My daughter killed me Tuesday morning.

I opened my front door and there she was in the hallway, armed with a wood axe.

"Cheryl--" I blurted.

"Hi, Mom," she said, and swung the axe.

My ribs made a funny sound. Chock. The noise reminded me of a dropped watermelon striking a tile floor. Suddenly all the thoughts that come with death burst forth in my head. Memories. Fear. Denial. It's going to miss, it's going to miss. But it had already struck, and I was sliding quickly into shock.

My left knee banged against the doorsill; the right collapsed altogether. My face swung down over a puddle of blood. It seemed odd to discover this red, wet liquid soaking into my welcome mat. It didn't register that the torrent originated from the vicinity of my left lung.

I suppose I felt a lot of pain, but my nanodocs have edited out the memory. It must have hurt, because my mouth popped open and stayed that way. I couldn't say a single word. Just as well, I suppose, considering the language I would have used had I been capable.

Cheryl whacked me on the spine next. I sprawled over the threshold. I guess I must have died at about that point, because the next thing I knew my ethereal self manifested up near the ceiling. I had a bird's-eye view as Cheryl brought the axe down like Paul Bunyan on my neck. My head bounced down the hallway and came to a stop against the potted fern by the elevator.

Cheryl regarded my decapitated body. The damn kid didn't even have the decency to turn green. She sighed, tossed the axe and her bloodstained clothes into the recycler, cleaned herself up, generated a new outfit from my wardrobe player, and left the apartment. She stole the barrette from my hair on her way to the elevator.

My ethereal self haunted the corridor, still too connected to the flesh to disappear into the Big White Light. Below me the nanodocs initiated resuscitation.

The big choice must have been whether to put my head back on my body, or my body back under my head. The docs chose the latter, probably because rebuilding the brain would take all that double-checking. I agreed with the choice--not that my condition allowed me to have any input.

Molecule by molecule, the docs stole material from the mess on the apartment threshold and funneled it down the hallway. A grainy stream, looking for all the world like a parade of sugar ants, gathered at my neck.

Once they got going, the docs worked quickly. My spine formed, only to vanish under layers of connective tissue, nerves, muscle, and fat. The corpse in the doorway dissolved steadily. The docs didn't neglect the blood in the carpet and the welcome mat; raw material was raw material.

Something pulled at my ethereal self. I descended.

I awoke to the tickle of a fern frond against my eyebrow. Instinctively I reached for my throat. No seam. Of course not.

Someone was standing beside me.

I jerked into a sitting position, hands up to guard my head. Then I saw who it was.

"Oh. Hi. Joan."

I extracted the words with invisible forceps. I guess part of me wasn't convinced my vocal cords would function.

My neighbor surveyed me as if she were a Mark Twain schoolmarm. Never mind that her body morph presented her as a stylish, if a bit voluptuous, nineteen-year-old blonde. Her carriage betrayed that she was really a prune-faced, four-hundred-year-old gossip.

"Your daughter again?" Joan asked. Her eyebrows drew together, broadcasting sympathy, yet somehow that concern did not extend to helping me up.

"Yeah. My daughter." I didn't offer specifics. Joan was bound to make up something even more embarrassing than the truth, no matter what I told her. Might as well not give her grist for the mill. At least she probably hadn't seen the axe.

"The kids today--they just aren't like we were." The eyebrows stayed drawn.

Count on Joan for a handy cliché. Yet to my dismay, I had to agree with her this time.

"Got to run. Drop by later if you need to talk," Joan said, putting on her confidante hat.

Sure, Joan.

Once she was gone, I climbed to my feet. My reflection shimmered in the brass of the elevator door. My hair hung in disarray. If someone had shouted "Boo!" right then, my head would have fallen off again. I stumbled into my apartment, closed the door, and sagged onto my sofa.

Cheryl, Cheryl, Cheryl. Sixty-one years old and still acting like four.

The clock in the entertainment console advanced to 9:22AM. Twelve minutes had passed since Cheryl had arrived at my door. That alone told me how careful the nanodocs had been as they repaired my tissues, edited the pain out of my memory, made safety checks, and kick-started my autonomic functions.

I'd been killed, one way or another, five other times in my life. But used to it or not, I could barely rise from the sofa.

I grabbed my kimono off the floor by the front door. My hand fit right through the rents over the left breast and center of the back. I tossed the garment into the recycler and coded the wardrobe player to generate another in the morning. Same style, but I altered the sash to lavender. No way could I stand to wear a red one for a while.

I stank. The docs had put back every particle of my body, right down to the thin layer of perspiration that had burst from my skin the instant the axe swung.

