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he’d had the superchargers put into his neck for an expanded brain. Anyone with that kind of hardware wouldn’t get past the gangs’ metal detectors and would end up in front of a firing squad.”
    “Jesus. People here have been taking implants for a hundred years. What was so bad about it?”
    This time Steward couldn’t keep himself from shrugging. “It was part of Far Jewel’s program, so it was evil. The modified people were the only ones the mob could find…the decision-makers were living in the asteroid belt and out of reach. Far Jewel’s facilities in France were gutted, so suddenly there wasn’t employment for all their people or for their survivors. Far Jewel washed its hands of the whole experiment once things went bad. The French government got chased to Portugal, so there wasn’t any help for people like my mother and me. We ended up moving to Marseilles, to live with my aunt. And even then we almost starved.” Steward looked at her. “You got any Xanadus left?”
    “In my shirt pocket. I heard some people ate each other. That true?”
    Steward frowned. “I’d believe it,” he said. “None of that was going down where I was living, though. The gangs kept things going.”
    “The Canards came to the rescue?”
    “Yes.” Steward stood, moved toward the chair where Ardala had thrown her shirt. He found the last Xanadu and began looking for the ashtray. “The teen gangs were running the city, more or less,” he said. “The Old Quarter, anyway. Keeping power and water running for people who weren’t living in ecodromes. But most of them had all sorts of funny French ideas about honor and turf and ideology—Jesus, half the gang fights weren’t even fights, just a bunch of kids screaming political slogans at one another. Issuing manifestos over the public datanets. Proclaiming their loyalty to the Société Bijoux or the New Rejuve Movement or Genetic Behaviorism. The Canards weren’t asking for that kind of loyalty. They just wanted to survive and get rich and have a few laughs at the expense of the kids who were taking it all so seriously.”
    He found the ashtray and brought it back to bed with him. He lit the cigarette and leaned back against the pillows.
    “Did you get rich?” Ardala asked.
    He put the lighter on the bedside table. “I was a good boy and gave it all to my mother. She bought her way into an ecodrome about the time I enlisted in CL.”
    “Sort of rich, then.”
    Steward inhaled, closed his eyes. “The Canards wanted to be middlemen. They figured that’s where the money was. Tried to know who was putting moves in certain directions, what the policorps were up to, where to find certain commodities. Acted as brokers, collected a percentage. Never allied with any of the other gangs. And we’d sabotage the others, too, just for fun. Issue funny absurdist manifestos over other gangs’ signatures, that kind of thing.”
    “What happened to them?”
    “Mostly they got killed. The gangs had a war. Being in the middle, the Canards were right in the crossfire. They’d never made any friends, so they were nothing but stationary targets. I took what I’d made and split for Coherent Light.” He grinned. “The other Canards would have approved, I think. They always tried to do the smart thing.”
    “And CL actually let you in.”
    “I fit the profile.”
    “A profile for an extinct policorp. Great.” She closed the issue of Guys and threw the magazine off the bed. “I can’t imagine you being in a gang. When you lived next door to me you were such a good soldier. Such a”—she shrugged her shoulders—“such a straight arrow. You know. Everything was always tidy and in its place. You were always full of Coherent Light’s programs for this and that. Making the galaxy a safer, brighter place.”
    “After what I saw in Nice and Marseilles, Coherent Light made a lot of sense. Seemed to, anyway. Besides,” he added, “there’s not so much between a good soldier and a