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them. Our business is not in death of that manner.”
    “Where is the artistry in employing assassins? Where is the personal sense of triumph? It is like paying to hear another composer’s sonatas; there is no satisfaction in the dry notification of a contract fulfilled. I must orchestrate it myself. It must be my own work, my own composition, my own personal vengeance.”
    “Ah, so it is the Dom Merreveth, then, patron.”
    “You pay close attention to the gossip of the Gracious.”
    “All the city has heard of your discomfiture, patron. Alas, but woman is as fickle and independent as—”
    “It is nothing to do with you. Nothing.”
    “Apologies, apologies, patron. We presume too much on our kinship.”
    “This ‘kinship’ is too slender a thing by far to support your right to gossip about your superiors. Consider this: you have a business and a respected name among all castes of the city, although you have had to relinquish your gracious name and take a common appellation. How many other disinherited clones can claim such favorable treatment? Nobler families than the Perellens have sold their engineered sons and daughters to the licensed mendicants and seraglios.”
    “Nobler families than the Perellens would not perhaps have required seven attempts.”
    “Enough. I am not responsible for our father’s whims. He wished his heir to be a composer, he cloned new sons until he had his composer, and that is it. Need I remind you that under the new law there may be only one legal claimant to any genotype? You live under sufferance and my good favor. Now, my dealings with the House Merreveth. I want to hear your suggestions for a fine present for the Gracious Dom as an apology for my behavior at his pageant.”
    From a high shelf the Brothers Ho (who we now see to be more than brothers, yet less) bring leather-bound volumes of sample books and a small imager which they employ to display their wares to Dom Perellen. They show him the wheeled gyropeds from the lava plains of Fafenny, helicoptera from the crystal forests of Chrios, fire-dwelling pyrogenes that seem mere lumps of dull stone until the moment they unfold in a blossom of flame; elegant, priceless agapanthas from Hannad, monstrous panjas from the mountains of Ninn; gooseberry-green vegemorphs that derive their motive power from sunlight and water; singing choirs of angels no larger than the palm of his hand; flocks of fritillaries on chains of silver filigree: he sees grampus, oliphaunt, kraken and werwulf; fur and feather, fang and fire. The imported exotica of a dozen worlds do not impress Dom Perellen.
    “Something more homely,” he says, “the gentle Dom is a home-loving fatherly man.” So again the books open and the imager displays: hunting trophies of every conceivable species that can be followed with fowling-piece, crossbow, or light-lance; strange near-human creatures from the forgotten quarters of the city; diorama cases of prehistorical beasts from remote epochs; dumb-waiters and mechanical tray-boys in the shapes of gallimaufs and padishants; humorous novelty collages assembled from diverse pieces of reptiles, birds, fishes, and mammals; mounted grotesques, like the two-headed kitten and the pair of Siamese-twin calves; collections of insects, birds, and small mammals; amusing novelty automata … Here Dom Perellen stops them and exclaims, “The very thing!”
    “What, patron, the House Mouse Family?”
    “Precisely, citizen. The Dom Merreveth may be doubtful of a gift to himself from me, and rightly so, for I’ll grant him a certain shrewdness, but a gift to his dear children could not possibly be suspect. And what could be more innocent, what better to delight a child’s eye, than our little family of mice? How quickly can you have a set prepared?”
    “Four days, patron?”
    “Three?”
    “It could be done, but not easily. The minutiae of detail, patron; we pride ourselves that our automata are indistinguishable from