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right staring at? Is it you? Why does he look at you so contemptuously?”
    To another Ben whispered, “Why is your wife conversing so avidly with that handsome stranger?”
    Years of practice and discipline had refined Ben’s skills at observation, deduction and evaluation, enabling him to make instantaneous and accurate appraisals of any subject so that ninety-seven percent of the time his first comment hit one’s Achilles’ heel. When he set eyes on the short, tubby conceptual artist with his mustache ends lacquered into curlicues that arced up and around his eyes, he knew that all he’d need to say would be: “Why did your mother hate you for masturbating?”
    He said it, and the fellow burst into tears and stamped his feet like an aggrieved infant.
    Ben went on.
    â€œWhy did that odious young man in the leather jacket shove you? Doesn’t he know who you are? Maybe he doesn’t care who you are!”
    And Ben went on.
    Occasionally he stopped long enough for a twenty-minute conversation with certain key individuals--carefully chosen--whose hostility, though slow to awaken, was extraordinarily volatile, and catching. Such was Lady Hann.
    Lady Hann stood before him, five-foot-three and weighing in at two hundred eighty pounds. She may have been female, but Ben wasn’t entirely certain. Her impressive girth was girdled in a pearly white gown embroidered with seashells. Abalones covered her transplanted breasts, an overgrown oyster shell rose over her head from the collar behind; the floor-length gown twinkled with a fabric-gram image tuned to slowly-rolling moonlit surf, and when she turned, her voluminous petticoats crashed about her ankles like white-capped breakers. Above her doughy, excessively made-up face, her scalp was missing, replaced by a mirror-chrome inset which reflected Ben’s face in a squat distortion. Lady Hann’s blue lips worked against one another like small fish, and a dribble of wine fell from the corner of her mouth to be vaporized by her gown’s protective dining shield. Beyond Lady Hann was the door to the hallucinogen saunas, and beyond the saunas were a glass wall, a metal wall, and another glass wall, and beyond that was empty air with a long drop to the nighted canyon floor where pensive lizards watched with eyes of the same silver-green reptilian sheen as Lady Hann’s.
    Ben almost grew dizzy at the scale of the place.
    A security drone wheeled by, and Ben hoped the drone-cybers’ reliance on the euphonium had made them as lax as his employer had predicted.
    To one side of Lady Hann an intent group in simulated animal skins sluggishly danced what they supposed were ancient tribal rites of South American aborigines, their eyes glazed with synthetic yage; to her left the famous artificially joined Fallon-bred Siamese octuplet attempted an incredibly complex yoga posture in which Ben, sliding in and out of the berserker trance as it suited him, saw prodigious possibilities for the generation of irritation. While quietly conversing with Lady Hann (obliquely suggesting that certain of her rivals had given her the ultimate insult by accusing her of dressing in outmoded fashions), he studied the octuplet, astounded by their incongruous grace: The eight of them, nude but tattooed in racing stripes and ancient armed-forces insignias, were joined by smoothly grafted wings of skin and gristle at the waist; four men and four women facing inward, all approximately the same height; their internal organs also joined in part through their flesh bridges. For one to urinate, the other seven had to exert bladder pressure, and when one was stimulated at the groin, the rest also registered the tingle. An orgasm for one was orgasm for all. But it was an arrangement far from idyllic. When one got sick, all fell ill. The operation was irreversible. Therefore, when one died, the others would have to tote the corpse about with them until it rotted off or