"Abolishing the Eighth Amendment did nothing to curb crime," John said, preening in the glow of a throughput rating that still hovered in the high hundred-thousands after his last major exhibit. "Desperate men kept right on killing each other. Users bought. The greedy embezzled. Flesh haunted us and was freely traded for money and privilege."

"Better times now," Mera, John's apprentice, replied--though she forced herself not to look up from the case file spread in front of her on the low table.

"Not even the governors helped," John said. "But, you know, after Monuco opened his first exhibit, statistics changed."

"Shame is a powerful motivator," Mera said, still not looking up.

John plopped his feet onto the table, toppling a ream of paper onto Mera's lap. She cast him a withering glance and their gazes locked together for a long moment. Tuned to John's channel and watching herself through him, Mera realized just what a masterful showman their boss Monuco was: keep the audience interested, keep the ratings up, let John throw a couple little coffeehouse gigs after last week's big event and develop a bit of soap opera romance with a fresh-faced girl. It figured. Men were so predictable. Mera bet that John loved the continuing attention.

John gave first.

Blushing slightly, he shifted his gaze. Compared to other girls John dated, Mera knew she was intimidating. She'd made it through The School, most of it, already. And she was planning her first exhibition, her thesis, even now.

I've got to be careful, she thought, or I'll scare him away.

"What made you want to be an Artist?" he asked.

Mera set the case file down, leaned back on the leather sofa and crossed her legs. They were listening now, different bandwidth, different audience: the proctors, tabulating her answers and thoughts, connecting through John just like the paying viewers but not just for entertainment. They were grading her, comparing the words she spoke against the firing of her emotions as reported by the governor that tapped her neurons.

"Do they really modify your governor when you graduate?" she parried, buying time.

"They have to," John said. "They'd run out of blue slips and black ink if they had to patrol our minds."

"So we can do anything? Think anything?"

"No. Of course, there are still guidelines, limits. Nothing so strict as Hammurabi. It's all Western style, letting the market dictate. Dish out a beheading for burglary, ticket sales suffer. So, we don't go that far the next time. It's not the 'punishment fits the crime' but more like 'the punishment fits the ratings.' 'Watch your bottom line,' Monuco says, 'It will keep you keyed to the whim of your public.'"

Mera sighed, her nose wrinkling.

"I hate Monuco."

John blanched. Monuco was John's mentor, his idol. Mera could almost see the proctors' tabulating machineries whirl, adding her opinion of Monuco to their charts. She played off the remark as casually as she could, suppressing an urge to run, to leave John and the coffee shop behind and start life over somewhere else. At last John's face transfigured, his furrowed brows softening as he received feedback from the analysis.

Quoting Monuco herself, Mera silently recited: 'Hate is an emotion capable of creating good Art.' They're going to let it slide.

"Actually, I prefer Figueroa or Novis myself," John said at last, smoothing things over. "Monuco's really not much of an aesthete. His talent has always been organization, administration and promotion. Novis has got that cool leeching and bloodletting thing going on. Did you catch Figerao's barn burnings? Novel way to deal with vagrant cattle poachers. Build them a place to sleep, wait until they're comfortable, then set it on fire. Might be a tad disproportionate to the crime but the screams are sure poignant. Too bad his ratings don't reflect his genius."

"He might catch you then."

John smiled but didn't reply. The following silence was awkward not because of the prideful way he accepted Mera's bit of teasing flattery but because of the probing look he turned on her.

She blinked.

An image of her father stole into her mind. It was early morning. Between velvet curtains a ray of sunlight struck the polished parquet floor of a dance hall. Which dance hall, Mera couldn't tell--it was an amalgamation, the memories of her whole childhood collapsed into a single scene. The white-clothed tables were empty, all except the one over which balding Milton slumped. He didn't notice the little girl in her nightgown coming down the back stairs from the hotel above until it was too late.

"What's that, daddy?" she asked, touching a slip of blue paper he held.

Milton startled to attention.

"Forgive me, Mera, my baby," he said, running his hand along her cheek. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

Mera forced the memory away. She scrambled to find and latch her emotions onto something else, anything else. At last, only moments ahead of a telltale rush of sentimentality that her governor would surely detect, her mind jumped back into the present and focused on John's disturbing gaze.

My God, she thought as loudly as she could, channeling all her burgeoning fear and love into the observation, he *likes* me.

She swallowed a tiny lump of anxiety that tickled the back of her throat and let herself return his smile with as much glittering openness as she could muster.

I might as well dive in, she told herself.

Then, lying, she answered his earlier question, "I'm a hedonist. That's really the deep down reason I want to be an Artist. I consider the Eighth Art the ultimate way to live for pleasure; the only lawful way to take that pleasure at someone else's expense."

This surprised John, but pleasantly so. Again, Mera could almost see the proctors computing her words somewhere deep in their catacombs, connected through the ether to John's eyes, ears, fingers and tongue. They knew what he knew. And, because of her governor, they knew what she felt too. She had to fool both John and herself in order to fool them. Briefly and emotionlessly, she wondered whether such a bold claim as hedonism would do her harm or earn points. Either way, it followed the plan she had set for herself. It was bait and camouflage both.