"Your status here is that of potential client innocents. That is, you may be of service to the Hexamon, and such services will gain you advantages—what you might term payment—but for the moment you are not to be disturbed. As innocents, you will be studied—unless you object—and the knowledge gained from these studies will be invested for you in certain Hexamon information banks. It will also be available to the Nexus and other governing bodies of the Hexamon, whether you object or not."

"I have some questions," Lanier said.

"Please ask them."

"What's the Hexamon. . . and the Nexus?"

"The Hexamon is the totality of human citizens. You might call it the state. The Nexus is the main lawmaking body of this city, and of the Way from the Thistledown and the forbidden territory to mark two ex nine. That is, the two-billion kilometer point of the Way."

"You're all descended from the Stoners—the people who lived in the Thistledown?" Carrolson asked.

"Yes," Ram Kikura said.

"Excuse me," Heineman said. "How many people live here? How large is this Axis City?"

Ram Kikura smiled and picted instructions to the empty walls. There were no data pillars anywhere—apparently their functions had been integrated into the inconspicuous room pictors.

A very solid looking image of the Axis City appeared next to her, rotating slowly. Heineman leaned forward in his seat, frowning in concentration.

"One hundred million humans occupy the city and the Way. Ten million live off-city, along the Way, chiefly traders and coordinators of the five hundred and seventy-one active wells. Ninety million live in the Axis City. Of these, seventy million are in City Memory. Most of those have lived out their legal two incarnations and have retired their bodies to exist as personality patterns in the City Memory environment. Under special circumstances, they may be assigned new bodies, but most often they are content in Memory. Some five million deviant personalities—those who are incomplete or deranged in such a way they cannot be redeemed, even with extreme methods of therapy—are kept inactive."

"People don't die?" Carrolson asked.

"Death and dying here usually refer to loss of corporeal states, not mental states. In a word, no, or very rarely," Ram Kikura said. "All of us are equipped with implants." She touched a spot behind her ear, then moved her finger to a spot above the bridge of her nose. "They supplement our reasoning, and should an accident occur, they retain a record of our most recent experiences and personality. The implant is almost indestructible—it is the first thing we recover from the victim of an accident. Every few days, we update our backups in City Memory with records from these implants. That way, a personality can be quickly reconstructed. All we need to do is make a final update and inhabit a new body, and the resurrection is indistinguishable from the original."