Marla hesitated, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Rondeau. It’s too hard. You’d need the apprentice and the old sorcerer both, and you’d basically have to reproduce what the old guy did, which I doubt you could do if he was conscious, as he’s unlikely to cooperate. And even then…it can be done, but minds aren’t meant to be swapped, you know? They get worn down. You remember Todd Sweeney, how he jumped from body to body? His own homunculi in that case, but still, there was wear, he got increasingly amoral and crazy, and eventually, if he’d kept on jumping, he would have stopped being human entirely.”
“But one more switch, Marla. Come on. Would it be so bad?”
“Probably not. But I have to get that Cornerstone, Rondeau, and get back home. In a day, maybe two, Susan is going to do something very nasty. Hamil will try to stall her, but I’ve got a couple of days, tops, before I miss my chance. I’m not prepared to tangle with the guy who runs Chinatown here, not when I have so much going on. When this thing with Susan is over, if it’s still important to you, I’ll hook you up with someone who can teach you how to switch minds, and put you in touch with some freelancers who can help with the wet-work. Okay? But I have too much on my plate right now.”
Rondeau nodded, not happy, but apparently satisfied for the moment. “I’ll take you up on that, when this thing with Susan is done. I’m serious about this.”
Marla put her hand on his shoulder for a moment. “It’s a deal.” Rondeau had never exhibited much interest in doing the right thing before—he was one of the most profoundly self-centered people she knew, though his loyalty to her was real—and Marla found the change intriguing. Seeing Rondeau develop a moral sense was like watching a primordial sea-creature climb out onto the land for the first time.
“Spare a quarter?” A scruffy young man smiled and held out a paper coffee cup with a few coins rattling around at the bottom. Marla and Rondeau went past without even a glance of acknowledgment.
“See? This place isn’t so different from home. They’ve got panhandlers here, too.”
Marla snorted. “He looked like a guy on spring break from college, begging for beer money. Back home, the street people have gravitas, you know? They look like they’ve hit bottom.” She glanced back, once again feeling as if she was being followed, but the college-boy-bum hadn’t trailed along after them, and she didn’t see anyone else, either.
Rondeau shrugged. “Go to the Mission, or the Tenderloin, and you’ll see plenty of people like that, I bet. This is the chichi part of town, a major tourist destination. The cops probably hustle off anybody who might make the tourons uncomfortable.”
They turned off Stockton, onto Geary Street. Marla squinted at the buildings lining the sidewalk. “Not a Gucci or a Louis Vuitton in sight! It’s all theaters and art galleries. Those have got to lose money, huh?”
Rondeau shrugged. “A lot of people come here for the culture. Maybe they do all right.”
Marla put her hand on Rondeau’s arm to stop him. “That gallery isn’t doing so well.” She pointed.
On the other side of the street, near the end of the block, a sawhorse barricade had been set up. Glass littered the sidewalk from the broken front window of the gallery, and a bored-looking cop in a uniform stood by the sawhorses, thumbs hooked in the loop of his belt.
Marla could never resist a crime scene. She crossed the street, Rondeau sighing behind her, and strode toward the breakage. Something yellow near the bottom of an adjoining building caught her eye, and Marla crouched to look at it.
Another tiny frog, lying on its back, unmoving. Marla reached into her bag for a pencil, and nudged the frog with the eraser end. The frog didn’t move. Lying there dead, it looked improbable, like a rubber toy. Marla glanced around and tossed the pencil into a nearby sewer grate. She didn’t want to absentmindedly chew on the end of the pencil and poison herself. Opening the flap on her bag, she fished around until she found a plastic bag with a few peyote buttons inside. She tossed those in the sewer, too. She could always get more hallucinogens, if an altered state of consciousness proved necessary. She spared a moment’s thought for where the things she was throwing away would go—both poisoned pencil and peyote would drain away, probably to the bay, where their effects would be largely diluted. And if a few fish got poisoned or started tripping, well, that was small karma, nothing to worry about, not compared to the vast debit she’d already run up in the course of keeping her own skin intact for so many years.