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antisocial, are you? I would hate for you to end up as a negative mention on the daily tidings.”
    “I don’t care about that.” She found his degree of indifference alarming. “But I will be careful, because if I break a law it will keep me from accomplishing what I hope to achieve. My own inner, personal goals—not the rules of society—will keep me honest.”
    “You need help.” Broud’s head was bobbing steadily, an indication of how seriously he viewed his colleague’s intentions. “Urgent therapy.”
    “Perhaps the effort alone will be enough to divert me into the tunnel of satisfaction. Perhaps the presence of humans is in fact no more than rumor. In either event, the change will relieve me of my boredom and help to alleviate my depression.”
    Broud was heartened by this assessment, if not entirely put at ease. “I will research possible openings near Geswixt. As soon as I have found the closest, I will recommend you for the position. It might be a lesser post than the one you enjoy now.”
    “That does not matter,” Des assured him. “I will compose poetry for sanitation workers charged with disposing of hazardous wastes. I will sweep tunnels.”
    “Machines do that,” Nio reminded him.
    “Then I will write poetry for the machines. Whatever is necessary.” Seeing the way in which they held themselves, he was compelled to comment further. “I can tell that you both think I’m crazy. Let me assure you that I am in possession of all my mental faculties and am perfectly sane. What I am is relentlessly driven.”
    “As a fellow poet, I know how small the difference is,” Broud commented dryly. “You walk a thin line in this matter, Desvendapur. Have a care you don’t fall off.”

3
    T he image in the center of the room was notably unstable, flickering between two and three dimensions, the colors shifting more than the broadcast parameters ought to have allowed. But it was an old tridee projector, the best the backcountry establishment could afford. Nobody complained. Here in the depths of the Amistad rain forest, even the smallest comfort was appreciated.
    Nor were the men and women whose blurred gazes occasionally turned to the image sufficiently sophisticated to complain about such details. Most appreciated the noise that emanated from the image more than the visuals. They were too engrossed in other matters to pay much attention to the broadcast, their serious interests lying in copious alcohol, swift-acting narcotics, cheap sex, expensive promises, and each other.
    At the bar—a traditional affair of battered cocobolo wood, hard unupholstered seats, bottles of luminescent metal and glass and plastic, foul-mouthed conversation and unrealized dreams, overhead lighting, and a complaisant mixologist—the dented but still functional multiarmed automated blender was the only concession to modernity. A couple sat at one end, negotiating a price for services that had nothing to do with the surrounding rain forest and everything to do with the most basic mammalian needs. One man lay on the floor, snoring loudly in his own spittle, ignored by those around him.
    Two others had turned in their seats to watch the tridee. Near them a third sat hunched over his drink, a pale green liquid concoction that whispered to him in soft, reassuring tones. The liquorish voice was not metaphorical: The drink actually spoke, its reassuring recording embedded in the fizzing molecules within the glass. As the level was lowered by consumption, new sentences manifested themselves for the benefit of the drinker, like the layers of a drunken onion.
    “Fat Buddha, would you look at that!” Shifting on his seat, whose aged and poorly maintained internal gyros struggled to keep the boisterous tridee-watching imbiber they supported from crashing to the floor, the speaker pointed at the image hovering in the center of the room. His clothes were thick with decomposing rain forest and he needed a shave.
    “Man, I never seen