THE EXECUTED MAN - part 2 of 3

        He finally found her in the bedroom, face down on the bed, fully clothed, weeping like a woman who has been raped. AuDup must have phoned ahead. She had known he was on the way home.
        "Honey?" he said. "Zophalia?"
        Standing there, he was conscious of his entitlements. She was, after all, his wife, and it had been a long ninety days. Furthermore, the experience of all the months before those ninety days was a part of his makeup, even though his living cells had not endured that jail time.
        "Zophalia?" he said, again, wondering whether to experiment with brute force.
        In jail, while preparing himself, mentally and spiritually, for duplication, he had taken some firm decisions as to how their married life would evolve. But this, he decided, was not the moment to force the pace.
        "How could you?" she said, crying it to the pillow. "How could you go and watch?"
        Now how could she know about that? Again, AuDup. Presumably. Certainly there had been nothing about the execution on the TV news he had watched when he had stopped by at Kim's Bar on the way home. The Consolidated Privacy Act was doing the job it was supposed to do, making it possible for him to bet on with his life.
        If she would only let him.
        "Honey?"
        Ten minutes later, he lost his patience. And, for the thousandth time in his married life, didn't hit her. Instead, he went out for a walk, striding through the streets, getting his anger under control.
        Anger management. He was good at that. Never had to do a course in it or anything like that. Anger management came naturally. He'd taught himself. He wasn't a bad person. Not violent. Not criminally reckless. Not the kind of person who went round making the world a bad place.
        But he did have his entitlements, and she would have to bring herself to see that, in time. She would have to.
        He left the "or else" in the realm of the unspoken. Time enough for that later. If it was really necessary.

* * *

        Monday. The office. Walking from the taxi to the lobby (he'd chosen not to drive today) Chris noticed a couple of people taking photos. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe foreign paparazzi, operating here in the territory of the One True Nation in violation of the Consolidated Privacy Act.
        Or maybe lawyer Nuttlebit had private detectives on his heels, making sure he was obeying the terms of the non-molestation order he'd been served. Yes, that was possible. Be careful, Chris. Play it cool. Remember, maturity is the ability to put a distance between desire and consummation.
        "And last time ....
        "Still young," muttered Chris.
        Then halted his mouth, shocked at himself. There was no telling what microphones might be trained on him. The thought - the thought that had tried to speak itself - was that the sister was still young. She would keep.
        Trying to look his executive best, Chris strode into the lobby, where Strawberry was waiting for him, presumably by design. Without a word, Strawberry fell in step with Chris and they walked to the elevator together. Strawberry didn't speak until they were above the twenty-fifth floor.
        "Hingman wants to see you," said Strawberry. "In his office. Now."

* * *

         Hingman was not alone. He had that fat-faced kid from legal sitting in with him ... what was the guy's name? Smith? Jones? Something like that. Something anonymous. Got it! Johns. Clayton Johns.
        "Glad to have you back," said Hingman, rising.
        "Mutual pleasure," said Chris.
        Handshakes. Dry. Firm. Confident.
        "Clayton has a little paperwork for you," said Hingman.
        "What the world runs on," said Chris, smiling. "Mind if I run my eye over it before signing?"
        "Not at all," said Hingman, cool, unflappable.
        No sign that Hingman was under stress. But there wouldn't be, would there? Hingman was not the kind of guy who let his emotions splash out. Hingman had remained perfectly cool even after that day in November when Chris had brought him the news about the bodies. The twenty thousand bodies.
        "Something funny?" said Hingman, a few iron filings mixed with the honey.
        "Just thinking," said Chris, realizing he had been smiling to himself, "it's a little odd that we don't entirely trust each other. Not after all these years under the bridge."
        Water. It's water that goes under the bridge. Chris did not like it when people made mistakes, and he did not easily tolerate them in himself. Not little mistakes. Not medium-sized mistakes. And certainly not major mistakes of the kind that got you executed.

* * *

        "So what was the document?" asked Termagill, the AuDup shrink who, by law, Chris would have to see at least once a month for the next year. More often, if that's what the shrink chose to demand (or if Chris requested it.)
        "Oh, just a ... a confession, sort of. Saying that recent, uh, private events, shall we say, were my own personal business, nothing to do with the company."
        "One wouldn't think that was legal," said Termagill.
        "To ask me to sign?" said Chris. "No, as I read the law, it's not. But they want their security blanket, so who am I to complain? After all that's happened."
        "Chris," said Termagill, "we have to acknowledge the past. To do otherwise would be to lapse from realism. But sometimes it's important to remind yourself of your copyhood. To remind yourself that you, considered as a volitional angel, so to speak, had no part in the decisions which led to that one death."
        "To those twenty thousand deaths," said Chris, softly.
        Termagill blinked.
        "There's no formal rule against hyperbole," said Termagill, "but I'd counsel against it. The exaggeration of situations does not lead one in the direction of therapeutic efficiency."
        "Twenty thousand dead," said Chris, as softly as before. "That's a ballpark figure, of course. I personally signed approval for only nineteen thousand doses, but - "
        "Doses?" said Termagill.
        "Of Grail Nine," said Chris. "Nineteen thousand, as I say. But I think there was a little ... cleaning up work, we could call it. On the periphery."
        "Mr Stainless," said Termagill, visibly confused. "Chris, I mean. Since the Canopus Act, the situation on client confidentiality ... I mean, if someone were to supoena ...."
        "Let them," said Chris. "It's to my advantage to have this on record. In case someone decides to make me vanish in the night. Of course, they might decide to make my therapist vanish, too."
        Termagill's face was expressionless. Padlocked. A frightened man? Maybe. Well, if he wasn't frightened already, Chris was going to take pleasure in scaring him a little. In the name of truth.