I went down to Emerald Street in search of something new, an attitude with keener claws, a sniper's calm and distant eye, a thief's immersion in the night. I wanted some red and unreasonable religion to supplant the conventionality I believed was suffocating my spirit … though I was less dissatisfied by conventionality itself than by my lack of dissatisfaction with it. That I had embraced the cautious and the conservative so readily seemed to reflect a grayness of soul. I thought adding a spare room to my mind, a space with a stained-glass window through which I could perceive the holy colors of the world, would allow me to feel content within my limitations.

It was a gloomy Seattle morning with misty rain falling and a cloud like a roll of silvery dough being squeezed up from the horizon and flattened out over the Sound. The shop, to which I had been directed by friends—satisfied customers all, successful young men and women of commerce who once had suffered from maladies similar to mine—was a glass storefront sandwiched between a diner and a surgical arcade. A hand-painted sign above the door depicted a green crystalline flash such as might be produced by a magical detonation, with the name—EMERALD STREET EXPANSIONS—superimposed. As I drew near, two neutral-looking, well-tailored men in their thirties, not so different from myself, emerged from the shop. The idea that I might be typical of its patrons diminished my enthusiasm. But recognizing that the mental climate that bred this sort of hesitancy was precisely my problem, I pushed in through the door.

The interior of the shop was furnished like a living room and all in green. The color of the carpet was a pale Pomona, the grouped chairs and couches a ripe persimmon, and the attendant was a woman of approximately my own age, wearing a parrot-green dress with a mandarin collar and a tight skirt. Her features were too strong for beauty, her cheekbones too sharp. Yet she was striking, impressive in her poise, perched alertly on the edge of a chair, and I had the thought that this was not a considered pose, that she must always sit this way, prepared to launch herself at some helpless prey. Her skin had a faint olive cast, testifying to a Latin heritage, and a coil of hair lay across her shoulder and breast like the tail of a black serpent. She glanced down at her hand, at a tiny palm console that—assuming the doorway was functioning—revealed my personal information. She smiled and indicated that I should sit beside her.

"Hello, David," she said. "My name is Amorise. How may I help? Something to brighten the overcast, perhaps? Or are you interested in a more functional expansion?"

I explained my requirements in general terms.

"I assume you've read our brochure," she said, and when I said I had, she went on: "We provide you with a perceptual program that you'll access by means of a key phrase. It's the usual process. The difference is that we only do custom work. We expand what is inborn rather than add an entirely new facet to the personality." She glanced down at the palm console. "I see you design weapons. For the military?"

"Personal protection devices. Home-defense."

"David LeGary …" She tapped her chin with a forefinger. "Wasn't there a piece about you on the news? Murderous appliances, windows that kill … that sort of thing."

"They sensationalized my work. Not all my designs are lethal."

We talked for fifteen or twenty minutes. As Amorise spoke she touched my hand with a frequency that appeared to signal more than simple assurance; yet I did not believe she was teasing me—there was a mannered quality to her gestures that led me to suspect they were an element of formal behavior. Her eyes, of course, were green. Lenses, I assumed. I doubted such a brilliant shade was found in life.

"I was going to pass you off to another therapist," she said. "But I'd like to treat you myself … if that's all right." She rested a hand on my forearm. "Do you want to hear what I have in mind?"

"Sure."

"A poet," she said.

My face may have betrayed disappointment, because she said hurriedly, "Not an ordinary poet, but a poète maudit. A lover, a thief, a man who shed the blood of a priest. He lived six hundred years ago in France. Like your own ancestors, David."

"You can provide elements from a specific personality? I didn't know that was possible."

She passed my comment off with a wave. "The man's name was François Villon. Have you heard of him?"

I said, "No," and Amorise said, "Well, it's not an age for poetry, is it?" She looked down at her hands, as if dismayed by the thought. "Villon was a cynic, but passionate. Sensitive, yet callous. A drunkard and an ascete."

"I don't believe any of those qualities are inborn in me."

"I’m certain that they are. Though the world has done its best to murder them."

I recognized that people in her line of work were gifted with intuition, capable of quick character judgments, but this intimation that she had some innate understanding of me, a knowledge that ran so contrary to my own—it seemed ridiculous. A silence shouldered between us, and then she said, "Let me ask you something, David. If you had the opportunity to create something miraculous, something that would ensure the continuance of a great tradition, but to achieve it you would have to risk everything you've worked for … What would you decide?"

