a farcical tongue of flame. A paired display, jDub made Dain understand, just like Pizi saw, wherever he was. jDub masked all other specifics, so Dain warned his alter, =It had better work!=
     jDub leaked knowledge, a non-technical summary, into their shared mind. They threatened Pizi with a virtual vaccine, benign to the Em-Deh, devastating to its victim because it immunized the Em-Deh against all his traffic.
     Dain added confidence to his grin.
     Pizi's voice filter screeched with, "Hot shit on a stick!" The scrambled image continued its pixel dance, the voice stayed gravelly, yet the person behind that wall spoke artlessly, "A Bouncin' Betty? You can do me with a Bouncin' Betty?" Grudging respect crept into his words. "How may I serve you?"
     Dain fingered another part of the holograph in front of him. His gleest reminder list appeared as a garble. He muttered fiducia and Kär deciphered the list. Ready, Dain said to the gleest, "Four projects."
     Pizi did not speak, probably clinging to his accustomed impudence, now seriously dented. Dain started with the simplest chore on the list, simple but still critically important. "Can you unveil the security structure within the policyware of a consortium, the one at this address?" Kär sent the Em-Deh coordinates of Byukan-Hamil's coag.
     "I can roll over that coag in my sleep and snort out imprimaturs, permissions, associated names." The tiny faces slowed their swirl for an instance as though distracted. "Decrypting fiducia would take me longer; I've got the code, man, but the processing is muy non-trivial."
     "Can you or can't you?"
     "I told you what I can do and how much it will cost." Back on his insolent feet. "So, you decide what you want."
     Fiducia: some sound or sight or smell supposedly unique to a person. In other words, reproducing a specific behavior at a specific time. You either copied it or — images of past seductions peppered Dain's thoughts. He knew how to control human behavior. All he needed to know was who had what access to the consortium's organization. He didn't know how that trail of authority would help him overthrow Norma; he just hoped to find something that powerful, some dusty secret he could exploit through the associated human's weaknesses. "Relay the data. Forget the fiducia.
     "Next, I want a hacker that will corrupt a specific entry in a Collective's database so that it looks normal to a person, but an agent-for-identification won't find it."
      "Match on text, like in a name, that fails?" Pizi said.
     Dain understood how Yeibichai's Open-and-Accountable Pattern had been implemented. He knew how Beobachtung recorded all public actions around the planet and how Heejanus had extended that indoors to some degree through her Common-Surveillance Program. He believed that the anshin were trying to use automata to identify every participant in every Incident. He had arranged for the Byukan-Hamil bureaucracy to impede that capability, but he also wanted to break the connection at the other end. He wanted to keep the ollomani from being automatically placed in their roles in the Rendezvous and specifically, their Ready Rooms. Too many matches to too few places would lead Heejanus' diligent people to draw harmful conclusions.
     "Not just text," Dain said, "but all other forms of match, image, DNA, fingerprints, iris and retina scans, everything."
     "I'll do it during my next nap except—" a disconnected finger wagged "— except for Em-Deh identifiers. That would be too suspicious, mucking too much with infrastructure. Besides nobody really knows how to generate and use them."
     jDub agreed, so Dain moved on. "Comprende dreamsticks?"
     "Yah." Stretched by a yawn.
     "Break them."
     "Dude!" Gravel-voice vanished; a younger, excited one replaced it. "Like total malfunction?"
     "I prefer selective malfunction — not affect my people like they don't affect the anshin — but I'll settle for total breakdown."
     "That's such a strange brain-gig. I boss automata around — I'm the best — but I sure wouldn't want to live with them inside me. Creepsville! Still, that's heavy-duty, a worthy problem — on an off-day. You do realize that selective malfunction would isolate the unaffected, make them stand out from those who still dream?"
     "You have a point," Dain said begrudgingly. "Total malfunction, then."
     Pizi responded with a smug slurp.
     "How soon?" Dain tired of the posturing. Had that ego driven Pizi into the sewers? Did he need to clutter such a pure motivation with braggadocio?
