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out. And as long as we get our regular search-and-repair silicrobe shots, we ain’t gonna suffer any more weird diseases or terry-tomas than your average New Yorker or Nevadan.
    Not that I do it mainly for glory or outa some sense of duty to humanity. Shit, no. I don’t think you’ll find one greenpeacer out of every thousand gipsies you talk to. I do it cuz the eft’s damn good, and so are the bennies, and you can retire after fifteen years. (My company, Dallas Detox, Inc., was one of the first to pioneer that particular policy, and that’s one of the reasons I’m purely proud to work for them. Another’s that they are one hunnerd percent American, and there’s not many companies left that can make such a claim, ’specially since they fully phased the Union in ten years ago. Now, I don’t hold with them Sons of Dixie, or any of the other constitutionalist groups, legal or underground, but there is something about being ruled by Canucks that just goes up my craw a mile. And if I got to be ruled by them, leastwise I don’t have to work for them. Yet.)
    Anyway, it’s a decent life, and sometimes an excitin’ one, even if, as I said, it’s no career for a married man—as Geraldine never tires of remindin’ me.
    But I ain’t married. And I never listen to Geraldine.
     
    * * *
     
    When Stack came into the dorm, wavin’ the metamedium printout that bore the DDI logo in its upper corner (a pair of tweezers nippin’ a double helix) and smilin’, we all knew we had gotten a good postin’. But we couldn’ta guessed how good till the crewboss spoke.
    “Parliament has voted, boys and girls. The Slikslak is deadmeat, and DDI’s gonna pick the corpse.”
    Well, the roar of excitement that greeted this announcement rattled the biopolymer panels of the big Komfykwik Kottage we were livin’ in, there on the shores of Lake Baikal in Greater Free Mongolia, which stagnant pisshole we had finally finished de-acidifyin’ and ecobalancin’ and revivifyin’ and suchlike. We were goin’ home, stateside, back to the good old U. S. of A. (and I’ll continue to call it that till my dyin’ day, despite all laws to the contrary). To actually get an assignment back in civilization—it was too good to be true. No more funny food or dark-skinned women or comic jabber which you couldn’t understand without takin’ a pill. It was hog heaven for a poor gipsy.
    I was emptyin’ my locker and packin’ my kit on my bunk when Geraldine sidled up to me all innocent-like. I pretended not to notice her.
    “Lew,” she said, in a voice as sweet as corn syrup on candied yams, “Stack is making up the room-roster for Waxahachie. We are going to put up at a local motel, and all the rooms’re doubles. I don’t suppose …”
    I looked up at Geraldine then. She was wearin’ earrings shaped like biohazard signs, her brown hair was cropped shorter’n mine, with a lopsided swatch across her brow, her face was naked of makeup, save for silicrobe tattoon butterflies at the corners of her lips, and she barely filled out her size small DDI-issue coverall. She reminded me of the kid sister I’d never had.
    “Geraldine, I do appreciate the offer or suggestion or proposition or whatever you wanna call it. But if I have told you once, I’ve told you a million times. The chemistry is just not there. My probe don’t match your target. Look, I like my women big, busty, and dumb, and you are neither.”
    The tattoons a milli beneath Geraldine’s skin fluttered their wings in agitation as the tears leaked like Israeli root-drips from her eyes.
    “I—I could be dumb for you, Lew, if that was what you really wanted. There’s new tropes for that, I heard. Dumbdown, More On … As for the other stuff, well, it’d cost me plenty, but I’d do it for you. Honest, I would—”
    I slapped my own forehead. “Holy shit, Geraldine, I ain’t askin’ you to change, get that into your head right now. I was only outlinin’, like, the kind of woman