Believing Is Seeing

NAD AND DAN ADN QUAFFY

She had struggled rather as a writer until she got her word processor. Or not exactly struggled, she thought, frowning at her screen and flipping the cursor back to correct adn to and. For some reason, she always garbled the word and. It was always adn or nad; dna or nda was less frequent, but all of them appeared far oftener than the right way. She had only started to make this mistake after she gave up her typewriter, and she felt it was a small price to pay.

For years she had written what seemed to her the most stirring sort of novels, about lonely aliens among humans, or lonely humans among aliens, or sometimes both kinds lonely in an unkind world, all without ever quite hitting the response from readers she felt she was worth. Then came her divorce, which left her with custody of her son, Daniel, then thirteen. That probably provided an impetus of some sort in itself, for Danny was probably the most critical boy alive.

“Mum!” he would say. “I wish you’d give up that lonely-heart alien stuff! Can’t you write about something decent for a change?” Or, staring at her best efforts at cookery, he said, “I can’t be expected to eat this!” After which he had taken over cooking himself: they now lived on chili con carne and stir-fry. For as Danny said, “A man can’t be expected to learn more than one dish a year.” At the moment, being nearly fifteen, Danny was teaching himself curry. Their nice Highgate house reeked of burned garam masala most of the time.

But the real impetus had come when she found Danny in her workroom sternly plaiting the letters of her old typewriter into metal braid. “I’ve had this old thing!” he said when she tore him away with fury and cursings. “So have you. It’s out of the ark. Now you’ll have to get a word processor.”

“But I don’t know how to work the things!” she had wailed.

“That doesn’t matter. I do. I’ll work it for you,” he replied inexorably. “And I’ll tell you what one to buy, too, or you’ll only waste money.”

He did so. The components were duly delivered and installed, and Daniel proceeded to instruct his mother in how to work as much of them as—as he rather blightingly said—her feeble brain would hold. “There,” he said. “Now write something worth reading for a change.” And he left her sitting in front of it all.

When she thought about it, she was rather ashamed of the fact that her knowledge of the thing had not progressed one whit beyond those first instructions Danny had given her. She had to call on her son to work the printout, to recall most of the files, and to get her out of any but the most simple difficulty. On several occasions—as when Danny had been on a school trip to Paris or away with his school cricket team—she had had to tell her publisher all manner of lies to account for the fact that there would be no copy of anything until Danny got back. But the advantages far outweighed these difficulties, or at least she knew they did now.

That first day had been a nightmare. She had felt lost and foolish and weak. She had begun, not having anything else in mind, on another installment of lonely aliens. And everything kept going wrong. She had to call Danny in ten times in the first hour, and then ten times after lunch, and then again when, for some reason, the machine produced what she had written of Chapter I as a list, one word to a line. Even Danny took most of the rest of the day to sort out what she had done to get that. After that he hovered over her solicitously, bringing her mugs of black coffee, until, somewhere around nine in the evening, she realized she was in double bondage, first to a machine and then to her own son.

“Go away!” she told him. “Out of my sight! I’m going to learn to do this for myself or die in the attempt!”

Danny gave her bared teeth a startled look and fled.

By this time she had been sitting in front of board and screen for nearly ten hours. It seemed to her that her threat to die in the attempt was no idle one. She felt like death. Her back ached, and so did her head. Her eyes felt like running blisters. She had cramp in both hands and one foot asleep. In addition, her mouth was foul with too much coffee and Danny’s chili con carne. The little green letters on the screen kept retreating behind the glass to the distant end of a long, long tunnel. “I will do this!” she told herself fiercely. “I am an intelligent adult—probably even a genius—and I will not be dominated by a mere machine!”

And she typed all over again:

CHAPTER ONE

The Captain had been at board and screen ever since jump—a total of ten hours. Her hands shook with weariness, making it an effort to hold them steady on her switches. Her head was muzzy, her mouth foul with nutrient concentrates. But since the mutiny, it was sit double watches or fail to bring the starship Candida safely through the intricate system of Meld....

At this point she began to get a strange sense of power. She was dominating this damned machine, even though she was doing it only by exploiting her own sensations. Also, she was becoming interested in what might be going to happen to the starship Candida, not to speak of the reasons that had led up to the mutiny aboard her. She continued writing furiously until long after midnight. When she stopped at last, she had to pry her legs loose from her chair.