I stepped into the cleanser. My skin tingled as the scrubbers vacuumed out my pores and dissolved the carpet lint in my hair. Feeling distinctly better, I sat down at my dining table and ordered it to create a pot of hot chamomile tea. Only after the first cupful--when I was damn good and ready--did I ask the Link to put me in touch with Cheryl's therapist.

"You were right," I said as soon as Ellen's virtual self materialized in one of my dining chairs.

"Matricide?" she asked.

"A regular tribute to Lizzy Borden," I replied. Ellen listened intently to the description of the assault. Like many psychologists, she affected the appearance of a studious person just entering classic middle age, complete with crow's feet at the outer corners of her eyes, an extra freckle or two on the cheeks, and strands of gray in her auburn hair. All these centuries since eternal youth became the norm, it's still easier to take advice from someone who projects an aura of maturity and experience.

I wondered what sort of morph she wore during her private time. Preadolescent, maybe?

"Well," Ellen said. "I wish she'd proven me wrong. At least you weren't taken totally by surprise."

I thought of the swinging axe. Not taken by surprise? I shuddered. She'd forewarned me that Cheryl would try to kill me, but that didn't mean I was prepared for the attempt to succeed, or to be done so ... vividly.

"I don't know if I can go through this again," I said. "You should have seen her face."

Ellen placed her phantom hand on top of mine. Strangely, it soothed me. Any other person would have acknowledged the intangibility of the Link and not bothered to reach out. She seemed to know it was what I needed. It was an example of why she'd reached adept level in her profession.

"What would you ordinarily have done if you didn't have me to call?" she asked.

I saw what she was getting at. "I would have called Cheryl and asked her what the hell was up."

The psychologist nodded. "And she knows that. We've got to show her that the rules have changed."

"I know. I didn't really think she'd resort to murder, though."

"She's never had to before." Ellen leaned back. "You know, it's not too late to change the plan. I could still petition for a personality remorph. It would be easier on everybody."

My fingers tightened around the teacup. "Not easier for Cheryl."

Ellen pursed her lips. "Actually it would be. Once it's done, the new Cheryl would thank us."

The new Cheryl. I cringed, thinking of someone I'd known who'd had a personality remorph. "No," I said. "I can't. Not yet."

Was that approval in the psychologist's pensive smile? "Then we'll have to work it through. I'll talk to her today. I don't expect much, though. You should expect to be killed at least one more time."

I blanched. "I understand."

Ellen prepared to blink out. "Anything more?" she asked.

I sighed. "I feel like a terrible mother."

Ellen waited until I was willing to meet her glance straight on. "On the contrary. The problem is that you've been too good a mother. She needs just the opposite right now."

I bit my lip, and pretended that I accepted that.

"Your mom still hasn't called, has she?" Giselle asked.

I pretended not to hear. Jacques was getting ready to jump. I focussed on that.

We were high in the Cascades, at the brink of a gorge. Scoured by glaciers and attacked by snow melt, the cliff below us was fissured and crumbling--not the smooth, tall, granite precipice type that attracts imagemakers and tourists. Steep, but nicely off the beaten track--we could usually get wilderness permits good at the site for an hour every week.

I could feel Giselle's smug grin, even if I didn't look at it. I yawned, projecting nonchalance. Not that it would fool anyone. Giselle knew me better than that.

Jacques leaped. He hit ass-first on a shelf about fifty feet down, probably breaking his pelvis. It slowed him down, but he regained enough momentum to tear open his viscera on a jagged projection a hundred feet below that. He bounced against the cliff, through brush and over ledges, losing parts of himself, and slammed to rest near the outcropping we all called Buffalo with an Attitude.

"Not bad," Giselle commented. "He was probably conscious until that last series of boulders." We both knew that meant a lot to Jacques. He preferred to leave his memories unedited. No pain, no gain.

"Coming with me?" Giselle sprang onto a rock at the very edge of the drop.

I shrugged. "Nah. I'll wait another minute or two."

"Oh, Cheryl," she taunted. "If she hasn't called by now, she's not going to. You always expect so much."

"Why don't you give yourself a Tabasco sauce enema?" I asked.

She mocked an expression of deep offense. I glared at her. Her scowl transformed into a crooked smile, still a bit smug, but laced with a certain amount of empathy.

Giselle and I operated from the same foundation. She, Jacques, and I constituted half of the sixty-something-year-olds in all Oregon. She knew what it was like to be a kid born in a society of Old Farts. Except for us, everybody alive had been around ever since nanotechnology had eliminated aging. None of them knew what it was like to grow up among immortals. When they'd been young, their elders had politely croaked, opening up the good jobs, the good home sites, providing at least a chance to excel in some aspect of life. Giselle and I had met at Reed College, had tried to compete in classes with students back for their seventh or twelfth or twentieth degrees, and had joined the local chapter of the Suicidals together.

