"How do you handle the responsibility?" she went on. "Hell, how do you even get the responsibility?" She tossed back her drink. "All the corpses and kings and policy-makers, they can't even agree what color to paint the bathrooms at the UR. Why'd they all agree to give God-like powers to you, exactly? You infallible or something?"

"Fuck no." Fleeting across his cortex, an unwelcome thought: I wonder how many people I killed today. "I just—I do my best."

"Yeah, but how do you even convince them of that? What's to stop you from crashing an airplane to get back at your boss? How do they know you're not going to use all that power to get rich, or to help out your buddies, or kill a corporation because you don't agree with its politics? What keeps you in line?"

Desjardins shook his head. "You wouldn't believe it."

"Bet I can guess."

"So guess."

"Guilt Trip, right? And Absolution?"

He laughed to cover his surprise.

Gwen laughed with him, reached into the nearest terrarium and stroked one of the jeweled frogs inside (they'd been tweaked to secrete mild psychoactives through the skin). Her shoulder was against his by the end of the maneuver. She waved off a couple of butterflies that were sniffing her for signs of actionable impairment. "I hate those things."

"Well, you are mixing your chemicals a bit. Not too good for the ambience if you throw up all over the bar."

"Aren't you all lawnorder." She rubbed thumb against forefinger to grind the frog juice into her skin. "Not to mention avoiding the subject."

"Subject?"

"Guilt Trip, remember?" She leaned in close: "I hear things, you hear things. Some sort of retrovirus, right? Forces you to behave yourself, right down in the brainstem."

She was guessing. She didn't know about the chemistry of guilt. Tell her about the interaction of GSH and synaptic vesicle and she'd probably give you a blank look. She didn't know about Toxoplasma tweaks or the little ass-backwards blobs of reverse transcriptase that got the whole ball rolling. She didn't know, and even if she did, she didn't. You couldn't know about that stuff until you actually felt it in you.

Retrovirus was all she knew, and she wasn't even sure about that.

"Nope," he told her. "Wrong. Sorry." He wasn't even lying. The virus was only the carrier.

She rolled her eyes. "I knew you wouldn't tell me. They nev—I knew it."

"So why the diver get-up?" Suddenly, changing the subject seemed like a good idea.

"Rifter chic." The corner of her mouth lifted in a half-smile. "Solidarity through fashion."

"What, rifters are political now?"

She seemed to perk up a bit. "You remember. You can't spend all your time saving the world."