"It's too general a question," I said.

"Is it? I think it's the basic question you're asking yourself, the one you're trying to answer by coming here. But if you want specifics, let's imagine you're François Villon, and that if you surrender your soul to a woman, you will achieve immortality as a poet. What would you do?"

"I don't believe in souls," I told her.

"Of course you don't. That's why I phrased my original question as I did."

"I suppose," I said after a moment's consideration, "that I would like to feel comfortable with taking that kind of risk."

"Taking that kind of risk never bestows comfort," said Amorise.

"But I'll consider that a 'yes.'" She got to her feet and offered me her hand. "Are you ready?"

A dozen questions sprang to mind, but they all illustrated a tiresome conventionality, and I left them unasked. I filled out a form, essentially a disclaimer, paid the fee, and Amorise ushered me into a small room in the back containing a surgical chair with arm and leg restraints. Once I had taken a seat, she handed me a cup half-filled with a bright green liquid, saying that it would put me to sleep. After I drank down the sweetish mixture, she leaned across me to secure the restraint on my left arm, her breast pressing my shoulder. She did not draw back immediately, but remained looking down at me.

"Are you afraid?" she asked. The unreal clarity of her brilliant eyes—they made me think of the painted eyes on signs outside psychics' doors.

I was afraid, a little, but I said, "No."

She caressed my cheek. "You surrender your power so easily … like a child."

Before I could analyze this obscure comment, she kissed me on the mouth. A deep, probing kiss to which, dizzied by the potion I had swallowed, I could not help responding. It was such a potent kiss, I can't be sure whether it or the liquid caused me to lose consciousness. When I woke, light-headed and groggy, I found the restraints had been removed and I discovered in my hand a business card advertising a club called the Martinique in South Seattle. On the back of the card Amorise had written the following:

These are your codes. The first accesses François, the second is to exit.

Je t'aime, Amorise.
Je te deteste, Amorise.

"She's with a client … Oh, wait!" She put a hand to her cheek. "I believe she had an emergency."

"I need to talk to her."

"Well, I'm sure she'll be back." The woman glanced at her watch. "No … maybe not. It's late. She might not come in again until tomorrow. I'm sorry."

She started back into the room from which she had emerged. Inside, a woman was lying in a chair like the one in which I had been treated, different only in that a cylindrical machine mounted on the ceiling had been lowered to fit over the woman's head.

"The machine," I said. "That provides the therapy?"

"Yes." The woman pushed me gently away. "Now please … I have work to do."

"There was no machine in my room! I think she did something to me … I don't know. It doesn't feel right."

The woman closed the door on her patient and said firmly, "All the rooms have machines."

"Not the room I was in!"

She let out an impatient sigh. "Which room was it?"

I pointed. "There."

She preceded me into the room.

"You see?" I said, triumphant.

She pushed a button on the wall; a section of ceiling slid back, and a machine like the one I had seen in the other room lowered to a point directly above the surgical chair.

"She didn't use the machine," I said. "I have no memory of it."

"I have to see to my client." The woman retracted the machine. "But I'm sure you'll be happy with the work. Amorise is extremely capable."

"You don't understand!" I said. "I think …"

"Have you tried out what she did?"

"No, I …"

"Give it a try," she said. "If you're not satisfied, call and we'll set up another appointment. You can ask for me. My name is Jane Eisley. Now, please … I do have to get back to my client."

I had a thirst, but there was no wine in the apartment. I called Spirits, an environment of black leather booths and chrome ornaments in the subterranean levels beneath my complex that pretended to be a bar, and ordered a case of wine sent up. Shortly after I received it, while sitting by my window and trying to discover the characteristics of whatever it was that Amorise had done, my message wall bonged and the larger-than-life image of my ex-girlfriend Angelica Korn snapped into view. I had not talked with her for several weeks, and I saw that she had lost weight, her skin drawn taut from cheekbone to jaw. She had always struck me as somewhat clownish in appearance. Coarsely, commonly pretty, with her thick eyebrows and an overly generous mouth. But there was nothing clownish about her at that moment. Her body language, formerly a vocabulary of exuberant head-tosses and giddy gestures, was restrained, elegant, and her steady gaze unnerved me. Instead of offering pleasantries, she said, "You've been down to Emerald Street. How was it?"

