tories











Stories

53 Stories

Greg Egan

 

From Greg Egan - Collected Short Stories (53) (v1.3)
(html) on #bookz, April 2009.

Contents

Original TOC

Appropriate
Love

Artifact

Axiomatic

Blood
Sisters

Border
Guards

The Caress

Chaff

Closer

Cocoon

Crystal
Nights

The Cutie

Dark
Integers

The Demonłs
Passage

Dust

Eugene

The Extra

Glory

The
Hundred-Light-Year Diary

In Numbers

Induction

The Infinite
Assassin

Into
Darkness

A Kidnapping

Learning to
Be Me

Lost
Continent

Luminous

Mind
Vampires

Mister
Volition

Mitochondrial
Eve

The Moral
Virologist

Neighbourhood
Watch

Oceanic

Oracle

Orphanogenesis

Our Lady of
Chernobyl

The Planck
Dive

Reasons To
Be Cheerful

Riding the
Crocodile

The
Safe-Deposit Box

Scatter My
Ashes

Seeing

Silver Fire

Singleton

Steve Fever

TAP

Transition
Dreams

Unstable
Orbits In The Space Of Lies

The Vat

The Walk

Wangłs
Carpets

The Way She
Smiles, The Things She Says

Worthless

Yeyuka

 

Original TOC

Egan, GregAppropriate Love

Egan, GregArtifact

Egan, GregAxiomatic

Egan, GregBlood Sisters

Egan, GregBorder Guards

Egan, GregCaress

Egan, GregChaff

Egan, GregCloser

Egan, GregCocoon

Egan, GregCrystal Nights

Egan, GregCutie

Egan, GregDark Integers

Egan, GregDemon's Passage

Egan, GregDust

Egan, GregEugene

Egan, GregExtra

Egan, GregGlory

Egan, GregHundred Light-Year Diary

Egan, GregIn Numbers

Egan, GregInduction

Egan, GregInfinite Assassin

Egan, GregInto Darkness

Egan, GregKidnapping

Egan, GregLearning To Be Me

Egan, GregLost Continent

Egan, GregLuminous

Egan, GregMind Vampires

Egan, GregMister Volition

Egan, GregMitochondrial Eve

Egan, GregMoral Virologist

Egan, GregNeighbourhood Watch

Egan, GregOceanic

Egan, GregOracle

Egan, GregOrphanogenesis

Egan, GregOur Lady Of Chernobyl

Egan, GregPlanck Dive

Egan, GregReasons To Be Cheerful

Egan, GregRiding the Crocodile

Egan, GregSafe Deposit Box

Egan, GregScatter My Ashes

Egan, GregSeeing

Egan, GregSilver Fire

Egan, GregSingleton

Egan, GregSteve Fever

Egan, GregTAP

Egan, GregTransition Dreams

Egan, GregUnstable Orbits In the Space Of Lies

Egan, GregVat

Egan, GregWalk

Egan, GregWang's Carpets

Egan, GregWay She Smiles the Things She Says

Egan, GregWorthless

Egan, GregYeyuka

 

Appropriate Love

ęYour husband is going to survive. Therełs no question
about it.ł

I closed my eyes for a moment and almost screamed with relief.
At some point during the last thirty-nine sleepless hours, the uncertainty had
become far worse than the fear, and Iłd almost succeeded in convincing myself
that when the surgeons had said it was touch and go, theyłd meant there was no
hope at all.

ęHowever, he is going to need a new body. I donłt expect you
want to hear another detailed account of his injuries, but there are too many
organs damaged, too severely, for individual transplants or repairs to be a
viable solution.ł

I nodded. I was beginning to like this Mr Allenby, despite
the resentment Iłd felt when hełd introduced himself: at least he looked me
squarely in the eye and made clear, direct statements. Everyone else whołd
spoken to me since Iłd stepped inside the hospital had hedged their bets; one
specialist had handed me a Trauma Analysis Expert Systemłs print-out, with one
hundred and thirty-two ęprognostic scenariosł and their respective probabilities.

A new body. That didnłt frighten me at all. It sounded so
clean, so simple. Individual transplants would have meant cutting Chris open,
again and againeach time risking complications, each time subjecting him to a
form of assault, however beneficial the intent. For the first few hours, a part
of me had clung to the absurd hope that the whole thing had been a mistake;
that Chris had walked away from the train wreck, unscratched; that it was
someone else in the operating theatresome thief who had stolen his wallet. After
forcing myself to abandon this ludicrous fantasy and accept the truththat he
had been injured, mutilated, almost to the point of deaththe prospect of a new
body, pristine and whole, seemed an almost equally miraculous reprieve.

Allenby went on, ęYour policy covers that side of things completely;
the technicians, the surrogate, the handlers.ł

I nodded again, hoping that he wouldnłt insist on going into
all the details. I knew all the details. Theyłd grow a clone of Chris,
intervening in utero to prevent its brain from developing the capacity to do
anything more than sustain life. Once born, the clone would be forced to a
premature, but healthy, maturity, by means of a sequence of elaborate
biochemical lies, simulating the effects of normal ageing and exercise at a
sub-cellular level. Yes, I still had misgivingsabout hiring a womanłs body,
about creating a brain-damaged ęchildłbut wełd agonised about these issues
when wełd decided to include the expensive technique in our insurance policies.
Now was not the time to have second thoughts.

ęThe new body wonłt be ready for almost two years. In the
mean time, the crucial thing, obviously, is to keep your husbandłs brain alive.
Now, therełs no prospect of him regaining consciousness in his present
situation, so therełs no compelling reason to try to maintain his other organs.

That jolted me at firstbut then I thought: Why not? Why not
cut Chris free from the wreck of his body, the way hełd been cut free from the
wreck of the train? Iłd seen the aftermath of the crash replayed on the waiting
room TV: rescue workers slicing away at the metal with their clean blue lasers,
surgical and precise. Why not complete the act of liberation? He was his
brainnot his crushed limbs, his shattered bones, his bruised and bleeding organs.
What better way could there be for him to await the restoration of health, than
in a perfect, dreamless sleep, with no risk of pain, unencumbered by the
remnants of a body that would ultimately be discarded?

ęI should remind you that your policy specifies that the
least costly medically sanctioned option will be used for life support while
the new body is being grown.ł

I almost started to contradict him, but then I remembered:
it was the only way that wełd been able to shoehorn the premiums into our
budget; the base rate for body replacements was so high that wełd had to
compromise on the frills. At the time, Chris had joked, ęI just hope they donłt
get cryonic storage working in our lifetimes. I donłt much fancy you grinning up
at me from the freezer, every day for two years.ł

ęYoułre saying you want me to keep nothing but his brain
alivebecause thatłs the cheapest method?ł

Allenby frowned sympathetically. ęI know, itłs unpleasant having
to think about costs, at a time like this. But I stress that the clause refers
to medically sanctioned procedures. We certainly wouldnłt insist that you do
anything unsafe.ł

I nearly said, angrily: You wonłt insist that I do anything.
I didnłt, though; I didnłt have the energy to make a sceneand it would have
been a hollow boast. In theory, the decision would be mine alone. In practice,
Global Assurance were paying the bills. They couldnłt dictate treatment,
directlybut if I couldnłt raise the money to bridge the gap, I knew I had no
choice but to go along with whatever arrangements they were willing to fund.

I said, ęYoułll have to give me some time, to talk to the doctors,
to think things over.ł

ęYes, of course. Absolutely. I should explain, though, that
of all the various optionsł

I put up a hand to silence him. ęPlease. Do we have to go
into this right now? I told you, I need to talk to the doctors. I need to get
some sleep. I know: eventually, Iłm going to have to come to terms with all the
details ... the different life-support companies, the different services they
offer, the different kinds of machines ... whatever. But it can wait for twelve
hours, canłt it? Please.ł

It wasnłt just that I was desperately tired, probably still
in shockand beginning to suspect that I was being railroaded into some
off-the-shelf ępackage solutionł that Allenby had already costed down to the
last cent. There was a woman in a white coat standing nearby, glancing our way
surreptitiously every few seconds, as if waiting for the conversation to end. I
hadnłt seen her before, but that didnłt prove that she wasnłt part of the team
looking after Chris; theyłd sent me six different doctors already. If she had
news, I wanted to hear it.

Allenby said, ęIłm sorry, but if you could just bear with me
for a few more minutes, I really do need to explain something.ł

His tone was apologetic, but tenacious. I didnłt feel
tenacious at all; I felt like Iłd been struck all over with a rubber mallet. I
didnłt trust myself to keep arguing without losing controland anyway, it
seemed like letting him say his piece would be the fastest way to get rid of
him. If he snowed me under with details that I wasnłt ready to take in, then
Iłd just switch off, and make him repeat it all later.

I said, ęGo on.ł

ęOf all the various options, the least costly doesnłt
involve a life-support machine at all. Therełs a technique called biological
life support thatłs recently been perfected in Europe. Over a two-year period,
itłs more economical than other methods by a factor of about twenty. Whatłs
more, the risk profile is extremely favourable.ł

ęBiological life support? Iłve never even heard of it.ł

ęWell, yes, it is quite new, but I assure you, itłs down to
a fine art.ł

ęYes, but what is it? What does it actually entail?ł

ęThe brain is kept alive by sharing a second partyłs blood
supply.ł

I stared at him. ęWhat? You mean ... create some two-headed
... ?ł

After so long without sleep, my sense of reality was already
thinly stretched. For a moment, I literally believed that I was dreamingthat
Iłd fallen asleep on the waiting room couch and dreamed of good news, and now
my wish-fulfilling fantasy was decaying into a mocking black farce, to punish
me for my ludicrous optimism.

But Allenby didnłt whip out a glossy brochure, showing satisfied
customers beaming cheek-to-cheek with their hosts. He said, ęNo, no, no. Of
course not. The brain is removed from the skull completely, and encased in
protective membranes, in a fluid-filled sac. And itłs sited internally.ł

ęInternally? Where, internally?ł

He hesitated, and stole a glance at the white-coated woman,
who was still hovering impatiently nearby. She seemed to take this as some kind
of signal, and began to approach us. Allenby, I realised, hadnłt meant her to
do so, and for a moment he was flusteredbut he soon regained his composure,
and made the best of the intrusion.

He said, ęMs Perrini, this is Dr Gail Sumner. Without a
doubt, one of this hospitalłs brightest young gynaecologists.ł

Dr Sumner flashed him a gleaming that-will-be-all-thanks
smile, then put one hand on my shoulder and started to steer me away.

* * * *

I wentelectronicallyto every bank on the planet, but they
all seemed to feed my financial parameters into the same equations, and even at
the most punitive interest rates, no one was willing to loan me a tenth of the
amount I needed to make up the difference. Biological life support was just so
much cheaper than traditional methods.

My younger sister, Debra, said, ęWhy not have a total hysterectomy?
Slash and burn, yeah! Thatłd teach the bastards to try colonising your womb!ł

Everyone around me was going mad. ęAnd then what? Chris ends
up dead, and I end up mutilated. Thatłs not my idea of victory.ł

ęYou would have made a point.ł

ęI donłt want to make a point.ł

ęBut you donłt want to be forced to carry him, do you?
Listen: if you hired the right PR peopleon a contingency basisand made the
right gestures, you could get seventy, eighty per cent of the public behind
you. Organise a boycott. Give this insurance company enough bad publicity, and
enough financial pain, and theyłll end up paying for whatever you want.ł

ęNo.ł

ęYou canłt just think of yourself, Carla. You have to think
of all the other women whołll be treated the same way, if you donłt put up a
fight.ł

Maybe she was rightbut I knew I couldnłt go through with
it. I couldnłt turn myself into a cause c�lŁbre and battle it out in the media;
I just didnłt have that kind of strength, that kind of stamina. And I thought:
why should I have to? Why should I have to mount some kind of national PR campaign,
just to get a simple contract honoured fairly?

I sought legal advice.

ęOf course, they canłt force you to do it. There are laws
against slavery.ł

ęYesbut in practice, whatłs the alternative? What else can
I actually do?

ęLet your husband die. Have them switch off the life-support
machine hełs on at present. Thatłs not illegal. The hospital can, and will, do
just that, with or without your consent, the moment theyłre no longer being
paid.ł

Iłd already been told this half a dozen times, but I still
couldnłt quite believe it. ęHow can it be legal to murder him? Itłs not even
euthanasiahe has every chance of recovering, every chance of leading a
perfectly normal life.ł

The solicitor shook her head. ęThe technology exists to give
just about anyonehowever sick, however old, however badly injureda perfectly
normal life. But it all costs money. Resources are limited. Even if doctors and
medical technicians were compelled to provide their services, free of charge,
to whoever demanded them ... and like I said, there are laws against slavery
... well, someone, somehow, would still have to miss out. The present
government sees the market as the best way of determining who that is.ł

ęWell, I have no intention of letting him die. All I want to
do is to keep him on a life-support machine, for two yearsł

ęYou may want it, but Iłm afraid you simply canłt afford it.
Have you thought of hiring someone else to carry him? Youłre using a surrogate
for his new body, why not use one for his brain? It would be expensivebut not
as expensive as mechanical means. You might be able to scrape up the
difference.ł

ęThere shouldnłt be any fucking difference! Surrogates get
paid a fortune! What gives Global Assurance the right to use my body for free?ł

ęAh. Therełs a clause in your policy ...ł She tapped a few
keys on her work station, and read from the screen: ę... while in no way
devaluing the contribution of the co-signatory as carer, he or she hereby
expressly waives all entitlement to remuneration for any such services
rendered; furthermore, in all calculations pursuant to paragraph 97 (b) ..."

ęI thought that meant that neither of us could expect to get
paid for nursing duties if the other spent a day in bed with the flu.ł

ęIłm afraid the scope is much broader than that. I repeat, they
do not have the right to compel you to do anythingbut nor do they have any
obligation to pay for a surrogate. When they compute the costs for the cheapest
way of keeping your husband alive, this provision entitles them to do so on the
basis that you could choose to provide him with life support.ł

ęSo ultimately, itłs all a matter of ... accounting?ł

ęExactly.ł

For a moment, I could think of nothing more to say. I knew I
was being screwed, but I seemed to have run out of ways to articulate the fact.

Then it finally occurred to me to ask the most obvious
question of all.

ęSuppose it had been the other way around. Suppose Iłd been
on that train, instead of Chris. Would they have paid for a surrogate thenor
would they have expected him to carry my brain inside him for two years?ł

The solicitor said, poker-faced, ęI really wouldnłt like to
hazard a guess on that one.ł

* * * *

Chris was bandaged in places, but most of his body was covered
by a myriad of small machines, clinging to his skin like beneficial parasites;
feeding him, oxygenating and purifying his blood, dispensing drugs, perhaps
even carrying out repairs on broken bones and damaged tissue, if only for the
sake of staving off further deterioration. I could see part of his face,
including one eye socketsewn shutand patches of bruised skin here and there.
His right hand was entirely bare; theyłd taken off his wedding ring. Both legs
had been amputated just below the thighs.

I couldnłt get too near; he was enclosed in a sterile
plastic tent, about five metres square, a kind of room within a room. A
three-clawed nurse stood in one corner, motionless but vigilantalthough I
couldnłt imagine the circumstances where its intervention would have been of
more use than that of the smaller robots already in place.

Visiting him was absurd, of course. He was deep in a coma,
not even dreaming; I could give him no comfort. I sat there for hours, though,
as if I needed to be constantly reminded that his body was injured beyond
repair; that he really did need my help, or he would not survive.

Sometimes my hesitancy struck me as so abhorrent that I
couldnłt believe that Iłd not yet signed the forms and begun the preparatory
treatment. His life was at stake! How could I think twice? How could I be that
selfish? And yet, this guilt itself made me almost as angry and resentful as
everything else: the coercion that wasnłt quite coercion, the sexual politics
that I couldnłt quite bring myself to confront.

To refuse, to let him die, was unthinkable. And yet ...
would I have carried the brain of a total stranger? No. Letting a stranger die
wasnłt unthinkable at all. Would I have done it for a casual acquaintance? No.
A close friend? For some, perhapsbut not for others.

So, just how much did I love him? Enough?

Of course!

Why ęof courseł?

It was a matter of ... loyalty? That wasnłt the word; it
smacked too much of some kind of unwritten contractual obligation, some notion
of ędutył, as pernicious and idiotic as patriotism. Well, ędutył could go fuck
itself; that wasnłt it at all.

Why, then? Why was he special? What made him different from
the closest friend?

I had no answer, no right wordsjust a rush of
emotion-charged images of Chris. So I told myself: now is not the time to
analyse it, to dissect it. I donłt need an answer; I know what I feel.

I lurched between despising myself, for entertaininghowever
theoreticallythe possibility of letting him die, and despising the fact that I
was being bullied into doing something with my body that I did not want to do.
The solution, of course, would have been to do neitherbut what did I expect?
Some rich benefactor to step out from behind a curtain and make the dilemma
vanish?

Iłd seen a documentary, a week before the crash, showing
some of the hundreds of thousands of men and women in central Africa, who spent
their whole lives nursing dying relatives, simply because they couldnłt afford
the AIDS drugs that had virtually wiped out the disease in wealthier countries,
twenty years before. If they could have saved the lives of their loved ones by
the minuscule ęsacrificeł of carrying an extra kilogram and a half for two
years ...

In the end, I gave up trying to reconcile all the
contradictions. I had a right to feel angry and cheated and resentfulbut the
fact remained that I wanted Chris to live. If I wasnłt going to be manipulated,
it had to work both ways; reacting blindly against the way Iłd been treated
would have been no less stupid and dishonest than the most supine cooperation.

It occurred to mebelatedlythat Global Assurance might not
have been entirely artless in the way theyłd antagonised me. After all, if I
let Chris die, theyłd be spared not just the meagre cost of biological life
support, with the womb thrown in rent-free, but the whole expensive business of
the replacement body as well. A little calculated crassness, a little reverse
psychology ...

The only way to keep my sanity was to transcend all this bullshit;
to declare Global Assurance and their machinations irrelevant; to carry his
brainnot because Iłd been coerced; not because I felt guilty, or obliged; not
to prove that I couldnłt be manipulatedbut for the simple, reason that I loved
him enough to want to save his life.

* * * *

They injected me with a gene-tailed blastocyst, a cluster of
cells which implanted in the uterine wall and fooled my body into thinking that
I was pregnant.

Fooled? My periods ceased. I suffered morning sickness,
anaemia, immune suppression, hunger pangs. The pseudo-embryo grew at a
literally dizzying rate, much faster than any child, rapidly forming the
protective membranes and amniotic sac, and creating a placental blood supply
that would eventually have the capacity to sustain an oxygen-hungry brain.

Iłd planned to work on as if nothing special was happening,
but I soon discovered that I couldnłt; I was just too sick, and too exhausted,
to function normally. In five weeks, the thing inside me would grow to the size
that a foetus would have taken five months to reach. I swallowed a fistful of
dietary supplement capsules with every meal, but I was still too lethargic to
do much more than sit around the flat, making desultory attempts to stave off
boredom with books and junk TV. I vomited once or twice a day, urinated three
or four times a night. All of which was bad enoughbut Iłm sure I felt far more
miserable than these symptoms alone could have made me.

Perhaps half the problem was the lack of any simple way of
thinking about what was happening to me. Apart from the actual structure of the
ęembryoł, I was pregnantin every biochemical and physiological sense of the
wordbut I could hardly let myself go along with the deception. Even half
pretending that the mass of amorphous tissue in my womb was a child would have
been setting myself up for a complete emotional meltdown. Butwhat was it,
then? A tumour? That was closer to the truth, but it wasnłt exactly the kind of
substitute image I needed.

