Iris

NINE

Cornwell and Krzakwa walked slowly across the heathered rise of the moor simulation, warm and safe amid the toys technology had created for them, and the clouds of the dark blue sky slid by unnoticed. They talked in a somewhat desultory fashion. John was saying, "I'm not sure I understand what you mean."

Tem found a hummock and sat, looking up, and for the first time really noticed the perfect harmony of this little illusion. He saw that the colored sky was not just a wall at some great distance, that it was the infinite heaven of innumerable literary references. A translucent eternity . . . "I'm not sure we can really do it. ... Even as an abstraction, it's complex. Personality transfer has been done between living people. In a sense, it's just an extension of Downlink Rapport. On one occasion, it was used to bring back a man who'd recently died."

"Really?" John looked slightly startled. "I don't remember ever hearing about anything like that."

"You wouldn't have. It's illegal on Earth.... A couple of years ago, on Luna, an important scientist had the bad judgment to have an aneurysm while he was working on a crucial transition zone in the higher math of a cataclysm system. More than just data . . . insights that he had failed to explain were lost. They put him on emergency life support." Krzakwa grinned, remembering. "Since I was a colleague of his, they brought me, among others, in with the idea that one of us might understand whatever they could get out of him. They tried to resuscitate him the usual way, but he was too far gone. So they grabbed a condemned criminal—"

"They have a death penalty on the Moon?"

Tem nodded. "It's a state secret, but, yes, they do. Anyway, they read off what was left of Dr. Hanscom's neuroelectrical patterns and pumped it into this poor fucker, right on top of his own personality. It resulted in a really bizarre psychosis, but we managed to reconstruct the transition math before he became catatonic."

Shaking his head, looking pale, John said, "I never imagined . . ." He stopped and thought about it. In a way that he had not really come to terms with, Elizabeth Toussaint's personality was overlying his own, and he shuddered. "All right, first things first. Is Brendan really gone?"

"Depends on what you mean. We still have an alien intelligence down in Iris that is a virtual unknown. It could give him back if we ask in the right way. But the process of contacting it again seems to involve a repetition of the danger. I've just got to think about it some more." John scuffed the mossy vegetation with his foot, watching it darken and lighten like velour. "The implications of all this are staggering. We're talking about more than immortality. Frankly, I didn't think we had come this far."

The Selenite shrugged. "What did you think the Data Control Insurrection was about, really? Even in the distorted history they taught me on Luna I could see that all this was coming. Why they allowed Shipnet is the real question; thetotal control they exercise over the elements of Comnet is the only thing that preserves the illusion of normalcy."

"I suppose . . ." John squeezed his eyes shut. "How would it work between Jana and Brendan? Aren't our personalities partially hard-wired into our heads? Neural pathways and all that?"

"Yeah. If we manage to get a good scan, we'll have a new person with Jana's memories and Brendan's emotional characteristics. Call it nine to one in Jana's favor."

"I ... don't know if it's worth it." Cornwell felt himself rapidly sinking into a fuguelike state. "Really, it seems . . ."

"We probably won't be able to do it. It's never been tried on someone so thoroughly dead before."

"But you said she'd keep."

"As meat, John! Jana had the extremely poor taste to freeze to death slowly. Every cell in her body is packed with ice crystals, ruptured."

"Because of me."

"All the more reason to think hard about the whole thing. Jana is—was—obviously unstable. In a way, we'll have the worst of both worlds. . . ."

Cornwell passed a hand over his face. "We'll have to talk to the others...."

"If you like." A wave of exhaustion passed through Krzakwa, and he noticed a grainy, faintly kaleidoscopic pattern pulsating in the sky, in time with his heartbeat. "I've got to get some rest. . . ."

Aksinia Ockels, wearing a rumpled orange space suit with the hood thrown back, was in a compartment of the containerized cargo hold where Brendan had stored the hefty mass of personal belongings that had come along with him on the Deepstar's flight. She'd been rummaging through his collection of antique books and had at last come upon the thing she sought. Now she stared fixedly at a color plate, a picture of a six-sided being, its parts neatly labeled, cephalosome, tail-sheath . . .

"I knew it," she muttered. She packed the book into a silver-lined environment bag and drew the top together intoits seal. Then, with some fumbling, she hardened her suit and hood and stepped into the airlock.

Krzakwa, who had just awakened from an unsatisfying nap upon the heather, was kneeling on the rim of the pool and splashing cool water on his face. The entrance at the far end of the dome made its

"cycling" warning and he wondered who had been outside. Finally the door came open and Aksinia came through, eagerness quickening her steps.

"What're you doing?" Tem asked.

"Reading." She came up and opened the bag that she carried, pulling out a book, and smiled. "Look at this." After a moment of turning slick pages, she had it.

"How the hell did you find a picture of a Seedee"—the oddness of it suddenly took hold of him—"in a book?"

She held it up so that he could see the cover. It was the 2007 edition of Raymond's Elements of Virological Anatomy.

"I don't understand. What're they doing with it?"

She smiled crookedly at him. "It isn't a Seedee, Tem. It's a T—4r+bacteriophage virus."

"I see." He picked up the book and read through the stereophotomicrograph's accompanying text. Gobbledegook, material far outside of his own specialty. "How did you come to find it here?"

"When we were in with Brendan, I knew I'd seen the Seedees before, somewhere. I think I even remembered the name.... I got an equivalency in bioengineering, back before residencies were required. I've forgotten a lot, but not everything. All it takes is something to jar it out. I wish I'd brought my tech info along! But I didn't. I suppose it was Beta-2 that saw to that. Shit! It never lets me care about things like that." She laughed softly. "When you people filled up Shipnet, you neglected the basic biology stuff. I ran a quick check on the cargo manifest. I was hoping . . . Anyway, this book turned up on Brendan's list." She looked at the man in front of her and was amazed to see how pale and watery his eyes looked.

"Is something wrong?" she asked.

Temujin looked hard at the woman. He had never heard someone use those words with such a lack of solicitousness. "I'm all right."

"That bastard was interested in too many things."

Was.Krzakwa felt a cold prickle of realization creep along his neck. He thought of Sealock back on the alien lander, swearing that the empty shell they'd found had a familiar shape. "So what does it mean?"

"Nothing, I suppose, but it's an interesting coincidence. If I'm not mistaken, evolution at the viral level is very quick, and what we see is almost totally optimized. Maybe these things are optimized for a similar type of existence."

"What, invading asteroid-sized cells? We didn't see anything like that in the Centrum memories. That is what viruses do, isn't it, parasitize DNA?"

"Something like that."

"OK. You're the closest thing we have to an expert on this. If you can integrate some sort of theory on the shape of the Seedees with what you know about these viruses, do so."

"They do parasitize planets...."

"So do we all ... we need something better than that. Anyway, I don't want to talk about it right now. I've got to get some more sleep."

Elizabeth Toussaint lay alone on the bed in her room. Periodically, for no reason, tears would start to flow down her cheeks, oozing in the low gravity, then stop, and she would be still, staring at the ceiling. When her face had time to dry, the crying would start again.

What's wrong with me now? she wondered. I'm not feeling anything. Brendan's dead; Jana's dead. Am I? Why am I thinking about these things? This numbness was a new, withering factor. It was something she had inherited from John, and though it was, in a measure, comforting, it felt so wrong. Perhaps if she had to come up with a word for it, it would be perspective. She had lost her gauge for the importance of things. And experiencing the primitive emotions that dominated Sealock's memories had given this emotionlessness even a greater hold on her. I need to be with someone, she thought. John? No. She rejected the idea summarily. How could he help? Right now she couldn't even call up an image of his face.

The door opened quietly and Vana Berenguer came in. People were not respecting the idea of privacy anymore. There were connections now, strange ones.

"Beth?" She saw the drying tears and came over, concerned. "Beth? What's wrong?

The woman looked up at her, wooden-faced. "I don't know." She started to cry again, shaking silently. "I really don't know!"

Vana put her hand on Beth's brow, brushed back her hair a little, and shook her head slowly. "You shouldn't be in here alone. . . ."

"I want to be. No one can help.''

"Someone can." She reached out and, taking Beth by the arms, pulled her to her feet. "You helped Demo a little, back when we first got here, remember? Let him help you now. . . ."

"How?"

Vana smiled. "You haven't been under yet. It's more than you think. Come on." They walked out of the room, slowly, and John was waiting for them. "Beth? I wanted to see you." Vana shook her head. "Not now, John. In a little while."

The man ignored her. "Beth, do you want to link with me now? DR, I mean. . . ." Beth looked at him in astonishment. "Now?" she asked. "Oh, John. Go away. . . ." He seemed stunned. "But I ..." He turned from them abruptly and stalked off. Vana said, "Come on, Beth. Demogorgon's in Ariane's room. They've lost him together, you know, in the same measure. They need us as much as we need them."

Ariane and Demogorgon were alone together in the former's room. They had been talking, trying to talk, but were quiet now, curled up on the bed. Words were useless. Their hearts throbbed to a measured stillness, an inner silence that held a matrix of conflicting ideas. The woman thought, He loved him as much as I did, perhaps more. Our culture still breeds a strange sort of contempt, fills us with a curious lack of understanding. We think of bizarre biochemical mix-ups, of volitional neuroses for which a refused cure exists . . . but the emotions continue to seem real. It's more than just a friction between sticky bodies—the great I-don't-know-what that binds humanity. And there remain no explanations but the ridiculous romanticisms of dead poets.

The man thought, There must have been more between them than just the sweat and gruel of heterosex. People bind without reason. I don't know. I think I always looked on other people as warped extensions of myself. They're not. There are differences I cannot understand, shades of meaning that do not come through. We can see each other's experiences, live through a tide of alien feelings, but still we are not each other. We strain everything through the one-way filter of our own ideas and meanings. We view everyone through a lens that distorts them into ourselves. We never see them as they are. We think, If I did that, I would be bad, therefore he must be bad. Brendan is gone, but really, to me, did he ever exist? Can empathy be real without understanding?

Oddly, it was as if Brendan had died before the episodic projections they'd gotten from the Starseeder computer. The personality of the man as relayed from inside Iris simply connected with their other memories at no point, and it was disappearing from their consciousnesses like nothing so much as a bad dream.

The door crackled open and Harmon Prynne looked in, his face uncertain, his manner tentative. "Can I be with you?"

Demogorgon almost smiled. "Come in. Please."

He entered and came to sit on the edge of the bed. "Is there anything I can do?" Ariane patted him on the thigh. "Just be here. That's enough." They sat in silence for another little while, then the door sizzled again. This time it was Vana and Beth. They came over to the bed. Beth sat down and Vana remained standing, smiling down at them a little. "Well," she said. "We needed to be with someone. I guess we weren't the only ones." She sat. Beth lay down, tangling herself with the others, and sighed. After a while she seemed to fall asleep.

Prynne stirred, snuggling closer into the mass. "We're becoming like little children. Pillows and blankets to curl up in. Teddy bears to hug. Warm laps to lie in. This is comforting." Demo looked at him, surprised, then thought, Oh, why not? We are none of us as stupid and insensitive as we always seem. Magicians. We can be closer. . . . But the idea fled, unripe. A short while passed, and Tem's head stuck in through the unclosed door. "What's going on in here?" He came in, followed by Aksinia. They came over to the bed and Krzakwa grinned, looking down. "Is this something sexual?"

Ariane smiled up at him. "We're having a special conclave. Climb aboard." Aksinia pushed herself off the deck and drifted down onto the bed, clutching her book.

Krzakwa sat on the edge of the growing human tangle. "Axie's made something of an important discovery. We . . ."

"Can it wait?" Ariane asked.

"Well . . . sure. I think I see." He wedged his bulk in among them. Demogorgon was frowning. They're all here, he thought, we're all here, but something's still missing. This is an artificial sort of closeness, an electric-blanket sort of thing. Just because our bodies are warm .

. . The idea came back. He said, "Listen, I think we should go to the Illimitor World together."

"Aw, Demo. Come on!" That was from Harmon.

"I mean it. I think we're all sick right now. Hurting. We could make things better. Some of you have been there. You know what I mean."

Vana nodded. "I do. He's right."

Krzakwa sat up slightly, looking out meditatively across the room. "Maybe. Could be, uh . . . OK." He thought about it a while longer, then said, "Um, where's John?" Opening her eyes, Beth said, "Fuck John."

That sealed it for them. They seized the ubiquitous waveguide cables, plugged in, and went under, then down.

And, going downward, continued to reach out. . . .

John Cornwell stood in front of the dome of the CM, arms folded, staring out across the bleak Ocypetan landscape, staring at the sky. A huge, early-phase incarnation of Iris loomed far above and the tiny, matching crescents of Podarge and Aello hovered nearby. The sky was star-sequined without pattern, a clumped maze of untwinkling pinpoints. Strange, he thought, that the atmosphere of the planet is still clear. You'd think the eclipse would have done something to it. But he knew there'd been no real effect. The pristinely clear upper air of Iris had merely acted as a lens . . . muddying things down here all right. And the thing they'd found in the planet had done the same.

Jana dead. Brendan dead. Beth ....

An image of their latest encounter came back to him and the muzzy hurt renewed itself. How has it come to this? he wondered. I only thought that we could be of some use to each other after the terrible strains of the last days. She needed contact. . . . But why did I walk away, give up so easily? A stab of pain, an abrupt turn, and the chain was snapped. The DR link between them had seemingly died in a moment, fading into an apartness even greater than before DR. He tried once again to analyze their last painful moments together. Yes. It was there. Everything that they had shared, all the superficial communion, had come down to that one moment when their two personalities had really commingled and they saw each other as themselves.

How could you know?

It was difficult for John to not judge himself harshly. But, with Jana, how could he have known what was transpiring in her confused head? Was there something about him, something so close to his perception of himself that he could not even imagine what it was, that was bad? He thought about it long and hard, and could only conclude that there wasn't.

And people ... at least some people . . . loved Sea-lock. How odd it was. How odd he was. How could anyone really have lived like that? John had done time in New York and never run across that sort of thing. But then, he hadn't gone everywhere, seen everything. What if it was real? Andwhy the hell did Brendan leave? It seemed to fit his outer persona so well. But the inner man . . . that was even harder to understand. Unbidden, an image of the shaven prostitute floated up from nowhere, bending over before him, holding her ankles. A stirring of lust twisted in his abdomen. God! The unbelievable coarseness of the man's imagery! How can anyone be like that? He drove it away, but other scenes came to take its place, visions of unknown naked women open before him, begging to be despoiled. He closed his eyes to an angry feeling of resentment. Is his ghost going to haunt me now? Perhaps Sealock dead was worse than Sealock alive. . . . How could he have been like that? The answer constructed itself: he couldn't have been. He wasn't. The flashes of feeling had been there. There was an emotive, sensitive Sealock, yes, but that reality was buried beneath the coarse, hard visions. Smashing people's faces, thrusting into sodden vulvae . . . those things hid all the rest. They gave expectations, made stereotypes. If you split an infinitive and put an expletive in between, it distorted the meaning of the verb. People heard that instead of what you said.

I've got to talk to Beth, he thought. I've got to be given another chance. She took my offer the wrong way.... I did mean to help. And how had she taken it? Like a raped woman being offered the comforts of sex. The playback of Sealock's life must have been brutal for her, the scented floweriness of love turned to some kind of horrid, animal carnage. He turned to walk below and the images floated before him again. Endless visions of dripping crotches, seas of spurting semen, totally repulsive. How could anyone not think it madness?

He came to Ariane Methol's chamber and opened the door. They were there. The seven were sprawled together on the bed, a tangle of limbs and bodies, with wires sprouting from their heads. He stared at them, silent.

Beth looked like a sleeping child, her hair flattened out into a fan. Tem looked like a huge, dead opossum. The others . . . Ariane's skirt had come awry, exposing her vulva. A pad of curly black hair, a slit, an animal-hole, a little wetness.

That's what Brendan would have seen. . . . But no, that's just my perception of the view from his eyes. He loved her.He would have felt something. The imagery was a perfect mask. He went back up into the dome and looked at the sky. Aello had moved and its phase had swollen, but Podarge was no longer in synch.

They'll be back, he thought. He wondered if they really would.

The stars were still untwinkling, still unmoving, emotionless pinpoints. They sat there in the matte-black sky and did nothing for him.

I miss that part of it, he realized. When the stars glittered and twinkled above the night, made pretty by their color and movement and seeming isolation, it made me feel better. In Mackenzie, I used to go out onto the tundra just to look at the night sky. That's how I came to know which stars were which. It was something, it was an image of a world where things really existed, really meant something. Is it that this ambience is my whore?