"I'm not sure yet," I said. "I didn't tell you I was going, did I?"

"You need to explore it," said an off-screen voice.

Carl McQuiddy stepped into view behind Angelica. A slim dark man whose goatee and receding hairline lent him a vulpine look. He was one of those who had recommended Emerald Street Expansions as a cure for my malaise. Yet had it been his recommendation alone, I would have paid it no mind. I didn't care for him, and I had assumed Angelica felt the same. If the Devil were to need a lawyer, McQuiddy would be a perfect choice. His black eyes were cold and inexpressive. If anything, they seemed more so than usual that day.

"Perhaps you should get out of the apartment," he suggested. "Go someplace that will bring it out."

"Bring what out?" I asked.

"The effect."

"Are you afraid?" The corners of Angelica's mouth lifted in a half-smile, causing me to believe that her repetition of Amorise's words was no coincidence. It angered me to think that she might be playing games, that she and McQuiddy were baiting me.

"Afraid of what?" I said

"Whatever it is you're afraid of," she said. "Take my advice. You won't remember much. Just scraps. So don't waste time trying."

"Tacque Thibault," Carl said. "Do you recall the name?"

"No." The name did sound a murky resonance, but I had no wish to say anything affirmative to him.

He smiled thinly. "Yet your name is familiar to me."

"Are you trying to trip me out?" I asked. "That's pitiful."

Carl turned his back. "See you tonight," said Angelica, and the wall was restored to its normal white blankness.

The call put me in a foul temper, yet I was delighted by the richness of my anger, a far cry from my usual pallid incarnation of the mood. For a time I drank and experimented with the two key phrases, saying them in succession, over and over, like a child playing with a light switch. Whenever I said, "Je t'aime, Amorise," the apartment with its metal furniture and white walls and stainless steel workbench seemed a cross between a morgue and a dentist's office, annoying in its spotless minimalism. When I said, "Je te deteste, Amorise," it became charming, functional, comfortable. Yet as I continued to alternate between these states, I came to see the place in a generally unfavorable light, as if the perceptual lens I had acquired was infecting all my orderliness.

Troubled by this, I accessed François Villon on the computer and learned that the surname was a nom de plume, taken in honor of his benefactor Guillaume du Villon. His given name had been François Montcorbier. Born in poverty in Paris in 1431, educated at the University of Paris. Convicted of the murder of a priest, the sentence of death dropped when he was found to have acted in self-defense. Always a martyr to love, he had been especially stricken by a woman named Martha Laurens. In 1453 he had been condemned to death a second time for fighting in the streets, the sentence commuted to banishment from Paris, a term during which he had written his most famous work, "The Testament," at the age of thirty—my age exactly—whereupon he vanished from history. It was believed that he had begun the poem while in prison, and it was assumed that he died shortly after completing it, probably from syphilis.

Nothing of this shadowy life was familiar. Yet when I began to read "The Testament," a poem constructed in the form of a will that enumerated dozens of bequests, the bulk of them ironic … as I read the poem, the names of his beneficiaries resonated in me. Noel Jolis, Fat Margot, Guillaume Charruau, Jeahn Cornu, Jeanneton the Bonnet-Maker, Tacque Thibault—the name McQuiddy had mentioned. Villon's jailer and torturer. There were ninety-two names (ninety-three if I counted Villon), and I could have sworn I remembered every one, yet I could not call the people they signified to mind. They seemed to be standing just beyond a locked door in my memory, and the poem itself … the words latched onto my mind as if slotting into spaces already created for them. After two readings I could quote sections by heart.

On occasion Villon was given to stitching his name and those of others down the left-hand side of his poems, forming acrostics, and toward the end of "The Testament," written in this exact way, was the name Amorise DeLore. This discovery aroused conflicting emotions in me. Paranoia, due to my suspicion that Amorise, perhaps obsessed with Villon, was using me to further some insanity; and frustration stemming from the fact that I remembered nothing of her namesake, Amorise LeDore. Acting out my frustration, I threw a wine bottle at the wall and stood admiring the purple stain it created. It served me as a kind of divination—staring at it, I realized that if I wanted to gain a better grasp of the situation, I had no choice other than to visit the club in South Seattle. I fingered out the business card and noted that the address was located in a high crime area. On my workbench lay a variety of psychotropic sprays, macrowebs, and other sophisticated devices designed for personal defense, but without a thought for these weapons, I chose a flick knife that I used to trim wire—it seemed perfectly suited to my anger.

