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"Why not? I bluffed my way into Preke territory."
"Your roll won't carry you a week up there."
"All I need is the price of admission."
"Face it, Bailey. There's more to it than the loot. You don't look like a Cruster, you don't act like one. How could you? Those babies have all the best from the day they're born, the best food, the best education, the best training! They have their own way of walking and talking, sniffing flowers, making up to a frill! They've got class where it shows, and they can back it up! You can't fake it!"
"Who said anything about faking it, Gus? You must know the name of a reliable tapelegger."
"A print man?" Aroon's voice had automatically dropped to a whisper. "Bailey, that ain't demi-chit stuff. Touch a wrong strip and it's a wiping rap!"
"If I'm caught."
"And anyway-a good tech line is worth a fortune! You couldn't touch even a Class Two tape job for under a quarter million."
"I don't want a tech education," Bailey said. "I want a background cultural fill-in-the kind they give a Cruster after a brain injury or wipe therapy."
"I guess there's no need my asking why you want to load your skull with fancy stuff you'll never use, that'll never buy you a night's flop?" Gus said hoarsely.
"Nope. Can you put me on to a right man?"
"If that's the way you want it."
"It's the way it's got to be for where I've got to go."
Aroon nodded heavily. "I owe you that much-and a lot more. You shook this whole lousy setup to bedrock, something that needed doing for a long time." He rose. "Come on. I'll take you there."
"I'll go alone, Gus. Just give me the name and address, and I'm on my way."
"You don't waste much time, do you, kid?"
"I don't have much time to waste."
"What is it you got to do that's eating at you?"
Bailey frowned. "I don't know. I just know the time is short for me to do it."
8
It was a narrow, high-ceilinged room, walled with faded rose and gold paper, furnished with glossy dark antiques perched around the edge of a carpet from which the floral pattern was almost worn away. An elaborate chandelier fitted with ancient flame-shaped incandescent bulbs hung from a black iron chain. Tarnished gilt lettering winked from the cracked leather spines of books in a glass-fronted case. The man who surveyed Bailey from the depths of a curve-legged wing chair was lean, withered, with a face like a fallen soufflй. Only his eyes moved, assessing his customer.
"Do you have any idea what it is you're asking?" he inquired in a voice like dry leaves stirred by the wind. "Do you imagine that by absorbing from an illegally transcribed cephalotape the background appropriate to a gentleman of birth and breeding, that you will be magically transformed from your present lowly state?"
"Can you supply what I want, or can't you?" Bailey said patiently.
"I can supply a full Class One socio-cultural matrix, yes," the old man snapped. "As to providing a magical entrйe into high places-"
"If what you've got to offer won't fill the bill, I'll be on my way." Bailey got to his feet. The old man rose quickly, stood stoop-backed, eyeing him.
"Why aren't you content to absorb a useful skill, a practical knowledge of a saleable trade? Why these grandiose aspirations to a place you can never fill?"
"That's my business," Bailey said. "Yes or no?"
The old man's puckered face tightened. "You're a fool," he said. "Come with me."
9
In a back room, Bailey took a seat in a worn leather-covered reclining chair; the tapelegger clucked and muttered to himself as he attached the electrodes to Bailey's skull, referring frequently to the dials on the wheeled cart beside him. As he pressed buttons, Bailey felt the stirrings and tinglings of the neuro-electric currents induced within his brain by the teaching machine.
"Make no mistake," the old man told him. "The material you'll receive here will be in no way inferior to that offered in the most exclusive universities. My prints were coded direct from the masters filed at HEW Central. Once assimilated, a bootleg education is objectively indistinguishable from any other."
"I'm counting on it," Bailey said. "That's why I'm paying you fifty M."
"A tiny fraction of the value of what is encoded here." The 'legger weighed the reel on his palm. "The essence of a lifetime of cultured ease. This particular Trace was made by Aldig Parn, Blue One, the critic and collector. You'll have a fabulous grounding in the arts. Parn was also a Distinguished Master at the game called Reprise. You'll get it all-and much, much more. It's not been edited, you see. It's all as it came from his brain, even to personal tastes and ma
"If it's as good as that, why sell at all? Why not use it yourself?"
"Why?" the print man snapped. "So that I could become even more acutely aware of the horrors of life in a petrified society? I've too much education already. One day I'll present myself at Unicen for voluntary wipe and begin again as a pink tag crude-labor gangman. The solace of nepenthe."
"That's not much of a sales talk," Bailey said.
"I'm not urging you to buy. I'd recommend a limited tech indoc, sufficient to guarantee you a yellow tag."
"Never mind; I won't hold you responsible. Just be sure you watch those meters. I don't want a burned cortex for my trouble."
10
Bailey had had headaches before, but nothing like this.
"You'll live," the 'legger said briskly. "It was you who insisted on haste. You took it surprisingly well. Your metabolic index never dropped below.8. Rest for a few days, avoid any creative mental activity, problem solving. I don't want any blankages to mar the imprint."
Bailey muttered and lay back in the chair. Through the thudding pain, a kaleidoscopic whirl of images danced; phantom voices rang in his ears against the complex shapes of abstract patterns.
"I don't feel any smarter," he said. "Are you sure it took?"
The old man snorted. "Of course you're no more intelligent than when I began. But you'll find your mind is imprinted with a very great mass of new data. Of course, the current-status portion will be out of date by some years: the fads, catch phrases, in-group gossip of the moment. After all, I don't have access to the daily addenda. But that will hardly be of importance, I imagine."
Bailey ignored the implied question. He paid off, made his way to the loft he had rented as temporary quarters. On the third day, the headache was gone. Gingerly then, he probed at his memory. Slowly at first, then more swiftly, a mass of data-concepts flowed into his awareness as the taped information swam into focus: The proper mode of address to a magistrate in a situation of formality degree five; the correct instruction to a groom when requiring disengagement from an awkward social context; the control layout of the Monojag Sport Twin, model 900; the precise gait appropriate to an unescorted entrance to a public dining salon, early evening, formality three; the names of the leading erotistes of the moment; the entry codes to clubs, the proper wardrobe combinations for this situation and that, the forty-one positions and three hundred and four strokes of the katcha-gat, the membership ritual for the Fornax Club…
"Good enough," he murmured. He dressed and left the loft, headed for the address he had purchased for an extra M from the tapelegger.