“That’s more like it, Mum!” Danny said the next morning, reading it as it came from the printer.

He was, as usual, right. Starship Candida was the book that made the name of F. C. Stone. It won prizes. It sold in resorts and newsagents all over the world. It was, reviewers said, equally remarkable for its insight into the Captain’s character as for the intricate personal relationships leading to the mutiny. Much was spoken about the tender and peculiar relationships between the sexes. This last made F. C. Stone grin rather. All she had done was to revenge herself on Danny by reversing the way things were between them. In the book the Captain was all-powerful and dominating and complained a lot about the food. The Mate had a hypnotically induced mind-set that caused him to bleat for assistance at the first sign of trouble.

Her next book, The Mutineers, was an even greater success. For this one, F. C. Stone extended the intricate personal relationships to the wider field of galactic politics. She discovered she reveled in politics. Provided she was making up the politics herself, there seemed no limit to how intricate she could make them.

Since then she had, well, not stuck to a formula—she was much more artfully various than that—but as she said and Danny agreed, there was no point in leaving a winning game. Though she did not go back to starship Candida, she stayed with that universe and its intricate politics. There were aliens in it, too, which she always enjoyed. And she kept mostly out in space, so that she could continue to describe pilots astronauting at the controls of a word processor. Sooner or later in most of her books, someone, human or alien, would have sat long hours before the screen until dazed with staring, aching in the back, itching in the nose—for the burning of Asian spices in the kitchen tended to give her hay fever—and with cramped hands, this pilot would be forced to maneuver arduously through jump. This part always, or nearly always, got written when F. C. Stone was unable to resist staying up late to finish the chapter.

Danny continued to monitor his mother. He was proud of what he had made her do. In holidays and around the edges of school, he hung over her shoulder and brought her continual mugs of strong black coffee. This beverage began to appear in the books, too. The mutineer humans drank gav, while their law-abiding enemies quaffed chvi. Spacer aliens staggered from their nav-couches to gulp down kivay, and the mystics of Meld used xfy to induce an altered state of consciousness, although this was not generally spotted as being the same substance. And it was all immensely popular.

It was all due to the word processor, she thought, giving the nearest component a friendly pat as she leaned toward the screen again. The latest mug of cooling kivay sat beside her. Her nose was, as usual, tickled by burned ginger or something. Her back was beginning to ache, or, more truthfully, her behind was. She ought to get a more comfortable chair, but she was too fond of this old one. Anyway, the latest book was the thing. For this one, she had at last gone back to starship Candida. There had been a lot of pressure from her fans. And her publisher thought there was enough material in their suggestions, combined with F. C. Stone’s own ideas, to make a trilogy. So she had decided to start in the way she knew would get her going. She typed:

Jump. Time nad the world stretched dna went out. Back. The Captain had sat at her boards for four objective days—four subjective minutes or four subjective centuries. Her head ached, gums adn all. She cursed. Hands trembling on controls, she struggled to get her fix on this system’s star.

Now what had some vastly learned reader suggested about this system’s star? It had some kind of variability, but that was all she could remember. Damn. All her notes for it were in that file Danny had set up for her. He was at school. But he had written down for her how to recall it. She fumbled around for his piece of paper—it had worked halfway under a black box whose name and function she never could learn—and took a swig of lukewarm xfy while she studied what to do. It looked quite simple. She took another sip of gav. Store the new book. Careful not to cancel this morning’s work. There. Screen blank. Now type in this lot, followed by Candida 2. Then—

A clear childish voice spoke. “This is Candida Two, Candy,” it said. “Candida One, I need your confirmation.”

It was no voice F. C. Stone knew, and it seemed to come from the screen. Her eyes turned to the mug of kivay. Perhaps she was in a state of altered consciousness.

“Candida One!” the voice said impatiently. “Confirm that you are conscious. I will wait ten seconds and then begin lifesaving procedures. Ten, nine, eight …”

This sounded serious. Coffee poisoning, thought F. C. Stone. I shall change to carrot juice or cocoa.

“… seven, six, five,” counted the childish voice, “four, three …”

I’d better say something, thought F. C. Stone. How absurd. Weakly she said, “Do stop counting. It makes me nervous.”

“Are you Candida One?” demanded the voice. “The voice pattern does not quite tally. Please say something else for comparison with my records.”

Why should I? thought F. C. Stone. But it was fairly clear that if she stayed silent, the voice would start counting again and then, presumably, flood the room with the antidote for xfy.