Of course, intellectually, I knew precisely what was inside
me, and precisely what would become of it. I was not pregnant with a child who
was destined to be ripped out of my womb to make way for my husbandłs brain. I
did not have a vampiric tumour that would keep on growing until it drained so
much blood from me that Iłd be too weak to move. I was carrying a benign
growth, a tool designed for a specific taska task that Iłd decided to accept.

So why did I feel perpetually confused, and depressedand at
times, so desperate that I fantasised about suicide and miscarriage, about
slashing myself open, or throwing myself down the stairs? I was tired, I was
nauseous, I didnłt expect to be dancing for joybut why was I so fucking
unhappy that I couldnłt stop thinking of death?

I could have recited some kind of explanatory mantra: Iłm
doing this for Chris. Iłm doing this for Chris.

I didnłt, though. I already resented him enough; I didnłt
want to end up hating him.

* * * *

Early in the sixth week, an ultrasound scan showed that the
amniotic sac had reached the necessary size, and Doppler analysis of the blood
flow confirmed that it, too, was on target. I went into hospital for the
substitution.

I could have paid Chris one final visit, but I stayed away.
I didnłt want to dwell upon the mechanics of what lay ahead.

Dr Sumner said, ęTherełs nothing to worry about. Foetal surgery
far more complex than this is routine.ł

I said, through gritted teeth, ęThis isnłt foetal surgery.ł

She said, ęWell ... no.ł As if the news were a revelation.

When I woke after the operation, I felt sicker than ever. I
rested one hand on my belly; the wound was clean and numb, the stitches hidden.
Iłd been told that there wouldnłt even be a scar.

I thought: Hełs inside me. They canłt hurt him now. Iłve won
that much.

I closed my eyes. I had no trouble imagining Chris, the way
hełd beenthe way he would be, again. I drifted halfway back to sleep, shamelessly
dredging up images of all the happiest times wełd had. Iłd never indulged in
sentimental reveries beforeit wasnłt my style, I hated living in the pastbut
any trick that sustained me was welcome now. I let myself hear his voice, see
his face, feel his touch

His body, of course, was dead now. Irreversibly dead. I
opened my eyes and looked down at the bulge in my abdomen, and pictured what it
contained: a lump of meat from his corpse. A lump of grey meat, torn from the
skull of his corpse.

Iłd fasted for surgery, my stomach was empty, I had nothing
to throw up. I lay there for hours, wiping sweat off my face with a corner of
the sheet, trying to stop shaking.

* * * *

In terms of bulk, I was five months pregnant.

In terms of weight, seven months.

For two years.

If Kafka had been a woman ...

I didnłt grow used to it, but I did learn to cope. There
were ways to sleep, ways to sit, ways to move that were easier than others. I
was tired all day long, but there were times when I had enough energy to feel
almost normal again, and I made good use of them. I worked hard, and I didnłt
fall behind. The Department was launching a new blitz on corporate tax evasion;
I threw myself into it with more zeal than Iłd ever felt before. My enthusiasm
was artificial, but that wasnłt the point; I needed the momentum to carry me
through.

On good days, I felt optimistic: weary, as always, but triumphantly
persistent. On bad days, I thought: You bastards, you think this will make me
hate him? Itłs you Iłll resent, you Iłll despise. On bad days, I made plans for
Global Assurance. I hadnłt been ready to fight them before, but when Chris was
safe, and my strength had returned, Iłd find a way to hurt them.

The reactions of my colleagues were mixed. Some were admiring.
Some thought Iłd let myself be exploited. Some were simply revolted by the
thought of a human brain floating in my womband to challenge my own
squeamishness, I confronted these people as often as I could.

ęGo on, touch it,ł I said. ęIt wonłt bite. It wonłt even
kick.ł

There was a brain in my womb, pale and convoluted. So what?
I had an equally unappealing object in my own skull. In fact, my whole body was
full of repulsive-looking offala fact which had never bothered me before.

So I conquered my visceral reactions to the organ per sebut
thinking about Chris himself remained a difficult balancing act.

I resisted the insidious temptation to delude myself that I
might be ęin touchł with himby ętelepathył, through the bloodstream, by any
means at all. Maybe pregnant mothers had some genuine empathy with their unborn
children; Iłd never been pregnant, it wasnłt for me to judge. Certainly, a
child in the womb could hear its motherłs voicebut a comatose brain, devoid of
sense organs, was a different matter entirely. At bestor worstperhaps certain
hormones in my blood crossed the placenta and had some limited effect on his
condition.

On his mood?

He was in a coma, he had no mood.

In fact, it was easiest, and safest, not to think of him as
even being located inside me, let alone experiencing anything there. I was
carrying a part of him; the surrogate mother of his clone was carrying another.
Only when the two were united would he truly exist again; for now, he was in
limbo, neither dead nor alive.

This pragmatic approach worked, most of the time. Of course,
there were moments when I suffered a kind of panic at the renewed realization
of the bizarre nature of what Iłd done. Sometimes Iłd wake from nightmares,
believingfor a second or twothat Chris was dead and his spirit had possessed
me; or that his brain had sent forth nerves into my body and taken control of
my limbs; or that he was fully conscious, and going insane from loneliness and
sensory deprivation. But I wasnłt possessed, my limbs still obeyed me, and
every month a PET scan and a ęuterine EEC proved that he was still
comatoseundamaged, but mentally inert.

In fact, the dreams I hated the most were those in which I
was carrying a child. Iłd wake from these with one hand on my belly,
rapturously contemplating the miracle of the new life growing inside meuntil I
came to my senses and dragged myself angrily out of bed. Iłd start the morning
in the foullest of moods, grinding my teeth as I pissed, banging plates at the
breakfast table, screaming insults at no one in particular while I dressed.
Lucky I was living alone.

I couldnłt really blame my poor besieged body for trying,
though. My oversized, marathon pregnancy dragged on and on; no wonder it tried
to compensate me for the inconvenience with some stiff medicinal doses of
maternal love. How ungrateful my rejection must have seemed; how baffling to
find its images and sentiments rejected as inappropriate.

So ... I trampled on Death, and I trampled on Motherhood.
Well, hallelujah. If sacrifices had to be made, what better victims could there
have been than those two emotional slave-drivers? And it was easy, really;
logic was on my side, with a vengeance. Chris was not dead; I had no reason to
mourn him, whatever had become of the body Iłd known. And the thing in my womb
was not a child; permitting a disembodied brain to be the object of motherly
love would have been simply farcical.

We think of our lives as circumscribed by cultural and
biological taboos, but if people really want to break them, they always seem to
find a way. Human beings are capable of anything: torture, genocide,
cannibalism, rape. After whichor so Iłd heardmost can still be kind to
children and animals, be moved to tears by music, and generally behave as if
all their emotional faculties are intact.

So, what reason did I have to fear that my own minorand utterly
selflesstransgressions could do me any harm at all?

* * * *

I never met the new bodyłs surrogate mother, I never saw the
clone as a child. I did wonder, thoughonce I knew that the thing had been
bornwhether or not shełd found her ęnormalł pregnancy as distressing as Iłd
found mine. Which is easier, I wondered: carrying a brain-damaged child-shaped
object, with no potential for human thought, grown from a strangerłs DNAor
carrying the sleeping brain of your lover? Which is the harder to keep from loving
in inappropriate ways?

At the start, Iłd hoped to be able to blur all the details
in my mindIłd wanted to be able to wake one morning and pretend that Chris had
merely been sick, and was now recovered. Over the months, though, Iłd come to
realise that it was never going to work that way.

When they took out the brain, I should have feltat the very
leastrelieved, but I just felt numb, and vaguely disbelieving. The ordeal had
gone on for so long; it couldnłt be over with so little fuss: no trauma, no
ceremony. Iłd had surreal dreams of laboriously, but triumphantly, giving birth
to a healthy pink brainbut even if Iłd wanted that (and no doubt the process
could have been induced), the organ was too delicate to pass safely through the
vagina. This ęCaesareanł removal was just one more blow to my biological
expectations; a good thing, of course, in the long run, since my biological
expectations could never be fulfilled ... but I still couldnłt help feeling
slightly cheated.

So I waited, in a daze, for the proof that it had all been
worthwhile.

The brain couldnłt simply be transplanted into the clone,
like a heart or a kidney. The peripheral nervous system of the new body wasnłt
identical to that of the old one; identical genes werenłt sufficient to ensure
that. Alsodespite drugs to limit the effectparts of Chrisłs brain had
atrophied slightly from disuse. So, rather than splicing nerves directly
between the imperfectly matched brain and bodywhich probably would have left
him paralysed, deaf, dumb and blindthe impulses would be routed through a
computerised ęinterfaceł, which would try to sort out the discrepancies. Chris
would still have to be rehabilitated, but the computer would speed up the process
enormously, constantly striving to bridge the gap between thought and action,
between reality and perception.

The first time they let me see him, I didnłt recognise him
at all. His face was slack, his eyes unfocused; he looked like a large, neurologically
impaired childwhich, of course, he was. I felt a mild twinge of revulsion. The
man Iłd seen after the train wreck, swarming with medical robots, had looked
far more human, far more whole.

I said, ęHello. Itłs me.ł

He stared into space.

The technician said, ęItłs early days.ł

She was right. In the weeks that followed, his progress (or
the computerłs) was astounding. His posture and expression soon lost their
disconcerting neutrality, and the first helpless twitches rapidly gave way to
coordinated movement; weak and clumsy, but encouraging. He couldnłt talk, but
he could meet my eyes, he could squeeze my hand.

He was in there, he was back, there was no doubt about that.

I worried about his silencebut I discovered later that hełd
deliberately spared me his early, faltering attempts at speech.

One evening in the fifth week of his new life, when I came
into the room and sat down beside the bed, he turned to me and said clearly,
ęThey told me what you did. Oh God, Carla, I love you!ł

His eyes filled with tears. I bent over and embraced him; it
seemed like the right thing to do. And I cried, toobut even as I did so, I
couldnłt help thinking: None of this can really touch me. Itłs just one more
trick of the body, and Iłm immune to all that now.

* * * *

We made love on the third night he spent at home. Iłd
expected it to be difficult, a massive psychological hurdle for both of us, but
that wasnłt the case at all. And after everything wełd come through, why should
it have been? I donłt know what Iłd feared; some poor misguided avatar of the
Incest Taboo, crashing through the bedroom window at the critical moment,
spurred on by the ghost of a discredited nineteenth-century misogynist?

I suffered no delusion at any levelfrom the merely subconscious,
right down to the endocrinethat Chris was my son. Whatever effects two years
of placental hormones might have had on me, whatever behavioural programs they
ęoughtł to have triggered, Iłd apparently gained the strength and the insight
to undermine completely.

True, his skin was soft and unweathered, and devoid of the
scars of a decade of hacking off facial hair. He might have passed for a
sixteen-year-old, but I felt no qualms about thatany middle-aged man who was
rich enough and vain enough could have looked the same.

And when he put his tongue to my breasts, I did not lactate.

We soon started visiting friends; they were tactful, and
Chris was glad of thatalthough personally, Iłd have happily discussed any
aspect of the procedure. Six months later, he was working again; his old job
had been taken, but a new firm was recruiting (and they wanted a youthful
image).

Piece by piece, our lives were reassembled.

Nobody, looking at us now, would think that anything had
changed.

But theyłd be wrong.

To love a brain as if it were a child would be ludicrous.
Geese might be stupid enough to treat the first animal they see upon hatching
as their mother, but there are limits to what a sane human being will swallow.
So, reason triumphed over instinct, and I conquered my inappropriate love; under
the circumstances, there was never really any contest.

Having deconstructed one form of enslavement, though, I find
it all too easy to repeat the process, to recognise the very same chains in
another guise.

Everything special I once felt for Chris is transparent to
me now. I still feel genuine friendship for him, I still feel desire, but there
used to be something more. If there hadnłt been, I doubt hełd be alive today.

Oh, the signals keep coming through; some part of my brain
still pumps out cues for appropriate feelings of tenderness, but these messages
are as laughable, and as ineffectual, now, as the contrivances of some
tenth-rate tear-jerking movie. I just canłt suspend my disbelief any more.

I have no trouble going through the motions; inertia makes
it easy. And as long as things are workingas long as his company is pleasant
and the sex is goodI see no reason to rock the boat. We may stay together for
years, or I may walk out tomorrow. I really donłt know.

Of course Iłm still glad that he survivedand to some
degree, I can even admire the courage and selflessness of the woman who saved
him. I know that I could never do the same.

Sometimes when wełre together, and I see in his eyes the
very same helpless passion that Iłve lost, Iłm tempted to pity myself. I think:
I was brutalised, no wonder Iłm a cripple, no wonder Iłm so fucked up.

And in a sense, thatłs a perfectly valid point of viewbut I
never seem to be able to subscribe to it for long. The new truth has its own
cool passion, its own powers of manipulation; it assails me with words like
ęfreedomł and ęinsightł, and speaks of the end of all deception. It grows
inside me, day by day, and itłs far too strong to let me have regrets.

Artifact

Euclid screams because the hooded man bends his arm behind
his back. I wish it would stop, because I fear the sound of snapping bone.
Euclid has very thin arms.

Before waking, perhaps precipitating it, I ponder the
insultingly obvious roots of the dream. Euclidłs thin arms are the laser beams
that criss-cross the artifact, bent by the black hole at the centre, which is
hooded by its event horizon. Euclid screams because space around the black hole
is violently distorted and will not support his axioms of geometry.

A final image before I open my eyes is of a mass
spectrometer, fed with my freshly ionised dream, depositing its easily
recognised components onto a photographic plate. I label each dark spot by
hand, except the last, which I know should be labelled ęsnapping bonesł. The
lab demonstrator would laugh if I wrote this on the plate.

Nervousness from my student days. A transparent image of my
dreamłs transparency. I wake.

Cabin lights brighten slowly to half strength. Over at my
desk the monitor still displays a blue schematic picture of the artifact, a sixty-four-pointed
star, each point joined to every other point by a slender blue beam. It is not
symmetric in any plane, yet it is pleasing to look at; hypnotically pleasing.

I dress and eat. I skim through the eight-year-old news summary
that arrived from home while I slept. News will come so fast on the trip back
that Iłll have time for nothing else.

In the corridor, everyone knows me with embarrassed cheerfulness.
People ask me to ęcheck that their shares are doing OKł although there is no
way I could get word to them faster than the daily reports. Just something to
say, to make me feel vaguely useful.

Eric Jackson, an astronomer like me, comes around a corner
and runs towards me, breathless and seemingly hoping to talk to me.

ęYoułve got to stay. You wonłt believe what Iłve found out.
The ratios between the times for the beams between the nodes are all
dimensionless constants!ł

He peers eagerly into my face, waiting. I havenłt really
heard him. His breathless staring makes me think back over his words for a
reply to make him go away, and as their meaning accumulates I feel horribly
uneasy.

In my contract, in every contract, is a guarantee of a free
passage home, no questions asked, on the next monthly shuttle. The
psychiatrists say it makes us all feel less worried by the time and distance
which separate us from home. I asked to go home, and they asked no questions,
but eyed me with concern and disappointment. How could I tell anyone that my
dreams had gone wrong?

ęFine structure?ł I ask blandly.

ęOh yes, and all the others.ł

ęAccurately?ł

ęAs far as we can measure. Arenłt you thrilled?ł

ęWell I suppose we know its purpose now.ł

ęIłd hardly say that. I mean there are still dozens of
possible explanations. It could be a work of art or a temple or a sort of �we
are intelligent" thing, like on Pioneer.ł

My mind drifts for a second. ęWho cares?ł I want to say. An
argument about Egyptian pyramids, and all the contrived and ultimately
meaningless ratios of their dimensions, half forms and then dies. It is not
likely to be coincidence or contrivance in this case, because whoever made the
artifact would certainly be aware of the values of certain dimensionless
combinations of physical constants. No surprise, no special implications.

ęYoułll stay now, wonłt you?ł

Jackson must be excited to breach etiquette so badly. ęNo.ł

ęBut think of all the work therełll be.ł

ęIłm sure it wonłt be too much for you.ł

This unsubtle hint to the unspeakable subject of nervous
breakdowns, which everyone on the ship now connects with me, cuts through his
excitement.

ęLook, Iłm sorry, but I thought youłd be pleased. I thought
it would be something to stay for.ł

Two days ago, when we picked up the artifact on deep-space
radar, Jackson had broken this news to me with a look in his eyes which had
said what he now put into words.

We parted. Today was my last day, but I took all the usual
turns, swung through all the same doors, and now Iłm seated at my ęofficeł desk
watching the computer doing X-ray spectrometry on emissions from gas being
drawn into the black hole. My eyes will not focus on the multicoloured graphs
that form in front of them, soon to be interpreted and summarised without my
intervention. A small bell will sound discreetly if something remarkable is
found, until I acknowledge my approval of a job well done.

The entire process, from the acceleration of the gas
molecules through to the sounding of the small bell, will appear in my mind as
a closed, complete entity, isolated and unchanged and unchangeable.

I hear a knock and turn around. Arthur Lindstrom, the Chief
Astronomer, is walking in, saying, ęMind if I come in? Iłd like to have a chat
about Ericłs discovery.ł

He sits on a swivelling chair beside me.

ęYou know, we mustnłt jump to conclusions. Therełs no reason
to assume that this ratio business is the whole purpose of the artifact,
because it could quite easily just be a minor aspect of its function. If youłve
been thinking over any theories you mustnłt junk them now just because this has
come up. Nothing even in natural astronomy is ever quite as simple as it seems
at first glance, and here wełre dealing with something carefully constructed by
another culture. We mustnłt be satisfied with our first theories or even our
tenth. This thing is going to provide generations of study, and we still may
never know its ultimate purpose.ł

ęMmm.ł It was all I could say.

ęI was hoping that you might let me know any thoughts youłve
had, seeing as this is your last day on the project.ł

I feel vaguely panicked. The past week I have been in no
state to think intelligently about anything, accepting my lack of interest in
the artifact as a final confirmation that spaceflight has disturbed me too
deeply to be tolerated. Back on Earth, just reading of the discovery would have
had my mind spilling over with possibilities, and being on the very ship that
found the artifact an ecstatic, impossible dream.

ęWell, Arthur, to be honest I havenłt really had much time
to think about it. My mind has been on other things.ł

This last sentence is a little too much for him, and his
mouth drops open in incredulity. What other things can there be to anyone with
this greatest discovery only light-minutes away? Finally the seriousness of my
impending trip home drifts into his mind, and he stands, saying as he walks
out:

ęDo let me know if you have any suggestions.ł

I feel like a dying man at a party, spoiling the fun for
everybody else. I hope they will forget me quickly when Iłve left. It is not my
intention for anyone else to feel as I do.

I instruct the computer to carry on with its spectrometry in
private, and to display the blue schematic of the artifact. I rotate the plane
of perspective aimlessly. The shape of the artifact is blandly soothing,
drawing the eye in, then abandoning it to wander without excitement from node
to node, with nothing to discover either jarring or beautiful. I try dutifully
to form an hypothesis for Lindstromłs sake, so that I shall not leave a painful
scar of disappointment.

The artifact consists of sixty-four small satellites
orbiting a black hole, ingeniously arranged so that their relative positions remain
unchanged. Ultraviolet lasers in each satellite are aimed at all the other
satellites. As yet we are too far away to examine the satellites in detail.
Some of the laser light is scattered by dust and gas which permeates the
system, and we do not believe the lasers are being modulated at all. No
modulation puts a wet blanket on any theories that the artifact is a computing
device or an interstellar communications relay; and, so far as we can tell, no
modulated signal is arriving at or leaving the artifact. There are as yet no
signs that the satellites are inhabited, but it is rather too early to tell.