South Seattle had not been rebuilt in such grand fashion as the downtown. Most of the buildings were one or two stories, spun by genetically engineered beetles out of cellulose, but there were a smattering of stores and homes that pre-dated the quake, the building that housed the Martinique among them—a low cement block affair with a façade rising above roof level. I must confess that by the time I reached the club, I was not certain which of my key phrases I had most recently uttered. However, I do know that I had come to detest Amorise—I was convinced she had performed an illegal manipulation—and this may indicate that I was under the spell of "Je t'aime, Amorise," for hate was something I had never before indulged. Though like everyone I had experienced bouts of temper, rancor, and so forth, my life until that day had been undisturbed by obsessive emotion.

A straight-down rain was falling when I emerged from the cab, and I stood beneath the overhang of a Vietnamese restaurant across the street from the club, watching the neon script letters on its façade come greenly alight one after another. The initial T was shaped like a coconut palm. My thoughts proceeded in a curious fashion, entirely unlike my usual process. On spotting a whore sheltering in a doorway next to the club, arms folded, a white thigh gleaming through the slit in her skirt, I imagined her face to be an undertaker's dream of lust, a corpse prettified by sooty eyes and spots of rouge. In a moment she would step forward, open her mouth to the black wine spilling from God's table, and be renewed. The passage of a car, puddled rainwater slashing up from its tires, bred the image of a razor slicing translucent flesh, and two drunken shadows walking away from the club, laughing and stumbling, implied a revel of shades within. I crossed the street, anxious to join them.

Inside, the smoky brown gloom seemed like an exhaust generated by the babble of voices. Perhaps a hundred patrons were gathered about tables and along the bar. On the walls were murals depicting scenes of voluptuous women with fanciful headdresses dancing in jungles. Spotlighted on the stage, visible above the heads of the crowd, a tall black man cried through a golden saxophone, backed by a bass and drum. His cheeks bulged hugely, and he glowed with sweat; his sidemen were all but invisible in the shadows. The melody he played was slow and lugubrious, but the rhythms beneath it were those of a drunken waltz, and this lent the music a rollicking air, making it seem that the idea of sadness were being mocked. I felt the tune tugging at some ghost of memory, but could not put a name to it. However, I recognized the man to be a street musician who played in the fish market and had once cursed me for not tossing money into his instrument case.

I located an unoccupied barstool and ordered a glass of wine. Most of the patrons were of an age with me, fashionably dressed, and as I glanced about, I realized I knew everyone that I had thus far seen, either as business associates or chance acquaintances. Just down the counter was Joan Gwynne, a lovely dark-haired woman who had catered several of my dinner parties before I was forced to let her go due to our unfortunate romantic entanglement, one toward which she had since expressed great bitterness. She had on a parrot-green dress identical to that Amorise had worn, and her drink shone with the same hue and intensity as the neon letters on the façade. Though all about me other women were being clutched and pawed, no one was bothering Joan. A space had been cleared around her, and she sat without speaking, her viridian eyes flicking side to side. Behind the bar was a long mirror so unclouded it appeared to form an adjunct to the club. In its reflection I saw Carl McQuiddy and Angelica Korn conversing together, separated from me by at least a dozen people. They were dressed in matching gray suits and black shirts. A large golden pin nested in Angelica's hair. I had no urge to join them.

I drank several glasses of wine and continued to stare at Joan. Something about her made my thoughts bend like a field of wheat impressed by a force of wind. I might have approached her, but her eerie solitude restrained me, and when the saxophonist completed his song to scattered applause, she downed her drink and moved off into the crowd. I was oddly distressed by her departure. Someone jostled my elbow. I spun about and confronted John Wooten, my lawyer for the last few years—he had recently successfully defended me in a civil suit brought by the families of two clients who had been killed when they misused one of my devices. Thick-waisted and jovial, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, clothed in a blue suit. He looked down at my hand and said with wry amusement, "Quick to anger as ever, François."

I discovered that without my notice, as if obeying some old barfighter reflex, I had put knife to his belly; but this did not concern me as much as the fact that he had called me François.

