...the technology of personality transfer is imperfect--sometimes bits get left behind: memories, abilities, traits, that might be useful. A full succession of bodies can mean successive senility.

It's for us, Daud. To get us out, into the Orbitals...Where it's clean, Daud...Where we're not in the street, because there isn't a street...It'll be different. Something we haven't known. Something finer. You should see your eyes when you say that...Like you've just put a needle in your veins. Like that hope is your drug, and you're hooked on it.

The panzer, she decides, is a place only a junkie could love. A cozy cybernetic womb of masculine scent, soft blinking lights, the studs that feed one's addiction. Whatever Cowboy's is, she doesn't want to know.

Porn mainlined to the forebrain, electric orgasms courtesy of induction, screaming synthetic highs circuited to the mind, technicolor power fantasies jabbed right into one's primal need.

It's the same as the city, Sarah knows, the same hierarchy of power, beginning with the blocs in the orbits and ending with people who might as well be the fieldmice in front of the blades of the harvester, pointless, countless lives in the path of a structure that can't be stopped. She feels the anger coiling around her like armor. The chance to rest, she thinks, was nice enough while it lasted. But right now another fragment of time must be survived.

Thunder explodes over their heads and Sarah sees the silver sheet of water pouring down outside the broken barn door, Cowboy slumped against the wall with a rueful smile, the buttons in his head reflecting the lightning in blue-white pattern, silver and turquoise, like eyes gazing inward, into his head. Sarah feels a sweep of sadness for Cowboy, the dispossessed panzerboy, his boots leaving tracks in the dust above which he once flew with his mind flicking at the speed of light.

Sarah's lips curl..."That's not my kind of action." Still, there is a trace of hesitation in her voice, as if she's bidding farewell to a cherished dream, having found its price.