Free Hopscotch by Kevin J. Anderson Page B

buy, but he did like to feel the sense of getting away with something.
    Smiling warmly, Eduard handed the contracts over while the attorneys swarmed about making copies, certifying documents, and no doubt charging the old crone an exorbitant fee for their ministrations.
             
    After swapping into the aching and withered form, Eduard lay back on the surgery table. Madame Ruxton's body was a collapsing ancient structure held together by cobwebs. The deep agony in his bones spoke of age, and his heartbeat stuttered like the slow drumbeat of a dirge. It was an effort just to endure the heavy weight of sheets around him.
    The surgery would repair her deteriorating vascular system, but Madame Ruxton would never feel young and healthy again. Eduard saw her standing there in his home-body, and a calculating expression pinched his familiar face.
    For the first time Eduard felt uneasy. He had covered himself with every clause he could imagine, added every legal caveat, but Madame Ruxton was a wily and desperate woman. What if he had forgotten something? What if he had been incredibly naïve?
    He ached so badly that he welcomed the anesthetic when the surgeons arrived. His vision blurred. He watched his own physique—Ruxton's, for the time being—through rheumy eyes that no longer saw the world clearly.
    Eduard felt the symphony of pain in his sunken chest and lungs, then drifted downward into chemically induced blackness. . . .

12
    “Don't forget, Daragon, we're not just police.” Mordecai Ob raised the COM screen on his desk and punched in a request. “The Bureau of Tracing and Locations finds missing people, uncovers the identity of parents or their children.” He printed out the results, handing the hardcopy to Daragon with an expectant smile. “Since you want to do something so badly, let me give you your first official Bureau assignment. You're ready for it.”
    Daragon flushed with pride as he took the paper and scanned the words.
    “You need to track down a lost family member. This woman needs a vital medical treatment, something that can only be cured through parallel DNA-matching therapy. And that can only be done if she finds the home-body of her brother. Unfortunately, he hopscotched out of his original body long ago in a long-term lease, which was transferred to another person, who died outside of the swapped body. Through a record-keeping snafu, the sibling's body then went onto the open market for permanent sale.”
    Daragon read the particulars, making a special effort not to smile or frown or show any sort of emotion whatsoever. That would have been bad form.
    “Thus, the family needs to recover the brother's lost home-body. It's a matter of life and death, and they came to the BTL for help. The brother himself has kept in touch, but he's hopscotched from one body to another as he took job after job. The sister needs the original body to do her any good.”
    Daragon folded the printout and stuffed it into one of his pockets. “I'll find him for you, sir.”
    “Don't find the body for
me,”
Ob said. “Do it for them.”
             
    Daragon ran into dead ends at every turn, no doubt exactly as the Chief had anticipated. But he'd given his word, and he refused to abandon the quest so easily. He would not disappoint the man who had helped him so much.
    In windowless chambers filled with bubbling coolants and life-support systems, the Bureau's mutated Data Hunters hung in limbo, living a surreal life with virtual bodies, lost inside the computer/organic matrix. Daragon went into the airlocked chambers and stood inside the dank-smelling room.
    As his eyes adjusted, he gazed up at where hairless, stunted bodies hung suspended in harnesses, wired to the vast cosmos of COM. Data Hunters looked like hideous embryos with flaccid arms that had atrophied through lack of use. Their spines were curved, their heads overlarge, their eyes blind, seeing only through neural inputs that linked them into