The more conservative imams taught that the implants fell under the same prohibition as intoxicants, because some people got their pleasure centers wired and spent the remainder of their short lives amp-addicted. Even if, as in my case, the pleasure center is left alone, the use of a moddy submerges your own personality, and that is interpreted as insobriety. Needless to say, while I have nothing but the warmest affection for Allah and His Messenger, I stop short of being a fanatic about it. I’m with that twentieth-century King Saud who demanded that the Islamic leaders of his country stop dragging their feet when it came to technological progress. I don’t see any essential conflict between modern science and a thoughtful approach to religion.

Chiri looked down the bar. “All right,” she called out loudly, “which one of you motherfuckers’ turn is it? Janelle? I don’t want to have to tell you to get up and dance again. If I got to remind you to play your goddamn music one more time, I’m gonna fine you fifty kiam. Now move your fat ass.” She looked at me and sighed. “Life is tough,” I said. Indihar came back up the bar after collecting whatever she could pry out of the few glum customers. She sat on the stool beside me. Like Chiri, she didn’t seem to get nightmares from talking with me. “So what’s it like,” she asked, “working for Friedlander Bey?”

“You tell me.” One way or another, everybody in the Budayeen works for Papa. She shrugged. “I wouldn’t take his money if I was starving, in prison, and had cancer.”

This, I guessed, was a dig, a not-very-veiled reference to the fact that I had sold out to get my implants. I just swallowed some more gin and bingara.

Maybe one of the reasons I went to Chiri’s whenever I needed a little cheering up is that I grew up in places just like it. My mother had been a dancer when I was a baby, after my father ran off. When the situation got real bad, she started turning tricks. Some girls in the clubs do that, some don’t. My mother had to. When things got even harder, she sold my little brother. That’s something she won’t talk about. I won’t talk about it, either.