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Feliciano woman looked, more than anything else—not at all pretty, but not worrisomely ugly, either. Mostly she looked sort of like the product of a mating between a human dad and a mom who was some kind of a venomous snake. But they weren’t going to let me off because I didn’t like their looks, so I did what I was told.
    Then the man attached sticky things all over my scalp, the back of my neck, my spinal cord, the soles of my feet, and several parts of my torso. Then he paused to look at what he had done. He was wearing a faint scowl. “What?” the woman asked.
    “It is not important,” he said. “I simply wonder if it mightn’t be better to open him all the way up.”
    She gave him an unfriendly smile. “If employment of the amphiprobe should prove to be indicated,” she informed him, “I will make that decision myself and will then request the colonel’s permission to go as deep as necessary. Now you, Sheridan”—she was turning to me—“let us cover this matter again, this time without omitting important facts.”
    Then the woman asked me the same questions all over again. This time I acknowledged my juvie crime spree. Then the two of them went to the corner and talked for some time, again too softly for me to hear.
    Then the woman came close to me, looked me straight in the eye—her eyes weren’t hard little reptilian dots, just normal brown eyes, but I still had the feeling that she was just waiting for the right moment to stab her poison fangs into me—and said, “You are Bradley Wilson Sheridan—let me see—175 centimeters, 93 kilos, eyes blue, complexion pale. Born 2054, so now you would be twenty-five.” I couldn’t deny any of that, so I just nodded. She didn’t seem to care whether I agreed or not, but went on without a pause. “In spite of my instruction you failed to disclose essential information about yourself, Sheridan. Why did you not tell us of your mother’s sister, the one who for a time before her marriage actually lived in your parents’ home, Mrs. Carolyn Sheridan DeVries Maddingsley?”
    “Whose husband was known as the Reverend Delmore DeVries Maddingsley,” her partner added. “The one who raised money to fund terrorists.”
     
     
    Right then I figured I was out of luck for good, and the best thing that might happen to me was that they’d put me on the next ship back to Egypt and its tax authorities and religion police and sand. Even that might be better than staying here. At least the Egyptians had been forgiving enough, or incompetent enough, to never mention Uncle Devious.
    I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Of course I did know. I knew all about my Uncle Devious’s secret criminal side, because of all the things that my father and mother had said to each other when they didn’t know I could hear. It was pretty clear that I didn’t know as much as the Security people did, though. After I told them, over and over, that I had truthfully answered every question on the Giubileo employment application, they reluctantly admitted that, no, there hadn’t been any question that asked if I had an uncle by marriage who was accused of funding terrorists. Then they just began asking, fairly civilly, or almost, for me to tell them everything I remembered about my Uncle Devious.
    Which was easy enough. I’d done it often enough for one American law enforcement body or another. So I told them yes, my uncle was Delmore DeVries Maddingsley. Yes, he was married to my mother’s older somadone-head sister—swept the poor woman off her feet and married her, against my mother’s advice and pretty nearly over the dead body of my father, but Aunt Carrie wasn’t listening to her family. She was listening to her glands. Uncle Devious was a studly-looking man with a document from a Tennessee Baptist college that said he was a full-fledged minister, though at present without a congregation, whose current good-doing ran to raising money for poor Tibetan