Why was it made? The satellites are positioned in the highly
ęcurvedł space around the black hole so that the ratios between the times for
the various laser beams to travel from source to destination equal
dimensionless physical constants. What conceivable function could result in a
design with this property, either as a necessary consequence of the function or
as a ędecorationł possible because the function is independent of the satellite
positions?

I donłt know. I donłt care. My mind wanders back to its
painful obsession, the withering of my dreams, source of my imagination and
happiness. My dreams on Earth were vast and complex and indecipherable,
tantalising and exotic and rich beyond the comprehension of my waking self. I
would touch ground each morning with my mind babbling joyously at thoughts
strange beyond words or visions, and like the sun or the sea, abundant beyond
any possible need, my dreams powered and flooded my waking life. They set me no
challenges or problems themselves, but rather fuelled my assaults on the
challenges of the daytime, inexhaustible wells of wonder overflowing into every
part of my mind, every part of my life.

The first few weeks in space, the strangeness of the ship
and the greater strangeness of its voyage doubled the strangeness of my dreams,
and I would wake early, exhausted but not distressed by the intensity of the
experience. A week ago I dreamt of an empty room.

I floated in the centre of an empty grey room, with a simple
thought: this is all there is, this is all there is, this is all there is.

That was the dream. The dream announced its own simplicity,
no more. The dream announced its own emptiness, no more. The dream said less
than nothing because the nothing that it said was its saying nothing.

The feeling that followed was of having finished. Before, my
dreams had been too huge to hold in my mind all at once, and too detailed and
strangely structured to feel that they might ever end up summarised and
tabulated and packed away tidily. Before, my dreams had burst through my mind,
slipped through my fingers, not from evanescence but from bulk. Now, my dreams
were thin skeletons laid out before me, every detail unambiguous and final,
nothing to guess, nothing to explore. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

The shipłs psychiatrist, whom I have met only once and whose
name I do not remember, knocks and walks in.

ęHi.ł

Yes, up yours also.

ęHi.ł

ęI just wanted to ask you if youłd given any thought to my
suggestion.ł

ęIłm sorry.ł He had asked me to record voluntarily an explanation
of my sudden need to get home again, to be played back only after I had left
the ship, and to be used only in the strictest confidence. I couldnłt bear to
try to put my emptiness into words, couldnłt imagine it meaning a thing to
anyone else.

ęWell, you can always change your mind. We have no wish to
invade your privacy, or make you feel you have to account for your decision,
but we would like to know if there are any changes we can make so that, in the
future, whatever caused problems for you will not cause problems for others. We
do think thatłs a worthwhile goal, but of course, as it says in your contract,
we canłt demand anything.ł

ęNo.ł

No to what? No to it all. Iłm very, very tired. I have a
sudden weary vision of the Captain coming to ęchatł with me, stressing the
value in my giving some hint for the planning of future missions. Itłs not the
considerable fuel expense of my trip that worries them, or even the effect on
morale of one member of the teamłs giving in. The real concern is not knowing
why. Any named weakness could be grappled with; every other person could say to
himself ęI should never be worried by thatł and the matter would be under
control.

The large, pale blue eyes of the psychiatrist try to ooze
protective reassurance. I couldnłt even whisper ęMy dreams are all wrongł with
those terribly forgiving eyes turned at me. I have no strength now to speak of
my loss of strength.

The day passes; the Captain does not come, because it would
be too much of an honour. The shuttle leaves at 2300 hours, so I am lying in my
cabin glancing frequently at my watch, although the computer will call me at
2230 and the Shuttle Control Officer would page me if I were not in his office
at 2250.

I glance at the blue display of the artifact. I will get
news reports from the ship, too, on my way home, and most of them will concern
the artifact. Small unmanned probes will enter the system, explore the
satellites; some will be dropped into the black hole.

Eight light-years from home, a black hole. Who would have
guessed? Every astronomerłs dream come true, but I donłt feel a thing, donłt
feel like an astronomer, donłt care about confirmation of the latest variation
on General Relativity. I feel naked and hollow.

I have the computer play some of the music in my personal library,
mainly fantasy rock of the early ę90s, but it bores me, slightly annoys me. I
shut it off.

I watch the seconds digits for a while, then switch to GMT.
The rate is not detectably different, as wełre going quite slowly now relative
to Earth. I amuse myself a little by flicking through the various time zones. I
remind myself to change the receiving frequency on my watch from that of the
shipłs computer to that of the shuttlełs computer, once I am on board.

A bell rings in my watch, and at the desk monitor. I acknowledge
the event, then sit on my bed for a while, not wanting to be early at the Shuttle
Control Office with nothing to do. There is nothing to pack, it has all been
done for me.

Now I am alone in the shuttle. The ship carries hundreds of
shuttles, but only ten can be fitted out to support life on the voyage home. If
more than ten people demanded to go home, they would have to take the whole
ship back.

That would make the Captain very sad.

With me in the shuttle are many high-density magnetic bubble
memories containing an entire monthłs transmissions from the ship. They are
sent back home in case something goes astray with some part of the maser
broadcasts. We do not get shuttles from home, because we have much more to tell
them than they have to tell us.

ęYou OK now?ł asks the Shuttle Control Officer nervously. He
has never sent back a person before. ęYes, Iłm fine thank you.ł

ęWell, this is it. Bon voyage.ł

No party of friends to see me off. This launch is being
treated like any other. I am to vanish cleanly from the minds on board.

With very little fuss, my temporary weightlessness is gone.
This shuttle will be slower than the others, with only 2 gees, the shipłs
standard acceleration, rather than the 15 gees of the unmanned ones. I shall
not get lonely, with all the news from Earth to catch up with, and all the news
from the ship to ignore. I switch on a monitor, and see the huge cylindrical
shell dwindling. The artifact is not visible, of course. I switch off the
monitor, and try to get some sleep.

For hours I canłt really keep my eyes closed. It does not
take long to explore with my eyes the inside of the shuttle many times. Then I
close my eyes and still see the rows and columns of bubble memories in neatly
labelled boxes. I start counting the bits of information in there with me. Each
memory contains two-to-thethirtieth bits. 1 G. they call it. There are two
thousand nine hundred memories, more than two-to-the-eleventh, so that makes
more than two-to-the-forty-first bits. What a lot of garbage, I think lazily.
What a vast amount. Nearly a million bits a second back to Earth.

Now I must be asleep, for the bubble memories are multiplying,
the stacks are spreading to fill the whole universe. And now they are
collapsing; the walls between the neat packages are melting, until only
sixty-four compartments remain. Each compartment shrinks to a point, and thin
blue lines appear in the familiar configuration. The universe shrinks to the
artifact, its essential summary, or maybe even, I think lazily, its essential
cause. The symmetry between the two is so nearly perfect that I cannot decide
which it is: ambiguity at last.

I wake with a smile. Iłll be home soon.

Axiomatic

ę... like your brain has been frozen in liquid nitrogen, and
then smashed into a thousand shards!ł

I squeezed my way past the teenagers who lounged outside the
entrance to The Implant Store, no doubt fervently hoping for a holovision news
team to roll up and ask them why they werenłt in school. They mimed throwing up
as I passed, as if the state of not being pubescent and dressed like a member
of Binary Search was so disgusting to contemplate that it made them physically
ill.

Well, maybe it did.

Inside, the place was almost deserted. The interior reminded
me of a video ROM shop; the display racks were virtually identical, and many of
the distributorsł logos were the same. Each rack was labelled: PSYCHEDELIA,
MEDITATION AND HEALING, MOTIVATION AND SUCCESS. LANGUAGES AND TECHNICAL SKILLS.
Each implant, although itself less than half a millimetre across, came in a
package the size of an old-style book, bearing gaudy illustrations and a few
lines of stale hyperbole from a marketing thesaurus or some rent-an-endorsement
celebrity. ęBecome God! Become the Universe!ł ęThe Ultimate Insight! The Ultimate
Knowledge! The Ultimate Trip!ł Even the perennial ęThis implant changed my
life!ł

I picked up the carton of You Are Great!its transparent protective
wrapper glistening with sweaty fingerprintsand thought numbly: If I bought
this thing and used it, I would actually believe that. No amount of evidence to
the contrary would be physically able to change my mind. I put it back on the
shelf, next to Love Yourself A Billion and Instant Willpower, Instant Wealth.

I knew exactly what Iłd come for, and I knew that it
wouldnłt be on display, but I browsed a while longer, partly out of genuine
curiosity, partly just to give myself time. Time to think through the
implications once again. Time to come to my senses and flee.

The cover of Synaesthesia showed a blissed-out man with a
rainbow striking his tongue and musical staves piercing his eyeballs. Beside
it, Alien Mind-Fuck boasted ęa mental state so bizarre that even as you
experience it, you wonłt know what itłs like!ł Implant technology was
originally developed to provide instant language skills for business people and
tourists, but after disappointing sales and a takeover by an entertainment
conglomerate, the first mass-market implants appeared: a cross between video
games and hallucinogenic drugs. Over the years, the range of confusion and
dysfunction on offer grew wider, but therełs only so far you can take that
trend; beyond a certain point, scrambling the neural connections doesnłt leave
anyone there to be entertained by the strangeness, and the user, once restored
to normalcy, remembers almost nothing.

The first of the next generation of implantsthe so-called
axiomaticswere all sexual in nature; apparently that was the technically
simplest place to start. I walked over to the Erotica section, to see what was
availableor at least, what could legally be displayed. Homosexuality,
heterosexuality, autoerotism. An assortment of harmless fetishes. Eroticisation
of various unlikely parts of the body. Why, I wondered, would anyone choose to
have their brain rewired to make them crave a sexual practice they otherwise
would have found abhorrent, or ludicrous, or just plain boring? To comply with
a partnerłs demands? Maybe, although such extreme submissiveness was hard to
imagine, and could scarcely be sufficiently widespread to explain the size of
the market. To enable a part of their own sexual identity, which, unaided,
would have merely nagged and festered, to triumph over their inhibitions, their
ambivalence, their revulsion? Everyone has conflicting desires, and people can
grow tired of both wanting and not wanting the very same thing. I understood
that, perfectly.

The next rack contained a selection of religions, everything
from Amish to Zen. (Gaining the Amish disapproval of technology this way
apparently posed no problem; virtually every religious implant enabled the user
to embrace far stranger contradictions.) There was even an implant called
Secular Humanist (ęYou WILL hold these truths to be self-evident!ł). No
Vacillating Agnostic, though; apparently there was no market for doubt.

For a minute or two, I lingered. For a mere fifty dollars, I
could have bought back my childhood Catholicism, even if the Church would not
have approved. (At least, not officially; it would have been interesting to
know exactly who was subsidising the product.) In the end, though, I had to
admit that I wasnłt really tempted. Perhaps it would have solved my problem,
but not in the way that I wanted it solvedand after all, getting my own way
was the whole point of coming here. Using an implant wouldnłt rob me of my free
will; on the contrary, it was going to help me to assert it.

Finally, I steeled myself and approached the sales counter.

ęHow can I help you, sir?ł The young man smiled at me
brightly, radiating sincerity, as if he really enjoyed his work. I mean,
really, really.

ęIłve come to pick up a special order.ł

ęYour name, please, sir?ł

ęCarver. Mark.ł

He reached under the counter and emerged with a parcel, mercifully
already wrapped in anonymous brown. I paid in cash, Iłd brought the exact
change: $399.95. It was all over in twenty seconds.

I left the store, sick with relief, triumphant, exhausted.
At least Iłd finally bought the fucking thing; it was in my hands now, no one
else was involved, and all I had to do was decide whether or not to use it.

After walking a few blocks towards the train station, I
tossed the parcel into a bin, but I turned back almost at once and retrieved
it. I passed a pair of armoured cops, and I pictured their eyes boring into me
from behind their mirrored faceplates, but what I was carrying was perfectly
legal. How could the Government ban a device which did no more than engender,
in those who freely chose to use it, a particular set of beliefswithout also
arresting everyone who shared those beliefs naturally? Very easily, actually,
since the law didnłt have to be consistent, but the implant manufacturers had
succeeded in convincing the public that restricting their products would be
paving the way for the Thought Police.

By the time I got home, I was shaking uncontrollably. I put
the parcel on the kitchen table, and started pacing.

This wasnłt for Amy. I had to admit that. Just because I
still loved her, and still mourned her, didnłt mean I was doing this for her. I
wouldnłt soil her memory with that lie.

In fact, I was doing it to free myself from her. After five
years, I wanted my pointless love, my useless grief, to finally stop ruling my
life. Nobody could blame me for that.

* * * *

She had died in an armed hold-up, in a bank. The security cameras
had been disabled, and everyone apart from the robbers had spent most of the
time face-down on the floor, so I never found out the whole story. She must
have moved, fidgeted, looked up, she must have done something; even at the
peaks of my hatred, I couldnłt believe that shełd been killed on a whim, for no
comprehensible reason at all.

I knew who had squeezed the trigger, though. It hadnłt come
out at the trial; a clerk in the Police Department had sold me the information.
The killerłs name was Patrick Anderson, and by turning prosecution witness,
hełd put his accomplices away for life, and reduced his own sentence to seven
years.

I went to the media. A loathsome crime-show personality had
taken the story and ranted about it on the airwaves for a week, diluting the
facts with self-serving rhetoric, then grown bored and moved on to something
else.

Five years later, Anderson had been out on parole for nine
months.

OK. So what? It happens all the time. If someone had come to
me with such a story, I would have been sympathetic, but firm. ęForget her,
shełs dead. Forget him, hełs garbage. Get on with your life.ł

I didnłt forget her, and I didnłt forget her killer. I had
loved her, whatever that meant, and while the rational part of me had swallowed
the fact of her death, the rest kept twitching like a decapitated snake.
Someone else in the same state might have turned the house into a shrine,
covered every wall and mantelpiece with photographs and memorabilia, put fresh
flowers on her grave every day, and spent every night getting drunk watching
old home movies. I didnłt do that, I couldnłt. It would have been grotesque and
utterly false; sentimentality had always made both of us violently ill. I kept
a single photo. We hadnłt made home movies. I visited her grave once a year.

Yet for all of this outward restraint, inside my head my
obsession with Amyłs death simply kept on growing. I didnłt want it, I didnłt
choose it, I didnłt feed it or encourage it in any way. I kept no electronic
scrapbook of the trial. If people raised the subject, I walked away. I buried
myself in my work; in my spare time I read, or went to the movies, alone. I
thought about searching for someone new, but I never did anything about it,
always putting it off until that time in the indefinite future when I would be
human again.

Every night, the details of the incident circled in my
brain. I thought of a thousand things I ęmight have doneł to have prevented her
death, from not marrying her in the first place (wełd moved to Sydney because
of my job), to magically arriving at the bank as her killer took aim, tackling
him to the ground and beating him senseless, or worse. I knew these fantasies
were futile and self-indulgent, but that knowledge was no cure. If I took
sleeping pills, the whole thing simply shifted to the daylight hours, and I was
literally unable to work. (The computers that help us are slightly less
appalling every year, but air-traffic controllers canłt daydream.)

I had to do something.

Revenge? Revenge was for the morally retarded. Me, Iłd
signed petitions to the UN, calling for the worldwide, unconditional abolition
of capital punishment. Iłd meant it then, and I still meant it. Taking human
life was wrong; Iłd believed that, passionately, since childhood. Maybe it
started out as religious dogma, but when I grew up and shed all the ludicrous
claptrap, the sanctity of life was one of the few beliefs I judged to be worth
keeping. Aside from any pragmatic reasons, human consciousness had always
seemed to me the most astonishing, miraculous, sacred thing in the universe.
Blame my upbringing, blame my genes; I could no more devalue it than believe
that one plus one equalled zero.

Tell some people youłre a pacifist, and in ten seconds flat
theyłll invent a situation in which millions of people will die in unspeakable
agony, and all your loved ones will be raped and tortured, if you donłt blow
someonełs brains out. (Therełs always a contrived reason why you canłt merely
wound the omnipotent, genocidal madman.) The amusing thing is, they seem to
hold you in even greater contempt when you admit that, yes, youłd do it, youłd
kill under those conditions.

Anderson, however, clearly was not an omnipotent, genocidal
madman. I had no idea whether or not he was likely to kill again. As for his
capacity for reform, his abused childhood, or the caring and compassionate
alter ego that may have been hiding behind the fa�ade of his brutal exterior, I
really didnłt give a shit, but nonetheless I was convinced that it would be
wrong for me to kill him.

I bought the gun first. That was easy, and perfectly legal;
perhaps the computers simply failed to correlate my permit application with the
release of my wifełs killer, or perhaps the link was detected, but judged
irrelevant.

I joined a ęsportsł club full of people who spent three
hours a week doing nothing but shooting at moving, human-shaped targets. A
recreational activity, harmless as fencing; I practised saying that with a
straight face.

Buying the anonymous ammunition from a fellow club member
was illegal; bullets that vaporised on impact, leaving no ballistics evidence
linking them to a specific weapon. I scanned the court records; the average
sentence for possessing such things was a five-hundred-dollar fine. The
silencer was illegal, too; the penalties for ownership were similar.

Every night, I thought it through. Every night, I came to
the same conclusion: despite my elaborate preparations, I wasnłt going to kill
anyone. Part of me wanted to, part of me didnłt, but I knew perfectly well
which was strongest. Iłd spend the rest of my life dreaming about it, safe in
the knowledge that no amount of hatred or grief or desperation would ever be
enough to make me act against my nature.

* * * *

I unwrapped the parcel. I was expecting a garish
cover-sneering body builder toting sub-machine-gunbut the packaging was
unadorned, plain grey with no markings except for the product code, and the
name of the distributor, Clockwork Orchard.

Iłd ordered the thing through an on-line catalogue, accessed
via a coin-driven public terminal, and Iłd specified collection by ęMark
Carverł at a branch of The Implant Store in Chatswood, far from my home. All of
which was paranoid nonsense, since the implant was legaland all of which was
perfectly reasonable, because I felt far more nervous and guilty about buying
it than I did about buying the gun and ammunition.

The description in the catalogue had begun with the
statement Life is cheap! then had waffled on for several lines in the same
vein: People are meat. Theyłre nothing, theyłre worthless. The exact words
werenłt important, though; they werenłt a part of the implant itself. It wouldnłt
be a matter of a voice in my head, reciting some badly written spiel which I
could choose to ridicule or ignore; nor would it be a kind of mental
legislative decree, which I could evade by means of semantic quibbling.
Axiomatic implants were derived from analysis of actual neural structures in
real peoplełs brains, they werenłt based on the expression of the axioms in
language. The spirit, not the letter, of the law would prevail.

I opened up the carton. There was an instruction leaflet, in
seventeen languages. A programmer. An applicator. A pair of tweezers. Sealed in
a plastic bubble labelled sterile if unbroken, the implant itself. It looked
like a tiny piece of gravel.

I had never used one before, but Iłd seen it done a thousand
times on holovision. You placed the thing in the programmer, ęwoke it upł, and
told it how long you wanted it to be active. The applicator was strictly for
tyros; the jaded cognoscenti balanced the implant on the tip of their little
finger, and daintily poked it up the nostril of their choice.

The implant burrowed into the brain, sent out a swarm of nanomachines
to explore, and forge links with, the relevant neural systems, and then went
into active mode for the predetermined timeanything from an hour to
infinitydoing whatever it was designed to do. Enabling multiple orgasms of the
left kneecap. Making the colour blue taste like the long-lost memory of
motherłs milk. Or, hardwiring a premise: I will succeed. I am happy in my job.
There is life after death. Nobody died in Belsen. Four legs good, two legs bad
...