"Guillaume de Villon," said the man I knew as John, inclining his head. "I was your friend, François. Of course I have no memory of that time. We have only your words and fragments of history to tell us who we were. Nonetheless, I'd know you anywhere." He clapped me on the shoulder. "Put your knife away, man. Things have always been unclear. Our task is to make as much light as we can in the darkness of life. Let us enjoy this night."

He raised his glass in a toast, and responding to what must have been a vestigial trace of camaraderie, I followed suit.

"What's happening here?" I asked.

"I confess that my understanding is incomplete," he said. "But from what I can gather, Amorise has brought us all forward from the fourteenth century to enact a certain rite that will allow us—and her—to continue."

I stared at him, rejecting this preposterous notion … and yet something would not allow me to completely reject it.

"Of course," he went on, "I'm merely repeating the consensus view. I haven't spoken to anyone who claims to know anything for certain."

"Are you saying she carried our essences inside her? Our …"

"Our souls," he said. "Her sinecure at Emerald Street afforded her the means to effect the transfers."

I wanted to inquire further, but at that moment a woman's voice sounded from the stage, asking for our full attention. It was Amorise. She posed as if embracing the spotlight, her arms outspread, wearing a simple white dress whose hem grazed the floor. Beside her, Joan Gwynne stood swaying, her eyes closed. The crowd grew still. It was so quiet I could hear the rain beating down on the roof. Amorise took Joan in her arms and kissed her deeply. Just as she had kissed me back at the shop. The kiss lasted nearly a minute, I reckoned, and for its duration no one spoke. Amorise's cheeks filled then hollowed, as if she were breathing into Joan's mouth. The expulsion of breath appeared to be causing her difficulty, for she soon began to tremble. At last she broke from the kiss. Two men jumped onto the bandstand to support Joan by the elbows, or else she might have fallen. Amorise steadied herself and then, flinging up her arms, she proclaimed, "The sublime act has begun! " She gestured at Joan. "I wish to present she who was last Martha Laurens! Our beautiful friend, Joan Gwynne!"

Martha Laurens.

The woman who, according to "The Testament," had metaphorically buried François Villon's heart in a little casket.

Shaken, I stared at Joan as the crowd applauded, seeing another woman, or rather seeing in her the force of another, one toward whom I felt both an intense longing and an intense aversion. Moved by no act of will or conscious desire, merely drawn to her, I pushed toward the stage. By the time I reached it, she had regained her senses and—to a degree—marshaled her composure. She looked as I imagined I must have when I woke from my kiss. Ruffled and disoriented. But there was no alarm in her face, and it occurred to me, thinking about her green dress, her solitude at the bar, that she had been prepared for whatever had happened. When she noticed me, the corners of her mouth lifted in a smile. She extended a hand so I could help her down from the stage, and then led me toward the bar, glancing at me with shy anxiety as we proceeded. We sat on stools near the end of the bar and considered one another.

"I don't know what to call you," she said.

It was as if another face were melting up from beneath the pallor of her familiar face, thus making her doubly familiar. Though disguised by bright green lenses, the shape of her eyes fit a shape in my brain that seemed to have been waiting for this sight. As did the fullness of her mouth, the concavities of her cheeks, her graceful neck and smooth forehead, every part of her.

"Aren't you going to say anything?" she asked.

"No," I said. "I don't think so."

She laughed, letting her head drop and glancing away, and the delicacy of that movement enraptured me. This was wrong, I told myself. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling. I wanted the comfort and security of David LeGary's blighted yet well-tended mental garden. Je te deteste, Amorise. I said it beneath my breath, but to no effect.

Joan, Martha, this creature whom I sat before, nervous and eager as a dog hoping for a treat, she looked at me, and that look became a heated environment, an absolute immersion—I had no idea why. Martha Laurens was to me no more than a name that caused a bloom of heat beneath the ice of my soul, and Joan Gwynne was an attractive, personable woman, given on occasion to spells of flat affect, who, according to other of my business associates, had—following our brief fling—seen the light of the White Goddess and was now an avowed lesbian with a live-in lover. Yet blended together, cooked in the same flesh (this, if I were to believe the improbable scenario related by John/Guillaume), they became a third person whose luminous specificity enlivened and bewildered me. If what I had been told was truly happening, why was it happening?

A rite, Guillaume had said. To allow our continuance. But for what reason did we continue … and what was "the sublime act?"