      "Depends on what else you want. What's Number Four?"
     "I want the Direvnya of Ganj Dareh disconnected from the Mirnaya Direvnya — and I want its will-hear penetrated."
     "No smegging way!"
      "Your reputation claims that you are a gleest, with skills and intentions capable of such work."
     The image panel cut to video: a craggy-faced man in ancient costume grimaced out the words, "A man's gotta know his own limitations." It ended in a freezeframe.
     "Bouncin' Betty," Dain said mildly.
     The distorted image reappeared. Gravel-voice returned, though it carried wheezes of exasperation. "Requirements, zhee-tel, requirements."
     "The Mirnaya Direvnya is a fundament, ubiquitous, constant, reliable. I want to challenge those qualities in the minds of the people of Ganj Dareh."
     "Disrupt service? Corrupt databases? Misroute messages? Add numbers wrong? That sort of thing?"
     "Yes."
     Pizi was silent, but the feet on the screen started walking themselves to and fro, heel and toe. One of his disparate hands reached out of the frame, then jerked back into forced calm interlaced with the other. "Thorough degradation? Completely undermine complete trust? Earthquake in virtual reality?
     "Yes. How soon?"
     "Zhee-tel, defilement, abomination, and corruption do not come from packaged personalities. They must be crafted, coaxed, breathed into life."
     "How soon?"
     "When do you need it?"
     "Four days."
     "Thirteen."
     "Six. Remember Bouncin' Betty."
      "Nine."
      "I shall plan on it."
     There was a pause, filled, it seemed, with calculation, then Pizi said, "All the troubles will seem to be local. We don't want the lattice managers poking their rancid and bifurcated noses into this business."
     "Consider it added to the requirements."
     "What about the will-hears?"
      "I want to read them, and I want to write to them anonymously."
     "No smegging way. Fake identity, maybe. Absence of identity violates the most fundamental protocols."
     Threat arose again; Dain resisted it. Words of ego-challenge rose to his lips, but he dismissed them also. This gleest, this man — or woman? — would tire of menace and shrug off a dare. Too much risk, too little gain. What would make the risk worthwhile?
      Power. No human, even a cyber-entrenched one, could pass up power — of the right kind.
     "A bonus, then, if you achieve anonymity — and stop the dreamsticks in three days. I direct Byukan-Hamil's infrastructure. I can make its infraware available to you. Here, try this handshake: Pizi+anonymous." Kär would limit the gleest's time, allow him just a taste of virtually unlimited computing resources. "Get back to me."
     Video replaced verité: This time, the figure stood obscenely tall, broad-shouldered, clad in space leathers. The face hid behind a skull-skimming dark visor. Long white hair streamed to the side in a gale-force wind even though the background was a crater-pitted asteroid. The startlingly low voice said, "Frankly, Scarlet, your wish is my command." The figure lifted a hand and followed it into the sky, leaving an unmoving battered surface.
     In turn, Dain left the freezeframe hanging, nonmaterial, yet real, insubstantial, yet auguring upheavals. It was a fitting apparition in the shadows of his aircraft.
     The delegation felt good. Lugar, Thy, Pizi, plunging off in different directions, but with one target: Ganj Dareh.
     Yet ... tentacles of frustration tightened around his innards. Too many days till tangible results, too many days before they had accomplished enough to Measure, too long till he knew whether he'd solved these problems or not. And too many insubordinates on the way there.
     Out of habit, he brushed at the pressure, sending it off to JDB's maw. The tendrils clung to his mind: nowhere to go, no connection, broken circuit. And that cranked up his insecurity.
     Dain fled, forcing his attention outward to his demanding queues. The final steps in his consolidation of Byukan-Hamil power: merging the disparate networks of coordinators, whittling their corpulence, purging hundreds into the ranks of Die Gastarbeiter, selecting those loyal to his double vision. He would finish arranging his place on the Team of Partners, one last step toward his confrontation with Har Norma. He activated the first queue, took its first message, and settled down to work.