I packed everything back into the carton, put it in a
drawer, took three sleeping pills, and went to bed.

* * * *

Perhaps it was a matter of laziness. Iłve always been biased
towards those options which spare me from facing the very same set of choices
again in the future; it seems so inefficient to go through the same agonies of
conscience more than once. To not use the implant would have meant having to
reaffirm that decision, day after day, for the rest of my life.

Or perhaps I never really believed that the preposterous toy
would work. Perhaps I hoped to prove that my convictionsunlike other
peoplełswere engraved on some metaphysical tablet that hovered in a spiritual
dimension unreachable by any mere machine.

Or perhaps I just wanted a moral alibia way to kill
Anderson while still believing it was something that the real me could never
have done.

At least Iłm sure of one thing. I didnłt do it for Amy.

* * * *

I woke around dawn the next day, although I didnłt need to
get up at all; I was on annual leave for a month. I dressed, ate breakfast,
then unpacked the implant again and carefully read the instructions.

With no great sense of occasion, I broke open the sterile
bubble and, with the tweezers, dropped the speck into its cavity in the programmer.

The programmer said, ęDo you speak English?ł The voice reminded
me of one of the control towers at work; deep but somehow genderless,
businesslike without being crudely roboticand yet, unmistakably inhuman.

ęYes.ł

ęDo you want to program this implant?ł

ęYes.ł

ęPlease specify the active period.ł

ęThree days.ł Three days would be enough, surely; if not,
Iłd call the whole thing off.

ęThis implant is to remain active for three days after
insertion. Is that correct?ł

ęYes.ł

ęThis implant is ready for use. The time is seven
forty-three a.m. Please insert the implant before eight forty-three a.m., or it
will deactivate itself and reprogramming will be required. Please enjoy this
product and dispose of the packaging thoughtfully.ł

I placed the implant in the applicator, then hesitated, but
not for long. This wasnłt the time to agonise; Iłd agonised for months, and I
was sick of it. Any more indecisiveness and Iłd need to buy a second implant to
convince me to use the first. I wasnłt committing a crime; I wasnłt even coming
close to guaranteeing that I would commit one. Millions of people held the
belief that human life was nothing special, but how many of them were
murderers? The next three days would simply reveal how I reacted to that
belief, and although the attitude would be hard-wired, the consequences were
far from certain.

I put the applicator in my left nostril, and pushed the
release button. There was a brief stinging sensation, nothing more.

I thought, Amy would have despised me for this. That shook
me, but only for a moment. Amy was dead, which made her hypothetical feelings
irrelevant. Nothing I did could hurt her now, and thinking any other way was
crazy.

I tried to monitor the progress of the change, but that was
a joke; you canłt check your moral precepts by introspection every thirty
seconds. After all, my assessment of myself as being unable to kill had been
based on decades of observation (much of it probably out of date). Whatłs more,
that assessment, that self-image, had come to be as much a cause of my actions
and attitudes as a reflection of themand apart from the direct changes the
implant was making to my brain, it was breaking that feedback loop by providing
a rationalisation for me to act in a way Iłd convinced myself was impossible.

After a while, I decided to get drunk, to distract myself
from the vision of microscopic robots crawling around in my skull. It was a big
mistake; alcohol makes me paranoid. I donłt recall much of what followed,
except for catching sight of myself in the bathroom mirror, screaming, ęHALłs
breaking First Law! HALłs breaking First Law!ł before vomiting copiously.

I woke just after midnight, on the bathroom floor. I took an
anti-hangover pill, and in five minutes my headache and nausea were gone. I
showered and put on fresh clothes. Iłd bought a jacket especially for the
occasion, with an inside pocket for the gun.

It was still impossible to tell if the thing had done
anything to me that went beyond the placebo effect; I asked myself, out loud,
ęIs human life sacred? Is it wrong to kill?ł but I couldnłt concentrate on the
question, and I found it hard to believe that I ever had in the past; the whole
idea seemed obscure and difficult, like some esoteric mathematical theorem. The
prospect of going ahead with my plans made my stomach churn, but that was
simple fear, not moral outrage; the implant wasnłt meant to make me brave, or
calm, or resolute. I could have bought those qualities too, but that would have
been cheating.

Iłd had Anderson checked out by a private investigator. He
worked every night but Sunday, as a bouncer in a Surry Hills nightclub; he
lived nearby, and usually arrived home, on foot, at around four in the morning.
Iłd driven past his terrace house several times, Iłd have no trouble finding
it. He lived alone; he had a lover, but they always met at her place, in the
afternoon or early evening.

I loaded the gun and put it in my jacket, then spent half an
hour staring in the mirror, trying to decide if the bulge was visible. I wanted
a drink, but I restrained myself. I switched on the radio and wandered through
the house, trying to become less agitated. Perhaps taking a life was now no big
deal to me, but I could still end up dead, or in prison, and the implant
apparently hadnłt rendered me uninterested in my own fate.

I left too early, and had to drive by a circuitous route to
kill time; even then, it was only a quarter past three when I parked, a
kilometre from Andersonłs house. A few cars and taxis passed me as I walked the
rest of the way, and Iłm sure I was trying so hard to look at ease that my body
language radiated guilt and paranoiabut no ordinary driver would have noticed
or cared, and I didnłt see a single patrol car.

When I reached the place, there was nowhere to hideno gardens,
no trees, no fencesbut Iłd known that in advance. I chose a house across the
street, not quite opposite Andersonłs, and sat on the front step. If the
occupant appeared, Iłd feign drunkenness and stagger away.

I sat and waited. It was a warm, still, ordinary night; the
sky was clear, but grey and starless thanks to the lights of the city. I kept
reminding myself: You donłt have to do this, you donłt have to go through with
it. So why did I stay? The hope of being liberated from my sleepless nights?
The idea was laughable; I had no doubt that if I killed Anderson, it would
torture me as much as my helplessness over Amyłs death.

Why did I stay? It was nothing to do with the implant; at
most, that was neutralising my qualms; it wasnłt forcing me to do anything.

Why, then? In the end, I think I saw it as a matter of
honesty. I had to accept the unpleasant fact that I honestly wanted to kill Anderson,
and however much I had also been repelled by the notion, to be true to myself I
had to do itanything less would have been hypocrisy and self-deception.

At five to four, I heard footsteps echoing down the street.
As I turned, I hoped it would be someone else, or that he would be with a
friend, but it was him, and he was alone. I waited until he was as far from his
front door as I was, then I started walking. He glanced my way briefly, then
ignored me. I felt a shock of pure fearI hadnłt seen him in the flesh since
the trial, and Iłd forgotten how physically imposing he was.

I had to force myself to slow down, and even then I passed
him sooner than Iłd meant to. I was wearing light, rubber-soled shoes, he was
in heavy boots, but when I crossed the street and did a U-turn towards him, I
couldnłt believe he couldnłt hear my heartbeat, or smell the stench of my
sweat. Metres from the door, just as I finished pulling out the gun, he looked
over his shoulder with an expression of bland curiosity, as if he might have
been expecting a dog or a piece of windblown litter. He turned around to face
me, frowning. I just stood there, pointing the gun at him, unable to speak.
Eventually he said, ęWhat the fuck do you want? Iłve got two hundred dollars in
my wallet. Back pocket.ł

I shook my head. ęUnlock the front door, then put your hands
on your head and kick it open. Donłt try closing it on me.ł

He hesitated, then complied.

ęNow walk in. Keep your hands on your head. Five steps,
thatłs all. Count them out loud. Iłll be right behind you.ł

I reached the light switch for the hall as he counted four,
then I slammed the door behind me, and flinched at the sound. Anderson was
right in front of me, and I suddenly felt trapped. The man was a vicious
killer; I hadnłt even thrown a punch since I was eight years old. Did I really
believe the gun would protect me? With his hands on his head, the muscles of
his arms and shoulders bulged against his shirt. I should have shot him right
then, in the back of the head. This was an execution, not a duel; if Iłd wanted
some quaint idea of honour, I would have come without a gun and let him take me
to pieces.

I said, ęTurn left.ł Left was the living room. I followed
him in, switched on the light. ęSit.ł I stood in the doorway, he sat in the
roomłs only chair. For a moment, I felt dizzy and my vision seemed to tilt, but
I donłt think I moved, I donłt think I sagged or swayed; if I had, he probably
would have rushed me.

ęWhat do you want?ł he asked.

I had to give that a lot of thought. Iłd fantasised this
situation a thousand times, but I could no longer remember the detailsalthough
I did recall that Iłd usually assumed that Anderson would recognise me, and
start volunteering excuses and explanations straight away.

Finally, I said, ęI want you to tell me why you killed my
wife.ł

ęI didnłt kill your wife. Miller killed your wife.ł

I shook my head. ęThatłs not true. I know. The cops told me.
Donłt bother lying, because I know.ł

He stared at me blandly. I wanted to lose my temper and
scream, but I had a feeling that, in spite of the gun, that would have been
more comical than intimidating. I could have pistol-whipped him, but the truth
is I was afraid to go near him.

So I shot him in the foot. He yelped and swore, then leant
over to inspect the damage. ęFuck you!ł he hissed. ęFuck you!ł He rocked back
and forth, holding his foot. ęIłll break your fucking neck! Iłll fucking kill
you!ł The wound bled a little through the hole in his boot, but it was nothing
compared to the movies. Iłd heard that the vaporising ammunition had a
cauterising effect.

I said, ęTell me why you killed my wife.ł

He looked far more angry and disgusted than afraid, but he
dropped his pretence of innocence. ęIt just happened,ł he said. ęIt was just
one of those things that happens.ł

I shook my head, annoyed. ęNo. Why? Why did it happen?ł

He moved as if to take off his boot, then thought better of
it. ęThings were going wrong. There was a time lock, there was hardly any cash,
everything was just a big fuck-up. I didnłt mean to do it. It just happened.ł

I shook my head again, unable to decide if he was a moron,
or if he was stalling. ęDonłt tell me �it just happened". Why did it happen?
Why did you do it?ł

The frustration was mutual; he ran a hand through his hair
and scowled at me. He was sweating now, but I couldnłt tell if it was from pain
or from fear. ęWhat do you want me to say? I lost my temper, all right? Things
were going badly, and I lost my fucking temper, and there she was, all right?ł

The dizziness struck me again, but this time it didnłt
subside. I understood now; he wasnłt being obtuse, he was telling the entire
truth. Iłd smashed the occasional coffee cup during a tense situation at work.
Iłd even, to my shame, kicked our dog once, after a fight with Amy: Why? Iłd
lost my fucking temper, and there she was.

I stared at Anderson, and felt myself grinning stupidly. It
was all so clear now. I understood. I understood the absurdity of everything
Iłd ever felt for Amymy ęloveł, my ęgriefł. It had all been a joke. She was
meat, she was nothing. All the pain of the past five years evaporated; I was
drunk with relief. I raised my arms and spun around slowly. Anderson leapt up
and sprung towards me; I shot him in the chest until I ran out of bullets, then
I knelt down beside him. He was dead.

I put the gun in my jacket. The barrel was warm. I
remembered to use my handkerchief to open the front door. I half expected to
find a crowd outside, but of course the shots had been inaudible, and
Andersonłs threats and curses were not likely to have attracted attention.

A block from the house, a patrol car appeared around a
corner. It slowed almost to a halt as it approached me. I kept my eyes straight
ahead as it passed. I heard the engine idle. Then stop. I kept on walking,
waiting for a shouted command, thinking: if they search me and find the gun,
Iłll confess; therełs no point in prolonging the agony.

The engine spluttered, revved noisily, and the car roared
away.

* * * *

Perhaps Iłm not the number-one most obvious suspect. I donłt
know what Anderson was involved in since he got out; maybe there are hundreds
of other people who had far better reasons for wanting him dead, and perhaps
when the cops have finished with them, theyłll get around to asking me what I
was doing that night. A month seems an awfully long time, though. Anyone would
think they didnłt care.

The same teenagers as before are gathered around the
entrance, and again the mere sight of me seems to disgust them. I wonder if the
taste in fashion and music tattooed on their brains is set to fade in a year or
two, or if they have sworn lifelong allegiance. It doesnłt bear contemplating.

This time, I donłt browse. I approach the sales counter
without hesitation.

This time, I know exactly what I want.

What I want is what I felt that night: the unshakeable conviction
that Amyłs deathlet alone Andersonłssimply didnłt matter, any more than the
death of a fly or an amoeba, any more than breaking a coffee cup or kicking a
dog.

My one mistake was thinking that the insight I gained would
simply vanish when the implant cut out. It hasnłt. Itłs been clouded with
doubts and reservations, itłs been undermined, to some degree, by my whole
ridiculous panoply of beliefs and superstitions, but I can still recall the
peace it gave me, I can still recall that flood of joy and relief, and I want
it back. Not for three days; for the rest of my life.

Killing Anderson wasnłt honest, it wasnłt ębeing true to myself.ł
Being true to myself would have meant living with all my contradictory urges,
suffering the multitude of voices in my head, accepting confusion and doubt.
Itłs too late for that now; having tasted the freedom of certainty, I find I
canłt live without it.

ęHow can I help you, sir?ł The salesman smiles from the bottom
of his heart.

Part of me, of course, still finds the prospect of what I am
about to do totally repugnant.

No matter. That wonłt last.

Blood Sisters

When we were nine years old, Paula decided we should prick
our thumbs, and let our blood flow into each otherłs veins.

I was scornful. �Why bother? Our bloodłs already exactly the
same. Wełre already blood sisters."

She was unfazed. �I know that. Thatłs not the point. Itłs
the ritual that counts."

We did it in our bedroom, at midnight, by the light of a
single candle. She sterilized the needle in the candle flame, then wiped it
clean of soot with a tissue and saliva.

When wełd pressed the tiny, sticky wounds together, and recited
some ridiculous oath from a third-rate childrenłs novel, Paula blew out the
candle. While my eyes were still adjusting to the dark, she added a whispered
coda of her own: �Now wełll dream the same dreams, and share the same lovers,
and die at the very same hour."

I tried to say, indignantly, �Thatłs just not true!" but the
darkness and the scent of the dead flame made the protest stick in my throat,
and her words remained unchallenged.

* * *

As Dr Packard spoke, I folded the pathology report, into
halves, into quarters, obsessively aligning the edges. It was far too thick for
me to make a neat job of it; from the micrographs of the misshapen lymphocytes
proliferating in my bone marrow, to the print-out of portions of the RNA
sequence of the virus that had triggered the disease, thirty-two pages in all.

In contrast, the prescription, still sitting on the desk in
front of me, seemed ludicrously flimsy and insubstantial. No match at all. The
traditionalindecipherablepolysyllabic scrawl it bore was nothing but a
decoration; the drugłs name was reliably encrypted in the barcode below. There
was no question of receiving the wrong medication by mistake. The question was,
would the right one help me?

�Is that clear? Ms Rees? Is there anything you donłt understand?"

I struggled to focus my thoughts, pressing hard on an
intractable crease with my thumb. Shełd explained the situation frankly,
without resorting to jargon or euphemism, but I still had the feeling that I
was missing something crucial. It seemed like every sentence shełd spoken had
started one of two ways: �The virus ..."or �The drug ..."

�Is there anything I can do? Myself? To ... improve the
odds?"

She hesitated, but not for long. �No, not really. Youłre in
excellent health, otherwise. Stay that way." She began to rise from her desk to
dismiss me, and I began to panic.

�But, there must be something." I gripped the arms of my
chair, as if afraid of being dislodged by force. Maybe shełd misunderstood me,
maybe I hadnłt made myself clear. �Should I ... stop eating certain foods? Get
more exercise? Get more sleep? I mean, there has to be something that will make
a difference. And Iłll do it, whatever it is. Please, just tell me" My voice
almost cracked, and I looked away, embarrassed. Donłt ever start ranting like
that again. Not ever.

�Ms Rees, Iłm sorry. I know how you must be feeling. But the
Monte Carlo diseases are all like this. In fact, youłre exceptionally lucky;
the WHO computer found eighty thousand people, worldwide, infected with a
similar strain. Thatłs not enough of a market to support any hard-core
research, but enough to have persuaded the pharmaceutical companies to rummage
through their databases for something that might do the trick. A lot of people
are on their own, infected with viruses that are virtually unique. Imagine how
much useful information the health profession can give them." I finally looked
up; the expression on her face was one of sympathy, tempered by impatience.

I declined the invitation to feel ashamed of my ingratitude.
Iłd made a fool of myself, but I still had a right to ask the question. �I
understand all that. I just thought there might be something I could do. You
say this drug might work, or it might not. If I could contribute, myself, to
fighting this disease, Iłd feel ..."

What? More like a human being, and less like a test tubea
passive container in which the wonder drug and the wonder virus would fight it
out between themselves. �... better."

She nodded. �I know, but trust me, nothing you can do would
make the slightest difference. Just look after yourself as you normally would.
Donłt catch pneumonia. Donłt gain or lose ten kilos. Donłt do anything out of
the ordinary. Millions of people must have been exposed to this virus, but the
reason youłre sick, and theyłre not, is a purely genetic matter. The cure will
be just the same. The biochemistry that determines whether or not the drug will
work for you isnłt going to change if you start taking vitamin pills, or stop
eating junk foodand I should warn you that going on one of those ęmiracle-cureł
diets will simply make you sick; the charlatans selling them ought to be in
prison."

I nodded fervent agreement to that, and felt myself flush
with anger. Fraudulent cures had long been my bęte noiralthough now, for the
first time, I could almost understand why other Monte Carlo victims paid good
money for such things: crackpot diets, meditation schemes, aroma therapy,
self-hypnosis tapes, you name it. The people who peddled that garbage were the
worst kind of cynical parasites, and Iłd always thought of their customers as being
either congenitally gullible, or desperate to the point of abandoning their
wits, but there was more to it than that. When your life is at stake, you want
to fight for itwith every ounce of your strength, with every cent you can
borrow, with every waking moment. Taking one capsule, three times a day, just
isnłt hard enoughwhereas the schemes of the most perceptive con-men were
sufficiently arduous (or sufficiently expensive) to make the victims feel that
they were engaged in the kind of struggle that the prospect of death requires.

This moment of shared anger cleared the air completely. We
were on the same side, after all; Iłd been acting like a child. I thanked Dr Packard
for her time, picked up the prescription, and left.

On my way to the pharmacy, though, I found myself almost
wishing that shełd lied to methat shełd told me my chances would be vastly
improved if I ran ten kilometers a day and ate raw seaweed with every mealbut
then I angrily recoiled, thinking: Would I really want to be deceived �for my
own good"? If itłs down to my DNA, itłs down to my DNA, and I ought to expect
to be told that simple truth, however unpalatable I find itand I ought to be
grateful that the medical profession has abandoned its old patronizing,
paternalistic ways.

I was twelve years old when the world learnt about the Monte
Carlo project.

A team of biological warfare researchers (located just a
stonełs throw from Las Vegasalas, the one in New Mexico, not the one in
Nevada) had decided that designing viruses was just too much hard work
(especially when the Star Wars boys kept hogging the supercomputers). Why waste
hundreds of PhD-yearswhy expend any intellectual effort whatsoeverwhen the
time-honoured partnership of blind mutation and natural selection was all that
was required?

Speeded up substantially, of course.

Theyłd developed a three-part system: a bacterium, a virus,
and a line of modified human lymphocytes. A stable portion of the viral genome
allowed it to reproduce in the bacterium, while rapid mutation of the rest of
the virus was achieved by neatly corrupting the transcription error repair
enzymes. The lymphocytes had been altered to vastly amplify the reproductive
success of any mutant which managed to infect them, causing it to out-breed
those which were limited to using the bacterium.

