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in her bedroom an hour later to fret over the dozens of carefully buried indiscretions of her past. On the morning she testified before the Tri-D Board of Governors, she was serene and razor sharp.
    Immediately upon returning home she summoned me to my bedroom and demanded screaming monkey sex from me. Afterward she could hardly stand the sight of me.
    I supported her as much as I could, except for a couple of times when I just had to get out of the house. I retreated to my Chicago studio and pretended to work.
    When Eleanor’s appointment was confirmed, we took the Slipstream down to Cozumel for some deep-sea diving and beachcombing. It was meant to be a working vacation, but by then I suffered no delusions about Eleanor’s ability to relax. There were too many plans to make and people to meet. And indeed, she kept some member of Cabinet at her side at all times: on the beach, in the boat, at the Mayan theme village, even in the cramped quarters of the submersible.
    We had planned to take advantage of an exclusive juve clinic on the island to shed some age. My own age-of-choice was my mid-thirties, the age at which my body was still active enough to satisfy my desires, but mellow enough to sit through long hours of creative musing. El and I had decided on the three-day sifting regimen and had skipped our morning visola to give our bodies time to excrete their cellular gatekeepers. But at the last moment, El changed her mind. She decided she ought to grow a little older to better match her new authority. So I went to the clinic alone and soaked in the baths twice a day for three days. Billions of molecular-sized janitors flowed through my skin and permeated my muscles, cartilage, bones, and nerves, politely snip, snip, snipping protein cross-links and genetic anomalies and gently flushing away the sludge and detritus of age.
    I returned to the bungalow on Wednesday, frisky and bored, and volunteered to prepare it for our regular weekly salon. I had to page through a backlog of thousands of recorded greetings from our friends and associates. More confetti for El’s appointment. The salon, itself, was a stampede. More people holoed down than our bungalow could accommodate. Its primitive holoserver was overwhelmed by so many simultaneous transmissions, our guests were superimposed over one another five or ten bodies deep, and the whole squirming mass of them flickered around the edges.
    Despite the confusion, I quickly sensed that this was a farewell party—for Eleanor. Our friends assumed that she would be posted on the Moon or at Mars Station, since all Tri-D posts on Earth were already filled. At the same time, no one expected me to go with her—who would? Given people’s longevity, it could take decades—or centuries—for Eleanor to acquire enough seniority to be transferred back to Earth.
    By the time the last guest signed off, we were exhausted. Eleanor got ready for bed, but I poured myself a glass of scotch and went out to sit on the beach.
    Wet sand. The murmur of the surf. The chilly breeze. It was a lovely equatorial dawn. “Henry,” I said, “record this.”
    Relax, Sam. I always record the best of everything .
    In the distance, the island’s canopy dome shimmered like a veil of rain falling into a restless sea. Waves surged up the beach to melt away in the sand at my feet. There was a ripe, salty smell of fish and seaweed and whales and lost sailors moldering in the deep. The ocean, for all its restlessness, had proven to be a good delivery medium for nanotech weapons—NASTIEs—which could float around the globe indefinitely, like particularly rude messages in tiny bottles, until they washed up on the enemy’s shore. Cozumel’s defense canopy, more a sphere than a dome, extended through the water to the ocean floor, and deep into bedrock. A legacy of the Outrage in the 2060s.
    “So tell me, Henry, how are you and Cabinet getting along?” I had taken his advice and bought him more neuro-chem