He shook his head and grinned ruefully. There is that, after all. When you stretch these ideas to their limits, the gulf that separates me from a soulless monster is not so great. We all make mistakes and I've made at least my share. Who am I to judge anyone else the worse. . . . Who am I to make any judgments at all? A familiar turn of phrase. He knew he'd said it before, but now, somehow, it was different. I mean it, he realized.

His laughter echoed eerily in the dome, perhaps magnified by his awareness that he was essentially alone at this moment in the whole Iridean system. Everyone else was away on some other ethereal electronic plane, one most ethereal. Listen to me, he thought with a touch of self-directed bitterness. What should I do, apologize for my own being? Sorry, Jana; sorry, Brendan; sorry, Beth? It's a foolishness of its own sort.

Should I grovel and promise to do better? Another laugh. This is just me, wallowing in the dung heap of self-generated guilt. No one else has even noticed what's happening to me,despite what Tem said. They're too busy writhing in their own night soil to notice my fetid breath. . . . My, how poetic we are in our bereavement! It's a damned good thing I'm laughing at myself. What an asshole! A total fucking moronic little head-up-the-ass shit-in-the-ears bloody little sniveling Lunatic. . . . He sobered then and thought about it, images without words. There is that, he subvocalized, watching all the scenes of Brendan and Beth mingle together in his head. He did talk that way, didn't he? I wonder what he meant by it all? The same thing as I? I doubt it. All I can do is turn him into another subset of my own image. We are what we project.

He stretched, yawning against a sudden weariness, and to no one in particular said, "The only time I'm myself is when there's nobody with me."

He went back down to the kitchen module then for a snack, hoping to keep his mind blank, in preparation for the moment of their return and the scene that he imagined would come then. I wonder what they'll have to say for themselves?

Who cares?

Who the fuck cares?

He saw himself in a paroxysm of nonchalance and smiled, his lips twisting in self-derision. Go ahead, Big Asshole Artist! Keep thinking like that. You'll talk yourself into a ticket home alone yet!

He went below.

They sailed down through the golden skies of the Illimitor World in a long, singing arc, holding hands as they fell. The heavens were a burnished shell of the brightest brass around them and they had no idea where they were going, what was happening to them. They had entered as a unit, headed, it seemed, for the Jeweled City on the Mountain, the portentous lands of Arhos in the midst of many seas and rivers, and this had happened. They fell and fell, and the sky beneath their feet gave no intimation of a landing. Demogorgon was stunned and, he supposed, a thrill of fear should have come. But they had designed it together, he andBrendan, and he thought he knew all its byways. He remembered the Sealock-mimicking GAM subunit and wondered . . . and programs could mutate of their own accord, even in the efficiencies of Shipnet. Perhaps especially there. Systems grew more complex, as in Comnet and Centrum, and the chances for diversion and change multiplied. What was happening?

They fell together, linked as they had come in, slowly forming into a circle until the nether ends joined hands. They became a sort of Midgard serpent, laagered against the coming of Fenris and Fimbulwinter, and the skies began to change. Fiery tongues of lavender and fabled heliotrope began to intrude into their golden world, a wash of mad color that sucked away all sense of separate consciousness and fear. Something that presaged Ginnunga-gap? Unknown . . .

They had come in together, linked in ways that Demogorgon had never experimented with before, and so there was a result. Some higher, unsuspected routine in Bright Illimit had seized control, plunging them down this long, horrible way, to some unfathomable experience. When their hands came together, completing the circle, their minds did too. The sky was shot with bolts of momentary black lightning, twisting rivers of ebon darkness, vines of ink, and the background pattern of the world shifted to a dark cerulean hue, with an overlay of honeyed amber. They saw each other again, as they had seen Sealock and the cohorts of Centrum in their unwilling journey to the beginning of time. It's not the same, thought Demogorgon, but it might as well be. I don't understand what's happening, yet I cannot fear. I must not. This is my thing, my place in the universe, the creation of my own heart and soul. If I fear it, then I fear myself. The sky around him brightened with the thought, sending beams of warmth deep into him, as if the circuits were responding to his courage and trust. He and Brendan had made this place! The stars above Arhos were real. He felt a little smug sense of, I knew it all along. . . . Achmet Aziz el-Tabari felt himself as a whole being, as he always had, with no overlay of the cultural biases against him. The value of Self stood out strong and the sky colored with a transparentoverlay of rosiness in response. The "me-ness" of his character rewarded him with gestalt happiness, no words, a distillate of feeling. The others were with him, holding him in arms of thought, and he smiled. Who would not feel this way? He transferred, the sky writhing with the shift.

Aksinia Ockels looked about her in wonder and the sky responded brightly, filling the incandescent shell through which they traveled with a whirl of indigos and greens, metallic hues that almost covered the blue that formed its base. Fading. Fading. She had been almost a day without her usual dose of Beta-2

and the drug was rapidly being flushed from her system. Dark, jagged streaks of an ugly red momentarily flashed all around, then were gone. All the years lost to me, she thought, lost to it all. I made my world as they all did, and it almost blotted me out. A tiny sphere of brown appeared and was gone without a sound. For the first time a sort of soft wind sighed in their ears, the movement of rushing air tugged at their hair. They felt its coolness. Axie laughed without sound and pictured the dead Seedees. The bacteria, the structure of a typical primitive cell, all of it came to the forefront of her consciousness, coloring the sky a brilliant peach that overwhelmed all that had gone before. Tiny ships, carrying the culture of the Beginning. Then the inheritors arise and go forth. I am myself again, at last. The sky flashed in brilliant red-orange hues and she transferred.

Harmon Prynne fell with them all, in his usual way almost unthinking. The sky dulled, began to turn gray and then, suddenly, reversed itself, waxing to a brilliant cobalt blue. I am not less than the others, he thought, neither more nor less within myself. Strip away the geas that was placed upon me at birth and I am one with them all. There is no less of me than there is of any other human being. Our identities and values manifest in different ways.... He remembered the people on the ship when they'd left Earth, the retardates, heading out. In another age their dysfunction would have gone unnoticed. I was less than the others only because I bought the propaganda that my childhood sold me. All my fears and failures were groundless. The sky grew momentarily blinding, and he transferred.

Whirling around in an arcing hora, Vana Berenguer danced among the others, reading what had gone before. Simplification, she thought, and the sky colored in rivers of deep yellow with her soundless cries. She had always been herself, the shadow of supposedly greater beings in need of love, comfort, friendship, physicality. It served, as did she, and in the service grew an individuality that knew no bounds. I am, she thought, complete within myself. The sky ululated in many hues all about, mirroring the different facets of her, as in the many beings of the world, and when she transferred it refused to dim. Their vision changed to accept the new background level, but the brightness could still be sensed. Temujin Krzakwa fell and, in falling, felt nullity. The sky grew transparent in response, clear and without color. The world had been lightening on him ever since he'd fled the depths of Luna, and now it grew weightless. He alone had been totally happy with the distance to which they'd gone. He was, as always, secure in his special individuality, and the loss of Brendan was a trauma that he had weathered. He chuckled, bright spots of wavering pinkness, and transferred.

To her surprise, Ariane Methol had the most to learn, the program was teaching her that fact. The sky darkened as she fell, horrified, awful muddy shades that tempered the growing mood of them all. She had only fooled herself into believing she was the center of other people's lives, the maiden goddess of her own little world. She needed others, as they had never needed her; dark pits of corroding madness opened in the sky. She fed their needs, just to gain their presence in her life. . . . The sky brightened volcanically, healing itself. I am no different, she thought. I never was. My needs are their needs; I am one with them in a binding matrix of society, a linkage of individual human beings, and that makes individuals of us all. I must be one. I must be! The sky flamed orange. We are all one, she thought out to the people falling with her, with her for the first time. I came for him and he for me, we came for each other, even the ones who were unknown in the beginning. She transferred....

And Elizabeth Toussaint was the seal of them all, bringing the group together in cohesion as she linked hands in therushing air with Demogorgon, completing the circuit she had begun when she approached him on the first day, the day they had landed on Ocypete. We are not less for having thus exposed ourselves, she thought, no one is. Sadness, blue comet trails marking their passage down the levels of the sky. I'm sorry, John! she cried and then it was audible to them all. The sky was suddenly golden again. The effigy of Brendan Sealock appeared among them, a sudden gravitational source at the focus of their circle. Demogorgon knew that, as before, it was not the man, merely his creation. GAM-and-Redux was its name, but, still, the appearance brought a pang of regret. He ached with loss and the others with him, but the sky remained intact, now unresponsive to the ways they were reacting. They were retreating from the multiple rapport that had bound them together. The subroutine was returning control to the main program, its functioning at an end, its purpose served.

How did you anticipate all this? Demogorgon whispered. It seemed impossible, even knowing, as he had always known, that the depth and feeling of this man were greater than most others were willing, in their shallowness, to suspect.

The doppelganger smiled shyly, an incongruous expression on the craggy features of a devil. He did not, it said. The power to heal all wounds is within me, more so than my brethren only because my creator was skilled at this particular craft. Someone is always the best at something. Heal all wounds . . .

They smashed apart, aflight on the ends of retreating rays, lost to each other on the edges of the expanding universe.

Demogorgon screamed, the death cry of hopelessness. There is a way!

Temujin Krzakwa reached out and seized control from the processor submatrix, driving them upward into light and life, and the Illimitor World shut down behind them, going dark.

John and Beth sat together under the CM dome, looking out across the landscape. Beth seemed subdued, unable to say quite what was occupying their thoughts. Finally the former spoke. "I'm sorry about what happened earlier, Beth. Idon't think I really understood what was going on. I didn't mean it the way ..."

The woman shrugged and smiled slightly, a faint twisting of her pale lips. "Don't worry about it. I didn't really know what you were asking." She stood up and walked a little way away from him, then turned to look back. "We never were sure of each other, even in DR, were we?" John stared at her, trying to fathom what had happened to her in the last few days. "I don't know. Maybe Downlink Rapport isn't so all-encompassing as I thought. You'd think it would be, but . . ." She nodded. "Yes, you'd think that, wouldn't you? But our separable selves aren't the totality of us." She shook her head slowly and looked away again. "Listen to me! I ought to be laughing and so should you. We use big words to hide our confusion."

"Everyone does, Beth." He tried to think, to force some kind of coherent idea out, but nothing would come. "What're we talking about right now?"

"If you don't know, well . . . Hell. Maybe I don't know either." She came back and sat at his side again. "I came up here fired with an enthusiasm, a will to bring you back to me, to make you become one of us again. Now that I'm up here I find that I don't know what to say. Despite my old resistance to DR, I always followed your lead, lagging a little way behind. I'm really not used to thinking for myself." She got up suddenly and walked to the ladder leading down. "I'll talk to you again later...." John stood up, calling, "But wait ..." She was, however, already gone. He turned back to his chair and drifted into it. The conversation had not only been less than satisfactory, it had been nonexistent. I've got to do something, he thought. The contents of a million conversations, with an unending number of people, came back to haunt him, but they were all sophomoric, useless. I spent too much time making up too many stupid ideas. Thinking and feeling aren't the same and I always knew that. Neuroelectrical patterns . . . Maybe that's what she meant. He got up again and went below, filled with acts of conscience, pursuing no goal.

Demogorgon sat with the mindless body of Brendan Sea-lock, surrounded by his maelstrom of equipment and circuitry. "I can get you back, Brendan," he whispered softly. "With a little help, I can find the way!" He put his hand on the body's chest. The flesh was still warm to his touch, as if the man would wake up in a moment and things would be as they had been. . . . No, not that way. Better. The door crackled open and Krzakwa came in. He took in the room's tableau and said, "What are you doing?"

Demogorgon looked up. "Thinking, I guess. What did you think of our little trip?" Shrugging, the Selenite said, "Well . . . that's the way GAM programs are supposed to work. I just never ran across one that was quite so poetic before. I suppose I should congratulate you for making a thing like that."

"Me? But Brendan's the one who did all the programming for Bright Illimit! I just gave him my generalized ideas."

That brought a narrow grin. "You have a typical misconception of what programmers do, Demo. Without software, the machines are useless. Everyone knows that; but without ideas, there's no software either. Brendan just took your ideas and expanded them to a logical final form." He paused, rubbing his hand in among the hair of his beard, seeming to ruminate. "It's like doing a bronze sculpture. The artist comes up with an idea, maybe roughs out the moldwork in wax, then a craftsman comes along, finishes the mold, and casts the statue itself. The two work together because, without either one, there is no final work of art."

The other turned to stare back at the body. "So . . . You're probably right, but he . . ." The Arab stood up to face Krzakwa. "This isn't what I wanted to talk about, Tem! Who the fuck cares who made what part of Bright Illimit? It's what we can do with it now that matters. . . ."

"I know, I caught some of what you were thinking before we resurfaced. I don't know if I understand what you meant, but it was the germ of an idea. . . ."

Demo's anger was supplanted by a look of desperation. Hesat down again. "Just a germ. I'll tell you about it and you tell me if it'll work."

Krzakwa pulled up another chair and sat down opposite him, caught up in the somberness of his mood. "OK. What, then?"

"Look. These things are called Guardian Angel Monitors because they're supposed to follow you around, keeping you from getting hurt in Comnet. I knew about that, but why the Redux part?" The other started to speak, but Demogorgon held up his hand. "I know! I looked the word up, it means a return or a recovery, like getting better after an illness, right?"

"Yes." Krzakwa nodded and, seeing that an amplification was awaited, went on. "If a GAM fails in its primary duty, the Redux is supposed to hook you back out before the various components of your personality can dissolve into the circuitry. If these programs didn't exist, on-line discharge wouldn't be a rare phenomenon and no one would be able to use Comnet."

"OK, so it gets you back from inside the machinery. Why didn't Brendan use such a thing?"

"He did. Me." Tem looked away. "We didn't realize Centrum would be as capable as it turned out to be. I lost my grip on him and couldn't go in after him because I had no lifeline on me."

"We know where he is, don't we?"

"Maybe. In Centrum, sure, but he came apart right at the end. That thing that we experienced as a loss of consciousness was him dissipating into Centrum's data control nexi . If we could find all the pieces, reintegration would still be more than a little difficult. We . . . might get most of him back, even now, but he'd never be the same again. The Brendan that went in is surely as dead as the Seedees." Demogorgon looked down into his lap, where his fingers were twisted together into an agonizing double fist of frustration. "Shouldn't we try?"

"How? Can you tell me?" Krzakwa felt a sense of intentional cruelty in that statement. Creative or not, ideas or not, the artist just wasn't competent in this area of technology. Taking a deep breath, he looked up. "Yes, I can." He stood and paced over to the body, not looking away. "Part of Brendan is in here still, the parts that made him act so bad all the time. They were the reptilian parts, the hard-wired brain-person that was a soulless monster. A lot more of him is locked up in Centrum. Those were the illusory conscious parts, the mind-thing in all of us that says 'I' and thinks of itself as the whole being, even though it isn't. The rest of him is in Shipnet. . . ." Krzakwa sat back in his chair, bewildered. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"His real soul is in there, Tem, the part of him that helped me make Bright Illimit. A programmer operating with routines so close to the Turing point must leave a little bit of himself in his creation. I know that, if nothing else."

"Are you talking about the GAM? If so . . ."

Demogorgon interrupted him with "No! Well . . . maybe a little bit. I mean all of Bright Illimit, maybe the whole body of work that Brendan did. There's a lot of him recorded all around us!"

"I ... see." Krzakwa closed his eyes. "You're talking about more than an abstraction. It would make a powerful ally ... a whole fucking operating system if it was done correctly. I never thought of it that way before." He thought, How much data can we pump out of these things? A lot? Enough? Ideas have to come from somewhere!

The Arab shook him angrily. "Do you know what I'm talking about, dammit?"

"Yes." That was said flatly, abstractedly.

"Will it work?"

"I don't know. I have to think about this thing. Maybe there's a way, maybe not. . . ."

"Well? How much time do we have?"

"I don't know." He opened his eyes. "Shit. It has to work. We'll get back something. I just don't think it'll be Brendan Sealock." He stood up. "Let's get out of here. You go get the others."

Temujin Krzakwa sat before a master control/writeboard panel, induction leads stuck to his head, trying to make things work. Despite his original opinions on the matter, it was an art of creation which quickly took possession of his entire being. There was a certain poetic and personal satisfaction to be had in breaking up extant, finished programs and reworking their subroutines into a new whole, a thing different from what had gone before. He worked feverishly, brilliantly, far beyond what he had imagined were his abilities. He found a new belief in the stories of superhuman accomplishments done under emergency conditions: indeed, more than once he had the feeling that his subconscious mind was leading the way, a feeling that the program was writing itself.