The theory was, theyłd set up a few trillion copies of this
system, like row after row of little biological poker machines, spinning away in
their underground lab, and just wait to harvest the jackpots.

The theory also included the best containment facilities in
the world, and five hundred and twenty people all sticking scrupulously to
official procedure, day after day, month after month, without a moment of
carelessness, laziness or forgetfulness. Apparently, nobody bothered to compute
the probability of that.

The bacterium was supposed to be unable to survive outside artificially
beneficent laboratory conditions, but a mutation of the virus came to its aid,
filling in for the genes that had been snipped out to make it vulnerable.

They wasted too much time using ineffectual chemicals before
steeling themselves to nuke the site. By then, the winds had already made any
human actionshort of melting half a dozen states, not an option in an election
yearirrelevant.

The first rumours proclaimed that wełd all be dead within a
week. I can clearly recall the mayhem, the looting, the suicides (second-hand
on the TV screen; our own neighbourhood remained relatively tranquilor numb).
States of emergency were declared around the world. Planes were turned away
from airports, ships (which had left their home ports months before the leak)
were burnt in the docks. Harsh laws were rushed in everywhere, to protect
public order and public health.

Paula and I got to stay home from school for a month. I
offered to teach her programming; she wasnłt interested. She wanted to go
swimming, but the beaches and pools were all closed. That was the summer that I
finally managed to hack into a Pentagon computerjust an office supplies
purchasing system, but Paula was suitably impressed (and neither of us had ever
guessed that paperclips were that expensive).

We didnłt believe we were going to dieat least, not within
a weekand we were right. When the hysteria died down, it soon became apparent
that only the virus and the bacterium had escaped, and without the modified
lymphocytes to fine-tune the selection process, the virus had mutated away from
the strain which had caused the initial deaths.

However, the cosy symbiotic pair is now found all over the
world, endlessly churning out new mutations. Only a tiny fraction of the
strains produced are infectious in humans, and only a fraction of those are
potentially fatal.

A mere hundred or so a year.

On the train home, the sun seemed to be in my eyes no matter
which way I turnedsomehow, every surface in the carriage caught its
reflection. The glare made a headache which had been steadily growing all
afternoon almost unbearable, so I covered my eyes with my forearm and faced the
floor. With my other hand, I clutched the brown paper bag that held the small
glass vial of red-and-black capsules that would or wouldnłt save my life.

Cancer. Viral leukaemia. I pulled the creased pathology
report from my pocket, and flipped through it one more time. The last page hadnłt
magically changed into a happy endingan oncovirology expert systemłs
declaration of a sure-fire cure. The last page was just the bill for all the
tests. Twenty-seven thousand dollars.

At home, I sat and stared at my work station.

Two months before, when a routine quarterly examination (required
by my health insurance company, ever eager to dump the unprofitable sick) had
revealed the first signs of trouble, Iłd sworn to myself that Iłd keep on
working, keep on living exactly as if nothing had changed. The idea of
indulging in a credit spree, or a world trip, or some kind of self-destructive
binge, held no attraction for me at all. Any such final fling would be an
admission of defeat. Iłd go on a fucking world trip to celebrate my cure, and
not before.

I had plenty of contract work stacked up, and that pathology
bill was already accruing interest. Yet for all that I needed the distractionfor
all that I needed the moneyI sat there for three whole hours, and did nothing
but brood about my fate. Sharing it with eighty thousand strangers scattered
about the world was no great comfort.

Then it finally struck me. Paula. If I was vulnerable for
genetic reasons, then so was she.

For identical twins, in the end we hadnłt done too bad a job
of pursuing separate lives. She had left home at sixteen, to tour central
Africa, filming the wildlife, andat considerably greater riskthe poachers.
Then shełd gone to the Amazon, and become caught up in the land rights struggle
there. After that, it was a bit of a blur; shełd always tried to keep me up to
date with her exploits, but she moved too fast for my sluggish mental picture
of her to follow.

Iłd never left the country; I hadnłt even moved house in a
decade.

She came home only now and then, on her way between continents,
but wełd stayed in touch electronically, circumstances permitting. (They take
away your SatPhone in Bolivian prisons.)

The telecommunications multinationals all offer their own expensive
services for contacting someone when you donłt know in advance what country
theyłre in. The advertising suggests that itłs an immensely difficult task; the
fact is, every SatPhonełs location is listed in a central database, which is
kept up to date by pooling information from all the regional satellites. Since
I happened to have �acquired" the access codes to consult that database, I
could phone Paula directly, wherever she was, without paying the ludicrous
surcharge. It was more a matter of nostalgia than miserliness; this minuscule
bit of hacking was a token gesture, proof that in spite of impending middle
age, I wasnłt yet terminally law-abiding, conservative and dull.

Iłd automated the whole procedure long ago. The database
said she was in Gabon; my program calculated local time, judged ten
twenty-three p. m. to be civilized enough, and made the call. Seconds later,
she was on the screen.

�Karen! How are you? You look like shit. I thought you were
going to call last weekwhat happened?"

The image was perfectly clear, the sound clean and
undistorted (fibre-optic cables might be scarce in central Africa, but geosynchronous
satellites are directly overhead). As soon as I set eyes on her, I felt sure
she didnłt have the virus. She was rightI looked half-deadwhereas she was as
animated as ever. Half a lifetime spent outdoors meant her skin had aged much
faster than minebut there was always a glow of energy, of purpose, about her
that more than compensated.

She was close to the lens, so I couldnłt see much of the background,
but it looked like a fibreglass hut, lit by a couple of hurricane lamps; a step
up from the usual tent.

�Iłm sorry, I didnłt get around to it. Gabon? Werenłt you in
Ecuador?"

�Yes, but I met Mohammed. Hełs a botanist. From Indonesia.
Actually, we met in Bogota; he was on his way to a conference in Mexico"

�But"

�Why Gabon? This is where he was going next, thatłs all.
Therełs a fungus here, attacking the crops, and I couldnłt resist coming along
..."

I nodded, bemused, through ten minutes of convoluted explanations,
not paying too much attention; in three monthsł time it would all be ancient
history. Paula survived as a freelance pop-science journalist, darting around
the globe writing articles for magazines, and scripts for TV programmes, on the
latest ecological troublespots. To be honest, I had severe doubts that this
kind of predigested eco-babble did the planet any good, but it certainly made
her happy. I envied her that. I could not have lived her lifein no sense was
she the woman I �might have been"but nonetheless it hurt me, at times, to see
in her eyes the kind of sheer excitement that I hadnłt felt, myself, for a
decade.

My mind wandered while she spoke. Suddenly, she was saying, �Karen?
Are you going to tell me whatłs wrong?"

I hesitated. I had originally planned to tell no one, not
even her, and now my reason for calling her seemed absurdshe couldnłt have
leukaemia, it was unthinkable. Then, without even realizing that Iłd made the
decision, I found myself recounting everything in a dull, flat voice. I watched
with a strange feeling of detachment the changing expression on her face;
shock, pity, then a burst of fear when she realizedfar sooner than I would
have doneexactly what my predicament meant for her.

What followed was even more awkward and painful than I could
have imagined. Her concern for me was genuinebut she would not have been human
if the uncertainty of her own position had not begun to prey on her at once,
and knowing that made all her fussing seem contrived and false.

�Do you have a good doctor? Someone you can trust?"

I nodded.

�Do you have someone to look after you? Do you want me to
come home?"

I shook my head, irritated. �No, Iłm all right. Iłm being
looked after, Iłm being treated. But you have to get tested as soon as possible."
I glared at her, exasperated. I no longer believed that she could have the
virus, but I wanted to stress the fact that Iłd called her to warn her, not to
fish for sympathyand somehow, that finally struck home. She said, quietly, �Iłll
get tested today. Iłll go straight into town. Okay?"

I nodded. I felt exhausted, but relieved; for a moment, all
the awkwardness between us melted away.

�Youłll let me know the results?"

She rolled her eyes. �Of course I will."

I nodded again. �Okay."

�Karen. Be careful. Look after yourself."

�I will. You too." I hit the ESCAPE key.

Half an hour later, I took the first of the capsules, and
climbed into bed. A few minutes later, a bitter taste crept up into my throat.

Telling Paula was essential. Telling Martin was insane. Iłd
only known him six months, but I should have guessed exactly how hełd take it.

�Move in with me. Iłll look after you."

�I donłt need to be looked after."

He hesitated, but only slightly. �Marry me."

�Marry you? Why? Do you think I have some desperate need to
be married before I die?"

He scowled. �Donłt talk like that. I love you. Donłt you
understand that?"

I laughed. �I donłt mind being pitiedpeople always say itłs
degrading, but I think itłs a perfectly normal responsebut I donłt want to
have to live with it twenty-four hours a day." I kissed him, but he kept on
scowling. At least Iłd waited until after wełd had sex before breaking the
news; if not, he probably would have treated me like porcelain.

He turned to face me. �Why are you being so hard on
yourself? What are you trying to prove? That youłre super-human? That you donłt
need anyone?"

�Listen. Youłve known from the very start that I need independence
and privacy. What do you want me to say? That Iłm terrified? Okay. I am. But Iłm
still the same person. I still need the same things." I slid one hand across
hischest, and said as gently as I could, �So thanks for theoffer, but no
thanks."

�I donłt mean very much to you, do I?"

I groaned, and pulled a pillow over my face. I thought: Wake
me when youłre ready to fuck me again. Does that answer your question? I didnłtsay
it out loud, though.

A week later, Paula phoned me. She had the virus. Her white
cell count was up, her red cell count was downthe numbers she quoted sounded
just like my own from the month before. Theyłd even put her on the very same
drug. That was hardly surprising, but it gave me an unpleasant, claustrophobic
feeling, when I thought about what it meant: We would both live, or we would
both die.

In the days that followed, this realization began to obsess
me. It was like voodoo, like some curse out of a fairy taleor the fulfilment
of the words shełd uttered, the night we became �blood sisters." We had never
dreamed the same dreams, wełd certainly never loved the same men, but now ...
it was as if we were being punished, for failing to respect the forces that
bound us together.

Part of me knew this was bullshit. Forces that bound us
together! It was mental static, the product of stress, nothing more. The truth,
though, was just as oppressive: the biochemical machinery would grind out its
identical verdict on both of us, for all the thousands of kilometres between
us, for all that we had forged separate lives in defiance of our genetic unity.

I tried to bury myself in my work. To some degree, I succeededif
the grey stupor produced by eighteen-hour days in front of a terminal could
really be considered a success.

I began to avoid Martin; his puppy-dog concern was just too
much to bear. Perhaps he meant well, but I didnłt have the energy to justify
myself to him, over and over again. Perversely, at the very same time, I missed
our arguments terribly; resisting his excessive mothering had at least made me
feel strong, if only in contrast to the helplessness he seemed to expect of me.

I phoned Paula every week at first, but then gradually less
and less often. We ought to have been ideal confidantes; in fact, nothing could
have been less true. Our conversations were redundant; we already knew what the
other was thinking, far too well. There was no sense of unburdening, just a
suffocating, monotonous feeling of recognition. We took to trying to outdo each
other in affecting a veneer of optimism, but it was a depressingly transparent
effort. Eventually, I thought whenifI get the good news, Iłll call her, until
then, whatłs the point? Apparently, she came to the same conclusion.

All through childhood, we were forced together. We loved
each other, I suppose, but ... we were always in the same classes at school,
bought the same clothes, given the same Christmas and birthday presentsand we
were always sick at the same time, with the same ailment, for the same reason.

When she left home, I was envious, and horribly lonely for a
while, but then I felt a surge of joy, of liberation, because I knew that I had
no real wish to follow her, and I knew that from then on, our lives could only
grow further apart.

Now, it seemed that had all been an illusion. We would live
or die together, and all our efforts to break the bonds had been in vain.

About four months after the start of treatment, my blood
counts began to turn around. I was more terrified than ever of my hopes being
dashed, and I spent all my time battling to keep myself from premature
optimism. I didnłt dare ring Paula; I could think of nothing worse than leading
her to think that we were cured, and then turning out to have been mistaken.
Even when Dr Packardcautiously, almost begrudginglyadmitted that things were
looking up, I told myself that she might have relented from her policy of
unflinching honesty and decided to offer me some palliative lies.

One morning I woke, not yet convinced that I was cured, but
sick of feeling I had to drown myself in gloom for fear of being disappointed.
If I wanted absolute certainty, Iłd be miserable all my life; a relapse would
always be possible, or a whole new virus could come along.

It was a cold, dark morning, pouring with rain outside, but
as I climbed, shivering, out of bed, I felt more cheerful than I had since the
whole thing had begun.

There was a message in my work station mailbox, tagged
CONFIDENTIAL. It took me thirty seconds to recall the password I needed, and
all the while my shivering grew worse.

The message was from the Chief Administrator of the Libreville
Peoplełs Hospital, offering his or her condolences on the death of my sister,
and requesting instructions for the disposal of the body.

I donłt know what I felt first. Disbelief. Guilt. Confusion.
Fear. How could she have died, when I was so close to recovery? How could she
have died without a word to me? How could I have let her die alone? I walked
away from the terminal, and slumped against the cold brick wall.

The worst of it was, I suddenly knew why shełd stayed
silent. She must have thought that I was dying, too, and that was the one thing
wełd both feared most of all: dying together. In spite of everything, dying
together, as if we were one.

How could the drug have failed her, and worked for me? Had
it worked for me? For a moment of sheer paranoia, I wondered if the hospital
had been faking my test results, if in fact I was on the verge of death,
myself. That was ludicrous, though.

Why, then, had Paula died? There was only one possible answer.
She should have come homeI should have made her come home. How could I have
let her stay there, in a tropical, Third World country, with her immune system
weakened, living in a fibreglass hut, without proper sanitation, probably
malnourished? I should have sent her the money, I should have sent her the
ticket, I should have flown out there in person and dragged her back home.

Instead, Iłd kept her at a distance. Afraid of us dying
together, afraid of the curse of our sameness, Iłd let her die alone.

I tried to cry, but something stopped me. I sat in the
kitchen, sobbing drily. I was worthless. Iłd killed her with my superstition
and cowardice. I had no right to be alive.

I spent the next fortnight grappling with the legal and
administrative complexities of death in a foreign land. Paulałs will requested
cremation, but said nothing about where it was to take place, so I arranged for
her body and belongings to be flown home. The service was all but deserted; our
parents had died a decade before, in a car crash, and although Paula had had
friends all over the world, few were able to make the trip.

Martin came, though. When he put an arm around me, I turned
and whispered to him angrily, �You didnłt even know her. What the hell are you
doing here?" He stared at me for a moment, hurt and baffled, then walked off
without a word.

I canłt pretend I wasnłt grateful, when Packard announced
that I was cured, but my failure to rejoice out loud must have puzzled even
her. I might have told her about Paula, but I didnłt want to be fed cheap
clich�s about how irrational it was of me to feel guilty for surviving.

She was dead. I was growing stronger by the day; often sick
with guilt and depression, but more often simply numb. That might easily have
been the end of it.

Following the instructions in the will, I sent most of her belongingsnotebooks,
disks, audio and video tapesto her agent, to be passed on to the appropriate
editors and producers, to whom some of it might be of use. All that remained
was clothing, a minute quantity of jewellery and cosmetics, and a handful of
odds and ends. Including a small glass vial of red-and-black capsules.

I donłt know what possessed me to take one of the capsules.
I had half a dozen left of my own, and Packard had shrugged when Iłd asked if I
should finish them, and said that it couldnłt do me any harm.

There was no aftertaste. Every time Iłd swallowed my own,
within minutes therełd been a bitter aftertaste.

I broke open a second capsule and put some of the white
powder on my tongue. It was entirely without flavour. I ran and grabbed my own
supply, and sampled one the same way; it tasted so vile it made my eyes water.

I tried, very hard, not to leap to any conclusions. I knew
perfectly well that pharmaceuticals were often mixed with inert substances, and
perhaps not necessarily the same ones all the timebut why would something
bitter be used for that purpose? The taste had to come from the drug itself.
The two vials bore the same manufacturerłs name and logo. The same brand name.
The same generic name. The same formal chemical name for the active ingredient.
The same product code, down to the very last digit. Only the batch numbers were
different.

The first explanation that came to mind was corruption. Although
I couldnłt recall the details, I was sure that Iłd read about dozens of cases
of officials in the health care systems of developing countries diverting
pharmaceuticals for resale on the black market. What better way to cover up
such a theft than to replace the stolen product with something elsesomething
cheap, harmless, and absolutely useless? The gelatin capsules themselves bore
nothing but the manufacturerłs logo, and since the company probably made at
least a thousand different drugs, it would not have been too hard to find
something cheaper, with the same size and colouration.

I had no idea what to do with this theory. Anonymous bureaucrats
in a distant country had killed my sister, but the prospect of finding out who
they were, let alone seeing them brought to justice, were infinitesimally
small. Even if Iłd had real, damning evidence, what was the most I could hope
for? A meekly phrased protest from one diplomat to another.

I had one of Paulałs capsules analysed. It cost me a
fortune, but I was already so deeply in debt that I didnłt much care.

It was full of a mixture of soluble inorganic compounds.
There was no trace of the substance described on the label, nor of anything
else with the slightest biological activity. It wasnłt a cheap substitute drug,
chosen at random.

It was a placebo.

I stood with the print-out in my hand for several minutes,
trying to come to terms with what it meant. Simple greed I could have
understood, but there was an utterly inhuman coldness here that I couldnłt
bring myself to swallow. Someone must have made an honest mistake. Nobody could
be so callous.

Then Packardłs words came back to me. �Just look after yourself
as you normally would. Donłt do anything out of the ordinary."

Oh no, Doctor. Of course not, Doctor. Wouldnłt want to go
spoiling the experiment with any messy, extraneous, uncontrolled factors ...

I contacted an investigative journalist, one of the best in
the country. I arranged a meeting in a small caf� on the edge of town.

I drove out thereterrified, angry, triumphantthinking I
had the scoop of the decade, thinking I had dynamite, thinking I was Meryl
Streep playing Karen Silkwood. I was dizzy with sweet thoughts of revenge.
Heads were going to roll.

Nobody tried to run me off the road. The cafe was deserted,
and the waiter barely listened to our orders, let alone our conversation.

The journalist was very kind. She calmly explained the facts
of life.

In the aftermath of the Monte Carlo disaster, a lot of
legislation had been passed to help deal with the emergencyand a lot of legislation
had been repealed. As a matter of urgency, new drugs to treat the new diseases had
to be developed and assessed, and the best way to ensure that was to remove the
cumbersome regulations that had made clinical trials so difficult and
expensive.

In the old �double-blind" trials, neither the patients nor
the investigators knew who was getting the drug and who was getting a placebo;
the information was kept secret by a third party (or a computer). Any
improvement observed in the patients who were given the placebo could then be
taken into account, and the drugłs true efficacy measured.

There were two small problems with this traditional
approach. Firstly, telling a patient that therełs only a fifty-fifty chance
that theyłve been given a potentially life-saving drug subjects them to a lot
of stress. Of course, the treatment and control groups were affected equally,
but in terms of predicting what would happen when the drug was finally put out
on the market, it introduced a lot of noise into the data. Which side-effects
were real, and which were artifacts of the patientsł uncertainty?

Secondlyand more seriouslyit had become increasingly
difficult to find people willing to volunteer for placebo trials. When youłre
dying, you donłt give a shit about the scientific method. You want the maximum
possible chance of surviving. Untested drugs will do, if there is no known,
certain curebut why accept a further halving of the odds, to satisfy some
technocratłs obsession with derails?

Of course, in the good old days the medical profession could
lay down the law to the unwashed masses: Take part in this double-blind trial,
or crawl away and die. AIDS had changed all that, with black markets for the
latest untried cures, straight from the labs to the streets, and intense
politicization of the issues.