"Parents," Giselle said, sighing. She had both a father and a mother, a fact I thought rather quaint. "Fuck 'em."

She leaned farther and farther back, until the slightest breeze would have committed her to the plunge. She gazed downward over her shoulder. The anticipation stiffened her nipples until headlights formed along the front of her pullover sweater.

"Oh, look," she said. "The coyotes are back."

I peered down. A small pack of the animals circled near the base of the precipice. They yapped and whined, searching for pawholds in the scree. Obviously they smelled the blood and intestines with which Jacques had decorated the side of the mountain. My best guess said they wouldn't be able to reach the spot where most of the corpse rested.

"Poor puppies," Giselle said. "Do you think it's the same bunch as last time?"

"Naturally," I said. Though we hadn't been here for a month or so, the three of us visited often enough that the critters had figured out the routine. Time before last I'd revived from a fall to see a young female and her litter scampering off with one of my legs; my nanodocs had to steal material from a nearby streambed to fashion the replacement. The park rangers would've given us hell if they'd found out.

Thrusting with her ankles, Giselle sailed clear of the cliff. Her trajectory, unlike that of Jacques, guaranteed she wouldn't snag on anything on the way down.

"Choke on thiiiiiisss," she screamed at the coyotes as she picked up speed.

She impacted quite fabulously on a shelf of jagged rocks well below Jacques's partially repaired body. Even from my vantage point many hundreds of feet above I could see her brains spray, anointing the granite with a shade distinctly lighter than the crimson that smeared everything else.

Suicide Number 6,327 for her. She was one ahead of me, but I'd soon fix that.

Yet I waited. It was stupid. Giselle was right. If Monica had been going to call, she would have. But shit, all my dear mother had to do was say a few words to the Link and her virtual ass could sit itself down beside me, even for just a minute. Was that really too much to expect?

I stared at the high peaks jutting up above timberline to the north, kicked a pebble over the edge, and got ready to follow it.

"Call for you, Cheryl," said the disembodied voice of the Link. "It's Ellen Branson."

Just fucking great. Well, I could refuse it, but she'd only keep bugging me. "Put her through," I said.

Dr. Branson's image materialized beside me. She sat in an invisible chair, her hair unruffled by the mountain breeze. She looked around, noticed the bodies below, and gave me that professional frown of concern she so carefully cultivated.

"I talked to your mother an hour ago," she said. "Your stunt didn't impress her."

"It wasn't supposed to impress her," I said. "It was just supposed to get her attention."

"You're lucky she doesn't file a complaint with the Net. They've just increased the community service time for murder and other misdemeanor assault, you know."

"I'm real worried about it," I quipped.

"You'll miss work. You'll blow your commission and have to petition for another career."

"Another chance of a lifetime, thrown down the face of an Oregon mountain." I wobbled and pretended to lose my balance. I leaned out over the gorge for several seconds, smiled demurely at Dr. Branson, and straightened up. "Why should I worry, Doc? I've filed a suicide petition. Pretty soon I won't have to worry about anything. I'll be checking out. Permanently."

Dr. Branson massaged her forehead. "I've read your case history, dear. You've filed suicide petitions before. You have to refile every day for thirty days running before the Net will deactivate your docs. You always run out of steam before the end."

I kicked her in her intangible knee. "So what? This time it's real. I'm going all the way. You tell that to my mother."

She sighed. "But she knows it's not true. You're just waiting for her to make a fuss over you like she's always done. I think she's tired of that. I think she's leaving it for you to work it out on your own."

"I have worked it out. In five days, I get archived. All I want is for her to acknowledge that."

"Why should she? It's not her problem."

I blinked. Something about the matter-of-fact way Dr. Branson delivered her statement awakened my suspicions. I yelled so loudly it echoed across the gorge. "You're telling her to ignore me, aren't you?"

Doc folded her palms together. She didn't actually smile, but I felt like a victim of the Cheshire Cat anyway. "Yes. I told your mother not to speak to you until you've cancelled the suicide petition."

"Keep your nose where it belongs," I said. "You're supposed to be my therapist, not Monica's. How the hell did I get reassigned to you? What are you, a journeyman, or a fucking apprentice?"

She didn't answer that last part. "I am your therapist, Cheryl. Why does that scare you? Why do you have to try to run back to Mommie?"

"Cancel link," I said. Dr. Branson's image popped out just as she opened her mouth to utter some more bullshit.

Mom couldn't keep it up. I knew her better than that. A lot better than any psychologist. I'd really thought the axe would do it, but if not--well, there were other ways.

I looked down to find Jacques, fully rebuilt, waving up at me. I waved back.

"That was nothing!" I yelled. "Take a look at this!"