The saxophone man was back on stage, executing a mournful ballad. The people who milled about us were all, like Joan, doubly familiar, as if two identities had been combined within their bodies. I did not believe in souls. So I had told Amorise. Yet feeling what I felt, having witnessed what I had, how could I not believe that the kiss had effected a transference, that Amorise had breathed some essence into me, into all assembled, and now into Joan.

"What are you thinking?" Joan asked, taking my hand.

That simple touch caused my head to swim. I saw that she had removed her green lenses; her eyes were still brilliant, live wheels of agate. The tip of her tongue flicked the underside of her upper lip. I was overwhelmed by sensory detail. The push of her breasts against green silk, the long sweep of her thigh …

"I'm trying to make sense of this," I said.

Joan leaned close, kissed my cheek, then—briefly—my mouth. "How does one make sense of a kiss?"

Her comment distanced me, seeming to imply a perspective on the situation that I had not yet achieved. I asked her if she cared for a drink, signaled the bartender and ordered two glasses of wine. A soul, I thought. A scrap of energy to which only trace memories attached and yet which sustained emotions such as love. A force that could be transferred from one mouth to another. My thoughts, pure contraries, ideological oppositions, began to strangle one another before they could fully establish themselves.

The wine came, and we drank. Everywhere I cast my eye I saw someone I knew and whom I sensed that I had also known half a millennium ago. Thomas Hamada who, until his incompetence cost me a large sum of money, had served as my accountant. Diana Semple, a former patron. Several old lovers. There were, as I've stated, about a hundred people in the Martinique that night, and I suspected that if I were to introduce myself to each and every one, I would discover there were exactly ninety-two, and that their names would be those Villon had mentioned in "The Testament." The poem, I decided, was likely central to the rite that Guillaume had mentioned. And since I was ostensibly the poet, I must also be central to it, trapped in its unclear heart like a flaw in the depths of an emerald.

"I want to be alone with you," Joan said.

I wanted to be alone with her, too, though I was not entirely certain why. Something was being orchestrated here, some music of action and word I was supposed to perform. The thought that I was being manipulated infuriated me, and I felt a more profound rage as well, one emblematized by a section of "The Testament" that then surfaced from my mind:

I renounce and reject love
And defy it in blood and fire
With such women death hustles me off
And they couldn't give a damn …

That she dared to ask this or any question of me, it was like gasoline thrown on a fire. I lunged at her, but McQuiddy stepped between us. I shoved him back and drew my knife. "Stand aside," I told him.

"A knife," said McQuiddy. "That's so fifteenth century!"

He gave a flick of his left hand—an almost imperceptible shadow briefly occupied the air between us. I felt the skeins of the macroweb settling over me, flowing down my face and shoulders in a heartbeat, growing and tightening, rendering the upper part of my body immobile. I knew that to strain against it would cause the web to tighten further, and I stood without twitching.

"What do you want of me?" I asked Amorise.

"I want you to enact the laws of your nature," she said.

"I was about to do that very thing," I said. "Dissolve the web—I'll be happy to oblige."

The web began to tighten. McQuiddy was standing beside me. I could not turn my head to see him, but I knew he was controlling the web, because I had not stirred. The mesh cinched about my throat and chest—I had difficulty drawing breath.

"Carl!" Amorise frowned at him. The web loosened slightly, and McQuiddy whispered in my ear, "Just like old times … eh, François?"

Amorise moved closer, so that her startling green eyes were inches from my own. Perhaps, I thought, they were not lenses.

"If you let your soul speak," she said, "you will know what I want."

"My soul? Are you referring to the thing you breathed into me, or the one whose place it usurped?"

"There's no difference between the two now. But don't be alarmed, David. You worked in machines instead of words, but you always had the soul of a poet maudit. I've done very little to you. I've simply given you the chance to fulfill your destiny." Then, to McQuiddy, she said, "I'm through here. Take his knife and release him."

Grudgingly, McQuiddy did as instructed.

As the web dissolved, a more protracted process than it had been to ensnare me, Amorise studied my face. What she saw there must have pleased her, for she smiled and allowed herself a laugh, a mere spoonful of sound.

"I've chosen well," she said. "You will create a beautiful text."

"Mister LeGary," said the blonde woman, Jane Eisley, who had dealt with me the previous afternoon. "We've been trying to call you."

Something about her seemed familiar, in the way that the individual members of the crowd the night previous had seemed familiar, but this resonance did not interest me. "I broke my phone," I said grimly. "Where is Amorise?"