The solution to both flaws was obvious.

You lie to the patients.

No bill had been passed to explicitly declare that �triple-blind"
trials were legal. If it had, people might have noticed, and made a fuss.
Instead, as part of the �reforms" and �rationalization" that came in the wake
of the disaster, all the laws that might have made them illegal had been
removed or watered down. At least, it looked that wayno court had yet been
given the opportunity to pass judgement.

�How could any doctor do that? Lie like that! How could they
justify it, even to themselves?"

She shrugged. �How did they ever justify double-blind
trials? A good medical researcher has to care more about the quality of the
data than about any one personłs life. And if a double-blind trial is good, a
triple-blind trial is better. The data is guaranteed to be better, you can see
that, canłt you? And the more accurately a drug can be assessed, well, perhaps
in the long run, the more lives can be saved."

�Oh, crap! The placebo effect isnłt that powerful. It just
isnłt that important! Who cares if itłs not precisely taken into account?
Anyway, two potential cures could still be compared, one treatment against
another. That would tell you which drug would save the most lives, without any
need for placebos"

�That is done sometimes, although the more prestigious journals
look down on those studies; theyłre less likely to be published"

I stared at her. �How can you know all this and do nothing?
The media could blow it wide open! If you let people know whatłs going on ..."

She smiled thinly. �I could publicize the observation that
these practices are now, theoretically, legal. Other people have done that, and
it doesnłt exactly make headlines. But if I printed any specific facts about an
actual triple-blind trial, Iłd face a half-million-dollar fine, and twenty-five
years in prison, for endangering public health. Not to mention what theyłd do
to my publisher. All the ęemergencył laws brought in to deal with the Monte
Carlo leak are still active."

�But that was twenty years ago!"

She drained her coffee and rose. �Donłt you recall what the
experts said at the time?"

�No."

�The effects will be with us for generations."

It took me four months to penetrate the drug manufacturerłs
network.

I eavesdropped on the data flow of several company
executives who chose to work from home. It didnłt take long to identify the
least computer-literate. A real bumbling fool, who used ten-thousand-dollar
spreadsheet software to do what the average five-year-old could have done
without fingers and toes. I watched his clumsy responses when the spreadsheet
package gave him error messages. He was a gift from heaven; he simply didnłt
have a clue.

And, best of all, he was forever running a tediously
unimaginative pornographic video game.

If the computer said �Jump!" hełd say �Promise not to tell?"

I spent a fortnight minimizing what he had to do; it started
out at seventy keystrokes, but I finally got it down to twenty-three.

I waited until his screen was at its most compromising, then
I suspended his connection to the network, and took its place myself.

FATAL SYSTEM ERROR! TYPE THE FOLLOWING TO RECOVER:

He botched it the first time. I rang alarm bells, and
repeated the request. The second time, he got it right.

The first multi-key combination I had him strike took the
work station right out of its operating system into its processorłs microcode
debugging routine. The hexadecimal that followed, gibberish to him, was a tiny
program to dump all of the work stationłs memory down the communications line,
right into my lap.

If he told anyone with any sense what had happened,
suspicion would be aroused at oncebut would he risk being asked to explain
just what he was running when the �bug" occurred? I doubted it.

I already had his passwords. Included in the work stationłs
memory was an algorithm which told me precisely how to respond to the networkłs
security challenges. I was in.

The rest of their defences were trivial, at least so far as
my aims were concerned. Data that might have been useful to their competitors
was well-shielded, but I wasnłt interested in stealing the secrets of their
latest haemorrhoid cure.

I could have done a lot of damage. Arranged for their
backups to be filled with garbage. Arranged for the gradual deviation of their
accounts from reality, until reality suddenly intruded in the form of
bankruptcyor charges of tax fraud. I considered a thousand possibilities, from
the crudest annihilation of data to the slowest, most insidious forms of
corruption.

In the end, though, I restrained myself. I knew the fight
would soon become a political one, and any act of petty vengeance on my part
would be sure to be dredged up and used to discredit me, to undermine my cause.

So I did only what was absolutely necessary.

I located the files containing the names and addresses of
everyone who had been unknowingly participating in triple-blind trials of the
companyłs products. I arranged for them all to be notified of what had been
done to them. There were over two hundred thousand people, spread all around
the worldbut I found a swollen executive slush fund which easily covered the
communications bill.

Soon, the whole world would know of our anger, would share
in our outrage and grief. Half of us were sick or dying, though, and before the
slightest whisper of protest was heard, my first objective had to be to save
whoever I could.

I found the program that allocated medication or placebo.
The program that had killed Paula, and thousands of others, for the sake of
sound experimental technique.

I altered it. A very small change. I added one more lie.

All the reports it generated would continue to assert that
half the patients involved in clinical trials were being given the placebo.
Dozens of exhaustive, impressive files would continue to be created, containing
data entirely consistent with this lie. Only one small file, never read by
humans, would be different. The file controlling the assembly line robots would
instruct them to put medication in every vial of every batch.

From triple-blind to quadruple-blind. One more lie, to
cancel out the others, until the time for deception was finally over.

Martin came to see me.

�I heard about what youłre doing. T.I.M. Truth in Medicine."
He pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. �ęA vigorous new organization
dedicated to the eradication of quackery, fraud and deception in both
alternative and conventional medicine.ł Sounds like a great idea."

�Thanks."

He hesitated. �I heard you were looking for a few more volunteers.
To help around the office."

�Thatłs right."

�I could manage four hours a week."

I laughed. �Oh, could you really? Well, thanks very much,
but I think wełll cope without you."

For a moment, I thought he was going to walk out, but then
he said, not so much hurt as simply baffled, �Do you want volunteers, or not?"

�Yes, but" But what? If he could swallow enough pride to
offer, I could swallow enough pride to accept.

I signed him up for Wednesday afternoons.

I have nightmares about Paula, now and then. I wake smelling
the ghost of a candle flame, certain that shełs standing in the dark beside my
pillow, a solemn-eyed nine-year-old child again, mesmerized by our strange
condition.

That child canłt haunt me, though. She never died. She grew
up, and grew apart from me, and she fought for our separateness harder than I
ever did. What if we had �died at the very same hour"? It would have signified
nothing, changed nothing. Nothing could have reached back and robbed us of our
separate lives, our separate achievements and failures.

I realize, now, that the blood oath that seemed so ominous
to me was nothing but a joke to Paula, her way of mocking the very idea that
our fates could be entwined. How could I have taken so long to see that?

It shouldnłt surprise me, though. The truthand the measure
of her triumphis that I never really knew her.

Border Guards

I

n the early afternoon of his fourth day out of sadness,
Jamil was wandering home from the gardens at the centre of Noether when he
heard shouts from the playing field behind the library. On the spur of the
moment, without even asking the city what game was in progress, he decided to
join in.

As he rounded the corner and the field came into view, it
was clear from the movements of the players that they were in the middle of a
quantum soccer match. At Jamilłs request, the city painted the wave function of
the hypothetical ball across his vision, and tweaked him to recognise the
players as the members of two teams without changing their appearance at all.
Maria had once told him that she always chose a literal perception of
colour-coded clothing instead; she had no desire to use pathways that had
evolved for the sake of sorting people into those you defended and those you
slaughtered. But almost everything that had been bequeathed to them was stained
with blood, and to Jamil it seemed a far sweeter victory to adapt the worst
relics to his own ends than to discard them as irretrievably tainted.

The wave function appeared as a vivid auroral light, a quicksilver
plasma bright enough to be distinct in the afternoon sunlight, yet unable to
dazzle the eye or conceal the players running through it. Bands of colour
representing the complex phase of the wave swept across the field, parting to
wash over separate rising lobes of probability before hitting the boundary and
bouncing back again, inverted. The match was being played by the oldest,
simplest rules: semi-classical, non-relativistic. The ball was confined to the
field by an infinitely high barrier, so there was no question of it tunnelling
out, leaking away as the match progressed. The players were treated classically:
their movements pumped energy into the wave, enabling transitions from the gamełs
opening statewith the ball spread thinly across the entire fieldinto the
range of higher-energy modes needed to localise it. But localisation was
fleeting; there was no point forming a nice sharp wave packet in the middle of
the field in the hope of kicking it around like a classical object. You had to
shape the wave in such a way that all of its modescycling at different
frequencies, travelling with different velocitieswould come into phase with
each other, for a fraction of a second, within the goal itself. Achieving that
was a matter of energy levels, and timing.

Jamil had noticed that one team was under-strength. The umpire
would be skewing the fieldłs potential to keep the match fair, but a new
participant would be especially welcome for the sake of restoring symmetry. He
watched the faces of the players, most of them old friends. They were frowning
with concentration, but breaking now and then into smiles of delight at their
small successes, or their opponentsł ingenuity.

He was badly out of practice, but if he turned out to be
dead weight he could always withdraw. And if he misjudged his skills, and lost
the match with his incompetence? No one would care. The score was nil all; he
could wait for a goal, but that might be an hour or more in coming. Jamil
communed with the umpire, and discovered that the players had decided in
advance to allow new entries at any time.

Before he could change his mind, he announced himself. The
wave froze, and he ran on to the field. People nodded greetings, mostly making
no fuss, though Ezequiel shouted, �Welcome back!" Jamil suddenly felt fragile
again; though hełd ended his long seclusion four days before, it was well
within his power, still, to be dismayed by everything the game would involve.
His recovery felt like a finely balanced optical illusion, a figure and ground
that could change roles in an instant, a solid cube that could evert into a
hollow.

The umpire guided him to his allotted starting position, opposite
a woman he hadnłt seen before. He offered her a formal bow, and she returned
the gesture. This was no time for introductions, but he asked the city if shełd
published a name. She had: Margit.

The umpire counted down in their heads. Jamil tensed, regretting
his impulsiveness. For seven years hełd been dead to the world. After four days
back, what was he good for? His muscles were incapable of atrophy, his reflexes
could never be dulled, but hełd chosen to live with an unconstrained will, and
at any moment his wavering resolve could desert him.

The umpire said, �Play." The frozen light around Jamil came
to life, and he sprang into motion.

Each player was responsible for a set of modes, particular
harmonics of the wave that were theirs to fill, guard, or deplete as necessary.
Jamilłs twelve modes cycled at between 1,000 and 1,250 milliHertz. The rules of
the game endowed his body with a small, fixed potential energy, which repelled
the ball slightly and allowed different modes to push and pull on each other
through him, but if he stayed in one spot as the modes cycled, every influence
he exerted would eventually be replaced by its opposite, and the effect would
simply cancel itself out.

To drive the wave from one mode to another, you needed to
move, and to drive it efficiently you needed to exploit the way the modes fell
in and out of phase with each other: to take from a 1,000 milliHertz mode and
give to a 1,250, you had to act in synch with the quarter-Hertz beat between
them. It was like pushing a childłs swing at its natural frequency, but rather
than setting a single child in motion, you were standing between two swings and
acting more as an intermediary: trying to time your interventions in such a way
as to speed up one child at the otherłs expense. The way you pushed on the wave
at a given time and place was out of your hands completely, but by changing
location in just the right way you could gain control over the interaction.
Every pair of modes had a spatial beat between themlike the moir� pattern
formed by two sheets of woven fabric held up to the light together, shifting
from transparent to opaque as the gaps between the threads fell in and out of
alignment. Slicing through this cyclic landscape offered the perfect means to
match the accompanying chronological beat.

Jamil sprinted across the field at a speed and angle
calculated to drive two favourable transitions at once. Hełd gauged the current
spectrum of the wave instinctively, watching from the sidelines, and he knew
which of the modes in his charge would contribute to a goal and which would
detract from the probability. As he cut through the shimmering bands of colour,
the umpire gave him tactile feedback to supplement his visual estimates and
calculations, allowing him to sense the difference between a cyclic tug, a to
and fro that came to nothing, and the gentle but persistent force that meant he
was successfully riding the beat.

Chusok called out to him urgently, �Take, take! Two-ten!"
Everyonełs spectral territory overlapped with someone elsełs, and you needed to
pass amplitude from player to player as well as trying to manage it within your
own range. Two-tena harmonic with two peaks across the width of the field and
ten along its length, cycling at 1,160 milliHertzwas filling up as Chusok
drove unwanted amplitude from various lower-energy modes into it. It was Jamilłs
role to empty it, putting the amplitude somewhere useful. Any mode with an even
number of peaks across the field was unfavourable for scoring, because it had a
nodea zero point between the peakssmack in the middle of both goals.

Jamil acknowledged the request with a hand signal and
shifted his trajectory. It was almost a decade since hełd last played the game,
but he still knew the intricate web of possibilities by heart: he could drain
the two-ten harmonic into the three-ten, five-two and five-six modesall with �good
parity", peaks along the centre-linein a single action.

As he pounded across the grass, carefully judging the
correct angle by sight, increasing his speed until he felt the destructive
beats give way to a steady force like a constant breeze, he suddenly recalled a
timecenturies before, in another citywhen hełd played with one team, week
after week, for forty years. Faces and voices swam in his head. Hashim, Jamilłs
ninety-eighth child, and Hashimłs granddaughter Laila had played beside him.
But hełd burnt his house and moved on, and when that era touched him at all now
it was like an unexpected gift. The scent of the grass, the shouts of the
players, the soles of his feet striking the ground, resonated with every other
moment hełd spent the same way, bridging the centuries, binding his life
together. He never truly felt the scale of it when he sought it out
deliberately; it was always small things, tightly focused moments like this,
that burst the horizon of his everyday concerns and confronted him with the
astonishing vista.

The two-ten mode was draining faster than hełd expected; the
see-sawing centre-line dip in the wave was vanishing before his eyes. He looked
around, and saw Margit performing an elaborate Lissajous manoeuvre, smoothly
orchestrating a dozen transitions at once. Jamil froze and watched her,
admiring her virtuosity while he tried to decide what to do next; there was no
point competing with her when she was doing such a good job of completing the
task Chusok had set him.

Margit was his opponent, but they were both aiming for
exactly the same kind of spectrum. The symmetry of the field meant that any
scoring wave would work equally well for either sidebut only one team could be
the first to reap the benefit, the first to have more than half the wavełs
probability packed into their goal. So the two teams were obliged to cooperate
at first, and it was only as the wave took shape from their combined efforts
that it gradually became apparent which side would gain by sculpting it to
perfection as rapidly as possible, and which would gain by spoiling it for the
first chance, then honing it for the rebound.

Penina chided him over her shoulder as she jogged past, �You
want to leave her to clean up four-six, as well?" She was smiling, but Jamil
was stung; hełd been motionless for ten or fifteen seconds. It was not
forbidden to drag your feet and rely on your opponents to do all the work, but
it was regarded as a shamefully impoverished strategy. It was also very risky,
handing them the opportunity to set up a wave that was almost impossible to
exploit yourself.

He reassessed the spectrum, and quickly sorted through the alternatives.
Whatever he did would have unwanted side effects; there was no magic way to
avoid influencing modes in other playersł territory, and any action that would
drive the transitions he needed would also trigger a multitude of others, up
and down the spectrum. Finally, he made a choice that would weaken the offending
mode while causing as little disruption as possible.

Jamil immersed himself in the game, planning each transition
two steps in advance, switching strategy half-way through a run if he had to,
but staying in motion until the sweat dripped from his body, until his calves
burned, until his blood sang. He wasnłt blinded to the raw pleasures of the
moment, or to memories of games past, but he let them wash over him, like the
breeze that rose up and cooled his skin with no need for acknowledgement.
Familiar voices shouted terse commands at him; as the wave came closer to a
scoring spectrum every trace of superfluous conversation vanished, every idle
glance gave way to frantic, purposeful gestures. To a bystander, this might
have seemed like the height of dehumanisation: twenty-two people reduced to
grunting cogs in a pointless machine. Jamil smiled at the thought but refused
to be distracted into a complicated imaginary rebuttal. Every step he took was
the answer to that, every hoarse plea to Yann or Joracy, Chusok or Maria,
Eudore or Halide. These were his friends, and he was back among them. Back in
the world.

The first chance of a goal was thirty seconds away, and the
opportunity would fall to Jamilłs team; a few tiny shifts in amplitude would
clinch it. Margit kept her distance, but Jamil could sense her eyes on him
constantlyand literally feel her at work through his skin as she slackened his
contact with the wave. In theory, by mirroring your opponentłs movements at the
correct position on the field you could undermine everything they did, though
in practice not even the most skilful team could keep the spectrum completely
frozen. Going further and spoiling was a tug of war you didnłt want to win too
well: if you degraded the wave too much, your opponentłs taskspoiling your own
subsequent chance at a goalbecame far easier.

Jamil still had two bad-parity modes that he was hoping to
weaken, but every time he changed velocity to try a new transition, Margit
responded in an instant, blocking him. He gestured to Chusok for help; Chusok
had his own problems with Ezequiel, but he could still make trouble for Margit
by choosing where he placed unwanted amplitude. Jamil shook sweat out of his
eyes; he could see the characteristic �stepping stone" pattern of lobes
forming, a sign that the wave would soon converge on the goal, but from the
middle of the field it was impossible to judge their shape accurately enough to
know what, if anything, remained to be done.

Suddenly, Jamil felt the wave push against him. He didnłt
waste time looking around for Margit; Chusok must have succeeded in distracting
her. He was almost at the boundary line, but he managed to reverse smoothly,
continuing to drive both the transitions hełd been aiming for.

Two long lobes of probability, each modulated by a series of
oscillating mounds, raced along the sides of the field. A third, shorter lobe
running along the centre-line melted away, reappeared, then merged with the
others as they touched the end of the field, forming an almost rectangular
plateau encompassing the goal.

The plateau became a pillar of light, growing narrower and
higher as dozens of modes, all finally in phase, crashed together against the
impenetrable barrier of the fieldłs boundary. A shallow residue was still
spread across the entire field, and a diminishing sequence of elliptical lobes
trailed away from the goal like a staircase, but most of the wave that had
started out lapping around their waists was now concentrated in a single peak
that towered above their heads, nine or ten metres tall.

For an instant, it was motionless.

Then it began to fall.

The umpire said, �Forty-nine point eight."

The wave packet had not been tight enough.

Jamil struggled to shrug off his disappointment and throw
his instincts into reverse. The other team had fifty seconds, now, to fine-tune
the spectrum and ensure that the reflected packet was just a fraction narrower
when it reformed, at the opposite end of the field.

As the pillar collapsed, replaying its synthesis in reverse,
Jamil caught sight of Margit. She smiled at him calmly, and it suddenly struck
him: Shełd known they couldnłt make the goal. That was why shełd stopped
opposing him. Shełd let him work towards sharpening the wave for a few seconds,
knowing that it was already too late for him, knowing that her own team would
gain from the slight improvement.

Jamil was impressed; it took an extraordinary level of skill
and confidence to do what shełd just done. For all the time hełd spent away, he
knew exactly what to expect from the rest of the players, and in Margitłs
absence he would probably have been wishing out loud for a talented newcomer to
make the game interesting again. Still, it was hard not to feel a slight sting
of resentment. Someone should have warned him just how good she was.

With the modes slipping out of phase, the wave undulated all
over the field again, but its reconvergence was inevitable: unlike a wave of
water or sound, it possessed no hidden degrees of freedom to grind its
precision into entropy. Jamil decided to ignore Margit; there were cruder
strategies than mirror-blocking that worked almost as well. Chusok was filling
the two-ten mode now; Jamil chose the four-six as his spoiler. All they had to
do was keep the wave from growing much sharper, and it didnłt matter whether
they achieved this by preserving the status quo, or by nudging it from one kind
of bluntness to another.

