He reached in to the gap in the paper with the round ends of his fingers and noticed that they were trembling. His breathed through his open mouth, coughed. He pulled the two parts of the backing free of the adhesive and smoothed the waybill against the top of the box, covering the Dell logo. He had duplicated the entire backups of the company's records for the past six years. His smile was twisted as he studied the address on the ticket. For the past six years except the last three months. Too bad for them, he thought, too bad that I haven't gotten around to moving the data from the last three months over to the backups yet... and too bad for us, that the return address doesn't match the address that shipped us the servers. He patted his pocket again, for the seventeenth time.

He decided that he would get money orders with the cash. None more than four thousand dollars. He decided to pay his bills off slowly, to husband the money so he could make more than the minimum payments for the next six months. He decided to buy a massaging chair for his mother, she'd like that. And he decided that he would take a thousand dollars and have a nice weekend in the city, he knew a cooperative girl who would make the spending enjoyable. Maybe a thousand and forty, he thought, what's the difference?

Spider wheeled the cart with the two computers down to shipping. They'd be on the truck in the morning.

---

Echo was in a far place. His teeth were ivory elephants, his hands a thousand miles away, giant hams connected to his shoulders by thin wires that swam through space. Wires encrusted with circuits, held suspended in space by flying grasshoppers and spinning flowers, a thousand of them, a million. The bird was finished it's meal and floated in the sky above him, circling higher and higher, the tip feathers of it's wings twitching in the gentle thermal that rose from his face. He clenched his teeth and volcanos erupted red magma, magma.. or was it wine? Echo reached with his hands to touch the sun and it was cold. Cold and thin in his hand, and bursting with a white light that hurt his eyes. "He's coming around." The sun was cold in his hand and his arm shot with cold needles as he squeezed it. His eyes were swimming with bugs, white in a purple river, he could see their little tails, their nucleuses, at the luminous twisted bindings that kept their protoplasm intact. "one sixty over ninety five," a dubious voice said. Echo squeezed the sun harder, the juice was running down his fingers and collecting in his lap, fire.

Echo fell back into the full darkness of space. The voice said "We'll talk to him in the morning."

---

Dietz studied Car Cox's face in the moonlight. Her eyes were moving as she slept, the bulges in her lids moved from left to right, from left to right. He closed his eyes and listened to her breathing, a whisp of sound in the darkness. Keeping his eyes closed he rolled back the blankets and sat up. The moon was barely more than a sliver and the light through the window was needle-shot white. He leaned close to her body, smelling it, studying the puckers in her nipples, the relentless continuity of their asymmetry, his nostrils wide. He ran his fingers across her underarm hair, prickling, and brought them to his nose, inhaling her. She stirred, her breathing uneven, and moved her legs against him. The heat of her thighs against his belly comforted him. He licked the fingers of his left hand and reached down between her legs, slowly pulling the covers over them. He'd be leaving for Tennessee in the morning.

---

She couldn't sleep. Her husband was snoring next to her, deep gone. She folded the covers back sliding her feet out onto the floor and she sat up waiting, still and alert. The house clicked around her, settling in the night. The curtains in her room -- their room -- hung unmoving, a thin line of moonlight betraying the junction between the two rippled panels and stretching a thin line across the floor. The heater in the furnace clicked on and she sat waiting, waiting for the fan to kick on, waiting and counting down from fourteen. When she reached three the gentle woosh of the air in the register rewarded her attentiveness and she leaned forward and stood up, the cords of the carpet thick reassuring, familiar, and constant between her toes.

She went to the chair and gathered her robe from the mess there, casting her mind back across the evening. The party had been a success, but she hadn't been able to relax. Funny how everyone can have a good time when the hostess is stretched as thin as a banjo string.

She went to the bathroom and sat, not turning on the light, the sound of her water familiar, the same middle of the night sound she had heard since she was sixteen, gentle, a rainbow. She dried herself and stood up, gathering her robe around her. She looked at him, unconscious on his pillow, and went out of their bedroom and down the stairs to the kitchen. She got a glass from the cabinet and filled it at the faucet. She went to her study and woke her laptop, squinting at the white-blue light. Nothing. Nothing from Drexler, nothing from Carla, no word from Memo. There was a note from Dice:

The Cat is ready for primetime, I checked her out personally. I took care of the elevator inspector. The fuel tanks are empty per instructions. Whatever the other divisions are reporting, Logistics are ready.

She winced. She'd have to talk to Dice first thing in the morning.

---

Memo started suddenly awake. What time is it? she wondered in the hospital twilight. Her dream of dancing in the darkness, swinging through the night with her lover, with his poetry through a shared darkness, alone together in the night on a swaying wooden gymnasium floor, in a room without a ceiling snapped away from her, what time is it? what time? The beeping of a monitor somewhere far away brought her back to... to reality? to another dream? who could know, she wondered. Who could know?

She heard a voice in the dim, the voice said, "We'll talk to him in the morning."

We'll talk to him in the morning.

She studied the shadows of the curtains on the ceiling, the patterns of the fabric pulsed light and dark there, painted a picture of thick and thin, of curving on the smooth white paint. Two bodies moved out of the room and the shadows trembled.

Memo closed her eyes and the shadows didn't go away.

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