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give him an answer.

Chapter 3
    Before I had my skull amped, I used to have an alarm  clock. In the morning when it went off, I liked to stay in bed a little while longer, bleary and yawning. Maybe I'd get up and maybe I wouldn't. Now, though, I don't have a choice. I chip in an add-on the night before, and when that daddy decides it's time, my eyes snap open and I'm awake. It's an abrupt transition and it always leaves me startled. And there's no way in hell that chip will let me fall back asleep. I hate it a lot.
    On Sunday morning I woke up promptly at eight o'clock. There was a black man I'd never seen before standing beside my bed. I thought about that for a moment. He was big, much taller than me and well built without going overboard about it. A lot of the blacks you see in the city are like Janelle, refugees from some famine-stricken, arid African wasteland. This guy, though, looked like he'd never missed a sensible, well-balanced meal in his life. His face was long and serious, and his expression seemed to be set in a permanent glower. His stern brown eyes and shaven head added to his grim demeanor. "Who are you?" I asked. I didn't get out from under the covers yet.
    "Good morning, yaa Sidi, "he said. He had a soft, low-pitched voice with a touch of huskiness. "My name is Kmuzu."
    "That's a start," I said. "Now what in the name of Allah are you doing here?"
    "I am your slave."
    "The hell you are." I like to think of myself as the defender of the downtrodden and all that. I get prickly at the idea of slavery, an attitude that runs counter to the popular opinion among my friends and neighbors.
     "The master of the house ordered me to see to your needs. He thought I'd be the perfect servant for you, yaa Sidi, because my name means 'medicine' in Ngoni."
    In Arabic, my own name means "sickness." Fried-lander Bey knew, of course, that my mother had named me Marîd in the superstitious hope that my life would be free of illness. "I don't mind having a valet," I said, "but I'm not gonna keep a slave." Kmuzu shrugged. Whether or not I wanted to use the word, he knew he was still somebody's slave, mine or Papa's.
    "The master of the house briefed me in great detail about your needs," he said. His eyes narrowed. "He promised me emancipation if I will embrace Islam, but I cannot abandon the faith of my father. I think you should know that I'm a devout Christian." I took that to mean that my new servant wholeheartedly disapproved of almost everything I might say or do.
    "We'll try to be friends anyway," I said. I sat up and swung my legs out of the bed. I popped out the sleep control and put it in the rack of daddies I keep on the nightstand. In the old days, I spent a lot of time in the morning scratching and yawning and rubbing my scalp; but now when I wake up, I'm denied even those small pleasures.
    "Do you truly need that device?" asked Kmuzu.
    "My body has sort of gotten out of the habit of sleeping and waking up on its own."
    He shook his head. "It is a simple enough problem to solve, yaa Sidi. If you just stay awake long enough, you will fall asleep."
    I saw that if I expected to have any peace, I was going to have to murder this man, and soon. "You don't understand. The problem is that after three days and nights without sleep, when I do doze off at last I have bizarre dreams, really gruesome ones. Why should I put myself through all that, when I can just reach for pills or software instead?"
    "The master of the house instructed me to limit your drug use."
    I was starting to get aggravated. "Fine," I said, "you can just fucking try." The drug situation was probably behind Friedlander Bey's "gift" of this slave. I'd made a bad mistake on my very first morning chez Papa: I showed
    up late for breakfast with a butaqualide hangover. I was moderately dysfunctional for a couple of hours, and that earned me his disapproval. So that first afternoon I passed by Laila's modshop on Fourth Street in the Budayeen and invested in the