Bright Illimit was the way, as Demogorgon had intimated. It was more complex than he could have imagined, undoubtedly one of the most recursive and gestalt-oriented programs ever conceived, much less written: a fully interactive program that did strange things. As he got into it, Temujin was surprised to discover that the program was set up to raid parts of the user's personality for its terminal background data. Of course, he mused, how could it work any other way? Only the user knew what would make him the happiest. Demo knew that fact and Brendan knew how to make the program realize and utilize it. Perhaps all these things had come about in a subconscious fashion, but then perhaps not. . . . He added bits from a hundred complex utilities that had been found in Brendan's data files, added things that he knew about from his own work at Lewislab, threw in bits and pieces of everything, in hopes that something would help. It began to coalesce, and he began to feel more hopeful. Cover every contingency, he thought, then throw in the kitchen sink in case we get dirty and need to wash up. Shit. And be careful not to break any dishes. The glass can cut you painlessly under water. Bleed to death and never know it. ...

Add hard wiring. Hookups to the ship's RAW complex and remote processors, then finally into the Machine and the QTD system. Get everyone into the act. Call on the dead man. Punch in through the amygdala, rewire those taps so they access whatever's left coursing across the corpus callosum. Crank up the limbic system, deep inside the brain stem. Get that old lizard-man punching away. Tell him there're faces yet to smash, haunches yet to hump. . . .

Krzakwa felt like a mad scientist, not creating his own monster, that was old hat, but taking all the monsters that ever lived, ripping them down, stripping their wires, making new monsters from bits of the old.

Mechanics of the soul, he thought. Adjust my petty neuroses with one deft twist of a spanner. Skulls greasily opened, shining with hydraulic fluid in the operating theater. Are we all robots under the flesh?

And the flesh is just machinery writ small.

He finished and came back up, resurfaced for a breath of conditioned, artificial air. The lights of the shipworld were dimming now, the collective, insensate soul of the 'net cannibalized to a different function. Without software, the machinery is inert, and now the minds would have to be in the wires once again. He wondered palely how much danger there would be. Theoretically little—Brendan had practically fed himself to Centrum, and, with the Bright Illimit's GAM-and-Redux as the only point of contact between them and it, how could they be caught? They could always break contact, and Tem had included the small subroutine to do that in any number of places in the program. A simple error/break. He was confident it would be enough, but if he was wrong . . . Centrum would get a particularly rich haul.

In the end, when it had been explained and demonstrated, they all came to be part of the great show, to be actors and prime movers on the multipolar stage that had been so long in erecting itself. In some fashion, those who had been united in the Falling Ring knew that they had to be here. At first John held out, reluctant to give himself over to a power so closely associated with Brendan, but, inspired by the apparent heroism of the others, he too had decided to go along. They sat mute, staring and perhaps fearful, all plugged into the wires that had dominated their lives in different ways. Krzakwa looked them over. "Well, we're ready." He remembered

Brendan saying, "As ready as we'll ever be," and felt weary. "I can't really explain what I did, and I don't think many of you would understand it, but . . . OK. We used the major operating routines from the Illimitor World to fill up Brendan's Machine. With its help, we ought to be able to find our way around in Centrum. It'll give some meaningful structure to what we find. Maybe we'll find what's left of him in there and drag what we can back. Are you set?"

John said, "What should we expect?"

The Selenite shrugged, keeping his face blank. "Demogorgon? No? Well, frankly, John, we can't say exactly. Our senses should report something very like the landscape of Bright Illimit. Really, it should be safe—ninety-seven percent of the circuitry is designed just to safeguard our personalities. What that actually entails, I don't know ... I mean, what it will feel like." He looked around at them and saw that there was no point in further delay, and turned to Demogorgon. "This is the one," he said, tapping a lead that was attached to his head in a position near the left angular gyrus . "You'll know what to do when the time comes."

"I understand."

"Do you? I'm not sure I believe that. It's your choice, though. I told you what might happen." The other nodded. "Like you said, it's my choice. Let's do it," he muttered, mimicking the words of a man more than a lifetime dead.

"Everybody get comfortable, in case this takes a long time. We don't want any kinks here." He smiled to himself. There would be no pressure gangrene in the almost zero gravity of Ocypete. Still, they arrayed themselves about the floor, assuming their habitual sleeping postures, each knowing that this would be a personal nexus for them, a moment, once the program was activated, from which they could never return. And their minds quickened, pondering what was more than mere life or death, but the infinite shading of gray spanning the gap between. They were embarking on a rainbow bridge, Bifrost, to take its place. Along separate paths, each mind questioned the power of their protective Heimdall, but thething had progressed too far for any backward turning now. . . .

Instead of the convenient but inefficient circlets of common use, they sprouted induction leads from their scalps, tucked in at the roots of their hair, and they were overloaded. Demogorgon, the familiar of his own lifework, wore more than double his usual number of cables, become the maintainer of the effort they would make. Krzakwa wished once again for the direct physical taps into his own circuitry that would remove the hundred-angstrom uncertainty in the induction field.

Brendan's body was energized, brought to the full level of its inherent ability. The shell waited, hoping for a return of its master, ready to unleash the demonic, primitive being that lurked at its physical core. With the circuit completed, open but untuned, they could all feel it waiting: a creature laid bare, stripped from beneath the layers of a hundred-million-year evolutionary path. It might be of some use. . . .

"Your show, Demogorgon. . . ."

"Right." Compressing his lips, eyes unfocusing with concentration, Demo thought his new command sequences and, in a wash of mingled wills, they went under and down.

Bright Illimit.

And again.

Again . . .

Demogorgon appeared alone on the middle of a clean white dais, standing in high-booted feet on a tough, somewhat resilient material, and noted the slightly diminished Earth gravity normal to the Illimitor World. All around was a sparsely grassed flat tundra, much of it a desiccated mud flat, cracked and clay-red. The sky was a winter cobalt blue flattened by the broken clouds which lined the horizon like a collar. A gusty wind fluttered from every compass point, plucking at the loose, cloth-of-green-gold combat uniform he wore. He felt the covered hilt of his golden sword Halaton at one hip, and a lozenge-shaped pistol on the other. Everything seemed right, although he couldn't identify this actual terrain with any he recalled creating. There was neither sun nor shadow. Theplatform sat on a courseway, a white road seemingly bleached into the otherwise naturalistic countryside, running off into the far distance. At its end, beyond the clouds, lay a faint blue shadow, a dark, almost empurpled thing, mountainlike. When he squinted hard, Demogorgon could make out shimmering, crenellated battlements, towers, and the instruments that would resist a siege. Like a sea mirage, the castle was disconnected from the horizon, floating, and he knew that, if he concentrated, he would see that the world dropped away from that citadel. There would be no earth there, no sea, no fire; just air. The elements of the world converged.

Briefly, Sealock's face, the face of the GAM, floated huge above him, looking down through featureless blue eyes, holes in its face that showed the sky behind. Demo shivered, and beckoned the others.

Harmon and Vana blinked into existence side by side a fraction of a second apart, clad in identical oversized gray tunics, the lustrous cloth bound in place with thin leather bands at waist and shoulder. Silver swords and ancient wheel-lock guns dangled from hip webbing. John appeared alone, holding a metallic blue machete, wearing a tight-fitting white shirt and trousers, with an emblem on his chest that showed twin eclipsing moons, their faces seamed by irregular canals. He wore a long white cape and had a small, modern-style sidearm in a holster that hung from his thigh, an energy weapon of some sort. Beth appeared behind him then, clad in a pale blue jumpsuit, similarly armed. She looked more like herself than any of the others, less enhanced. Ariane came, dressed in white also. Her sole weapon was a slim, rifle-like device, a delicate thing of lenses and indigo crystalline rods. Axie appeared in a diaphanous swirl of pale green fabric. She carried nothing, but the diadem about her temples had a red gem that glittered dangerously. There was a long pause and then Temujin Krzakwa came into existence. He was dressed in flowing black robes and had a massive sword at his hip. Over one shoulder he carried a heavy iron weapon, its snout a blued metal cylinder. It had complex controls on its stock and, with them, instructions stenciled in white. Demogorgonsquinted and could make out one line: it said,missile preheat. Stiffly they came together, staring at the outlines of Centrum's castle in the distance. Krzakwa looked around. "Somehow," he said, "I expected more than this." Ariane nodded. "With so much to draw from ... It could be more compact."

"It's giving us room to negotiate," said Demogorgon. "A big world means options, choices. . . . We can't have expected it to be cut and dried. I'm surprised, actually, that so far everything is so comprehensible."

"Well, with this white Brick Road, and dark Oz on the horizon, our choices seem pretty clear cut," said the Selenite, "but we don't want to be too predictable. There's no telling what might happen."

"Maybe we should head in the opposite direction," said Cornwell. "Though I doubt that would accomplish much."

"Probably not." Demo walked slowly to the edge of the platform and looked out into the arid wasteland. "We may as well try to make contact." He turned back to face them. "No reason for us to walk, is there?" Without waiting for a reply, he clasped his right hand to his left shoulder, then whipped it about in a salute-like motion, thinking his control calls. Eight of the gray, three-legged riding beasts of Arhos appeared: heavy, three-eyed creatures called thers. Taxonomically somewhere between an elephant and a vastly overstuffed footstool, the creatures were telepathically controlled, each keyed to an individual.

Harmon stared at the one that approached him, looking into its limpid brown eyes. It was the size of a small house. "How are you supposed to mount . . . Oh!" He looked up and the animal had crouched down on two of its legs to make a perfect thirty-degree ramp with its third. Delighted, he clambered up the leg and sat himself on the cushion of soft flesh in the center of its disk-shaped body. When the rest had mounted up, they began to ride. The thers stayed in a compact group and were faster than they looked, propelling themselves into a sinusoidal canter that was totally at variance with their appearance.

In the distance, Centrum awoke to itself, feeling slightly uneasy, a faint itch that was inaccessible to its full consciousness. Something, it realized, is wrong. What? The failing program was a constant danger. . .

.

After a time of riding they dismounted to let their mounts rest and feed from a great clump of tall, red-flowered grass. Demogorgon gesticulated a series of camp seats and they made themselves at home. The thers demonstrated their peculiar method of gathering food, revealing a set of scythelike claws on the hoof of the third leg with which they sliced down the weed and carried it to their delicate mouths. For all intents, the goal the adventurers had set themselves was no nearer, although the dais they had started from was long disappeared behind them. The white path continued onward.

Demogorgon stood finally and, for perhaps the thousandth time, scanned the blank horizon. The land had grown a bit rockier, showing gray outcroppings from the dry mud here and there. As he turned he was astounded to find a wet concrete wall before him. Deja vu assailed him. . . .

Achmet Aziz el-Tabari was sixteen years old and the world was Paris Free City. The Family was here and he the scion, fading stars of obsolete 3V screen and antiquated stage. They dreamed their dreams of the past and practiced a dying art to no avail, hopeless for the future, beautiful in wastage and decay. He wandered the dark streets and became trapped within himself.

Three men had him in an alley. They were tall and heavy and very dark, bestial, a rough gutter argot their only tongue. They laughed as they stripped him and smiled as they fingered his slim, brown flesh. " Ce putanne, trop de ant-zaftig!" said one, running rough fingers over his hairless chest, pinching sharply at his nipples. "Il-y-estparfait, ma soeur ," said another, cupping a broad palm across one slim buttock. They turned him over then and set him across the edge of some concrete stairs. They were about to begin their complex deed. Achmet gasped finally and said, "Wait. . . ." Unaccountably, they waited. "Not this way." He knelt before one of the men and began fumbling at the front of his trousers.

The man laughed and said, "Ca c'est maricon !" The others giggled. He was unclean. It was a great, sticky thing that burst out at him, but he did it anyway, trying to preserve himself. The man smiled mindlessly and was clean when he was done. The creature patted him on the head and moved away. The others seized him then and threw him back across the stairs, despite his cries of protest, and used him as they would, one at each end. When they were done, they left him in the darkness and he wandered off, burning.

Not the first time, not the last. Usually he sought them out, nicer denizens of the better-lighted places, but sometimes they caught him like this. Forces impelled him to go on. He could not remain in the safe sterility of the Home.

He walked on.

Two years older, he sat in his studio, staring at a half-finished canvas. Sleet drizzled out of a gray November sky, splashing, freezing in strata on the dirty-paned skylight, an artifact put there for men who pretended to a filthy grandeur almost two centuries gone. They recovered the past, pretension their game, goal, and reward.

The painting waited, castles and sky in the background, green forest to the sides, animal in the foreground. It was not the stuff of great art, by any means, but it satisfied him to try to create a scenario from his fantasies. Before him, on a green-carpeted floor, sat a stuffed tiger. He muttered to himself. Alia was, as usual, quite late.

The door opened and she came in, clad in white linen pajamas. She undressed quickly, long blond hair flashing to her moves, and, slim-hipped, went to sprawl on the tiger. She said nothing and was not apologetic. Models do as they please and the world lives up to their expectations. Achmet sighed. Her hair was matted again. He picked up a little soft-bristled hairbrush that he kept just for her and came forward. He teased the hair, pulling out the knots with care, casting away the white dandruff encrustations. Was it acoincidence that someone so beautiful should be so unconcerned for her appearance? Women could be such disgusting creatures.

She cuffed at his hand, giggling, and, when he continued to brush at her, moved her hips suggestively. He coughed and went back to his easel suddenly. She continued to titter long after he had set the carburetor on the brush and begun to paint.

Two years older, he lay in the semidark of his midnight bedroom, reading about the Peloponnesian Wars. His nameless lover slept at his side, snoring through half-open soiled lips. The face looked bruised with the summation of prolonged lust. The boy, whoever he was, looked like an injured child, his soft blond hair curling about his nape in tiny wisps and strands. He felt a renewed stirring, somewhere deep within, but ignored it. Enough was, he supposed, enough.

He turned the page of the book and a name jumped off at him out of context: Demogorgon. Ah! It was evocative and moved into him instantly, nestling deep within his psyche. Now that was more like it!

He'd been casting about for a name for years and never found a satisfactory one. His generation put classical Greek cognomens in vogue and their subculture moved throughout the free cities of the world at a constant level. They were a world society, almost strangled under the growing weight of the rules, but surviving handily in these little pockets of antiquity.

He had a name. Now he needed a design.

Sighing, he put down the book and turned to sprawl across the boy, who continued to snore gently. No sense waking him up.

He turned him carefully over onto his stomach and parted his legs, felt the soft flesh of his buttocks, and found his place, still ready. He eased within and paused, feeling the dark heat with gratitude. He moved, and fell away into mindlessness.

Demogorgon.

It fitted.

Two years older, he put on a circlet for the first time and began his sublimation to Comnet. Dreams within dreams he cycled down and around. It surprised him with pleasure. His mind went into the wires on other people's wings and he flew, seeing the possibilities. He tried to learn the way but it was beyond him, frustrating him. He looked for assistance as the ideas grew into grandeur. When he found it, the new art form was born. It was a long gestation. Hundreds of cascading experiences, small in themselves, built into a framework of desire, a mature, full-blown version of his childish desire to create. Without warning this house of cards tipped and fell, sliding memories breaking into the cloud-rimmed sky of the Illimitor World.

Dumbfounded, his original turning continued. Ariane was there, and Tem, and the rest. Confusion that he knew must mirror his own showed on their faces. "We were with you," said Vana.

"I know," he said.

Centrum began to feel the invaders, multiplying like a disease through its subsystems. It was an alien program moving through its circuits, stronger than any taken in before. Demanding action, it cast about for the ancient means of its defenses.

Circle back through the memories. There must have been a way, though in the beginning there had been nothing to fear, no other life. The Starseeders thought of everything. Their successors developed what was needed.

The years began to reverse themselves as the stack pointers moved back through the files, activating search commands. It was located.

Though its physical sensorium was frozen and meaningless, it was as yet unnecessary. There were no physical invaders. That did not make them less dangerous . . . rather more so. Deep within its memory, work vacuoles began to stir, to form themselves in a composite conceptual being, set to goabout their tasks after an agelong silence, after a time of nonbeing. The first primitive intelligences began to awake, too simple to wonder who or where they were. It went on.

To Ariane, this was not at all like a dream. A hard, sharp reality composed of a world, her friends, and the improbable thers. But in the moments after reliving sections of Demogorgon's past, which had seemed just as real, there was a strong sense of disbelief which could find no handhold in the realism around her. The camp chair bit into her thighs. "How," she said, "do memories function within this program?" She started to stand and, perhaps not surprised, became incorporeal. It ran like a film. . . . She flew on the wire without imagery, an electronic ghost of herself cruising the circuits of Globo Entertainment Net in search of the glitches that bedeviled the commercial paradise. The world was without form, and void, save for when she stepped into the comlines of others, checking to see if a sensed power surging had disturbed anything.

A bright spark up ahead . . .

