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past was an impressionistic blur, all bright colors and emotions, with no fine detail. “I don’t know,” she admitted.
    â€œSunshine, your answers are about as revealing as your silence.” Wyeth touched her arm. “Here we are!” He grabbed the rope to stop himself, flipped over, and kicked through an opening between hutches. Rebel followed.
    A skeletally thin old man leaned out of a shanty window into the entraceway. “Hallo, Jonamon. How’s the kidneys?” Wyeth said. He was wearing his laughing face. “Got a new tenant for you.”
    â€œHallo yourself.” The old man’s skin was fishbelly white, and red blotches ran over his bald pate. “Rent’s due tomorrow.” Then he noticed Rebel, and pursed his lips suspiciously. “You the religious type, girlie?”
    Rebel shook her head.
    â€œThen where’s your paint?” He jabbed a bony finger at the abrasion circle behind Rebel’s ear, and said to Wyeth, “You put the mark on her! Don’t allow none of that shit in my court. I run a clean place here—no drunks, no whores, no burn cases, and no reprogramming. I don’t care what kind of excuse you got, God don’t like—”
    â€œHold on, hold on—nobody’s reprogramming anybody!” Wyeth said. “What are you ragging on me for? The lady’s right here, you can ask her for yourself.”
    â€œBe damned if I won’t.” The old man swam out the window, chasing them into the courtyard. Then he grabbed the side of his hutch, muttered, “Damn! Forgot the book,” and darted back through the window.
    The courtyard was just a large, open space fronted on by some dozen or so hutches. Three ropes crisscrossed the area, tied to outcroppings of pipe. Here and there people clung to them, chatting or working on private tasks. A young man sat wedged in a doorway, playing guitar.
    â€œI’m sorry about this,” Wyeth said. “Old Jonamon is a terrible snoop, even worse than most landlords. He was a rock prospector seventy years back, one of the last, and he thinks that gives him the right to pester you half to death. If you don’t feel like facing him, I think I can put him off for a day or so. That’d give us time to find you a place nearby.”
    â€œActually,” Rebel had been chewing thoughtfully on a thumbnail; now she spat out what she had gnawed off, “I think I would like to talk about it. All these weird things have been happening to me, and I haven’t had the chance to sort them out. And I guess I owe you some kind of explanation too.” She frowned. “Only maybe I’d better not. I mean, there are people out there looking for me. If word got out—”
    Wyeth flashed a wide, froggish grin. “There are no secrets in a tank town. But there are no facts either. You tell your story to Jonamon, and in ten minutes the whole court will know it. Inside an hour everyone within five-courts will know—but they’ll have it a little wrong. Half the people in the tanks are on the run from something. Your story will melt into theirs, a detail here, a name there, a plot twist from somewhere else. By tomorrow all the tank will know the story, but it will have mutated into something you wouldn’t recognize yourself. Nobody’s ever going to trace those stories back to you. There are too many of them, and not a one that’s worth a damn.”
    â€œWell, I—”
    Jonamon swooped into the court, a scrawny old bird in a tattered cloak, pushing a book before him. It was three hands wide and a fist thick, with one red cover and one black. Opening it from the black side, he said, “The Lord Jesus despised reprogramming. ‘And behold the herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea and perished in the waters.’ That’s from Matthew.”
    Wyeth looked like he was having trouble holding his laughter in.