The steady resistance he felt as he ran told Jamil that he
was driving the transition, unblocked, but he searched in vain for some visible
sign of success. When he reached a vantage point where he could take in enough
of the field in one glance to judge the spectrum properly, he noticed a rapidly
vibrating shimmer across the width of the wave. He counted nine peaks: good
parity. Margit had pulled most of the amplitude straight out of his spoiler
mode and fed it into this. It was a mad waste of energy to aim for such an
elevated harmonic, but no one had been looking there, no one had stopped her.

The scoring pattern was forming again, he only had nine or
ten seconds left to make up for all the time hełd wasted. Jamil chose the
strongest good-parity mode in his territory, and the emptiest bad one, computed
the velocity that would link them, and ran.

He didnłt dare turn to watch the opposition goal; he didnłt
want to break his concentration. The wave retreated around his feet, less like
an Earthly ebb tide than an ocean drawn into the sky by a passing black hole.
The city diligently portrayed the shadow that his body would have cast,
shrinking in front of him as the tower of light rose.

The verdict was announced. �Fifty point one."

The air was filled with shouts of triumphEzequielłs the
loudest, as always. Jamil sagged to his knees, laughing. It was a curious
feeling, familiar as it was: he cared, and he didnłt. If hełd been wholly
indifferent to the outcome of the game there would have been no pleasure in it,
but obsessing over every defeator every victorycould ruin it just as
thoroughly. He could almost see himself walking the line, orchestrating his
response as carefully as any action in the game itself.

He lay down on the grass to catch his breath before play resumed.
The outer face of the microsun that orbited Laplace was shielded with rock, but
light reflected skywards from the land beneath it crossed the 100,000 kilometre
width of the 3-toroidal universe to give a faint glow to the planetłs
nightside. Though only a sliver was lit directly, Jamil could discern the full
disk of the opposite hemisphere in the primary image at the zenith: continents
and oceans that lay, by a shorter route, 12,000 or so kilometres beneath him.
Other views in the lattice of images spread across the sky were from different
angles, and showed substantial crescents of the dayside itself. The one thing
you couldnłt find in any of these images, even with a telescope, was your own
city. The topology of this universe let you see the back of your head, but
never your reflection.

J

amilłs team lost, three nil. He staggered over to the
fountains at the edge of the field and slaked his thirst, shocked by the
pleasure of the simple act. Just to be alive was glorious now, but once he felt
this way, anything seemed possible. He was back in synch, back in phase, and he
was going to make the most of it, for however long it lasted.

He caught up with the others, whołd headed down towards the
river. Ezequiel hooked an arm around his neck, laughing. �Bad luck, Sleeping
Beauty! You picked the wrong time to wake. With Margit, wełre invincible."

Jamil ducked free of him. �I wonłt argue with that." He
looked around. �Speaking of whom"

Penina said, �Gone home. She plays, thatłs all. No frivolous
socialising after the match."

Chusok added, �Or any other time." Penina shot Jamil a
glance that meant: not for want of trying on Chusokłs part.

Jamil pondered this, wondering why it annoyed him so much.
On the field, she hadnłt come across as aloof and superior. Just unashamedly
good.

He queried the city, but shełd published nothing besides her
name. Nobody expectedor wishedto hear more than the tiniest fraction of
another personłs history, but it was rare for anyone to start a new life
without carrying through something from the old as a kind of calling card, some
incident or achievement from which your new neighbours could form an impression
of you.

Theyłd reached the riverbank. Jamil pulled his shirt over
his head. �So whatłs her story? She must have told you something."

Ezequiel said, �Only that she learnt to play a long time
ago; she wonłt say where or when. She arrived in Noether at the end of last
year, and grew a house on the southern outskirts. No one sees her around much.
No one even knows what she studies."

Jamil shrugged, and waded in. �Ah well. Itłs a challenge to
rise to." Penina laughed and splashed him teasingly. He protested, �I meant
beating her at the game."

Chusok said wryly, �When you turned up, I thought youłd be
our secret weapon. The one player she didnłt know inside out already."

�Iłm glad you didnłt tell me that. I would have turned
around and fled straight back into hibernation."

�I know. Thatłs why we all kept quiet." Chusok smiled. �Welcome
back."

Penina said, �Yeah, welcome back, Jamil."

Sunlight shone on the surface of the river. Jamil ached all
over, but the cool water was the perfect place to be. If he wished, he could
build a partition in his mind at the point where he stood right now, and never
fall beneath it. Other people lived that way, and it seemed to cost them
nothing. Contrast was overrated; no sane person spent half their time driving
spikes into their flesh for the sake of feeling better when they stopped.
Ezequiel lived every day with the happy boisterousness of a five-year-old;
Jamil sometimes found this annoying, but then any kind of disposition would
irritate someone. His own stretches of meaningless sombreness werenłt exactly a
boon to his friends.

Chusok said, �Iłve invited everyone to a meal at my house tonight.
Will you come?"

Jamil thought it over, then shook his head. He still wasnłt
ready. He couldnłt force-feed himself with normality; it didnłt speed his
recovery, it just drove him backwards.

Chusok looked disappointed, but there was nothing to be done
about that. Jamil promised him, �Next time. OK?"

Ezequiel sighed. �What are we going to do with you? Youłre
worse than Margit!" Jamil started backing away, but it was too late. Ezequiel
reached him in two casual strides, bent down and grabbed him around the waist,
hoisted him effortlessly onto one shoulder, then flung him through the air into
the depths of the river.

J

amil was woken by the scent of wood smoke. His room was
still filled with the nightłs grey shadows, but when he propped himself up on
one elbow and the window obliged him with transparency, the city was etched
clearly in the predawn light.

He dressed and left the house, surprised at the coolness of
the dew on his feet. No one else in his street seemed to be up; had they failed
to notice the smell, or did they already know to expect it? He turned a corner
and saw the rising column of soot, faintly lit with red from below. The flames
and the ruins were still hidden from him, but he knew whose house it was.

When he reached the dying blaze, he crouched in the
heat-withered garden, cursing himself. Chusok had offered him the chance to
join him for his last meal in Noether. Whatever hints you dropped, it was
customary to tell no one that you were moving on. If you still had a lover, if
you still had young children, you never deserted them. But friends, you warned
in subtle ways. Before vanishing.

Jamil covered his head with his arms. Hełd lived through
this countless times before, but it never became easier. If anything it grew
worse, as every departure was weighted with the memories of others. His
brothers and sisters had scattered across the branches of the New Territories.
Hełd walked away from his father and mother when he was too young and confident
to realise how much it would hurt him, decades later. His own children had all
abandoned him eventually, far more often than hełd left them. It was easier to
leave an ex-lover than a grown child: something burned itself out in a couple,
almost naturally, as if ancestral biology had prepared them for at least that
one rift.

Jamil stopped fighting the tears. But as he brushed them
away, he caught sight of someone standing beside him. He looked up. It was
Margit.

He felt a need to explain. He rose to his feet and addressed
her. �This was Chusokłs house. We were good friends. Iłd known him for
ninety-six years."

Margit gazed back at him neutrally. �Boo hoo. Poor baby. Youłll
never see your friend again."

Jamil almost laughed, her rudeness was so surreal. He pushed
on, as if the only conceivable, polite response was to pretend that he hadnłt
heard her. �No one is the kindest, the most generous, the most loyal. It doesnłt
matter. Thatłs not the point. Everyonełs unique. Chusok was Chusok." He banged
a fist against his chest, utterly heedless now of her contemptuous words. �Therełs
a hole in me, and it will never be filled." That was the truth, even though hełd
grow around it. He should have gone to the meal, it would have cost him
nothing.

�You must be a real emotional Swiss cheese," observed Margit
tartly.

Jamil came to his senses. �Why donłt you fuck off to some
other universe? No one wants you in Noether."

Margit was amused. �You are a bad loser."

Jamil gazed at her, honestly confused for a moment; the game
had slipped his mind completely. He gestured at the embers. �What are you doing
here? Why did you follow the smoke, if it wasnłt regret at not saying goodbye
to him when you had the chance?" He wasnłt sure how seriously to take Peninałs
light-hearted insinuation, but if Chusok had fallen for Margit, and it had not
been reciprocated, that might even have been the reason hełd left.

She shook her head calmly. �He was nothing to me. I barely
spoke to him."

�Well, thatłs your loss."

�From the look of things, Iłd say the loss was all yours."

He had no reply. Margit turned and walked away.

Jamil crouched on the ground again, rocking back and forth,
waiting for the pain to subside.

J

amil spent the next week preparing to resume his studies.
The library had near-instantaneous contact with every artificial universe in
the New Territories, and the additional lightspeed lag between Earth and the
point in space from which the whole tree-structure blossomed was only a few
hours. Jamil had been to Earth, but only as a tourist; land was scarce, they
accepted no migrants. There were remote planets you could live on, in the home
universe, but you had to be a certain kind of masochistic purist to want that.
The precise reasons why his ancestors had entered the New Territories had been
forgotten generations beforeand it would have been presumptuous to track them
down and ask them in personbut given a choice between the then even-more-crowded
Earth, the horrifying reality of interstellar distances, and an endlessly extensible
branching chain of worlds which could be traversed within a matter of weeks,
the decision wasnłt exactly baffling.

Jamil had devoted most of his time in Noether to studying
the category of representations of Lie groups on complex vector spacesa
fitting choice, since Emmy Noether had been a pioneer of group theory, and if
shełd lived to see this field blossom she would probably have been in the thick
of it herself. Representations of Lie groups lay behind most of physics: each
kind of subatomic particle was really nothing but a particular way of
representing the universal symmetry group as a set of rotations of complex
vectors. Organising this kind of structure with category theory was ancient
knowledge, but Jamil didnłt care; hełd long ago reconciled himself to being a
student, not a discoverer. The greatest gift of consciousness was the ability
to take the patterns of the world inside you, and for all that he would have
relished the thrill of being the first at anything, with ten-to-the-sixteenth
people alive that was a futile ambition for most.

In the library, he spoke with fellow students of his chosen
field on other worlds, or read their latest works. Though they were not
researchers, they could still put a new pedagogical spin on old material,
enriching the connections with other fields, finding ways to make the complex,
subtle truth easier to assimilate without sacrificing the depth and detail that
made it worth knowing in the first place. They would not advance the frontiers
of knowledge. They would not discover new principles of nature, or invent new
technologies. But to Jamil, understanding was an end in itself.

He rarely thought about the prospect of playing another
match, and when he did the idea was not appealing. With Chusok gone, the same
group could play ten-to-a-side without Jamil to skew the numbers. Margit might
even choose to swap teams, if only for the sake of proving that her current
teamłs monotonous string of victories really had been entirely down to her.

When the day arrived, though, he found himself unable to
stay away. He turned up intending to remain a spectator, but Ryuichi had
deserted Ezequielłs team, and everyone begged Jamil to join in.

As he took his place opposite Margit, there was nothing in
her demeanour to acknowledge their previous encounter: no lingering contempt,
but no hint of shame either. Jamil resolved to put it out of his mind; he owed
it to his fellow players to concentrate on the game.

They lost, five nil.

Jamil forced himself to follow everyone to Eudorełs house,
to celebrate, commiserate, or as it turned out, to forget the whole thing.
After theyłd eaten, Jamil wandered from room to room, enjoying Eudorełs choice
of music but unable to settle into any conversation. No one mentioned Chusok in
his hearing.

He left just after midnight. Laplacełs near-full primary
image and its eight brightest gibbous companions lit the streets so well that
there was no need for anything more. Jamil thought: Chusok might have merely
travelled to another city, one beneath his gaze right now. And wherever hełd
gone, he might yet choose to stay in touch with his friends from Noether.

And his friends from the next town, and the next?

Century after century?

Margit was sitting on Jamilłs doorstep, holding a bunch of
white flowers in one hand.

Jamil was irritated. �What are you doing here?"

�I came to apologise."

He shrugged. �Therełs no need. We feel differently about certain
things. Thatłs fine. I can still face you on the playing field."

�Iłm not apologising for a difference of opinion. I wasnłt
honest with you. I was cruel." She shaded her eyes against the glare of the
planet and looked up at him. �You were right: it was my loss. I wish Iłd known
your friend."

He laughed curtly. �Well, itłs too late for that."

She said simply, �I know."

Jamil relented. �Do you want to come in?" Margit nodded, and
he instructed the door to open for her. As he followed her inside, he said, �How
long have you been here? Have you eaten?"

�No."

�Iłll cook something for you."

�You donłt have to do that."

He called out to her from the kitchen, �Think of it as a
peace offering. I donłt have any flowers."

Margit replied, �Theyłre not for you. Theyłre for Chusokłs
house."

Jamil stopped rummaging through his vegetable bins, and
walked back into the living room. �People donłt usually do that in Noether."

Margit was sitting on the couch, staring at the floor. She
said, �Iłm so lonely here. I canłt bear it any more."

He sat beside her. �Then why did you rebuff him? You could
at least have been friends."

She shook her head. �Donłt ask me to explain."

Jamil took her hand. She turned and embraced him, trembling
miserably. He stroked her hair. �Sssh."

She said, �Just sex. I donłt want anything more."

He groaned softly. �Therełs no such thing as that."

�I just need someone to touch me again."

�I understand." He confessed, �So do I. But that wonłt be
all. So donłt ask me to promise therełll be nothing more."

Margit took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her mouth
tasted of wood smoke.

Jamil said, �I donłt even know you."

�No one knows anyone, any more."

�Thatłs not true."

�No, itłs not," she conceded gloomily. She ran a hand
lightly along his arm. Jamil wanted badly to see her smile, so he made each
dark hair thicken and blossom into a violet flower as it passed beneath her
fingers.

She did smile, but she said, �Iłve seen that trick before."

Jamil was annoyed. �Iłm sure to be a disappointment all
round, then. I expect youłd be happier with some kind of novelty. A unicorn, or
an amoeba."

She laughed. �I donłt think so." She took his hand and
placed it against her breast. �Do you ever get tired of sex?"

�Do you ever get tired of breathing?"

�I can go for a long time without thinking about it."

He nodded. �But then one day you stop and fill your lungs
with air, and itłs still as sweet as ever."

Jamil didnłt know what he was feeling any more. Lust. Compassion.
Spite. Shełd come to him hurting, and he wanted to help her, but he wasnłt sure
that either of them really believed this would work.

Margit inhaled the scent of the flowers on his arm. �Are
they the same colour? Everywhere else?"

He said, �Therełs only one way to find out."

J

amil woke in the early hours of the morning, alone. Hełd
half expected Margit to flee like this, but she could have waited till dawn. He
would have obligingly feigned sleep while she dressed and tip-toed out.

Then he heard her. It was not a sound he would normally have
associated with a human being, but it could not have been anything else.

He found her in the kitchen, curled around a table leg,
wailing rhythmically. He stood back and watched her, afraid that anything he
did would only make things worse. She met his gaze in the half light, but kept
up the mechanical whimper. Her eyes werenłt blank; she was not delirious, or
hallucinating. She knew exactly who, and where, she was.

Finally, Jamil knelt in the doorway. He said, �Whatever it
is, you can tell me. And wełll fix it. Wełll find a way."

She bared her teeth. �You canłt fix it, you stupid child."
She resumed the awful noise.

�Then just tell me. Please?" He stretched out a hand towards
her. He hadnłt felt quite so helpless since his very first daughter, Aminata,
had come to him as an inconsolable six-year-old, rejected by the boy to whom
shełd declared her undying love. Hełd been twenty-four years old; a child
himself. More than a thousand years ago. Where are you now, Nata?

Margit said, �I promised. Iłd never tell."

�Promised who?"

�Myself."

�Good. Theyłre the easiest kind to break."

She started weeping. It was a more ordinary sound, but it
was even more chilling. She was not a wounded animal now, an alien being
suffering some incomprehensible pain. Jamil approached her cautiously; she let
him wrap his arms around her shoulders.

He whispered, �Come to bed. The warmth will help. Just being
held will help."

She spat at him derisively, �It wonłt bring her back."

�Who?"

Margit stared at him in silence, as if hełd said something
shocking.

Jamil insisted gently, �Who wonłt it bring back?" Shełd lost
a friend, badly, the way hełd lost Chusok. That was why shełd sought him out.
He could help her through it. They could help each other through it.

She said, �It wonłt bring back the dead."

M

argit was seven thousand five hundred and ninety-four years
old. Jamil persuaded her to sit at the kitchen table. He wrapped her in
blankets, then fed her tomatoes and rice, as she told him how shełd witnessed
the birth of his world.

The promise had shimmered just beyond reach for decades.
Almost none of her contemporaries had believed it would happen, though the
truth should have been plain for centuries: the human body was a material
thing. In time, with enough knowledge and effort, it would become possible to
safeguard it from any kind of deterioration, any kind of harm. Stellar
evolution and cosmic entropy might or might not prove insurmountable, but therełd
be aeons to confront those challenges. In the middle of the twenty-first
century, the hurdles were aging, disease, violence, and an overcrowded planet.

�Grace was my best friend. We were students." Margit smiled.
�Before everyone was a student. Wełd talk about it, but we didnłt believe wełd
see it happen. It would come in another century. It would come for our
great-great-grandchildren. Wełd hold infants on our knees in our twilight years
and tell ourselves: this one will never die.

�When we were both twenty-two, something happened. To both
of us." She lowered her eyes. �We were kidnapped. We were raped. We were
tortured."

Jamil didnłt know how to respond. These were just words to
him: he knew their meaning, he knew these acts would have hurt her, but she
might as well have been describing a mathematical theorem. He stretched a hand
across the table, but Margit ignored it. He said awkwardly, �This was ... the
Holocaust?"

She looked up at him, shaking her head, almost laughing at
his naivete. �Not even one of them. Not a war, not a pogrom. Just one
psychopathic man. He locked us in his basement, for six months. Hełd killed
seven women." Tears began spilling down her cheeks. �He showed us the bodies.
They were buried right where we slept. He showed us how wełd end up, when he
was through with us."

Jamil was numb. Hełd known all his adult life what had once
been possiblewhat had once happened, to real peoplebut it had all been
consigned to history long before his birth. In retrospect it seemed almost
inconceivably stupid, but hełd always imagined that the changes had come in
such a way that no one still living had experienced these horrors. Therełd been
no escaping the bare minimum, the logical necessity: his oldest living
ancestors must have watched their parents fall peacefully into eternal sleep.
But not this. Not a flesh-and-blood woman, sitting in front of him, whołd been
forced to sleep in a killerłs graveyard.

He put his hand over hers, and choked out the words. �This
man ... killed Grace? He killed your friend?"

Margit began sobbing, but she shook her head. �No, no. We
got out!" She twisted her mouth into a smile. �Someone stabbed the stupid fucker
in a bar-room brawl. We dug our way out while he was in hospital." She put her
face down on the table and wept, but she held Jamilłs hand against her cheek.
He couldnłt understand what shełd lived through, but that didnłt mean he couldnłt
console her. Hadnłt he touched his motherłs face the same way, when she was sad
beyond his childish comprehension?

She composed herself, and continued. �We made a resolution,
while we were in there. If we survived, therełd be no more empty promises. No
more day dreams. What hełd done to those seven womenand what hełd done to uswould
become impossible."

And it had. Whatever harm befell your body, you had the power
to shut off your senses and decline to experience it. If the flesh was damaged,
it could always be repaired or replaced. In the unlikely event that your jewel
itself was destroyed, everyone had backups, scattered across universes. No
human being could inflict physical pain on another. In theory, you could still
be killed, but it would take the same kind of resources as destroying a galaxy.
The only people who seriously contemplated either were the villains in very bad
operas.

Jamilłs eyes narrowed in wonder. Shełd spoken those last
words with such fierce pride that there was no question of her having failed.