. . . and a bulbous sheik sat in the midst of his harem in a gorgeous turquoise-encrusted canvas pavilion that rustled in the gentle, dry breezes blowing in off the blindingly bright silver desert. Enormous turbaned eunuchs (mostly black but with a few token Caucasians to avoid a lawsuit) stood silhouetted at every entry point, heavy-bladed falchions at the ready. There were a hundred women here, every one of them slim and dark and willing. They rubbed his hands and feet, fed him and sucked at him as he sighed, mindless ...

. . . she dropped out of the circuit, smirking somehow within. Why did they do it? People took from the wires something that was readily available in the real world. Why bother? Especially considering that they were powerless to affect the outcome, could only feel and not do ... yes, for a certain kind of person, perhaps that was a reason in itself. A spark flared ugly red nearby and she drove swiftly toward it, rescuing superheroine . . .

... a woman lay in the strong, gentle arms of her

Annenian lover and suddenly screamed. The dark, hawk-faced man began to melt LSD-style, flesh, then muscles, then bone dribbling away, eyes flattening and trickling down onto her breasts, dripping to the carpet from erect, sensitive nipples. She screamed and strong hands suddenly burst through the wall and slapped him back together. The woman sighed and resumed her kissing, tasting the man's sweet tongue. . . .

Behind the walls of pseudoreality, Ariane finished patching the damned thing and sailed off, feeling smug. Have to alert the Assembly monitor about that one. The foolish program was interactive enough to accumulate errata after a few hundred uses and disturb the paying customers. Most 'net works were stable, could only do a few prescribed action-sequence choices forking from predefined nexi, but they were getting more complex, better, as those who controlled the 'net relaxed the rules, more assured of their technology. This only made her job more difficult, since many of the sequences were assembled by free-lancers, and bugs proliferated.

Another spark, cool blue, and she peeked at it briefly. . . .

. . . The man stood before a huge, formally garbed audience. He was handsome, and young for his heavy responsibility, and seemed well liked by the people he served. "Ask not what your country . . ." he began, in rich, mellow tones, directly contravening two centuries of political ideal . . .

. . . and she dropped away. Historical dramas were even less to her taste than sexy romances. Well, everybody to their own preferences.

*End Circuit-run* said the Assembly monitor, and she dropped back to the real world, shift ended. Ah, the heady life of a practical engineer! She pulled the induction leads from her scalp and, nodding to her PM replacement at the monitor boards, went home through the bright, living streets of the Arcology.

Brendan was there as usual, waiting in her room in preference to his own. They lay together in the semidarkness and she felt his ears on her thighs, the sharp rasp of his whiskers scratching at her pudenda. His tongue sent flashes of delight expanding awayfrom her groin and she felt pity for the people whose experiences were delineated by 'net-borne pornography. She ran her fingers through his hair, feeling the brain-taps embedded in his skull, and rocked her hips to the rhythms of his real-world face. Somehow, dimly, I know, she thought. Where is the satisfaction of having an imaginary creature do this for me? I might as well have a robot. . . . But a real man . . . Ah . . . The strength of it clutched at her and an orgasm began its explosive course. She sighed and held his head fast, pushing against his now still face until it was over. He crawled up her body and entered her. She stroked his sweaty back and waited patiently for him to finish.

They were back, reeling from a paroxysm of memories. The thers had not moved, nothing had changed, yet it seemed a little darker, colder, as if a season closer to midwinter had enveloped them.

"OK, who's next?" asked Tem gruffly.

John looked hard at Demogorgon. "Are we powerless to keep these . . . memories from engulfing us?

Is it our program or"—he gestured at the distant castle—"its?"

"I think I know what's happening," said the Arab. "We're being strengthened, united. It must be a continuation of the process begun among us before; you weren't with us, John, but the GAM is trying to

... help us become whole. These shared memories are part of that."

Tem, still waiting to be submerged into another memory chain, spoke tentatively. "On the other hand, Centrum might be stealing these experiences as it did Brendan's. I'm pretty sure that if it was the Artifact doing this we would know. Shit. I don't know. Who's for stopping this, right now? It can be done." No one spoke.

"All right," said Demogorgon. "We go on."

The thers were tethered a little distance away, snatching clawfuls of feathery blue and roan grass that had grown just for them, and the people sat around a little campfire, toasting shish kebab and marshmallows, talking. No further flashbackshad interrupted the smooth flow of the program, and they had begun almost to enjoy the prospects for adventure before them. They discussed options, having Demo materialize a skimmer for them to simply fly to their encounter with the Centrum, but he pointed out that the more he interfered with its operation the less the interface program could do to determine the scenarios under which the contact would take place. It knew what was best for them. They hoped. . . . There had been little enough conversation on this adventure thus far and now their speech was, perforce, desultory. Axie said, "It's ironic, but I never have felt as close to anyone as I do to all of you, now. We seem like a particularly lucky people." It was happy-sounding, but they could sense nothing from her.

"Adversity always brings people together," said Harmon.

"No, it's more than that," said Beth. "We are being continually presented with the most forceful evidence that we are the same . . . literally, the same. Where DR enhanced differences, incompatibilities .

. . this is so different."

"Don't get carried away," said Tem, pulling a kebab out of the fire. "I don't think we should trust all of our feelings while under the influence of the program. After all, it can synthesize feelings as easily as anything else."

"Oh?" said Vana haughtily. "And just what should we trust if not our emotions?"

"She's right, Tem," said Ariane. "We can't lose faith in ourselves." The Selenite looked apologetic, sucking at a piece of onion. "That's not what I meant." Axie regarded the bearded man. "We've come a long way in a short time, Temujin. It's only right that there should be some skepticism." She reached past the fire and patted him on the shoulder. "But words, even here, are stilted. They ring hollow in my own ears. Believe me when I say—"

"Shut up!" Demogorgon loomed up, more impressive now than even his Arhos persona. He pointed into the distance: a group of pinpoints, lights like burning ashes from a fire, floated at an unknowable distance against the blue of the sky, arrayed at random above the castle. Thus far the world hadseemed a personal thing, their own to explore. Now, suddenly, the first sign of a power other than theirs was revealed.

"What are those?" asked Ariane, and they could all feel a keying up of interiors, as their nerves began to wind tight.

Krzakwa stood up, gripping his missile weapon. "I don't know and can't guess," he said, "but I think we should assume they are enemy hostiles."

Demogorgon drew his sword, a deadly metallic whisper.

"Can they really kill us?" That was from Vana.

The Selenite shrugged. "No way to tell. I think we ought to behave as if they can." He sighted in the device, carefully twirling little verniers, peering into a tiny plasma screen that contained an enlarged image of the approaching things. They were blurred and indistinct, twinkling slightly from the intervening atmosphere.

He punched up the preheat and armed his warhead, an em-field generator with coils set to discharge. He breathed out in a soft sigh and hit the lock-on switch, then held himself still. He pushed the launch button.

A roar of sound disturbed their world, rolling thunder with nothing to echo from, and a splash of reddish-orange flame wreathed Tem for a moment. It hurled away, first a flaming rocket, then a bright fleck at the head of a narrow, misty contrail. The targets did nothing to disperse and the missile ' buried itself in their midst.

There was a moment of ringing silence, a bright flash that turned the sky pink and made them all flinch. An expanding ball of yellow fire shot with violet made the sky brassy and, for a moment, everything was very still. A roar. A shock wave, an air front tugging at their costumes. The world came back to normal with an impossible suddenness. There were fewer of the pinpoints, a hole in their formation, but still they were there.

They expanded, growing before their eyes as if from small to large rather than far to near. They moved with a speed that should have generated a sonic shock cone but did not. The things were silent. Tem cursed and, throwing down his missile projector, drew a sword. Someone made a strange halfwhine in the background, perhaps all of them, perhaps no one.

The things were upon them, nightmarishly resolvable.

The vanguard thing approached, bearing in on them swiftly. It was a balloon with a horrid face, red eyes hate-glaring, half its substance open with a black, tooth-fringed mouth. It seemed to chuckle as it flew. Hungry. Hungry, it said to them.

Demogorgon drew his magic pistol and fired. He stood before them like a mythopoeic hero, legs widespread, body tall and muscular, gripping a sword in one hand and a gun in the other. Glittering pink and purple rays reached out to touch the creature as it roared in for a quick kill, white cartoon sparkles writhing around its spherical flesh. It stopped dead, the world a motionless frame in isolation, then exploded. Thin black threads rained down and the world was in motion again. A score of the things swooped down on the thers, mouths gaping in starving shark grins. Teeth sank together and bones crunched, legs writhed, dark blood covered the ground in spatters. The animals bleated in agony, scrambling, and were gone, sucked to bloated, happy interiors. Axie glared and her diadem threw a red ray outward. The nearest monster screamed an echoing cry and soared upward. It burst into tawny flames and staggered against the sky, then fell, trailing a long plume of greasy smoke. There was an explosion at some distance.

More of the things circled and came in at them.

Toothy leers in tight V formation darkened their view. John and Beth stood side by side, guns held two-handed in a crouching stance. They pulled triggers in unison and sheets of transparent fire lanced out. Creatures were riven. Harmon and Vana knelt back to back with them, shooting their old-style guns and barely coping with their exaggerated recoils. Their guns roared, throwing explosive charges away in gouts of fire and smoke. Punctured, the creatures burst apart and threads rained down like long black snow. Ariane's beam flailed about, an indigo whip trailing destruction. More of thethings came swooping in, ten to replace each one downed. There was an endless supply of them, it seemed. Temujin Krzakwa stood alone, dispatching the ones that penetrated their shield of modern fire. He whirled his broadbladed sword in figure eights, closing with the demons and slicing so many that he was covered with the ropy, gray gore that they discharged. As he fought, a kind of magnificent numbness came over him. He was going to heaven, he was already there.

Then, without warning, the sword slipped out of his grasp and went flying. Fear lanced at him, and he wanted to hide. Self-born images of the crystalline teeth shearing though his flesh, breaking his bones. A final agony knifing inward as his bowels were torn asunder. He looked and one of the things bobbed against him, for all the world like a toy balloon; there was a red halo around it and it was gone. More disappeared in red coruscation, and Aksinia smiled and gave him a little salute. His sword came back to him hilt first on a rosy ray. He smiled back and resumed his slashing.

Something like Chopin's funeral march sonata began to play. There were too many of them! They were becoming a single entity in the circuits of Centrum, their program the defining factor of Bright Illimit. We will be eaten alive! Querulous despair assailed them all, flooding them with a common source of feeling and a unity of thought. Will we really die? Can we? Hopes of a real haven in abundance, waking up on Ocypete in their real bodies, mission failed.

But even if we can escape, thought Demo, Brendan is still in here, his discharge real, his entrapment impenetrable. And if we can't, we will be added to him, in unity with the dark thing that lives forever. . . . A dull sound of tearing flannel alerted them.

A giant anteater tongue flashed crimson from the heavens, licked up the monsters all at once, flickering bloodily before them, and was gone. A feeling of joy, a smirking satiation briefly filled the space about them. They stood alone again, quiescent, sweating.

"What was that?" asked Harmon.

"Evolution unveiled," said Tem, sheathing his sword, swaying with tightly closed eyes. Vana slumped to the ground and saw the demon entrails subliming into nonexistence precisely as had neon regolith. "They ate our thers," she said. The place where the campfire had been was wiped clean. Demogorgon put his weapons away and stood tall and still. Clasping hand to shoulder, he made his motion again, and thought his command thoughts. Nothing happened.

"We've lost something," he said.

And, suddenly, they were elsewhere. . . .

Vana Berenguer and Ariane Methol ran along the roof of Tupamaro Arcology, flying a kite. This part of the building was almost a mile high and had an immense park of many acres on its roof. There was deep soil here, supporting grass and trees and little streams, fields of flowers and little ponds. There were many people, children and poets, and there was a lot of laughter. The sky was pale blue, supporting a herd of fleecy clouds that kept pace with each other against the background of the sun. A sense of universal summer pervaded their insensate feelings.

They ran, and the diamond shape of paper grew away from them on its downward-bulging, white string stem. It was dark green, with a red, grinning face against the sky. They stood still, panting, and watched it fly. "Good day for it," said Ariane, holding the roll of filament. "Just enough wind." Vana nodded and watched it grow tiny, falling into an invisible distance. The string tautened, rising into the sky and disappearing long before it reached the kite, which seemed to float unsupported, far away yet held to them by some sort of inanimate loyalty. She felt the sweat trickling between her breasts, felt the delicate skin of her nipples engorged, rubbing against the inside of her halter. She stood closer to Ariane, touching flesh with her in little taps of breathing movement. The space inside her shorts seemed steaming, moistened by the exertion and rubbings of the run. She exhaled, a long breath, and relaxed. She dropped to the grass, sitting cross-legged.

Nothing to say, nothing to think, nothing to reason about, she smiled brightly at the land and sky and clouds. Light and shadow played on Ariane's skin, outlining her strong, delicate muscles. She was nice to look at. She stretched, arching her back, and, standing again, twirled about, letting impressions of the parkscape flood in upon her. She stood still and watched a group of small girls playing jump rope nearby, saying loud rhymes in Spanish to each other and giggling when one faltered of fell rolling to the grass. She whacked Ariane on the buttocks, eliciting a yip of surprise, and ran away. She ran away across the park to the edge of the roof, up a flight of stairs to the top of the wall, and fled along a chain-link fence, looking down at the blue and gold of her world. She grinned as she ran, breathing freely, sweating all over herself and her clothes, limbs swinging in an animal freedom, lubricated by the juices of an unthinking aliveness. She ran on and on until darkness fell down the sky and then went home to a man and more muscular thrusting in the dark and light. Images without form dazzled her consciousness and time stretched on to eternity.

Seven Red Anchorelles awoke to himself with a startled pheromonic cry: I still live?

His body still seemed real, the same hard-squid shape and form that had always, it seemed, existed, but he had memories. Life in the ship in the shadows of a Starseeder ghost. Life and work and the end. The last despairing moments as Centrum soaked in his oil flooded over him: death in Unity, his oil dispersed and turned to the irrevocable electronic incantations of the immortal brain that controlled his life. Why am I here? And how?

He looked about him. Row on row of sleeping Seedees were stacked against the sky, awaiting the command to awaken. This was not supposed to be possible. They were all gone forever, he knew that. Somehow, they were all to live again, subjected to some kind of mysterious resurrection process, brought to life again in the complexes of an eternal circuitry. How? He thought about it, his renewed oil, if such itwas, coursing with excitement. Obviously, something new had been added to the dark equations of reality.

Centrum began to speak within him, a thing it had never been able to do before. A curious double entity tracked along its voice, a different being, writ large with it, a new, unconscious dominance in the old being.

You have work to perform, it said, its voice echoic in nature, two thought-tracks merging with his consciousness in a strange, intractable fashion. Centrum seemed angry with itself, almost schizoidal. Mother Ocean has been invaded by a disease. The product of the Grand Design has gone wrong. Things must be rectified. The invaders must be repelled.

Sent away?

No. We must have all that is within them. There is a greater cosmos waiting without and we must have a way of dealing with it. Absorb them all. I will reach out and take what is theirs into myself. I must be supreme once again.

7red wondered at the meaning of it all, but the voice of God said, Go thou! and he went. He sailed away from the massed, sleeping ranks of all the beings that ever lived, the first scout of his renewed kind, to be in the proud vanguard of an unending, everlasting horde. He should have been overjoyed, but a shadow of unhappiness followed him, troubling the smooth flow of his liquid thoughts. What was wrong? He pondered as he flew, marveling at the changes in his world. Something had gone wrong. . . . No, he realized. Something had always been wrong. He merged with a waiting work vacuole and fled into the limpid depths of the blue sky, staring hard through its enhanced senses. Something was happening ahead, and he squinted to see what it was, eager to discover the form of the invaders. The sense of wrongness left him disquieted. He had no reason to live again, but here he was. Something had happened to Centrum. What?

He wondered if Cooloil would live again and wished for her presence. He had always missed her. He could feel the circuits all about him, and suddenly realized he could remember bits and pieces of that great dark time when he had beenpart of the unified mind. I am not real! he thought. His own oil had long ago dissipated. The body he inhabited now wasjust an image, held in the cold imagination of Centrum. It recreates me as a mere subroutine! He wondered at the source of this new terminology. I am dead, still, never to liveagain. But he felt real within himself, even knowing thatconsciousness was an illusion. Maybe it had alwaysbeen. . . . He felt a flood of horror course through him, but the battlewas before him now, already joined.

Harmon Prynne was lying on his bed in the darkness alone, hands laced behind his head, staring into the black depths of an invisible ceiling and waiting for sleep to come. He'd been living in Tupamaro Arcology for seven months now, and sometimes wondered why he'd come. He and Vana were more or less living together, as much as anyone ever did in the free-wheeling life of a modern urban monad, but it was a troublesome state. She came and went as she pleased and his complaints about her behavior were not only ignored, they seemed to go unnoticed.

