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less than forty years old."
    "I'm thirty. You're a cagey old bastard, Ryumin." Ryumin took Lindsay's well-cooked shoes out of the microwave, studied them, and slipped them on his own bare feet. "How many languages do you speak?"
    "Four, normally. With memory enhancement I can manage seven. And I know the standard Shaper programming language."
    "I speak four myself," Ryumin said. "But then, I don't clutter my mind with their written forms."
    "You don't read at all?"
    "My machines can do that for me."
    "Then you're blind to mankind's whole cultural heritage." Ryumin looked surprised. "Strange talk for a Shaper. You're an antiquarian, eh? Want to break the Interdict with Earth, study the so-called humanities, that sort of thing? That explains why you used the theatrical gambit. I had to use my lexicon to find out what a 'play' was. An astonishing custom. Are you really going through with it?"
    "Yes. And the Black Medicals will finance it for me."
    "I see. The Geisha Bank won't care for that. Loans and finance are their turf."
    Lindsay sat on the floor beside a nest of wires. He plucked the Black Medicals pin from his collar and twirled it in his fingers. "Tell me about them."
    "The Geishas are whores and financiers. You must have noticed that your credit card is registered in hours."
    "Yes."
    "Those are hours of sexual service. The Mechanists and Shapers use kilowatts as currency. But the System's criminal element must have a black market to survive. A great many different black currencies have seen use. I did an article on it once."
    "Did you?"
    "Yes. I'm a journalist by profession. I entertain the jaded among the System's bourgeoisie with my startling exposes of criminality. Low-life antics of the sundog canaille." He nodded at Lindsay's bag. "Narcotics were the standard for a while, but that gave the Shaper black chemists an edge. Selling computer time had some success, but the Mechanists had the best cybernetics. Now sex has come into vogue."
    "You mean people come to this godforsaken place just for sex?"
    "It's not necessary to visit a bank to use it, Mr. Dze. The Geisha Bank has contacts throughout the cartels. Pirates dock here to exchange loot for portable black credit. We get political exiles from the other circumlunars, too. If they're unlucky."
    Lindsay showed no reaction. He was one of those exiles.
    His problem was simple now: survival. It was wonderful how this cleared his mind. He could forget his former life: the Preservationist rebellion, the political dramas he'd staged at the Museum. It was all history. Let it fade, he thought. All gone now, all another world. He felt dizzy, suddenly, thinking about it. He'd lived. Not like Vera.
    Constantine had tried to kill him with those altered insects. The quiet, subtle moths were a perfect modern weapon: they threatened only human flesh, not the world as a whole. But Lindsay's uncle had taken Vera's locket, booby-trapped with the pheromones that drove the deadly moths to frenzy. And his uncle had died in his place. Lindsay felt a slow, rising flush of nausea.
    "And the exhausted come here from the Mechanist cartels," Ryumin went on. "For death by ecstasy. For a price the Geisha Bank offers shinju: double suicide with a companion from the staff. Many customers, you see, take a deep comfort in not dying alone."
    For a long moment, Lindsay struggled with himself. Double suicide—the words pierced him. Vera's face swam queasily before his eyes in the perfect focus of expanded memory. He pitched onto his side, retching, and vomited across the floor.
    The drugs overwhelmed him. He hadn't eaten since leaving the Republic. Acid scraped his throat and suddenly he was choking, fighting for air. Ryumin was at his side in a moment. He dropped his bony kneecaps into Lindsay's ribs, and air huffed explosively through his clogged windpipe. Lindsay rolled onto his back. He breathed in convulsively. A tingling warmth invaded his hands and feet. He breathed again and lost consciousness.