No, no, this was ridiculous. There was no way a word processor could flood anyone’s system with anything. Come to that, there was no way it could speak either—or was there? She must ask Danny. She was just letting her awe of the machine, and her basic ignorance, get on top of her. Let us be rational here, she thought. If she was not suffering from gav poisoning, or if, alternatively, the smell of charred turmeric at present flooding the house did not prove to have hallucinogenic properties, then she had worked too long and hard imagining things and was now unable to tell fantasy from reality … unless—what a wonderful thought!—Danny had, either for a joke or by accident, connected one of the black boxes to the radio and she was at this moment receiving its Play for the Day.

Her hand shot out to the radio beside her, which she kept for aural wallpaper during the duller part of her narratives, and switched it on. Click. “During this period Beethoven was having to contend with his increasing deafness—”

The childish voice cut in across this lecture. “This voice is not correct,” it pronounced, putting paid to that theory. “It is the voice of a male. Males are forbidden access to any of my functions beyond basic navigational aids. Candida One, unless you reply confirming that you are present and conscious, I shall flood this ship with sedative gas ten seconds from now.”

Then perhaps Danny has put a cassette in the radio as a joke, thought F. C. Stone. She turned off the radio and, for good measure, shook it. No, no cassette in there.

And the childish voice was at its counting again: “… six, five, four …”

Finding that her mouth was hanging open, F. C. Stone used it. “I know this is a practical joke,” she said. “I don’t know what it is you’ve done, Danny, but my God, I’ll skin you when I get my hands on you!”

The countdown stopped. “Voice patterns are beginning to match,” came the pronouncement, “though I do not understand your statement. Are you quite well, Candy?”

Fortified by the knowledge that this had to be a joke of Danny’s, F. C. Stone snapped, “Yes, of course I am!” Very few people knew that the C. in F. C. Stone stood for Candida, and even fewer knew that she had, in her childhood, most shamingly been known as Candy. But Danny of course knew both these facts. “Stop this silly joke, Danny, and let me get back to work.”

“Apologies,” spoke the childish voice, “but who is Danny? There are only two humans on this ship. Is that statement addressed to the male servant beside you? He asks me to remind you that his name is Adny.”

The joke was getting worse. Danny was having fun with her typos now. F. C. Stone was not sure she would ever forgive him for that. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me we’ve just emerged in the Dna System and will be coming in to ladn at Nad,” she said bitterly.

“Of course,” said the voice.

F. C. Stone spent a moment in angry thought. Danny had to be using a program of some kind. She ought first to test this theory and then, if it was correct, find some way to disrupt the program and get some peace. “Give me your name,” she said, “with visual confirmation.”

“If you like,” the voice responded. Had it sounded puzzled? Then Danny had thought of this. “I am Candida Two. I am your conscious-class computer modeled on your own brain.” It sounded quite prideful, saying this. But, thought F. C. Stone, a small boy co-opted by a grand fifteen-year-old like Danny would sound prideful. “We are aboard the astroship Partlett M32/A401.”

Motorways, thought F. C. Stone, but where did he get the name?

“Visual,” said the voice. Blocks of words jumped onto the screen. They seemed to be in—Russian? Greek?—capitals.

It had to be a computer game of some kind, F. C. Stone thought. Now what would Danny least expect her to do? Easy. She plunged to the wall and turned the electricity off. Danny would not believe she would do that. He would think she was too much afraid of losing this morning’s work, and maybe she would, but she could do it over again. As the blocks of print faded from the screen, she stumped off to the kitchen and made herself a cup of xfy—no, COFFEE!—and prowled around in there amid the smell of cauterized ginger while she drank it, with some idea of letting the system cool off thoroughly. She had a vague notion that this rendered a lost program even more lost. As far as she was concerned, this joke of Danny’s couldn’t be lost enough.

The trouble was that she was accustomed so to prowl whenever she was stuck in a sentence. As her annoyance faded, habit simply took over. Halfway through the mug of quaffy, she was already wondering whether to call the taste in the Captain’s mouth merely foul or to use something more specific, like chicken shit. Five minutes later F. C. Stone mechanically made herself a second mug of chofiy—almost as mechanically noting that this seemed to be a wholly new word for the stuff and absently constructing a new kind of alien to drink it—and carried it through to her workroom to resume her day’s stint. With her mind by then wholly upon the new solar system just entered by the starship Candida—there was no need to do whatever it was the learned fan wanted; after all, neither of them had been there and she was writing this book, not he—she switched the electicity back on and sat down.