He reached down under the comforting sheets and rubbed a hand slowly across his crotch, feeling a responsive stiffening, and wondered about himself. I'm a human itch, he thought reflectively, waiting to be scratched. He grinned in the darkness and took his hand away, enjoying the weight of an unused erection. Couldn't do it in Key West, he remembered. Couldn't do it at all. I wonder why? Was it the racing?

An image came to him that filled the world with light. He was walking along a corridor in Tupamaro's ElComPod complex, carrying a bag of tools, headed for the engineer's station. He'd been hired to come here and fix up some waveguide panels by a contractor, and he came to get the purchasing credit for his work.

He entered the immaculate room and stared. The engineer was a slim, beautiful Spanish woman with strikingly intelligent eyes clad in a crisp linen dress that highlighted her eye-clutching breasts. He stared at her, eyes sweeping up and down her frame. God! She was a total beauty! "Engineer Methol?" he asked, a catch in his voice. She nodded, turning away, and he felt slightly nauseous, lust tearing at him against his will. How could he work with something like this?

There was another woman there, sitting in the corner behind a console, and when he turned to look at her they locked eyes, his head canting sharply downward to face her, as if forced by a hand. He stared into her black-dark eyes, almost oblivious to the ripeness of her somewhat stocky form. Her arms were brown and supple.

This woman grinned at him. "Hi!" she said. "I'm Ariane's friend, Vana Berenguer!" The door of his bedroom popped open suddenly, spilling light from the hall and calling him back from his dreamland. It was Vana, springing lightly toward him, shedding clothes as she came. The door closed by itself, plunging them into darkness again, but the rustle of cloth continued. She sprang on the bed, bouncing and naked, and nuzzled against the skin of his chest. She was hot, drenched with sweat, and he wondered where she'd been. She ran her face down his chest, nibbling at his stomach and giggling.

Rhythmic motions drew him out of himself and made him unable to think, made him a slave. He didn't mind at all just then. . . .

What he felt, as her hips pounded up and down atop him, was a sense of belonging, not just to her but to the human race. It gave him a delicate sense of self-worth to know that this woman desired his flesh, when she could have any flesh that she wanted. He laughed into the face of the night and clasped her writhing form tight against him, feeling the muscles of her back straining under his hands. She was panting, short, sharp breaths through her open mouth. At these moments he knew he loved her above all else in the world.

It overcame him. His orgasm began, throbbing heavily, and she cried out briefly, shuddering as she settled down into a quiet, sweating stillness.

Unaccountably, they said nothing more, and Prynne imagined that it was because nothing needed to be said. After a while Vana got up and went to the bathroom. She came backto bed with a snack, crackers, cheese, and some sweet beverage. They shared it and he dozed in her arms.

Seven Red Anchorelles hovered a long way from the battle, watching carefully through the amplified senses of his old work vacuole. He knew it wasn't the same one, that reality was a long time dead, but it seemed the same and that was all that counted. His released oil circulated in the narrow space outside his shell and reported to him all that was happening.

The defensive spheres were gathered about the invaders now, subunits of Centrum's newly expanded consciousness attacking the alien program segments in swift movements of artificial thought. Like me, thought 7red, things of the imagination. The invaders fought back with their own electronic weaponry, bending the inner world to their will, providing an imagery that satisfied their mysterious needs. By all rights, the spheres should win, for they were closer to the source of their power. And yet ... Something was happening. A sense of greater power at immense distance pervaded the scene. It was as if a giant, invisible cable stretched upward to near infinity, providing a link with some massive entity lurking beyond the gentle blue of the sky. 7red expanded his horizons.

A tenuous being stood over the battle, watching. It had the same strange, mobile appearance as the aliens, and blank space where its eyes should have been. There was something familiar about it. ... There was some resemblance that connected the thing with the weird echo that dogged the voice of Centrum. It seemed to be looking at him.

It ended suddenly, shockingly. The brooding presence, the overseer, abruptly transformed itself into a great leathery creature that looked a bit like the memory of unknown origin identified with the ancient, extinct Starseeders. The being's mouth opened, a yawning, fiery pit, and the spheres were sucked away into nothingness.

7red felt stunned. How well prepared they were! Now he knew why Centrum had brought them all back from the grave. This was no ordinary menace that they faced. . . .

And yet . . .

Another presence made itself felt, not the invaders but something connected with Centrum itself. A pair of immense, cold, blue-stained eyes opened out of the void next to him and stared, a glittering, icy, emotionless look of measurement. The phenomenon lasted only the briefest instant, but 7red was chilled. I know it now, he thought. No matter what happens, this imaginary life I and all my kind have been granted will be all too brief. If the aliens win, we are lost. And even if Centrum triumphs, we will all be put away again, probably forever. We are here as mere weapons, to be used and discarded. He felt the beginnings of rage. Had it always been thus?

In the hierarchy of things, this requisition was perhaps little better than a note for the Suggestion File. Temujin slipped his hand into the warm sanctuary of his armpit and flexed the fingers until they began to lose the frozen stiffness. Another breach drill had left this section of Peirce a low-pressure icebox. No, there would be no official link with the Comnet people. Despite their continued advances in practical hard mathematics, despite the ease with which an exchange could be set up, it would not be. And to ask for even a brief contact with someone down there could be viewed as dangerously heterodoxical. Fuck them, he murmured, then repeated the phrase to himself for maximum adumbration. He chuckled. Tem was glad he could amuse himself so easily.

He sat, with a fart quickening in his bowels, and stuck an induction lead to his head. He hoped it wasn't a particularly smelly one, since the circulation system was probably cycled down. He held tight the sphincter of his anus and the gas came out slowly, silently. No odor. Good. There was nothing he would've liked less than to have Margaret come upon him alone, an aroma of unquestionable origin making the room even less habitable.

Data about the overflow of neutrons from the high-density containment field that was his pet project began to come into his brain, arrayed in a four-dimensional histogram of his own devising. With methodical dispatch he began tugging at a datum here, pushing there, hoping to pull some hidden asymmetry from the information that would explain the anomalies. Equations of flux, representing possible new theories of chromodynamic interaction, were fitted into the hypergraph like the meshing of an antique clock. He keyed in a systematized differential and, waiting for realtime changes, finally saw a flag indicating the match of the equation with the data. Ah, Tem thought: is this the beginning of Krzakwa Space? Or is the old spanner in the machinery showing itself?

Damn it! That's why these things have to be compared with the work on Earth. There is absolutely no way to tell. I'd have to build an entire duplicate to tell. What a joke. "There's no redundancy on the Moon." So another cat stays in its bag.

An interrupt light glared red at him from the porta -desk. Mentally, Tem hooked into the communication and found a simple word message: "Meet me at the canteen at break— Hugo Sergio." It was rather odd: Tem knew that this was probably going to be one of the illicit gabs Hugo Sergio had been initiating recently and that, as usual, a few tidbits of gossip that he had somehow acquired would be passed. But the man had never contacted him through a standard link before. He was getting careless. Well, it was nearly break, and he was at a dead end, so Tem shut down his stem link and stood. The canteen Hugo meant was the one serving the twelve halls of Wedge 4, which was a good ten-minute walk. He pushed aside the now limp pressure seal and came out into the even colder hall, a glance showing him that it was awaiting renorming in its turn. He jogged, painfully out of breath almost immediately, down the endless-seeming corridor and at last reached the center concourse, passing through an energy portal into the heat and pressure of the crowded hub. He stood panting, slightly bent over, until the engirdling pains lessened. In the congested flow of the hub ring he was repeatedly bumped into and jostled until he felt as if he would be trampled. Slowly, he made his way to the canteen, which was extraordinarily crowded, and searched the faces that lined the standing tables until he found the hard, straight-nosed oval that was Hugo Sergio.

Tem fought his way to the bar and ordered a double coffee,laying out the waxy paper bills. Two small reusable cups were exchanged for the money, and he made his way to the place that had been saved by his friend. In the heavy surf of a hundred people talking at once, there was no chance of being heard.

"What's up, Hugh? Anything worth calling me like you did?" Hugo Sergio looked at Tem ironically, a childlike smile playing on his bare lips. "I should say so. They've made a new pact with the men who own Pallas. We should have water raining down from above any week now. Maybe that'll make them a little bit less heavy-handed, with the shortage ended."

"Unseparated water? Or will they take the deuterium first?"

"I don't know. But there will be some hard bargaining. Another thing—there's a civilian on Earth who is advertising for people to launch a commune on Triton. Says he's going to bring the best techs, latest marks, everything."

"Mother Maria! Where'd he get the money? I didn't think they even minted enough for private space travel on that scale."

"His name is Cornwell. Makes money from data music— they say he's quite well known."

"I'd go if I could, you know. No regrets. Totally free from the Moon ... I'd go in a minute." Tem pulled a few straggles out of his beard and looked at them, stiff lines like tan tensors. He was thinking.

The legions of the revived Seedees began to march, floating out on rank after orderly rank, flying formation to the commands of a Centrum under assault. The battle was shaping itself in earnest, but still Seven Red Anchorelles waited. In time, he knew, he would be forced to go, he couldn't hang back forever, but, for now, he waited. It was not in vain.

She was there! 7red swooped down on the drifting army and plucked her from the ranks with his articulated arms. Cooloil! he cried, jetting oil. Though confused by her recent resurrection, she greeted him joyously, and they flew away together, exchanging happiness. The corridors of Centrumwere huge and dark, many of its ancient functions having died, and they found a place to hide. They coupled once again, their souls mixed together in joined bodies, and shared each other's thoughts. Pleasure at having come back to life, joy at having found each other again after so long an eternity, sadness at the reason for their return, horror at their probable fate. Ultimately, we die again, they thought.

Time passed for them to the steady beat of a command counter's march, while their inner pheromones mixed until they were inextricably bound together, inseparable. When the time came, they would separate, they knew, but until then . . .

Why should it be?

In a bound state they could think and wonder as one, with the power of their minds magnified conjointly. They still had some sense of a separate self, but it was very small, hard to get a hold on. The marching orders came, and they drifted apart, valves closing, become two again. They flew to join the army, going near to its head, and traveled side by side, communicating with their little jets of oil, a sort of small conjunction.

Why are we doing this?

Because the Lord of our world so orders it.

Is that the only reason?

It is the only one that we can have.

Agreement. It has always been so.

A pity. Why do you suppose that is?

Because the world was created thus.

And who created the world?

Centrum . . .

Ah. And who created Centrum?

The Starseeders.

And where are they now?

Dead.

It is so.

They flew on into a gathering night that frightened them beyond all reason, a thing that toyed with what passed in them for sanity and made them almost unreasoning beingsagain, but not quite. They had begun to think again, after ten billion years of fragmented, undreaming sleep, and they did not want to stop. We must go on.

7red felt a surge of pity for her and wondered how all the other countless resurrectees were taking it. We must, he agreed, but we cannot.

Why not? It was a cry that attracted the attention of those close about them, globules of oil rebounding for them to catch on their shells.

Yes, why not? asked another mournfully.

Because, said Seven Red Anchorelles, the Lord does not will it. How can we fight against our God?

It made them fall silent. How, indeed? But they continued to think about the matter, for, though they were reborn as subunits of Centrum's vast mind, it had given them a strange sort of freedom for just a little while. For however brief a time, until it swallowed them whole again, they were independent, able to think for themselves in their own small fashion. While they lived, they could fear and, perhaps, try to flee.

Aksinia looked around coldly. From the air above the Carnicom there was a smooth, clear view to the center city of Davenport, a crenellated monad crowning the rivered plain like half a broken bottle in which some complex crystal had grown. Morning mists shrouded the mildly undulating land like a floating film of milk. The squashed red sun had just cleared its belly from the city-dotted checkerboard that sat beneath it, and the beginnings of shadows etched in strange relief reached out to her. It was a view that should have astounded. She felt slightly nauseous.

She had been here for a week and a half, as the guest of a near-moronic playwright named Jass. His last name had never been revealed, unless of course Jass was his last name. Jass had many acquaintances here and seemed to have spent most of his life in the amusement complex. His room was filled with personal gear and elaborate drug-taking devices that would be difficult to carry on the road. Perhaps he livedhere. She hadn't asked. Beta-2 almost seemed tame compared with the elaborate pharmacopoeia Jass accessed daily; and she had gone along, inhaling burning junk for an archaic thrill, popping the most esoteric brain-chemical derivatives, and hopping the fastest, most diverting of the Carnicom's rides. It had been a bit of a rush, but it was over.

She reached into the nearest lattice of the energy matrix and pushed. The world slowly revolved, and the twenty or so others suspended in the flight simulator were shown to her. They were puppets hanging from invisible wire, unsupported and limp. Jass was within a dekameter. "I'm going now," she said. He was a handsome man, bald-shaven with blond hair fanning out from his lower lip to hide a chin slightly double from overindulgence. His eyes seemed to reflect the icy illness that she felt. "Good-bye, then," he said. "It was fun." He reached out both hands and swooped upward and away. In his room Aksinia found the overgarment that she wore when it was cold, pulled it out of the crevice between bed and wall-screen, and put it on. The wrinkles in the otherwise form-fitting garment felt good. She liked looking like a misfit, someone who couldn't care less about her appearance. It was the look she cultivated. From around the room she gathered the other few articles she carried with her, stuffed them into a shopping bag, and rang for a taxi. Almost as a last thought, feeling furtive for some reason, she opened the origami drawer in which Jass kept his stimulants and grabbed a handful of Beta poppers. She did not enjoy registering with coms and this would keep her anonymous for at least a week. If she found a new host before then, maybe she could stay disappeared for a month or more. And, of course, that meant no calls.

The light came on over the balcony door, and she quickly slipped through the dilating energy port and hopped into the floater without even noticing the concrete and metal integrated circuit forty stories down.

"This will be an entitled trans," she spoke into the microphone grid decal in the bubble wall, and settled into the plush cushioning, the air cold on her neck. "Go—direct to ground."

"More information is needed," said the floater in a perfectly modulated voice, neither male nor female.

"Address or building name is necessary." The floater lurched slightly as it pulled away from its mooring.

"Please repeat or clarify."

It was not easy to escape the address grid with a com floater, though some had not been reprogrammed since a free-form flight and thus could be sent anywhere. In any case, you couldn't survive without some knowledge. "Go Rebreak," she said, "test/checkup go." And, after a pause, "WhiteCode Zero zero four go." The floater obediently dropped, and Aksinia watched as the windows and balconies fell upward. Half a meter from the ground, the craft came to a stop and reported an obstacle that prevented further motion. "Go Release," she said, leaping with a thud to the pavement. The floater immediately began to rise, much like a soap bubble being blown by the wind, until it vanished behind the Carnicom obelisk.

From this perspective the landscape was much changed. But Aksinia was used to this aspect of the world, the places where no one went. To the horizon there stretched almost featureless boxes of concrete and senplast: a desert save where a tiny plot of ground sent forth the green and brown weeds/grasses. Aksinia hitched up the shopping-bag handles on her shoulder and silently began to walk. Thumbing rides was very different than it had been during its early days. It was simply a matter of being visible on the ground, being where a person never was. Someone would look down from the seat of a lifter and catch sight of you. It took anywhere from an hour to days. Occasionally you ran into another thumb-rider, but only very rarely. When that happened, you talked; said things you could never say to someone from above.

She started to walk, the nausea that she had felt a thing of the past. She popped a lozenge beneath her tongue and enjoyed the sensation of her strong legs moving her across desolation. Later, when she was skirting the edge of a cultivated field, passing row after row of diminutive, rigid plants separated by magnetic strips, her eyes were drawn from the nearest farm-float to a metallic glint far up in the patchy, cloud-striped sky. Not a lifter, no. Suddenly a contrail plumed out from it, tiny and at an oblique angle to the prevailing cloud-march. It was a shuttle, coming back. Returning from the endless blackness out there. Aksinia shuddered slightly and thought, That's where I'd like to go. The thought resonated within her.

Temujin Krzakwa held open a jagged fissure in the ground, into which Ariane Methol deeply probed. It was the best they could do. Thrusting in among the gossamer clockwork of the world, she put her delicate fingers into the elastomeric machinery and grappled with its underpinnings. It was all madness, of course, nothing so real as it seemed, but they were locked into a path of imagery now and had to live with it. The battle with Centrum's defenders, the eating of the imaginary thers, had done damage to the inner workings of Bright Illimit—not much, but enough. A single command had mutated, becoming inexecutable, and a whole section of action routines had gone out of reach. She deftly parted the substance, touching here and there, going where Tem's logic told her to search. It took time. Item after item seemed OK until she uncovered a waveguide-like tube with a dark, carboned knot blocking it. "I think I found it," she said. She read a tiny silver inscription on the wire. "Terminus Junction 26:aleph-aleph subA033?"

