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plenty of chances to sample whatever pleasures you like and then, if rich enough, get yourself a new body to suit your tastes. But the technology of personality transfer is imperfect--- sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits that might be useful. A succession of bodies can mean successive senility. If you get a new body and aren’t so powerful you can’t be moved, you are often demoted until you can prove yourself.
    “What’s her new name?” she asks.
    “She’ll tell you, I’m sure. Let’s just call her Princess for now.”
    Sarah shrugs. There are half a dozen imbecilic security rules in this operation, and she guesses that most of them are simply to test her capacity for obedience.
    “Her new body doesn’t seem to have altered his sexual orientation, just his manner of expressing it,” Cunningham says. “Princess has exhibited some characteristic behaviors since she’s started her new job. When she’s on the ground, she likes to go slumming. Find herself a working girl--- sometimes a dirtgirl, most often a jock– and take her home for a night or two. She wants a pet, but a dangerous one. Not too clean. A little rough. Not too removed from the street. But civilized enough to know how to please. Not a thatch. ”
    “That’s me?” Sarah asks, with no surprise. “Her new pet?”
    “We’ve researched you. You were a licensed prostitute for five years. And rated highly by your employers. ”
    “Five and a half,” she says. “And not with girls.”
    “He’s a man, really. An old man. Why should it be hard for you?”
    Sarah looks at the blond freckled girl in the holo, trying to find the old Russian in those eyes. The look that was always the same, wanting her to be some piece of private fantasy, real but not too real, orgasms genuine but never with genuine passion. The plastic girl, an object for things that grew hidden in their minds, something they could get rid of quickly and never have to take home. They were upset, somehow, if you didn’t understand their fantasy right away. After a while she had got so that she could.
    No different from all the other old men, she thinks as she looks at the picture. Not really. They want power, over their own flesh and another’s. Pay not so much for sex, but for power over sex, over the thing that threatens to control them. And so they take their passion and use it to control others. She understands control all right.
    She looks up at Cunningham. “Did they give you a new body as well?” she asks. “Guaranteed inconspicuous? Or did you have Firebud make you over, so that you had no style at all?”
    He gazes at her steadily, the same calm gaze. She can’t seem to touch it, or him. “I can’t say,” he says.
    “How long have you worked for them?” she asks. “You were a mudboy once– you don’t have the look that they do. But you work for them now. Is that what they promised you? A new body when you get old? And if you die on one of these jobs here in the mud, a nice funeral with the corporate anthem sung over your body?”
    “Something like that,” he agrees.
    “Got you heart and soul, have they?” she asks.
    “That’s how they want it.” Dryly, accepting. He knows the price of his ticket.
    “Control,” she says. “You understand that. You are owned by people who worship control, and so you control yourself well. But you’re a pressure cooker, and the steam is just under the surface. Do you go slumming in your off hours, like Princess? To the clubs, to the houses? Are you one of my old customers?” She gazes into his expressionless eyes. “You could be,” she says. “I never remembered faces.”
    “As it happens, I’m not,” he says. “I never saw you before I was given this assignment.”
    He is beginning to look a little out of patience.
    Sarah grins. “Don’t worry,” she says, and throws the holo of Princess on the table. “I’ll do your owners proud.”
    “I’m sure you will,” he says. “They