Neat blocks of Greco-Cyrillic script jumped to her screen. “Candy!” said the childish voice. “Why don’t you answer? I repeat. We are well inside the Dna System and coming up to jump.”

F. C. Stone was startled enough to swallow a mouthful of scalding c’phee and barely notice what it was called. “Nonsense, Danny,” she said, somewhat hoarsely. “Everyone knows you don’t jump inside a solar system.”

The script on the screen blinked a little. “His name is Adny,” the voice said, sounding a little helpless. “If you do not remember that, or that microjumps are possible, then I see I must attend to what he has been telling me. Candy, it is possible that you have been overtaken by senility—”

“Senility!” howled F. C. Stone. Many murderous fates for Danny crowded through her mind.

“—and your male has been imploring me to ask you to authorize his use of functions Five through Nine to preserve this ship. Will you so authorize? Some action is urgent.”

A certain curiosity emerged through F. C. Stone’s anger. How far was Danny prepared to take his joke? How many possibilities had he allowed for? “I authorize,” she said carefully, “his use of functions Five through Eight only.” And let’s see if he planned for that! she thought.

It seemed he had. A symbol of some kind now filled the screen, a complex curlicue the like of which F. C. Stone had never seen or imagined her equipment capable of producing. A wholly new voice spoke, male and vibrant. “I thank you,” it said. “Function Eight will serve for now. This justifies my faith in you, Candida Three. I am now able to bypass the computer and talk to you direct. Please do not turn your power source off again. We must talk.”

It was a golden voice, the voice, perhaps, of an actor, a voice that made F. C. Stone want to curl up and purr and maybe put her hair straight, even while she was deciding there was no way Danny could have made his rough and squawky baritone sound like this. Gods! He must have hired someone! She gave that boy far too much money. She took another swig of ogvai while she noted that the voice was definitely in some way connected to the symbol on the screen. The curlicue jumped and wavered in time to its words.

“What do you mean by calling me Candida Three?” she asked coldly.

“Because you are the exact analogue of my mistress, Candida One,” the golden voice replied. “Her ship’s computer is known as Candida Two. It therefore followed that when I had searched the universes and discovered you, I came to think of you as Candida Three. I have been studying you—most respectfully, of course—through this machine you use and the thoughts you set down on it, for two years now, and—”

“And Daniel has been reading other books besides mine,” F. C. Stone interrupted. “Unfaithful brat!”

“I beg your pardon?” The symbol on the screen gave an agitated jump.

Score one to me! F. C. Stone thought. “My son,” she said. “And we’re talking parallel universes here, I take it?”

“We are.” The golden voice sounded both cautious and bemused. “Forgive me if I don’t quite follow you. You take the same sudden leaps of mind as my mistress, though I have come to believe that your mind is far more open than hers. She was born to a high place in the Matriarchy and is now one of the most powerful members of the High Coven—”

“Coven!” said F. C. Stone. “Whose book is this out of?”

There was a pause. The curlicue gave several agitated jumps. Then the golden voice said, “Look, please let me explain. I’m delaying jump as long as I can, but there really is only a very narrow window before I have to go or abort.”

He sounded very pleading. Or perhaps beguiling was a better word, F. C. Stone thought, for that kind of voice. “All right,” she said. “Get on with the program. But just tell me first what you mean when you say mistress, Danny.”

“Adny,” he said. “My name is Adny.”

“Adny, then,” said F. C. Stone. “Mistress has two meanings.”

“Why, I suppose I mean both,” he answered. “I was sold to Candy as a child, the way all men are in this universe. Men have almost no rights in the Matriarchy, and the Matriarchy is the chief power in our galaxy. I have been luckier than most, being sold to a mistress who is an adept of the High Coven. I have learned from her—”

F. C. Stone gave a slight exasperated sigh. For a moment there she had been uneasy. It had all seemed far more like a conversation than any program Danny could produce. But his actor friend seemed to have got back to his lines now. She shot forth another question. “So where is your mistress now?”

“Beside me, unconscious,” was the reply.

“Senile?” said F. C. Stone.

“Believe me, they are liable to it,” he said. “The forces they handle do seem to damage them, and it does seem to overtake them oftenest when they’re out in space. But”—she could hear the smile in his voice—“I must confess that I was responsible for this one. It took me years of study before I could outwit her, but I did it.”

