"Not as such.  I'm reading your body language.  The way you hesitated when you lifted the bottle, the expression on your face as you thought it over . . . Direct Interface, the nature of the un-reality we're inhabiting.  Your 'real' body did none of these things, of course.  But interfacing with your mind, I read the signals your brain sent to your body-which doesn't happen to be hooked into the circuit at the moment.  Do you see?"

"I think so.  Does this have anything to do with why you've chosen to communicate with me like this?  In that body, I mean."

"Very good.  You've only tried Direct Interface twice in your life, both of them quite a long time ago, in terms of the technology.  You weren't impressed, and I don't blame you.  It was much more primitive in those days.  But I communicate with most people visually now, as well as audially.  It is more economical; more can be said with fewer words.  People tend to forget just how much human communication is accomplished with no words at all."

"So you're here in that preposterous body to give me visual cues."

"Is it that bad?  I wanted to wear the hat."  He picked it up and looked at it admiringly.  "It's not strictly contemporary, if you must know.  This world is about at the level of 1880, 1890.  The uniform is late eighteenth century.  Captain Bligh wore a hat a lot like this.  It's called a cocked hat, specifically, a bicorne."

"Which is a lot more than I ever needed to know about eighteenth century British naval headgear."

"Sorry.  The hat really has nothing to do with anything.  But I'm curious.  Has my body language conveyed anything to you?"

I thought it over, and he was right.  I had gleaned more nuances from talking to him this way than I would have in the past, listening to his voice.

"You're nervous about something," I said.  "I think maybe you're worried . . . about how I'll react to what you've done to me.  What an astonishing thought."

"Perhaps, but accurate."

"I'm completely in your power.  Why should anything worry you?"

He squirmed again, and took another sip of his drink.

"We'll get into that later.  Right now, let's get back to my story."

"It's a story now, is it?"

He ignored me, and plowed ahead.

"What you have just experienced is a fairly recent capability of mine.  It's not advertised, and I hope you don't plan to do a story on it in the Nipple.  So far I've used it mostly on the insane.  It's very effective on catatonics, for instance.  Someone sits there all day, unmoving, not speaking, lost in a private world.  I insert several years' worth of memories in a fraction of a second.  The subject then remembers wakening from a bad dream and going about a comfortable, routine life for years."

"It sounds risky."