"If you like." My ring tingles, and I remember to smile. "My name's Robin, and you're right, I'm fresh out of the rehab tank. Only been out for a meg, to tell the truth." (A bit over ten planetary days, a million seconds.) "I'm from"—I go into quicktime for a few subseconds, trying to work out what story to give her, ending up with an approximation of the truth—"around these parts, actually. But just out of memory excision. I was getting stale and needed to do something about whatever it was I was getting stale over."

Kay smiles. She's got sharp cheekbones, bright teeth framed between perfect lips; she's got bilateral symmetry, three billion years of evolutionary heuristics and homeobox genes generating a face that's a mirror of itself—and where did that thought come from? I ask myself, annoyed. It's tough, not being able to tell the difference between your own thoughts and a postsurgical identity prosthesis.

"I haven't been human for long," she admits. "I just moved here from Zemlya." Pause. "For my surgery," she adds quietly.

I fiddle with the tassels dangling from my sword pommel. There's something not quite right about them, and it's bugging me intensely. "You lived with the ice ghouls?" I ask.

"Not quite—I was an ice ghoul."

That gets my attention: I don't think I've ever met a real live alien before, even an ex-alien. "Were you"—what's the word?—"born that way, or did you emigrate for a while?"

"Two questions." She holds up a finger. "Trade?"

"Trade." I remember to nod without prompting, and my ring sends me a flicker of warmth. It's crude conditioning: reward behavior indicative of recovery, punish behavior that reinforces the postsurgical fugue. I don't like it, but they tell me it's an essential part of the process.

"I emigrated to Zemlya right after my previous memory dump." Something about her expression strikes me as evasive. What could she be omitting? A failed business venture, personal enemies? "I wanted to study ghoul society from the inside." Her cocktail emerges from the table, and she takes an experimental sip.