"I'm afraid she no longer works here," Jane Eisley said. "But I have good news. We checked the machine she used to treat you. It was inoperable. The power leads were burned out. She could have done nothing to you. That's why we had to let her go. She received payment for work she didn't do. I have your refund here."

She held out a slip of paper that I supposed was a record of a transfer to my credit line. I knocked her hand away. "Where is Amorise?"

"You've no reason to act this way!" She fell back a step. "Take the refund. She didn't do anything to you."

"The hell she didn't! She doesn't need a fucking machine. Give me the address!"

When Jane Eisley refused to cooperate, I pushed past her and went along the corridor searching for the office. At the very back lay a room with a desk atop which a computer was up and running. I searched the files for Amorise's address. It was listed under the name Amorise LeDore, and I recognized it to be a house on Vashon Island whose defense system I had installed six weeks before. I recalled that I had not dealt with the owner, but her lawyer, who had referred to her merely as "my client."

The lawyer had been Carl McQuiddy.

Just off the office was a room containing a number of lockers. The name "LeDore" was written on the third one I came to. The door was loose, and I managed to pry it open. Inside were a pair of athletic shoes, cosmetics, and a slim leather-bound volume that I assumed to be an address book. I pocketed it and went out into the corridor. Jane Eisley was at the front of the shop, talking on the phone. I tore the phone from her grasp and said, "Don't cause me any trouble, or my lawyer will smother you." She made a shrill response that I, in my anger and haste, failed to register. I slammed the door behind me with such force, it called after me in a fruity computerized voice that I would be charged for any damage that had been incurred.

Having deciphered this much, I tossed the book aside, went to my workbench, and called up my designs for Amorise's house on my computer. If I were, indeed, infected by the soul of a dead poet, one spat into my body by a centuries-old witch—and it seemed such was the case—I refused to be her pawn. I did not intend to produce a text, and more, I resolved to put an end to the Sublime Act, and to Amorise herself. It was not merely anger that inspired me. As I examined the plans, determining what I might need to neutralize my defensive system, I experienced a feeling of revulsion in reaction to the Sublime Act, an apprehension of sacrilege, of unholy practice—I thought this might well be Villon's reaction and not LeGary's.

The message wall bonged, and John Wooten appeared. Sitting in his study, wearing a black dressing gown. He looked worried, and his first words to me were, "David, we have problems."

"What are they?" I asked, returning my attention to the plans.

"I had a call from an attorney representing the Villanueva family. They're planning to refile in the basis of new evidence."

"The suit was dismissed," I said.

"Yes, but not with prejudice. They have the right to refile." He leaned back, lowered his chin to his chest so that his jowls flattened out like a fleshy ruff framing the lower portion of his face. "They're also urging the district attorney to institute criminal charges. Negligent homicide. Reckless endangerment."

"That's ludicrous!"

"Perhaps. But it's a problem nonetheless." Wooten folded his hands on his belly. "What new evidence could they have, David?"

"You know, John," I said, my temper fraying. "This is not my concern. You're the lawyer. Find out what they have."

"I'm trying to do just that. It would help if I knew what there was to find."

"Nothing!" I slapped the palm of my hand hard against the workbench. "These fucking people! They could have heat sensors, motion detectors … but normal security isn't enough. It doesn't satisfy their urge to be trendy. So they hire me to devise clever little toys they can show off to their friends …"

"Calm down, David."

"House pet assassins! Robotic freaks! Then when two Mexican rich kids don't bother to read the manuals and zap themselves, I'm to blame for what happens? It's bullshit!"

"I agree," Wooten said. "But you're the standard of the industry, David. I doubt the Villanuevas can win in court. They've already lost once. But you have to expect to be the target of litigation now and then."

"You know what I expect?" I said. "I expect you to handle the Villanuevas. You're the fucking lawyer. I don't want to be bothered. If you can't do it without calling me every five goddamn minutes, I'll get someone else."

"It would be unprofessional of me—if not unethical—to fail to consult you."

"All right. You've consulted me. What else?"

Wooten appeared puzzled.

"You said there were problems," I said. "Give me the rest of it."

He was silent for a short count, then he said, "François …"

I looked up at him, calmer, as if he had spoken to some deeper part of me, though I was still angry at his intrusion. "What?" I said gruffly.

"Nothing … Never mind." He broke the connection.