“Congratulations, Adny,” said F. C. Stone. “What do you want me to do about it? You’re asking me to help you in your male backlash, is that it?”

“Yes, but you need do almost nothing,” he replied. “Since you are the counterpart of Candida One, the computer is accepting you already. If you wish to help me, all I need is your voice authorizing Candida Two to allow me functions Nine and Ten. I can then tap my mistress’s full power and navigate the ship to my rendezvous, whereupon I will cut this connection and cease interrupting you in your work.”

“What!” said F. C. Stone. “You mean I don’t get to navigate a word processor?”

“I don’t understand,” said Adny.

“Then you’d better!” said F. C. Stone. She was surprised at how strongly she felt. “Listen, Danny or Adny, or whoever you are! My whole career, my entire success as a writer, has been founded on the fact that I enjoy, more than anything else, sitting in front of this screen and pretending it’s the controls of a starship. I enjoy the dazed feeling, I like the exhaustion, I don’t mind getting cramp, and I even like drinking myself sick on ogvai! The only reason I haven’t turned the machine off again is the chance that you’re going to let me do it for real—or what feels like for real, I don’t care which—and I’m not going to let that chance slip. You let me pilot my WP and I’ll even authorize you to function Eleven afterward, if there is such a thing. Is that clear?”

“It is very clear, Great Lady,” he said. There was that in his tone that suggested he was very used to yielding to demanding women, but could there have been triumph in it, too?

F. C. Stone was not sure of that tone, but she did not let it worry her. “Right,” she said. “Brief me.”

“Very well,” he said, “though it may not be what you expect. We are about to make a microjump which in the normal way would bring us out above the spaceport but in this case is designed to bring us directly above the city of Nad and, hopefully, inside the Coven’s defenses there. Other ships of my conspiracy should be materializing, too, hopefully at the same moment, so the jump must be made with utmost accuracy. I can broadcast you a simulacrum of Partlett’s controls, scaled down to correspond to your own keyboard. But you must depress the keys in exactly the order in which I highlight them. Can you do this?”

“Yes,” said F. C. Stone. “But stop saying hopefully, or I shan’t grant you any functions at all. The word shouldn’t be used like that, and I detest sloppy English!”

“Yours to command,” Adny said. She could hear the smile in his voice again. “Here are your controls.”

The curlicue faded from the screen, to be replaced by a diagrammatic image of F. C. Stone’s own keyboard. It was quite recognizable, except to her dismay, an attempt had been made to repeat it three times over. The two outer representations of it were warped and blurred. “Gods!” said F. C. Stone. “How do I use this? There isn’t room for it all.”

“Hit HELP before you use the extra keys on the right and CAP before you use the ones on the left.” Adny’s voice reassured her. “Ready?”

She was. She took a hasty sip of cooling qavv to steady herself and hovered over her keyboard, prepared to enjoy herself as never before.

It was actually a bit of a letdown. Keys on her screen shone brighter green. Obedient to them, F. C. Stone found herself typing CAP A, d, HELP N and then HELP N, a, D. Some part of her mind suggested that this still looked like Danny’s joke, while another part, more serious, suggested it might be overwork and perhaps she should see a doctor. But she refused to let either of these thoughts distract her and typed CAP D, n, HELP A in high excitement.

As she did so, she heard the computer’s childish voice again. “Ready for jump. Candida One, are you sure of this? Your coordinates put us right on top of Nad, in considerable danger from our own defenses.”

“Reassure her,” Adny’s voice said urgently.

Without having to think, F. C. Stone said soothingly, “It’s all right, Candida Two. We have to test those defenses. Nad is under orders not to hurt us.” And she thought, As to the manner born! I’d have made a good Matriarch!

“Understood,” said the childish voice. “Jump as given, on the count of zero. Five, four, three”—F. C. Stone braced herself—“two, one, zero.”

Did she feel a slight lurch? Was there a mild ripple of giddiness? She was almost sure not. A quick look around the workroom assured her that all was as usual.

“Jumping,” said Candida Two. “There will be an interval of five subjective minutes.”

“Why?” said F. C. Stone, like a disappointed child.

Adny’s voice cut in hastily. “Standard for a microjump. Don’t make her suspicious!”

“But I don’t feel anything!” F. C. Stone complained in a whisper.

