"Did she actually say that, about a bullshit detector?"

"More or less. What do you think, Tomas, is it true?"

Tomas had recovered from his illness—from the genetic rebuild that constituted the Fourth treatment—as quickly as Diane had predicted. His psychological adjustment was another matter. He was a man who had come to Equatoria prepared to die, and instead he had found himself staring down another three or more decades for which he had no plan or ambition.

Physically, though, it had been a liberation. After a week of recovery Tomas could have passed for a man much younger. His crabbed way of walking became more supple, his appetite was suddenly bottomless. This was almost too strange for Turk to deal with, as if Tomas had shed his old body the way a snake sheds its skin. "Fuck, it's just me," Tomas would proclaim whenever Turk became too uncomfortably conscious of the distance between the old Tomas and the new. Tomas clearly relished his newfound health. The only drawback, he said, was that the treatment had erased his tattoos. Half his history had been written in those tattoos, he said.

"Is it true that I have an improved bullshit detector? Well, that's in the eye of the beholder. It's been ten years, Turk. What do you think?"

"We never talked much about this."

"I would of been happy to keep it that way."

"Can you tell when you're being lied to?"

"There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart. And I'm not a particularly smart man. I'm no lie detector, either. But I can generally tell when somebody's trying to sell me something."

"Because I think Lise has been lied to. Her business with Fourths is legitimate, but I think she's being used. Also she has some information Diane might like to hear."

Tomas was silent for a while. He tipped up his beer to drain it and put the bottle on a tray table next to his chair. He gave Turk a look uneasily reminiscent of Diane's evaluative stare.

"You're in some difficult territory here," he said.

"I know that," Turk said.

"Could get dangerous."

"I guess that's what I'm afraid of."

"Can you give me some time to think this over?"

"Guess so," Turk said.

"Okay. I'll ask around. Call me in a couple of days."

"I appreciate it," Turk said. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet," Tomas said. "Maybe I'll change my mind."

CHAPTER SEVEN

The node in Lise's car announced new mail as she was driving to the Consulate. "From?" Lise asked.

"Susan Adams," the node replied.

These days Lise could not think of her mother without visualizing that calendar-box of pharmaceuticals on her kitchen counter, assorted by day and hour, the clockwork of her mortality. Pills for depression, pills to adjust her blood cholesterol, pills to avert the Alzheimer's for which she carried a suspect gene.

"Read," she said, grimly.