as breathing deeply, willing the spasms to unclench.
"Thanks," he said.

"What now? Should I call a doctor?"

"He'd just give me painkillers and tell me to lose some weight. I'll probably be
like this for a week. Shit. Fede's going to kill me. I was supposed to go to
Boston next Friday, too."

"Boston? What for? For how long?"

Art bunched the sheets in his fists. He hadn't meant to tell her about Boston
yet -- he and Fede hadn't worked out his cover story. "Meetings," he said. "Two
or three days. I was going to take some personal time and go see my family, too.
Goddamnit. Pass me my comm, OK?"

"You're going to *work* now?"

"I'm just going to send Fede a message and send out for some muscle-relaxants.
There's a twenty-four-hour chemist's at Paddington Station that delivers."

"I'll do it, you lie flat."

And so it began. Bad enough to be helpless, weak as a kitten and immobile, but
to be at the whim of someone else, to have to provide sufficient excuse for
every use of his comm, every crawl across the flat... Christ. "Just give me my
comm, please. I can do it faster than I can explain how to do it."

In thirty-six hours, he was ready to tear the throat out of anyone who tried to
communicate with him. He'd harangued Linda out of the flat and crawled to the
kitchen floor, painstakingly assembling a nest of pillows and sofa cushions,
close to the icemaker and the painkillers and toilet. His landlady, an
unfriendly Chinese lady who had apparently been wealthy beyond words in Hong
Kong and clearly resented her reduced station, agreed to sign for the supply
drops he commed to various retailers around London.

He was giving himself a serious crick in his neck and shoulder from working
supine, comm held over his head. The painkillers weighted his arms and churned
his guts, and at least twice an hour, he'd grog his way into a better position,
forgetting the tenderness in his back, and bark afresh as his nerves shrieked
and sizzled.

Two days later and he was almost unrecognizable, a gamey, unshaven lump in the
tiny kitchen, his nest gray with sweat and stiff with spilled take-away curry.
He suspected that he was overmedicating, forgetting whether he'd taken his
tablets and taking more. In one of his more lucid moments, he realized that
there was a feedback cycle at play here -- the more pills he took, the less
equipped he was to judge whether he'd taken his pills, so the more pills he
took. His mind meandered throug