The keyboards vanished from the screen. “Nobody does,” said Adny. “Computer’s out of the circuit now. You can speak freely. There is no particular sensation connected with jump, though disorientation does occur if you try to move about.”

“Damn!” said F. C. Stone. “I shall have to revise all my books!” An acute need to visit the toilet down the passage came upon her. She picked up her mug of chphy reflexively, thought better of that, and put it down again. Her mind dwelt on that toilet, its bowl stained from Danny’s attempt, some years ago, to concoct an elixir of life, and its chain replaced by a string of cow bells. To take her mind off it, she said, “Tell me what you mean to do when you and the other ships come out over Nad. Does this start a revolution?”

“It’s rather more complicated than that,” said Adny. “Out of the twelve Male Lodges, there are only six prepared to rebel. Two of the remaining six are neutral traditionally and supported in this by the Minor Covens, but the Minor Covens are disaffected enough to ally with the Danai, who are a helium life-form and present a danger to all of us. The four loyal Lodges are supposed to align with the Old Coven, and on the whole they do, except for the Fifth Lodge, which has thrown in with the Midmost Coven, who are against everyone else. Their situation is complicated by their concessions to the Traders, who are largely independent, save for overtures they seem to have made to the Anders. The Anders—another life-form—have said they are our allies, but this flirting with the Traders makes us suspicious. So we decided on a bold ploy to test—”

“Stop!” said F. C. Stone. Much as she loved writing this kind of stuff, hearing someone talk like it made her head reel. “You mean, you’ve gone to all this trouble just for a test run?”

“It’s more complicated than—” began Adny.

“No, I don’t want to know!” said F. C. Stone. “Just tell me what happens if you fail.”

“We can’t fail,” he replied. “If we do, the High Coven will crush the lot of us.”

“Me, too?” F. C. Stone inquired anxiously.

“Possibly,” said Adny. “They may not realize how I did this, but if they do, you can probably stop them by destroying your machine.”

“Never!” said F. C. Stone. “I’d rather suffer—or, better still, win!”

A bell rang. The keyboard reappeared, elongated and bent, in her screen. “Emerged over Nad,” the computer said. “Candy! What is this? I count sixteen other ships emerged, two Trader, four Ander, and the rest appear to be Matriarch. We jump back.”

“Give me functions Nine and Ten!” Adny snapped.

“I authorize Adny—” said F. C. Stone.

“Oh, Candy!” the computer said reproachfully. “Why are you so good to that little creep? He’s only a man.”

“I authorize Adny in functions Nine and Ten,” F. C. Stone almost shrieked. It was the only way she could think of to stop the unpleasant sensations which were suddenly manifesting, mostly in her head and stomach. It was as if surf were breaking through her in bubbles of pain. A tearing feeling across her shoulders made her think she was germinating claws there. And psychic attack or not, she knew she just had to get to that toilet.

“Acknowledged,” the computer said glumly.

She leaped from her chair and ran. Behind her she heard claps of sound and booms that seemed to compress the air around her. Through them she heard Adny’s voice issuing orders, but that was shortly overlaid by a high-pitched whistling, drilling through her ears even through the firmly shut toilet door.

But in the loo, as she was adjusting her dress, a certain sanity was restored to F. C. Stone. She looked at her own face in the mirror. It was encouragingly square and solid and as usual—give or take a sort of wildness about the eyes—and it topped the usual rather overweight body in its usual comfortably shapeless sweater. She raked her fingers through the graying frizz of her hair, thinking as she did so that she would make a very poor showing beside Adny of the golden voice. The action brought away two handfuls of loose hair. As always, she was shedding hair after a heavy session at the word processor—a fact she was accustomed to transfer to her aliens, who frequently shed feathers or fur during jump. Things were quite normal. She had simply been overworking and let Danny’s joke get to her.

Or perhaps it was charred chili powder, she thought as she marched out into the passage again. Possibly due to its hallucinogenic nature, that damnable whistling was still going on, pure torture to her ears. From the midst of it she could hear Adny’s voice. “Ned Coven, do we have your surrender, or do we attack again?”

I’ve had enough! thought F. C. Stone. She marched to her desk, where the screen was showing Adny’s curlicue, pulsing to the beat of the beastly shrilling. “Stop this noise!” she commanded. “And give me a picture of Partlett’s flight deck.” If you can, she thought, feeling for the moment every inch the captain of the starship Candida.