Tem sent her a nod. "That's probably it. We'd know better if we had a system architecture diagram, but, uh, what's it read now?"

She passed across it, like blind fingertips feeling out the subtle meanings of electronic braille. "I can't quite . . . ah! 0Q30:0Q31,XFB1,028F:028E."

Krzakwa almost snarled to himself and then felt amused. One fucking bit-pair swapped around on a near-three-hundred-trillion-byte address complex! No wonder we lost it! Load Link; Command Listen; and Decode Logic. He wanted to chuckle and finally did. "That's it, all right. 028F:028E is nonsense. Supposed to be 028F:029R, I think."

"You're not sure?"

He sent her a shrug. "How can I be sure? That's the way a

HORMAD sequencing device usually writes it, but who knows what Brendan really did? There're a lot of oddities in this program."

Including us, Ariane thought. "I'll have to take your word for it," she said. "I was never this far into the substrata of execution control before." Really. Who ever heard of servicing high-level software from underneath? She sighed. "Ax, let me have your diadem, please." When she had it, she activated the gem, pushing the numbers around, a shift left to add twice, and it was done. The Dramatic Creation subroutines reconnected themselves with a metaphysical thump.

Harmon lifted her out and Tem let the earth snap shut. She turned over onto her back and gasped. All of them turned and looked where she pointed. Centrum's castle towered above them, a looming slate-gray mass, obscured by deep shadow, perspective giving it a bizarre aspect ratio that made it almost triangular in shape. A heavy battlement wall of irregular stone, topped with massive tooth-shaped merlons, protected the inner castle, which was positively medieval. Above the citadel massed towers, themselves crenellated, loomed. To give it a thoroughly alien feel, a ring of black machines, blunt and intricate, hung like broken boulders in a wide orbit about the towers. The castle, as before, did not sit on the ground but floated above a terribly truncated horizon that could not have been more than a mile distant. The sky had became twilit, clouds turning taupe and gray, drifting in striated bands across a sky hued into dark orange and vermilion, a band of sunset all around that merged into a circle of indigo and black directly overhead. The program let them assume the invisible sun had already set, but it could not quite provide them with stars. The ground humped up into mounds, carrying them upward in a single-surge earthquake, and silhouetted purple hills rose up to hide the unnatural horizon, making a believable edge to creation. A blanket of short green grass sprang up at their feet and roared outward to clothe the world's bones, shivering in waves before a soft breeze. Let us die in beauty, it said, and thunder rumbled, lightless, in the distance.

They watched the castle, silent, waiting, spread out in afighting formation, preferring to brood somberly and let Centrum make the first move. A long time passed, and it did not. Nothing moved except for the halo of orbiting machines, and the castle came no closer. Finally, exhausted, they sat in a half circle on the ground, wanting to plan but having no will. John Cornwell sat with forearms around upfolded knees and gazed at the bleak castlescape, his mind a cool tunnel of emptiness. By chance, Axie sat cross-legged by his side, reading from a small book she had produced. Almost like the old days, he thought, in the real world. Have I yet really examined my motives for doing all this? Probably not. We think we know ourselves, then life takes in its belt another notch and we feel the pinch. Time to go on another involuntary diet. He sighed and looked at the woman.

She sat still, reading, and her eyes looked tired. He wondered why the program allowed such an appearance and decided that it probably fitted right into the composite. The sentence, "Appearances can be deceiving," came to him, and he sighed. Her head drifted slowly around, tracking to return his stare. She smiled faintly at him, a drawn, wry look, and said, "It's all too much, isn't it, John?" He surprised himself by feeling startled and felt a certain layering returning to his thoughts. "Oh, I don't know," he said offhandedly. "I'm handling it, I think. I like to be grounded in what we call reality. Here that's meaningless."

Her smile widened to a skeptical grin.

"Really." He felt a pulse of self-annoyance. "It's too unreal to not handle." Her grin faded and she turned her gaze to the castle again. "OK. . . . But it was real when the monsters tried to eat us, and I think what's coming is going to be a lot worse." He shook his head. Try not to consider anything as real, he told himself. He remembered a time when he had briefly tried dream control, finally concluding that, even if he felt he was in control of the dream, it was simply part of the dream structure and in no way indicated actual ability to influence the outcome of the dream. Was this like that? Was the illusion of free will here simply part of the program? He couldn't tell, of course. Is that what madness is? He wanted to think aboutthe real world, real life, as if this were no part of it. "Tell me something," he said, "about the binding that you have been feeling since we've been here."

Axie glanced at him, then went back to her contemplation of the immense, structured pile of stone. "It's hard to quantify, and I'm not sure I even want to try. The feelings that dominated our lives before were a form of blindness. Now we see."

John wanted to laugh but managed to control himself. Febrile nonsense once again! Always couched in the same occult ways. Did they have nothing inside them but theories of life? Everyone seemed to engage in modeling behavior at some point! He threw himself on his back, preferring to watch the unreal-seeming sky, staring into the strange disk of night directly above. A simulacrum is better than nothing, I suppose. But he wondered if it really was. And just how far does that idea extend? Are my self-images real? I don't have any way to challenge them. He stopped it there and drifted back into that long cool tunnel where his thoughts liked to live.

Time passed and their energies cycled up. Time struck hard, though the vista of day's end remained unchanged before them. The moments waxed into being and arrived one by one. The eight made camp on their hill, weapons sheathed, and waited to act. There was nothing else they could do. Armies? They had none. It was obvious that Bright Illimit lacked a will to populate this wilderness with creatures of its own. Larger weapons, though perhaps of greater symbolic importance, could not be more powerful than Tem's missile weapon. For whatever reason, Demogorgon did not extend his ideas further.

The blackness at zenith was growing, and all of the world was dimming. Some tried to sleep but could not. Finally, muttering a great oath, Krzakwa stood and shouldered his blunt launcher. "This is getting ridiculous," he said, set the controls for maximum range and effect, and hit the firing trigger. The projectile flared away, leaving a thin, curving trail ofsmoke in its wake. It struck the wall with a shower of sparks, molten metal dripping down the stones to spatter on the ground. The motion of things seemed to slow and the breeze gradually died down. The point of impact slowly brightened, throwing shadows behind them on the hillside. The spark grew, its color shifting upward, the wavelengths of the light shortening. It hit violet, searing holes upon their motionless retinae, and it came. The blob of light suddenly expanded into a great globe, outlined in brilliant shock waves. The sky turned a garish blood red and, for a moment, everything was still. They waited, then it exploded. White light shut off the world with a glare and the wave front rolled over them soundlessly, throwing them all to the ground. It ended with equal suddenness, as they knew it would, and the castle in the twilight land was back, a hole blown in its walls beneath a small, billowing mushroom cloud. Things came roaring out of the cloud, attacking them.

They came at them fast, swept-wing creatures with tails of bright blue fire and staring malevolent eyes, pinpoints of dark, glowing crimson. The eight stood again together as the assault force went into a wingover and dive, a strafing run. There seemed to be no time to do anything but gape. The first winged being swept over them, guns stuttering a staccato roll. Streaks of tracer white stained the air and it was gone by. Little explosions marked the hillside, turf and earth thrown from little craters, and Demogorgon suddenly staggered, pierced by a dozen flaming rounds. He fell to the ground, gasping, and lost all touch with the battle. Another being made its run over the little group, rattling off a story of mayhem and blood.

Demogorgon lay on the grass face down, isolated from the inner world and drifting away into gray nonexistence. He wanted to run slides of all times past, to have his little death experiences and be done with it all, but the electronic lifelines held on and would not let him go. He was compelled to go on thinking, to call out in his pain.

What should it be? Yes: Brendan, if you are anywhere now, if you can hear me, please help. We are here for you.

A roar of rage tore the sky back into daylight and green eyes flamed, a frosty thunder that stopped the world. A hand swelled above their heads, immense, swatting the flying things from the air, crushing them back into an electronic nether place, ignoring their little cries of strident dismay. It struck at the walls of the castle, folding them back in upon themselves, tearing away at Centrum's outermost circuits, blinding Mother Ocean's God in the process.

Night fell suddenly and then more; the world went black and they moved on, transported and healed.

They ran down the dark corridors of Centrum's mind, surrounded by a glowing pool of liquid light that kept pace with their every step. They fled, and blackness enveloped fore and aft, surrounding them on all sides. They ran in a compact group, eight together, afraid to separate to any distance for fear of getting lost, and as a result they kept bumping into each other, caroming off walls, constantly in danger of falling down. They were afraid to stop.

Demogorgon was in the lead, slim, muscular legs pumping effortlessly, clenched fists swinging on the ends of balancing arms. His breath rasped in his throat, an aftershock of some deathlike experience, but he felt no pain. The cool air surged in and out, feeding him, urging him to go on. To what end? he thought. We're in here now, without plan or preparation. It mirrors our lives, like the lives of all men. We go on and on, running blindly toward the unknown until we stumble and fall. Where can he be? Can anything help me find him? I'll know what to do then. The notion was comforting.

Krzakwa came last, lumbering, trying to keep up, wobbling with fatigue. Thin worms of pain crawled through his sides, demanding rest, but he couldn't stop. The others would go on without him. I laid careful plans for what we were to do and none of it has happened, he thought. Only the interactive processes of Bright Illimit keep us rolling. "Throw in the kitchen sink!" I said. A good thing, too. So much unpredictability would have overwhelmed us in an instant! He ran on, moaning softly as his feet thudded heavily upon the unforgiving stone.

Ariane ran in the middle, thankful for the superb physical conditioning that she'd unintentionally kept all her life. How is it so? Bright Illimit, she realized, must have some reason for making us suffer like this. It could give us unlimited endurance, or at least take away the pain!

How many factors impinged upon them? In the old days, when the wires were simple and processes were clean, programs had warred upon each other for the edification of men, for their delight and amusement. In that time, as now, the programs were still at the mercy of their hardware. They could do no more than the machine would allow. And they were in a machine, its capacities unknown. They came to a sudden stop, jumbling together comic-opera fashion, limbs entangled, bodies sprawled across the hard, dusty floor. They were still, hearts pounding, breaths wheezing into slow silence. There was a light ahead, and theirs had gone out.

Linked into the past through a series of memories connected by a single thread of emotion, Beth sat, seeing herself as a small dark eleven-year-old, on the ledge of the transparent solar panel of the family farmhold, watching the dust devils of this last day of November sweep across the fallow, stripy field which extended to the dim blue humps that defined the horizon. She kicked her feet and let the plastic flip-flops loosely flap against her soles. It was cold, though not cold enough to mist her breath, but the sun, a light so intense it blanched the most intense sky she could recall, seemed to sear her skin. Kentucky had already grown too small for her. She wanted to see the world, not just be in it through Comnet.

She wished her fathers would dream the same dreams she did. Theder was totally lost to the 'net, especially when there were fullsense programs, and Anselm was off most of the time, studying the lightning-quick evolution of the toxin-dominated ecosystems that sprouted among the fields. Neither had any time for her, though Theder did make love to her once or twice a week. She had heard that was the reason her mother had left, a month after the first time. It was fun,though, and the physical contact that it provided was a comfort. She didn't like the mess, though. When she had brought forth blood, the day before yesterday, that really had been messy. Of course, she had expected it for a month or two, and it really wasn't a surprise, but she knew that it was time for her to get herself together and get out of this situation. The school up in Canada had sent her a prospectus, indicating a scholarship would be no problem, and she supposed that was where she would go.

It was Anselm who made most of the decisions for the family. Her mother had chosen his last name, Toussaint, for her. Anselm was the person to speak to.

A whirlwind appeared almost at her feet, scouring up dust and dead leaves like an invisible sweeper. Beth hopped down and ran into it, giggling as the hot wind turned about her and pelted her with weightless debris. Suddenly it swung to the left and headed off toward the hills, leaving her to watch. She turned wistfully and skipped toward the entrance portico of the Station, maneuvering the lithe smallness of her body up the dirty concrete stairway, halfway up onto a massive balustrade. The warmth of the air seeping from the energy curtain ushered her in.

It wasn't difficult to find Theder Sabin. As usual, he was curled up on the watercouch in the darkened viewing room, head encased in the complex helmet which transmitted 'net sensory input. A look of amusement had somehow oozed out onto his face. Beth cleared the control tablet and wrote "Break" on the metallic surface. Though no physical change was obvious, Theder's body began to straighten, and his smile hardened into a grin. His eyes, after a minute, opened.

"Hello, dear Libbie. You should see what they've done. Another breakthrough in preparing films from the early days for a four-sense presentation. It's fantastic what they can do. I've just been watching something called Wings, from 1927. What color! And to imagine that they could get stuntmen to do those things. You know, there's a difference between real action and matte-pastiches. Care to join me?"

"No, Dad. I have something I want to talk to you and Dad

Anselm about. Something important. I am going away to school."

"Uh-hah. Well, it's really about time. I'll miss you, though. We both will. Let's get Ans on the phone." It was only an hour before the family's car came crunching up out of the dust to the west, casting a hazy shadow before it. The smell of oxidized metal preceded it. The big soft wheels conformed to the shallow troughs of the field and deflated into withered blue prunes as the vehicle came to a stop in front of the Station. Beth and Anselm both came out and hugged their third silently, and began to walk back up the stairs, hand in hand in hand. Anselm dropped their hands and sat on the top step, wiping his forehead with a dusty hand. Beth sat between her two fathers, resting her dark hands on the two knees, one pale and pudgy, the other sallow, scarred, and knobby. If the world could have stayed the way it was at that moment, she wouldn't have wanted to leave. Together with the two of them, the center of attention, she could see no winds in the field.

"You know I love the two of you," she began, feeling awkward, almost unable to tell them what they already knew. "But I've decided to leave. I'm eleven now, and I'm going to the Macallister School in Yellowknife. That's in the CFE, nowhere near the Sosh Old Zone, and they have offered me a scholarship."

Anselm looked pleased. "What kind of school is it. Old Style? Freeform?"

"It's a Summertree school, sort of free-form, but more rigorous. I think I'll like it there." Theder took her hand and intertwined her small fingers into his large clasp. "You can always come back. And we'll visit you too." Anselm nodded. He enveloped them both in his naked arms, and they held each other like that for a long time. "Remember," he said, "always remember—we're a family. Your mother is still with us. We're a family."

The Seedees, at least temporarily defeated, lay deep within the folds of Centrum, coupled together in a staggered line. They were wed primarily to each other, to their old mates andfriends, but the oils leaked back and forth along the line, making the many one. They whispered softly to each other in the silent darkness, reggae tunes of the battle's excitement, the flying mist and the sound-flare of an imaginary sun. But we lost, they sighed, wind currents in the sea, and so come closer to the death from which we cannot arise. The battle was lost and the war was in peril. Other voices whispered softly, pointing up the other factors among them: And if we win? What then? Centrum swallows us back into itself. We become dream matter once again, our awareness gone. That, too, is death. Shivers of terror, powered by the knowledge that it had already happened, that they had all been dead for countless ages. So why should we fight for the thing that will kill us? Why not let Centrum go down to doom with us? Let the great world spin on into darkness and come to a stop. A still, somber voice sparkled in their midst, one of many, interconnected: If Centrum dies, we are dead forever. If it lives, we may someday live again, for it needs us. We must fight!

The voices sighed on, talking to each other, making love grow like bubbles in the sea, a froth of mixing minds. They dreamed to each other, minimizing their differences, contravening the old evolutionary drives, yet powering them nonetheless.

Cooloil was caught in a bright dream of times past. Her gentle rhythms were settled into their old, quiescent ways. She wanted only to live again, as she had always lived, and so bespoke it to 7red and to all the others who had been called back from the void.

Before her, Seedees played in the freshness of Mother Ocean's methane sky, chasing about in great, complex patterns, the old culture-dances that made their senses reel with happiness and wonder, and she danced among them. Here, it was not the enclosed sea of Centrum's ship, instead people played their games in the natural surround of the old world, the world none of them had ever seen. She dashed about the sky on an anophagomotor jet, dodging playfully among the bright toxin-clouds, dashing through schools of brothermind fliers, bursting their unity asunder, feeling their raspy bodies bumping along her sides, hearingthe muted cries of their synchronized oils dimmish into startled cacophony. She tumbled, and kinesthesia made the world tumble.

There was another Seedee ahead. She projected her remote senses, reading the methane pressure waves, and identified him. Seven Red Anchorelles awaited her. She rushed forward joyfully and coupled with him. . . .

The deep oils of 7red pulsed with energy. He told a story to her, then to them all, of a time that had never been. In a complex song of what-if, he imagined that the Starseeders had never been born. What then?

