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upon hundreds. Some were well preserved, some were mere crumbling skeletons. But they have all been destroyed. The syndrome must be preserved at all costs if the stable basis of modern society is to be preserved."

The Mistress stood up with an air of finality. "There will be no news release, and I shall make arrangements immediately for the body to be incinerated. As a servant of the government you will, of course, have nothing to say on the subject to anyone. The man is a secret, dead or alive, an obscene secret of ancient history."

Aubretia bowed understandingly and took her leave.

Aquilegia was a woman in high key. She was a vision in pale cream against a background of white. She lived in the top apartment of one of the highest apartment blocks in Lon North and she was lightness itself, like the sky. The rooms of her home were decorated in the palest of pastel hues, and the furniture was mainly of transparent plastic material. In this setting of whiteness and semi-invisibility she was an object of slender fragile beauty, pure in her whiteness and almost intangible in her ethereal albinism.

She was wearing a gossamer gown in spider latex. It was white, in the translucent white of spun glass, but no whiter than the flesh it concealed. Only the nipples were darker under the folds of the garment, smoke-tinted, diminutive, and the body hair was colorless. Her fingernails and toenails were lacquered in silver, and her lips were ivory-white with cosmetic. The pink of her eyes was generously extended by means of suitably matched stain over the entire surface of the cornea, lending her a transcendental air of remote ghostliness. But for all that she was as real and as physical as any woman Aubretia had ever known.