The whistling died to an almost bearable level. “I need function Eleven to give you vision,” Adny said—irritably? casually? or was it too casually? He was certainly overcasual when he added, “It does exist, you know.”

Give him what he wants and get rid of him, thought F. C. Stone. “I authorize function Eleven then,” she said.

“Oh!” said the computer, like a hurt child.

And there was a picture on the screen, greenish and jumping and sleeting green lines, but fairly clear for all that. Partlett’s controls, F. C. Stone noted absently, had fewer screens than she expected—far fewer than she put in her books—but far more ranks of square buttons and far, far too many dials for comfort, all of them with a shabby, used look. But she was looking mostly at the woman who seemed to be asleep in the padded swivel seat in front of the controls. Mother naked, F. C. Stone was slightly shocked to see, and not a mark or a wrinkle on her slender body or on her thin and piquant face. Abruptly F. C. Stone remembered being quite proud of her looks when she was seventeen, and this woman was herself at seventeen, only beyond even her most idealized memories. Immense regret suffused F. C. Stone.

The whistling, blessedly, stopped. “Candy is really the same age as you,” Adny observed.

Her attention turned to him. His seat was humbler, a padded swivel stool. Sitting on it was a small man with a long, nervy face, the type of man who usually has tufts of hair growing in his ears and below his eyes, as if to make up for the fact that such men’s hair always tends to be thin and fluffy on top. Adny’s hair was noticeably thin on top, but he had smoothed and curled it to disguise the fact, and it was obvious that he had plucked and shaved all other hair from his wrinkled little body; F. C. Stone had no doubt of this, since he was naked, too. The contrast between his appearance and his voice was, to say the least of it, startling.

Adny saw her look and grinned rather ruefully as he leaned forward to hold a paper cup under some kind of tap below the control panel. She realized he could see her, too. The contrast between herself and the sleeping beauty beside him made her feel almost as rueful as he looked. “Can you give me a picture of Nad and any damage there?” she asked, still clinging to her role as Captain. It seemed the only way to keep any dignity.

“Certainly,” he said, running his finger down a row of the square buttons.

She found herself apparently staring down at a small town of old houses built up against the side of a hot stony hill—red roofs, boxlike white houses, courtyards shaded with trees. It was quite like a town in Spain or Italy, except that the shapes of the walls and the slant of the roofs were subtly different and wrong. It was the very smallness of the difference between this and towns she knew which, oddly enough, convinced F. C. Stone for once and for all that this place was no fake. She really was looking at a real town in a real world somewhere else entirely. There was a smoking, slaggy crater near the market square and another downhill below the town. That had destroyed a road. She had glimpses of the other spaceships, drifting about looking rather like hot-air balloons.

“Why is it such a small place?” she said.

“Because Nad is only a small outpost of the Matriarchy,” Adny replied in his golden voice. The picture flipped back to show he had turned to face her on his stool, sipping steaming liquid from his paper cup. No doubt it was kfa or even quphy. He smiled through its steam in a way that must have beguiled the poor sleeping beauty repeatedly, and she found she was wishing he had turned out to be an alien instead. “I owe you great thanks on behalf of the Second Male Lodge,” he said. “We now have the Nadlings where we want them. And since you have given me full control of this ship and access to all my ex-mistress’s power, I can move on to the central worlds in strength and use her as a hostage there.”

Hitler and Napoleon were both small men, F. C. Stone thought, with golden voices. It gave her a slight, cold frisson to think what she might have loosed on the unfortunate Matriarchy. “You gave me the impression that this was the central world,” said F. C. Stone.

“Not in so many words,” said Adny. “You don’t think I’d be fool enough to move against the strength of the Matriarchy without getting hold of a conscious-class computer first, do you?”

F. C. Stone wished to say that yes, she did. People took that sort of desperate risk in her books all the time. It depressed her to find him such a cautious rebel. And he had cheated her, as well as his sleeping beauty, and no doubt he was all set to turn the whole works into a Patriarchy. It was a total waste of a morning.

Or was it? she wondered. A matriarchy where men were sold as slaves was right up her street. There was certainly a book in there. Perhaps she should simply be grateful and hope that Adny did not get too far.

“Tell me,” she said, at which he looked up warily from his cup, “what is that stuff you’re drinking? Goffa? Xvay?”

She was glad to see she had surprised him. “Only coffee,” he said.