The Starseeders had been the beginning of it all, yes, the founders of the Grand Design, but they had come from nature itself, just like the worlds and all the stars. The little methane worlds had come into being on their own, without interference from any intelligent agency, and it was known that intelligence could evolve by itself, in a haphazard fashion. Maybe . . . Maybe, without Starseeder and without Centrum, there would still have been Seedees. . . . No, that was the wrong word. There must be something else. . . .

He projected a vision: high in the skies of a cold, blue-green world the hard squid jetted, proud, knowing themselves the masters of creation. Though the nature of the sea dictated their form, they were no longer subsumed to the modeling powers of a silicate world virus. Unlike the dreamer, they had eyes and, from old, had known about the remote, twinkling points of light that had always dominated the sky. They had eyes, these proud creatures, and called themselves the People.

They worked together, on a Grand Design of their own. The People studied the worlds about them and, slowly, over the aeons, accumulated the materials for their quest. They plunged deep, to the core of their world; they mined the random metal masses that occasionally fell from the sky. They flew higher and higher until they had penetrated the spaces about them. They built ships that coursed the heavens. In time they had starships and found the other worlds. Mostly they were empty worlds, it was true, frequently theywere useless save as a source of more raw material, but that was not always the case. As the People colonized among the methane worlds they found other People in various stages of development. They coupled with them, subsumed them to the universal whole. They spread throughout creation.

The universe aged and, as it mellowed, brought forth other forms of life, other intelligences. The silicate worlds filled with life of their own sort, quick minds that climbed the steady ladder upward into the black, star-sequined night. As they arrived, one by one, they found the People waiting with open generosity, the elder statesmen of creation.

Cooloil flew through his vision, enthralled by the nobility of it, saddened by the tragedy that she knew had been real. Why had the fates not seen to it that her people had been the masters of their own destiny?

Because the fates were Centrum and the Starseeder plan.

And why was it still so? Why had they never rebelled?

Because we could not, whispered another Seedee. Because we lived within Centrum and it ruled our lives down to the tiniest detail, down to the ultimate moment. How could we fight against such a thing without some outside agency to intervene in our behalf?

There was nothing beyond Centrum and the sea of Mother Ship. We are, as we always were, trapped. The Seedees moaned in unison, a soft wail of whispered death. . . . 7red's oil burst upon them like an incandescent cataract. There is now, he said, his meaning penetrating to them all. The disease is here. The thing that infects Centrum watches us and waits. You know what it is.

Some chance by-product of the Grand Design?

It is the Grand Design! The Starseeders made Centrum, which made us, solely to make more of their own kind. We are merely intermediary stages in a long process that has succeeded at last. They are here. Can they help us? Will they?

It doesn't matter. Let us help them to kill Centrum.

But then we will all die! Die forever!

Perhaps. But at least God will go down into the darknesswith us. We will not die alone. To me, that is a satisfactory end to it all.

So be it, whispered all the Seedees together, relishing their potential revenge.

John stood wearily. The others were seated on an inner rampart of one of the higher parapets, huddled in couples as if to hold off the next attack by ignoring the world around them and concentrating on what was happening behind their closed eyes. For the first time he noticed that a strong bond seemed to have been formed between Temujin and Aksinia, the latter cuddled in the bearded man's bulky grip. Strange, he thought. He scanned, once again, the flat, broken wall before him, the huge tower reaching upward into the night-circle, which now sported six stars, bloated and red like Betelgeuse, in a random constellation. He shook his head. What is this? How the fuck are we supposed to deal with a world in which their are no bases for understanding, in which the rules of the game are unreadable? OK . . . OK .

. . even if logic is not totally applicable here, this that seems is strongly tied to the premises of the Bright Illimit program. Something is not quite what it appears . . . no, that's wrong, nothing is quite what it appears.

"Well," he said, looking at the others, "should we proceed?" There was no dissent. They moved. Through barren halls that were nothing at all, John walked automatically, barely feeling the scraping of his feet on the hard rock. He had begun to feel that he would not be involved in the process of reliving memories, but, unexpectedly, it was not so.

There were endless hours of building data montages, pasting consonant intervals through the purely mathematical central motif. The music leading to the break before the rush into the coda was coming along, coming along. It would be finished, perhaps, today.

He looked through the complex notation, rather like a color abstraction of a city skyline viewed through a screen and window splattered with raindrops, to the real window that his desk faced. The computer feed dimmed anddisappeared, and the mountains of Backbone Range, snowy bleak and rimmed with halos of blowing ice, looked back at him. January was lord of Canada and he was warm and cozy in the sconce of his mother's cabin. Removed from the interface with his machine, the raw ache of his restored leg returned like a claw bite. He looked down at the cloth within which his cold, pale leg was regenerating its nerve tissue, and remembered the fall.

And yet, despite it all, it had been good. Here he was, idea tumbling on to idea, building the complexity of Reflection Counterpoint from the well of experiences that had brought him to this place. Sometimes he would marvel at how the pain had helped fuse the earlier idea of complex structures analogous to music in direct data throughput into something real and within his grasp to produce. It was a wonder—one of those things that are unbelievable until they occur. And, for the first time in his life, he was about to know the feeling of absolute triumph.

He brought the program overlay back into his field of vision and began to manipulate the loopy half scales of numbers that provided the background, interposing passing tones flanking the pivot chords a hundred deep. This, when played back, amazingly, had just the effect he had desired, and no more tinkering was necessary. The penultimate passage was finished. He linked in the preliminary coda file and looked at it again in the context of the finished climax. Ho! he thought. That's closer to the final version than I suspected.

A sequence of commands fleshed out the coda with the color-chords he had already made, holding the additions in his mind for a moment to twist them this way and that, catching overly legato numbers and popping them slightly. A little inversion put just the hint of a reference to Bach's " Heut ' triumphieret Gottes Sohn ," followed by the barest chuckle, and, yes! it was finished. He had done it!

John shut the interface off with a mental click and sat back. He was laughing, knowing for once that what he had done was right. Perfect. He had captured the essence that brimmed within him, and, perhaps, created a new art form in theprocess. He slapped his leg and smiled at the pain, and returned to the present.

The eight crept forward out of the darkness, slowly feeling their way into the unknown circuitry. The dim world about them stayed artificialized, moldering stone walls glowing with a dim, greenish phosphorescence, redolent of damp, ancient life. They stopped, hiding behind a low wall that had somehow come into existence, and peered into an enormous chamber. Lit by flickering red torchlight, its walls were of pale, translucent marble in which varihued whorls of color were faintly visible. The ceiling was a vaulted arch, the inside of a blank, high dome. Windows suddenly appeared, as if an afterthought, tall, thin slits that admitted dim vermilion twilight and faint breezes, drafts of cool, dry air that stirred the flames and made shadows dance upon the walls. The strong, incongruous smell of jasmine tea began to fill their nostrils.

Things floated above the floor. For a brief moment they saw the familiar hard-squid shapes of the Seedees hanging there. They were linked together in pairs, connected at their anchorelles, and the couplets were joined together in a double row, like a string of firecrackers waiting to be touched off. The forms began to change. They writhed and their outlines began to blur, shifting away into a melting softness, like oil-based clay thrown into a kiln.

"What's going on?" asked Vana, turning to look at the others. Tem shook his head, pale face beaded with droplets of cold sweat. "I think Bright Illimit's routines are looking for some image we can deal with."

"Yes," said Ariane. "It's trying to find an average for all of us. . . ." They fell silent and watched. The shapes before them coalesced, forming into a huddled, glowing mass, an insensate pool of light gathered in the middle of the soft, padded floor. Things began to appear in the light, vaguely humanoid images that spilled onto one another, mixing together as a mass of indistinct limbs and bodies. They shifted and changed rapidly as the program picked up imagery, first from one controlling mind, then another. Abruptly, the picture sharpened into focus, jumping out at them like a dense holograph. There were a hundred human beings jumbled together motionless on the floor. They were huddled in endless arrays of sexual poses, every conceivable posture and position, like some alien Karnak wrought in three-dimensional, fleshlike stone. They remained still, for the moment showing no sign of life; then the first one moved.

A being from the center of the group stirred and, with his motion, the others breathed, a sudden sighing from a hundred manlike throats. The man, for he was clearly male, arose and stretched. Separated from the generalized mass of the group, posing before them, they could see him clearly now. The shape was generally humanoid, all of the parts were more or less present, but there seemed to be a lack of fine detail. The skins were pallid, the dull bone white of institutional walls, and everywhere there was a lack of flexion lines. The fingers were smooth; likewise the elbows and knees. His brow was empty of feature and his face was without the character lines that help distinguish human beings. Their hair, also white, was undifferentiated, a shapeless mass meant to indicate where hair would go. They were cartoons brought to life. A female Seedee arose to stand beside the man and they could see that she too was crude, as if adapted from a paleolithic statuette.

Their eyes opened, reddish orange, dully glowing coals.

"A touch of humanity," murmured Demogorgon, "and a strong flavor of alienness. Good work." The two Seedees walked slowly forward to stand before them while the others hung back and watched, motionless and silent. The two groups examined one another for a drawn-out moment; then the male being spoke. "I am called Seven Red Anchorelles," he said. "You are the aliens?" Krzakwa smiled softly. "I guess we are," he said.

7red nodded slowly and exchanged glances with the woman. In their featurelessness, they seemed to communicate. He turned back to the humans. "We know you're here to destroy the ancient Mind, what you call Centrum . . ."

"Wait a minute!" said Cornwell. "We don't want to . . ." 7red held up a pale hand, silencing him. "It doesn't matter what you intend. That is what you have come to do. We want to join you."

"Why?" asked Krzakwa flatly, his voice echoing from the hardening stone of the chamber. "That'll mean the end of you all."

Cooloil spoke for the first time, her voice portrayed as a rich, deep flow of liquid syllables. "We know that. We don't care. This has gone on long enough. Our people have never been free, and if we cannot be free, we would as soon cease to exist."

The humans could find no reply to this, each buried in his own secret responses. Cornwell found himself recalling his feelings as he'd emerged from his first submergence into the world of Centrum, when they'd followed Sealock's fleeing soul down into the depths. "Poor bastards, indeed," he murmured, and,

"Join us, then. We'll do what we can."

The Seedee reached forward and grasped his hand, touching him only fleetingly, while the others pressed forward, animated by an eagerness to begin.

Achmet Aziz el-Tabari was in Montevideo, in Tupamaro Arcology so far from Paris, to meet with his technical adviser for the first time. He walked through the cool, dark, quiet hallways, thinking of what it could mean. Brendan Sealock. He rolled the name around, considering its feel. It was an ordinary-seeming sort of name, a Sean Smith-like Anglo-Irish pastiche, but the syllables had a rolling dignity to them that was unusual. It sounded like the name of an impressive man and he wondered what sort of figure would be attached to it. He smiled. Probably a typical sort of brain-worker: short, skinny, stuttering. A hundred years ago he would have had rotten teeth and thick glasses. This character would probably smell bad. The vital statistics had been sparse. Born in the Deseret Enclave Complex thirty-two years ago, moved to New York Free City when eighteen, and spent the rest of his life at NYU. Typical. Some kind of theoretical design engineer working for MCD. A high-caliber type. Unlimited Comnet access.

That puzzled him a little. When he'd applied to Comnet for professional assistance in designing the Illimitor World, he'd been expecting to get a list of good programmers, preferably people working right in Paris, where he could easily visit them in person. He liked to work closely with the craftsmen he hired. You never knew when some sexy flesh might wander by. After his request, Comnet had asked for a set of specifications, so he'd sent in a précis of what he wanted the program to do. Astonishingly, there had been a wait of several minutes, then the unit had sent him one name, Brendan Sealock, and a single-digit TY-com address. Weird.

Whoever heard of a one-number address? Not only that, but why had Comnet referred him to a design engineer? The world held millions of top-quality programmers, many of them—hell, most of them—working in artistic fields. Surely the program wasn't so difficult that it would require new hardware! The idea was beginning to disturb him.

He arrived at the correct door and announced himself. He stood in front of it, staring at his own eye level, waiting for a person to appear. The door slid open and he was gazing at a chest. Demogorgon gasped and took a sudden step backward. The man was huge! At least a hundred kilos, close to a hundred and ninety centimeters tall. He looked upward from a broad, heavily muscled body into a face marked by unreconstructed scars. Details began to force themselves on him. At some point the man's nose had obviously been broken, and his eyes were dark green, sunk into shadows beneath heavy brows. His hair was a reddish-blond tangle, cut short in what looked like a homemade butchery of a coiffure. Sealock was grinning at him, showing big, square white teeth. He let his eyes drift downward, drinking in the minutiae of his physique. The man was dressed in white tennis shorts and a sleeveless shirt. His arms were thick, laden with big, slabby muscles and roped with thick veins; his legs were sleek, hairy pillars ending in short, broad, blunt-toed feet. His hands had knobby, white-scarred knuckles, as if he'd spent a lot of time fighting with stone walls. "Ah . . ." He swallowed, convulsively, fighting confusion. "Mr. Sealock?"

The behemoth nodded. "Right. You must be Tabari, the artist." He stood aside from the doorway that he blocked, moving with a lithe grace that somehow fitted in with his otherwise megalithic appearance.

"Come on in. I've been waiting for you."

Demogorgon followed him into the apartment, watching the muscles of his buttocks bulge inside his shorts, following the rolling movements of the sinews in his back and legs. The man's arms swung lightly at his sides, fingers slightly flexed, a delicate-looking posture. Good God! he thought. I'm in love. Somehow he found himself sitting in a soft chair, sipping from a tall, cold, mildly alcoholic drink the man had made him. The glass helped to cover up the difficulty he was having, giving him something innocuous to do with his hands as they talked. This was going to be more difficult than he'd thought. Sealock sat down opposite him, swilling foamy red ale from a glass mug.

"You know," said Sealock, "that's a pretty interesting idea you've got. You realize no one's ever called for user/program interactivity on that level before?"

Demogorgon shook his head. "I had no idea what I was asking. I just know what I wanted it to do." The man grinned. "Which was quite a lot! This thing is really beyond the reach of the public-access Comnet levels. We're going to have to work with Tri-vesigesimal, at least! And that may disappoint you. But, look, I have to tell you— the ultimate barriers we will run into are legal, not technological. If we ... Is something wrong?"

Demogorgon realized with a start that he'd been staring fixedly at Sealock's face, fascinated by the complex interplay of the savage features as they were animated by speech and thought. "I'm sorry. I, uh .

. . excuse me, but why do you have all those scars and muscles?"

"Huh?" The man burst out laughing, a thrilling resonance from deep within his chest. "It's from my hobby."

"Your hobby?" Allah! Why am I acting so stupid? He felt as if he were totally out of control.

"I'm a boxer."

Shit! A boxer? This was ridiculous! The man must be likesome kind of comic-opera hero, all the muscles and brains a human body could hold gathered into one place. And he probably had the manners and wit of a nineteenth-century fictional nobleman. "I see." Oh, witty reply!

They got to work, laying out the initial questions and problems that would finally lead to the creation of Bright Illimit. Later, far into the night, they were sitting side by side, poring over a preliminary flow diagram, when he got up the courage to make his move at last.

He put his hand on the man's thigh and let it drift around to the sensitive skin of the inner side. The action seemed to go unnoticed, but the contact of the flesh under his hand made his finger tingle, egging him on. He ran his hand up the thigh, touching the place where a thick tendon ran into Sealock's trunk. Still nothing? No.

The man stopped talking and stared at him, then leaned back on the couch, grinning wryly. Demogorgon gazed into his eyes for a moment, searching for some kind of acceptance. There seemed to be nothing there, no movement in the soul. He sighed. For the moment, maybe this would be enough. These things often took time. He gripped Sealock's waistband and gently slid the shorts down, then buried his face in a hair-tangled crotch, greeted by the exciting start of an erection. When it was over, he rubbed his face against the man's side, feeling the power enclosed beneath his skin, and softly said, "That was nice. Want to do something for me now?" He still ached with desire. The man opened his eyes and looked down, then seemed to smirk, an ugly expression. "No," he said. Demogorgon felt a vague surprise dawning. "But . . . I ..." Sealock grinned. "Your choice, asshole. I didn't ask for that." But when Demogorgon burst into tears the man held him close, stroking his long dark hair and murmuring softly, trying to comfort him in some strange way.

Centrum felt the awaited attack in three stages. It was nursing itself in the darkness the battle had made, trying to reassemble its tattered subroutines, to repair the damage that had been wrought among its circuitry. So far, it was not too bad, but the humans were far stronger than it had suspected. It had known what they could do from what it had seen in the first captive, but the others were far weaker. How had they done so much? Something was helping them, but what? It felt like the captive, but that was impossible. Everything was there, the captive secured, dismantled and soaked into the circuitry, part of Centrum, adding to its strength. What have they done to me? Another thought surfaced. What have I done to myself? It was disquieting. . . .

