Chapter Twenty-two

The door of Eisner's palace slid open as smoothly as oil moving in water.

Eisner laughed humorlessly from within. "You're alone, Rolls?" she asked. "No troupe of jugglers or dancing girls in attendance?"

Rolls ducked as he stepped into the library. He felt but could not hear the door close behind him.

"I don't need to put on side with you, Eisner," he said. "In fact, I walked instead of riding."

"Should I congratulate you for that?" she asked tartly. "We can do anything we please, can't we? We gods." There was bitterness in the final word.

Eisner sat at the hub of a semi-circular desk whose surface, a gorgeous expanse of burl walnut, was covered with various forms of paper.

Books were interfiled with their open edges together, each marking a place in the other, and in worms of six or eight volumes with each spine thrust into the open edge of the next. Cards and sheets of paper, some of them covered with cryptic notes, marked other places. Swathes of gate-fold hardcopy peeked from the stacks of bound volumes.

There was no dust in the room.

Eisner had a collection of bound sheet music open in front of her. Light fell on it from a hidden source, providing perfect illumination.

"Yes, the problem's always been to decide what to do rather than whether or not it's possible," Rolls agreed.

He held his left hand closed. Eisner glanced at it, then back to his face, but for the moment the big man ignored her interest.

"Did you come for a reason?" Eisner demanded.

"My, what a greeting," Rolls said with a rueful smile.

Eisner rubbed her forehead in self-annoyance. "I'm sorry, Rolls," she said. "With all the time in—" her lips twisted "—in the world, I can certainly talk with a friend. And you've always been as much of a friend as I allowed."

There was a second chair beside the desk, but it too was covered with books and papers. For a moment, Rolls' lips pursed as he considered moving the stacked volumes to the floor. Instead he walked around the end of the desk to look over Eisner's shoulder at the open score.

"What's this, then?" he asked. " 'I wish that I could,' was the man's sad reply, 'But she's dead, in the coach ahead.' "

Eisner stiffened momentarily, but she recognized that interest rather than amusement prompted the question. Like her, the big man was a watcher, a searcher. . . .

"It—has to do with the last intruder from the Consensus," she said. "I thought there might be an avenue of approach to locating the threat to Diamond."

Rolls nodded, glancing up at the books whose shelves covered all the walls save where low doorways interfered. "Have you thought about what I said, Eisner?" he asked. "About it still being possible for us to be human?"

"We are human," she snapped.

Rolls wasn't touching her, but his big form blocked Eisner into her desk alcove. Though he continued to look upward, he shifted to the side as if responding to the nervous anger in the woman behind him.

"I mean," he said gently, still without looking toward her, "that we could resume being fully human. Complete men and women. It's worth taking risks to stay fully human, don't you think?"

"You come closer than most of us, Rolls," Eisner said. The bitterness was back in her voice. "But I . . ."

Rolls turned. When she looked up at his face, she remembered that this big, soft-looking man had led an exploration team, and that he was the one of them who watched against the final day when androids and Lomeri unlocked the pathways of the Matrix and came for long-deferred vengeance.

Risk.

Rolls opened his left hand slowly. His thumb and forefinger held the band that was a shimmer rather than an object, and the jewel below glowed with its own internal fire.

"For one day only," he said as he lowered the necklace over Eisner's head.

"How did you . . . ?" she started. Her voice caught as her mind connected the data it was her life to connect.

And he was right. With Penny's jewel between her breasts—it was worth it.

Eisner stood up. The chair caught the back of her knees. She pushed it away. Her face was changing, and her body filled out as she unsealed the touch-sensitive opening of her coveralls.

Rolls poised, watchful but unwilling to presume even now that Eisner was shrugging out of her single garment.

Nude, she looked at him and then, very deliberately, swept dozens of books onto the floor to clear half of the desk's polished walnut.

"Well, come on, big boy," she said, spreading her arms to Rolls.

Eisner wore the form of a plump, blond woman; a young woman, still in her teens. The necklace dangled brightly across her chest.

There was a noticeable mole on her left breast.