The first event occurred. Suddenly, Centrum felt the Seedee subroutines stripping away, popping from its grasp one by one. The little programs came to life as they left, bubbling gleefully, bright surges within their electronic pheromones. Centrum screamed mournfully within itself and began frantically patching up its shredded defenses, stopping the gaping rents that had been left behind. This was impossible! How could the suborned consciousnesses act independently of its will? The answer awaited it in the renewed darkness: I gave them back life. Not all, but enough. Apparently. How could it turn the tide against them all? It must go on the attack!

Centrum prepared itself carefully, getting ready to strike out at its enemies, to defeat them, but there was not enough time. In the nanosecond world of the artificial mind, the attack was renewed. Centrum squalled with terror.

Sudden probes thrust in from all sides, opening it to the sudden harsh light of the burgeoning stars without. It went from dark blindness to an incandescence that showed no detail. Pain tore at it. What is happening? cried its terror. Some great ravening beast was tearing its way in, gnawing through the delicate vitals of an age-old circuitry, a mad, hungry thing clad in the visage of the captive, a thing which sought out itself.

They had it now! Centrum felt powerful forces grasping inon every side, tendrils reaching throughout its complex organism. It had time for one soft cry, a desperate plea for mercy, then the powers of the universe pulled it apart, fragmenting it into its separate subunits, and a consciousness that had endured for twenty billion years was extinguished.

Afterward, Centrum's castle had been reduced to a flattened pile of smoking rubble. Sheets of color drifted across the sky, mostly hues of gray and pale yellow, and the horizon seemed shrunken. Bright Illimit still maintained its illusion, but it was working near its capacities now and was having difficulty keeping the various facets in order. The Seedees circled overhead, still alive by the external program's power, flying winged work vacuoles, and the eight stood in the middle of the carnage, accompanied by 7red and Cooloil. Not far from them, a small, ancient stone tower rose from the earth. Krzakwa turned to face the two Seedees. "It's done," he said.

"It had to be," said 7red, nodding slowly. "How long will we last now?"

"I don't know. Probably for as long as Bright Illimit can hold its grip on you as a subroutine. After we're gone . . ."

"Isn't there anything we can do for them?" asked Cornwell, gazing about at the wreckage of this complex inner world. "Seems like a shitty reward for the help they gave us." The Selenite shrugged.

Demogorgon was staring steadfastly at the tower. "We can leave them with the program, I suppose, but I don't know how much good it will do. This is an alien place. . . . When we close off the connection with Shipnet, it may not survive."

"Something will survive," said Ariane, "but it may not be the individually conscious Seedee routines." Cooloil sighed. "If that is all we can hope for, it is all we must ask. If we survive in any form as a free people, then it will be better than anything we ever had before."

"Why do we have to close them off from Shipnet?" asked Harmon. "As long as we leave it open, they'll still be alive."

"You're all forgetting one important fact," said Krzakwa. "We aren't really out here in isolation, permanently separated from the rest of the Solar System. In just a few weeks Formis Fusionwill arrive, with its cargo of USEC scientists, who'll take all this away from us, by force of arms if necessary. . . . And after them, vessels of the Contract Police will arrive, bringing with them all the force of the Pansolar Union."

"To put it succinctly," said Axie, "we're fucked."

"Yeah."

"Let's worry about all that when the time comes," said Demogorgon. "We didn't come down here to destroy Centrum or rescue the Seedees from a fate worse than death. We came to get Brendan back. Now let's see if we can pry him out of this mess."

"We have to find him first," said Vana. "Where is he?" Ariane gestured toward the tower. They began to walk, Demogorgon in the lead, and the Seedees followed them. The interior of the small building was simple, a spiral staircase that led upward through the wan near darkness to a small, roofless room, its crenellated walls open to the sky. Brendan Sealock lay on a small pallet in the middle of the floor, his eyes closed, his face peaceful. His skin was waxen, almost translucent, and his chest was still.

Demogorgon knelt beside him and reached out to touch the cold features. He peeled back the eyelids and then recoiled briefly. The eyes were spheres of transparent glass, lightless and dull.

"He's all apart," said Krzakwa. "I don't know what we can do."

"Weren't we going to use Bright Illimit to find and reassemble his components?" asked Ariane. The Selenite nodded. "We were. But if we take it away from the functions it's maintaining now, all the Seedees die."

"Do it then," said Seven Red Anchorelles. "Don't fail your friend for our sake."

"No," said Demogorgon. He looked up at them all. "You told me what I could do before we came in here, Tem, and you told me what it might mean. I know how to do it and I'm willing to take the chance." He didn't wait. Demogorgon turned and threw himself onto the body. There was a moment of electric tension in the air, then he seemed to melt into the dead flesh.

Brendan Sealock was strolling through Ronkonkoma Megapark out on Long Island, hand in hand with a young woman. Maraia Manderville was tall and blond, slender, with narrow hips and a bright, open face. Her eyes were a pale sea green and she seemed to be always smiling. He put his arm around her as they walked, one hand resting on her buttock, feeling the aliveness of her flesh flow into him. They stopped beneath a carefully sculpted weeping willow tree, burying themselves in the cathedral of its branches, and embraced. Brendan felt a surge of warmth as he crushed her to his chest. They kissed and then broke apart, holding each other at arm's length, smiling. Her breath had tasted faintly of some unidentifiable ketone.

They walked on, looking at the sky and the park's attractions, isolated from each other but together. They went on the Sunburst ride, a sort of magnetic-field roller coaster in which the flying cars soared on unique, randomly programmed paths. She sat on his lap, facing him, looking steadfastly into his eyes as the ride threw them around. Her breasts brushed against his chest and he held his hands clamped around her waist. The motion of the car moved them against each other and they felt a hot tension forming between them. The ride ended and they walked on.

Darkness fell, and they strolled along the beach, watching the meaningless stars and listening to the surf hissing across the sand, breaking in cool surges around their ankles, excavating the ground from beneath their feet. As they walked, Maraia pressed close against his side, her shoulder under his arm and her head nestled at the base of his throat. He felt the wisps of her hair, stirring in the gentle, fresh sea breezes, tickling on his bare skin. They stopped, wrapping their arms about each other, and kissed for a long time, and a heavier wave burst over them, throwing foamy water up onto their thighs. They went up into the higher dunes and lay down, squirming together to make a pocket in the sand. They touched and stroked each other and Brendan felt her breath like a hot little furnace on the side of his face. They were ready to make love, but this was too exquisite. Thescraps of cloth that were their scant pieces of apparel held them apart just long enough, prolonging their excitement, bringing them to levels of anticipation from which the act itself could only be a denouement. They lay still for a while, letting the matter subside. Their hearts slowed and their skins cooled with the evaporation of drying sweat.

After a while they got up and walked on, holding hands again. Their hips bumped together as they moved up the beach, renewing a touch of their excitement. They came to a long, dark wooden pier, a carefully preserved relic of a former era, and walked out on it. They sat at the end of the structure, sides touching, and let their feet dangle down into an infinite-seeming darkness. Sealock put his arm around her side, reaching under her arm to toy with the firmness of a small breast. He felt her nipple stiffening and enlarging under the movement of his fingers. She nuzzled her head against his chest, rubbing her face against his skin, and her breath snarled softly in her throat, a faint, desire-driven purr. She lay down along the edge of the pier, putting her head in his lap, facing upward to gaze at his face, her eyes pools of glinting moisture in the starlight. She reached her hand up and drew her fingernails softly across his chest, making long trails in his dense hair. He shivered and ran his hand down across her stomach and onto the outside of her thin shorts, drawing his fingers softly between her legs. Her hips rocked back and forth once and she sighed, closing her eyes. She turned her head and bit gently at the ridged flesh of his stomach, then turned on her side and ran one hand up the inside of his thigh. The spell of apartness, of waiting, seemed broken then and they clutched at each other hungrily.

I'm going to Montevideo in the morning, he thought with a small pang of regret. They made love at last, slowly and far into the night, and the quiet sea breezes sighed a steady accompaniment to awaken their senses.

Stereotaxis.

Brendan and Demogorgon lay together on the roof garden of Tupamaro Arcology, cooling slowly as the night progressed and the southern stars wheeled above them. The

Arab lay sprawled across his chest, hand grappling low, following the development of a slow detumescence. Another episode, another bit of disagreeability. It wasn't all that different from his relationship with Ariane. Where did all these things come from?

"You know," said Demo, "I can always taste the woman on you." Brendan snorted softly. "You're imagining things again."

"It doesn't matter. I know she's there and what I taste is the bitterness of that knowledge."

"What do you expect me to do?"

Demogorgon sat up and let his head drop forward onto his knees, long black hair flowing over his forearms. "I don't know. A little something for me, I suppose. It'd be nice."

"I'm submitting to your desires; letting you do things to me. That's the best I can manage."

"I know." The man got up suddenly and walked off into the darkness. Brendan called after him, but he didn't turn back, disappearing swiftly into the night, a phantasm that quickly wasted away. Brendan lay there for a while longer, his mind deliberately kept blank, feeling the warm summer wind rush over him. The upper atmosphere seemed to be heavily disturbed at the moment and the stars were twinkling violently. He got up and walked through the damp grass, feeling the rough edges of the blades clutch at his bare feet and stroke the tender spaces between his toes. He shook his head angrily and went below, looking for Ariane.

He was back in New York again and an MCD board meeting was breaking up, the nine members rising to their feet, chairs making hollow sounds as they scraped across the floor. Cass Mitchell had been his usual raucous, giggling self, a miasma of seeming senility interspersed with flashes of the old brilliance. Sealock started to follow Gina Redden out the door, his eyes fixed on the delicate, 2/4 twitching of her jeans-clad buttocks, but the chairman stopped him.

"Boy, I wish I could still fuck!" he said, grinning up at him, his face a mass of leathery, cancerous-looking wrinkles. "Youknow what? It hurts to get a hard-on when you're as old as me. Sometimes it even hurts to pee. I haven't gotten laid in almost forty years. Do yourself a favor, kid: live gloriously and die young!" He stalked off like a baggy insect, shaking his head and muttering angrily to himself.

Brendan stood motionless for a moment, then drew his hand across his face like an old-time comedian, stretching his features downward. Jesus! What next? He walked out the door, intent on catching up with the woman. She was waiting for him by the elevator.

"Is he nutty, or what?" Gina Redden was not a particularly attractive woman. She had long brown hair which she wore in a high ponytail, with wings of hair hanging down beside her narrow, triangular face. Her nose was large, aquiline, and her eyes were dark brown and looked watery all the time. She was grinning and he noticed that her lips were getting chapped again.

She was thick-waisted, not fat but muscular-seeming. She had a mannish stride; "Walks like a farmer," someone had said; and had considerable strength in her shoulders and arms. For some reason a lot of men were excited by her appearance and masculine habits. He grinned at her. "Who knows? I can't imagine what it must be like to get that old."

"Who would want to?" The elevator let them off on the ground floor and they were standing in the foyer, beneath its famous caveman poster.

"Want to go out to dinner with me?"

She looked at him with a narrow, sidelong glance, smiling crookedly. "I got a date tonight." Sealock shrugged haphazardly. "Oh. OK, maybe some other time."

"Sure." They were walking down the street together, long strides matched, arms swinging in unison.

"Who is it, anybody I know?"

"Mike Torr ."

"The snuff-dipper? You got to be kidding!"

"No, really!" She was giggling at him, almost blushing at his laughter. "He's a lot of fun." Sealock shook his head in mock dismay. "Boy, oh, boy," hesaid, "I will never understand why women make the choices that they do!"

"Now, now. Just because I didn't choose you is no reason to get bitter." They were still smiling, still in a teasing social mode.

"Yeah. I've heard all that before. How can you take that cud-chewer in preference to a Celtic god like me?" He posed before her in the street, flexing his muscles into a buckling chaos of flesh.

"My, my!" she exclaimed, running a hand over one stiffened bicep. "I just don't know. I must be mentally ill!"

"You must be." The charade fell apart as laughter overcame them.

"Look, I gotta run now. See ya later." She punched him in the arm and was gone. Sealock walked slowly back to his apartment, still grinning. She was fun to work with.

Later that night Brendan was standing in one of the little street parks so common in modern New York, watching the passing scene with a mild disinterest. There seemed to be a lot of bums out tonight. Probably most of them were just posing as bums, for it was a fun role that many people enjoyed playing. Some of them might be real bums, he supposed, people far gone in volitional alcoholism.

"Hi!" He turned about and saw one of the young girls from the Intro to QTD course that he was teaching. Cathy, um . . . no, Lori something-or-other. The rest of her name escaped him.

"Hello. Having a nice night?" She was slim and had lots of bushy red hair framing a cute, bland little face, with a light dusting of freckles. She was, he knew, something like eighteen years old. She shrugged. "OK, I guess. I'm getting a little bored."

"Tired of studying?"

She nodded. "Your class is a little hard for me."

A glinting supposition appeared in his mind. "Tell you what," he said, "come on up to my apartment and I'll give you a nice body rub. Fix you right up."

She seemed startled and stared at him, hands on her hips. "What is this, some kind of come-on?" He held his hands up before him, palms outward, grinning broadly. "Perish the thought! Look, I'm trying to do something nice for one of my students for a change. This'll be the ultimate in refreshing experiences. I promise not to fuck you."

She still seemed doubtful but went with him. Once there, she stood quietly while he spread a soft blanket on the floor of his living room, watching him closely. He turned to face her, and she said, "What do I do now?"

"Stand still." He began to undress her, unbuttoning her blouse, pulling off her tattered, cut-down shorts. He slid her out of a pair of green silk underpants and she stood naked before him, obviously uneasy. He looked her over and shook his head, smiling. Youth held its own special beauty, something he had not noticed when he had been that age. She blushed before his gaze, redness suffusing down onto her chest.

"OK, now lie face down on the blanket." She did his bidding.

He got out a small bottle of almond-scented oil and poured it onto her back. She shivered as he touched her with his hands, beginning to knead the slippery stuff into her skin. She was tense at first, frightened by the way it had gotten out of her control so quickly, but later relaxed, surrendering to the experience as his hands squeezed her buttocks and worked their way down her legs. He turned her over and worked on the front of her soft body. Her breathing quickened when he massaged her breasts and sweat began to bead across her brow and upper lip as his hands moved down her abdomen. She had at least one orgasm when he rubbed the oil slowly into her groin, but he kept his word to the end.

Morning found him sitting cross-legged on the beach, staring out across the steel-gray sea, watching the mists disperse before the oncoming day, waiting for the sun to rise out of the sea, a dull, fat orange ball. This was the day. He breathed in deeply, smelling the tang of ionized air, the scent of the land, sailors called it, and feeling it invigorate him, fill him with renewed life. I love it here, he realized, just like I loved my childhood.

This time, I'll not let it get away. New York, Comnet, the life in the streets, all of it. I don't think I've ever been happier. How could I ever go away?

Scenes passed before him, women clustered thickly round, friends and experiences everywhere. His work was fulfilling, sex could be had just by stretching out his hand. He treasured the nights spent alone in his apartment, the times of close and somber thought. What else could anyone want?

The Games awaited. He got up and stretched carefully, feeling the solid muscles rippling across his back. Montevideo, he thought, and glory before my peers, then I come home again. He strode off into a gathering cloud of darkness.

Demogorgon felt himself going down the drain, like a childhood nightmare come to life at last. He swirled down and around and down, the darkness growing all around him. His memory and life were coming apart, and he felt himself fragmenting, subsystems flying off in all directions, preceding him into the night of nonbeing. He was silent and felt nothing as his emotional drivers were stripped from him. In the end, he was no longer a person, just a disembodied consciousness dropping in a tight spiral. As he fell, other subsystems were being sucked up the center of the spiral, pieces of Brendan Sealock being reassembled by the process of his fall. He was succeeding. He recognized the bits as they swept past him, scenes from Brendan's life in which he had had a part. I will not completely die, then, he realized, for bits of me rise again, embodied in all the past that was his. Had he been able to feel, it might have been comforting.

He fell and the black clouds gathered him in. He fell and, in just a little while, he was gone.

Brendan Sealock felt himself rising through cottony layers of unconsciousness. It was like the journey that imagination sent him on in the old films. The doctor was peeling away the endless layers of gauze bandage that covered his eyes and he waited, frightened. Will I be able to see again when he's done? I don't want to know. The light grew as the layers ofcloth between him and the world diminished. He fancied he could see the grainy texture of the gauze. What will I see when the last layer is gone? Will I emerge into a life of light and color or will the world always be a blur to me? Is a life of light and shadow without any detail better than black, blinding death? He was in agony, but he waited. Suddenly, the last layer was gone.

Brendan Sealock awoke and opened his eyes.