�You are Ndoli? You invented the jewel?" As a child, hełd
been told that the machine in his skull had been designed by a man whołd died
long ago.

Margit stroked his hand, amused. �In those days, very few
Hungarian women could be mistaken for Nigerian men. Iłve never changed my body
that much, Jamil. Iłve always looked much as you see me."

Jamil was relieved; if shełd been Ndoli himself, he might
have succumbed to sheer awe and started babbling idolatrous nonsense. �But you
worked with Ndoli? You and Grace?"

She shook her head. �We made the resolution, and then we
floundered. We were mathematicians, not neurologists. There were a thousand
things going on at once: tissue engineering, brain imaging, molecular
computers. We had no real idea where to put our efforts, which problems we
should bring our strengths to bear upon. Ndoliłs work didnłt come out of the
blue for us, but we played no part in it.

�For a while, almost everyone was nervous about switching
from the brain to the jewel. In the early days, the jewel was a separate device
that learned its task by mimicking the brain, and it had to be handed control
of the body at one chosen moment. It took another fifty years before it could
be engineered to replace the brain incrementally, neuron by neuron, in a seamless
transition throughout adolescence."

So Grace had lived to see the jewel invented, but held back,
and died before she could use it? Jamil kept himself from blurting out this
conclusion; all his guesses had proved wrong so far.

Margit continued. �Some people werenłt just nervous, though.
Youłd be amazed how vehemently Ndoli was denounced in certain quarters. And I
donłt just mean the fanatics who churned out paranoid tracts about ęthe
machinesł taking over, with their evil inhuman agendas. Some peoplełs
antagonism had nothing to do with the specifics of the technology. They were
opposed to immortality, in principle."

Jamil laughed. �Why?"

�Ten thousand yearsł worth of sophistry doesnłt vanish overnight,"
Margit observed dryly. �Every human culture had expended vast amounts of
intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death. Most
religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out to be
something other than it wasthough a few were dishonest about life, instead.
But even most secular philosophies were warped by the need to pretend that
death was for the best.

�It was the naturalistic fallacy at its most extremeand its
most transparent, but that didnłt stop anyone. Since any child could tell you
that death was meaningless, contingent, unjust, and abhorrent beyond words, it
was a hallmark of sophistication to believe otherwise. Writers had consoled
themselves for centuries with smug puritanical fables about immortals whołd
long for deathwhołd beg for death. It would have been too much to expect all
those who were suddenly faced with the reality of its banishment to confess
that theyłd been whistling in the dark. And would-be moral philosophersmostly
those whołd experienced no greater inconvenience in their lives than a late
train or a surly waiterbegan wailing about the destruction of the human spirit
by this hideous blight. We needed death and suffering, to put steel into our
souls! Not horrible, horrible freedom and safety!"

Jamil smiled. �So there were buffoons. But in the end,
surely they swallowed their pride? If wełre walking in a desert and I tell you
that the lake you see ahead is a mirage, I might cling stubbornly to my own
belief, to save myself from disappointment. But when we arrive, and Iłm proven
wrong, I will drink from the lake."

Margit nodded. �Most of the loudest of these people went
quiet in the end. But there were subtler arguments, too. Like it or not, all
our biology and all of our culture had evolved in the presence of death. And
almost every righteous struggle in history, every worthwhile sacrifice, had
been against suffering, against violence, against death. Now, that struggle
would become impossible."

�Yes." Jamil was mystified. �But only because it had triumphed."

Margit said gently, �I know. There was no sense to it. And
it was always my belief that anything worth fighting forover centuries, over
millenniawas worth attaining. It canłt be noble to toil for a cause, and even
to die for it, unless itłs also noble to succeed. To claim otherwise isnłt
sophistication, itłs just a kind of hypocrisy. If itłs better to travel than
arrive, you shouldnłt start the voyage in the first place.

�I told Grace as much, and she agreed. We laughed together
at what we called the tragedians: the people who denounced the coming age as
the age without martyrs, the age without saints, the age without
revolutionaries. There would never be another Gandhi, another Mandela, another
Aung San Suu Kyiand yes, that was a kind of loss, but would any great leader
have sentenced humanity to eternal misery, for the sake of providing a suitable
backdrop for eternal heroism? Well, some of them would have. But the
down-trodden themselves had better things to do."

Margit fell silent. Jamil cleared her plate away, then sat
opposite her again. It was almost dawn.

�Of course, the jewel was not enough," Margit continued. �With
care, Earth could support forty billion people, but where would the rest go?
The jewel made virtual reality the easiest escape route: for a fraction of the
space, a fraction of the energy, it could survive without a body attached.
Grace and I werenłt horrified by that prospect, the way some people were. But
it was not the best outcome, it was not what most people wanted, they way they
wanted freedom from death.

�So we studied gravity, we studied the vacuum."

Jamil feared making a fool of himself again, but from the expression
on her face he knew he wasnłt wrong this time. M. Osv�t and G. F�st. Co-authors
of the seminal paper, but no more was known about them than those abbreviated
names. �You gave us the New Territories?"

Margit nodded slightly. �Grace and I."

Jamil was overwhelmed with love for her. He went to her and
knelt down to put his arms around her waist. Margit touched his shoulder. �Come
on, get up. Donłt treat me like a god, it just makes me feel old."

He stood, smiling abashedly. Anyone in pain deserved his
helpbut if he was not in her debt, the word had no meaning.

�And Grace?" he asked.

Margit looked away. �Grace completed her work, and then decided
that she was a tragedian, after all. Rape was impossible. Torture was
impossible. Poverty was vanishing. Death was receding into cosmology, into
metaphysics. It was everything shełd hoped would come to pass. And for her,
suddenly faced with that fulfilment, everything that remained seemed trivial.

�One night, she climbed into the furnace in the basement of
her building. Her jewel survived the flames, but shełd erased it from within."

I

t was morning now. Jamil was beginning to feel disoriented;
Margit should have vanished in daylight, an apparition unable to persist in the
mundane world.

�Iłd lost other people who were close to me," she said. �My
parents. My brother. Friends. And so had everyone around me, then. I wasnłt
special: grief was still commonplace. But decade by decade, century by century,
we shrank into insignificance, those of us who knew what it meant to lose
someone for ever. Wełre less than one in a million, now.

�For a long time, I clung to my own generation. There were
enclaves, there were ghettos, where everyone understood the old days. I spent
two hundred years married to a man who wrote a play called We Who Have Known
the Deadwhich was every bit as pretentious and self-pitying as youłd guess
from the title." She smiled at the memory. �It was a horrible, self-devouring
world. If Iłd stayed in it much longer, I would have followed Grace. I would
have begged for death."

She looked up at Jamil. �Itłs people like you I want to be
with: people who donłt understand. Your lives arenłt trivial, any more than the
best parts of our own were: all the tranquillity, all the beauty, all the
happiness that made the sacrifices and the life-and-death struggles worthwhile.

�The tragedians were wrong. They had everything upside-down.
Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its
gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the
value of life always lay entirely in itselfnot in its loss, not in its
fragility.

�Grace should have lived to see that. She should have lived
long enough to understand that the world hadnłt turned to ash."

Jamil sat in silence, turning the whole confession over in
his mind, trying to absorb it well enough not to add to her distress with a
misjudged question. Finally, he ventured, �Why do you hold back from friendship
with us, though? Because wełre just children to you? Children who canłt
understand what youłve lost?"

Margit shook her head vehemently. �I donłt want you to understand!
People like me are the only blight on this world, the only poison." She smiled
at Jamilłs expression of anguish, and rushed to silence him before he could
swear that she was nothing of the kind. �Not in everything we do and say, or
everyone we touch: Iłm not claiming that wełre tainted, in some fatuous
mythological sense. But when I left the ghettos, I promised myself that I
wouldnłt bring the past with me. Sometimes thatłs an easy vow to keep. Sometimes
itłs not."

�Youłve broken it tonight," Jamil said plainly. �And neither
of us have been struck down by lightning."

�I know." She took his hand. �But I was wrong to tell you
what I have, and Iłll fight to regain the strength to stay silent. I stand at
the border between two worlds, Jamil. I remember death, and I always will. But
my job now is to guard that border. To keep that knowledge from invading your
world."

�Wełre not as fragile as you think," he protested. �We all
know something about loss."

Margit nodded soberly. �Your friend Chusok has vanished into
the crowd. Thatłs how things work now: how you keep yourselves from suffocating
in a jungle of endlessly growing connections, or fragmenting into isolated
troupes of repertory players, endlessly churning out the same lines.

�You have your little deathsand I donłt call them that to deride
you. But Iłve seen both. And I promise you, theyłre not the same."

I

n the weeks that followed, Jamil resumed in full the life hełd
made for himself in Noether. Five days in seven were for the difficult beauty
of mathematics. The rest were for his friends.

He kept playing matches, and Margitłs team kept winning. In
the sixth game, though, Jamilłs team finally scored against her. Their defeat
was only three to one.

Each night, Jamil struggled with the question. What exactly
did he owe her? Eternal loyalty, eternal silence, eternal obedience? She hadnłt
sworn him to secrecy; shełd extracted no promises at all. But he knew she was
trusting him to comply with her wishes, so what right did he have to do
otherwise?

Eight weeks after the night hełd spent with Margit, Jamil
found himself alone with Penina in a room in Joracyłs house. Theyłd been
talking about the old days. Talking about Chusok.

Jamil said, �Margit lost someone, very close to her."

Penina nodded matter-of-factly, but curled into a
comfortable position on the couch and prepared to take in every word.

�Not in the way wełve lost Chusok. Not in the way you think
at all."

Jamil approached the others, one by one. His confidence
ebbed and flowed. Hełd glimpsed the old world, but he couldnłt pretend to have
fathomed its inhabitants. What if Margit saw this as worse than betrayalas a
further torture, a further rape?

But he couldnłt stand by and leave her to the torture shełd
inflicted on herself.

Ezequiel was the hardest to face. Jamil spent a sick and
sleepless night beforehand, wondering if this would make him a monster, a
corrupter of children, the epitome of everything Margit believed she was
fighting.

Ezequiel wept freely, but he was not a child. He was older
than Jamil, and he had more steel in his soul than any of them.

He said, �I guessed it might be that. I guessed she might
have seen the bad times. But I never found a way to ask her."

T

he three lobes of probability converged, melted into a
plateau, rose into a pillar of light.

The umpire said, �Fifty-five point nine." It was Margitłs
most impressive goal yet.

Ezequiel whooped joyfully and ran towards her. When he
scooped her up in his arms and threw her across his shoulders, she laughed and
indulged him. When Jamil stood beside him and they made a joint throne for her
with their arms, she frowned down at him and said, �You shouldnłt be doing
this. Youłre on the losing side."

The rest of the players converged on them, cheering, and
they started down towards the river. Margit looked around nervously. �What is
this? We havenłt finished playing."

Penina said, �The gamełs over early, just this once. Think
of this as an invitation. We want you to swim with us. We want you to talk to
us. We want to hear everything about your life."

Margitłs composure began to crack. She squeezed Jamilłs shoulder.
He whispered, �Say the word, and wełll put you down."

Margit didnłt whisper back; she shouted miserably, �What do
you want from me, you parasites? Iłve won your fucking game for you! What more
do you want?"

Jamil was mortified. He stopped and prepared to lower her,
prepared to retreat, but Ezequiel caught his arm.

Ezequiel said, �We want to be your border guards. We want to
stand beside you."

Christa added, �We canłt face what youłve faced, but we want
to understand. As much as we can."

Joracy spoke, then Yann, Narcyza, Maria, Halide. Margit
looked down on them, weeping, confused.

Jamil burnt with shame. Hełd hijacked her, humiliated her.
Hełd made everything worse. Shełd flee Noether, flee into a new exile, more
alone than ever.

When everyone had spoken, silence descended. Margit trembled
on her throne.

Jamil faced the ground. He couldnłt undo what hełd done. He
said quietly, �Now you know our wishes. Will you tell us yours?"

�Put me down."

Jamil and Ezequiel complied.

Margit looked around at her teammates and opponents, her
children, her creation, her would-be friends.

She said, �I want to go to the river with you. Iłm seven thousand
years old, and I want to learn to swim."

The Caress

Two smells hit me when I kicked down the door: death, and
the scent of an animal.

A man who passed the house each day had phoned us, anonymously;
worried by the sight of a broken window left unrepaired, hełd knocked on the
front door with no results. On his way to the back door, hełd glimpsed blood on
the kitchen wall through a gap in the curtains.

The place had been ransacked; all that remained downstairs
were the drag marks on the carpet from the heaviest furniture. The woman in the
kitchen, mid fifties, throat slit, had been dead for at least a week.

My helmet was filing sound and vision, but it couldnłt
record the animal smell. The correct procedure was to make a verbal comment,
but I didnłt say a word. Why? Call it a vestigial need for independence. Soon
theyłll be logging our brain waves, our heartbeats, who knows what, and all of
it subpoenable. ęDetective Segel, the evidence shows that you experienced a
penile erection when the defendant opened fire. Would you describe that as an appropriate
response?ł

Upstairs was a mess. Clothes scattered in the bedroom.
Books, CDs, papers, upturned drawers, spread across the floor of the study.
Medical texts. In one corner, piles of CD periodicals stood out from the jumble
by their jacketsł uniformity: The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature,
Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Embryology. A framed scroll hung on the
wall, awarding the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to Freda Anne Macklenburg in
the year two thousand and twenty-three. The desktop had dust-free spaces shaped
like a monitor and a keyboard. I noticed a wall outlet with a pilot light; the
switch was down but the light was dead. The room light wasnłt working; ditto
elsewhere.

Back on the ground floor, I found a door behind the stairs,
presumably leading to a basement. Locked. I hesitated. Entering the house Iłd
had no choice but to force my way in; here, though, I was on shakier legal
ground. I hadnłt searched thoroughly for keys, and I had no clear reason to
believe it was urgent to get into the basement.

But what would one more broken door change? Cops have been
sued for failing to wipe their boots clean on the doormat. If a citizen wants
to screw you, theyłll find a reason, even if you came in on your knees, waving
a handful of warrants, and saved their whole family from torture and death.

No room to kick, so I punched out the lock. The smell had me
gagging, but it was the excess, the concentration, that was overwhelming; the
scent in itself wasnłt foul. Upstairs, seeing medical books, Iłd thought of
guinea pigs, rats and mice, but this was no stink of caged rodents.

I switched on the torch in my helmet and moved quickly down
the narrow concrete steps. Over my head was a thick, square pipe. An
air-conditioning duct? That made sense; the house couldnłt normally smell the
way it did, but with the power cut off to a basement air-conditioner

The torch beam showed a shelving unit, decorated with
trinkets and potted plants. A TV set. Landscape paintings on the wall. A pile
of straw on the concrete floor. Curled on the straw, the powerful body of a
leopard, lungs visibly labouring, but otherwise still.

When the beam fell upon a tangle of auburn hair, I thought,
itłs chewing on a severed human head. I continued to approach, expecting,
hoping, that by disturbing the feeding animal I could provoke it into attacking
me. I was carrying a weapon that could have spattered it into a fine mist of
blood and gristle, an outcome which would have involved me in a great deal less
tedium and bureaucracy than dealing with it alive. I directed the light towards
its head again, and realised that Iłd been mistaken; it wasnłt chewing anything,
its head was hidden, tucked away, and the human head was simply

Wrong again. The human head was simply joined to the leopardłs
body. Its human neck took on fur and spots and merged with the leopardłs shoulders.

I squatted down beside it, thinking, above all else, what
those claws could do to me if my attention lapsed. The head was a womanłs.
Frowning. Apparently asleep. I placed one hand below her nostrils, and felt the
air blast out in time with the heavings of the leopardłs great chest. That,
more than the smooth transition of the skin, made the union real for me.

I explored the rest of the room. There was a pit in one
corner that turned out to be a toilet bowl sunk into the floor. I put my foot
on a nearby pedal, and the bowl flushed from a hidden cistern. There was an
upright freezer, standing in a puddle of water. I opened it to find a rack
containing thirty-five small plastic vials. Every one of them bore smeared red
letters, spelling out the word spoiled. Temperature-sensitive dye.

I returned to the leopard woman. Asleep? Feigning sleep?
Sick? Comatose? I patted her on the cheek, and not gently. The skin seemed hot,
but I had no idea what her temperature ought to be. I shook her by one
shoulder, this time with a little more respect, as if waking her by touching
the leopard part might somehow be more dangerous. No effect.

Then I stood up, fought back a sigh of irritation (Psych
latch on to all your little noises; Iłve been grilled for hours over such things
as an injudicious whoop of triumph), and called for an ambulance.

* * * *

I should have known better than to hope that that would be
the end of my problems. I had to physically obstruct the stairway to stop the
ambulancemen from retreating. One of them puked. They then refused to put her
on the stretcher unless I promised to ride with her to the hospital. She was
only about two metres long, excluding the tail, but must have weighed a hundred
and fifty kilos, and it took the three of us to get her up the awkward stairs.

We covered her completely with a sheet before leaving the
house, and I took the trouble to arrange it to keep it from revealing the shape
beneath. A small crowd had gathered outside, the usual motley collection of
voyeurs. The forensic team arrived just then, but Iłd already told them
everything by radio.

At the casualty department of St Dominicłs, doctor after
doctor took one look under the sheet and then fled, some muttering half-baked
excuses, most not bothering. I was about to lose my temper when the fifth one I
cornered, a young woman, turned pale but kept her ground. After poking and
pinching and shining a torch into the leopard womanłs forced-opened eyes, Dr
Muriel Beatty (from her name badge) announced, ęShełs in a coma,ł and started extracting
details from me. When Iłd told her everything, I squeezed in some questions of
my own.

ęHow would someone do this? Gene splicing? Transplant surgery?ł

ęI doubt it was either. More likely shełs a chimera.ł

I frowned. ęThatłs some kind of mythicalł

ęYes, but itłs also a bioengineering term. You can
physically mix the cells of two genetically distinct early embryos, and obtain
a blastocyst that will develop into a single organism. If theyłre both of the
same species, therełs a very high success rate; for different species itłs
trickier. People made crude sheep/goat chimeras as far back as the nineteen
sixties, but Iłve read nothing new on the subject for five or ten years. I
would have said it was no longer being seriously pursued. Let alone pursued
with humans.ł She stared down at her patient with unease and fascination. ęI
wouldnłt know how they guaranteed such a sharp distinction between the head and
the body; a thousand times more effort has gone into this than just stirring
two clumps of cells together. I guess you could say it was something halfway
between foetal transplant surgery and chimerisation. And there must have been
genetic manipulation as well, to smooth out the biochemical differences.ł She
laughed drily. ęSo both your suggestions I dismissed just then were probably
partly right. Of course!ł

ęWhat?ł

ęNo wonder shełs in a coma! That freezer full of vials you
mentionedshe probably needs an external supply for half a dozen hormones that
are insufficiently active across species. Can I arrange for someone to go to
the house and look through the dead womanłs papers? We need to know exactly
what those vials contained. Even if she made it up herself from off-the-shelf
sources, we might be able to find the recipebut chances are she had a contract
with a biotechnology company for a regular, pre-mixed supply. So if we can
find, say, an invoice with a product reference number, that would be the
quickest, surest way to get this patient what she needs to stay alive.ł

I agreed, and accompanied a lab technician back to the
house, but he found nothing of use in the study, or the basement. After talking
it over with Muriel Beatty on the phone, I started ringing local biotech
companies, quoting the deceased womanłs name and address. Several people said theyłd
heard of Dr Macklenburg, but not as a customer. The fifteenth call produced
resultsdeliveries from a company called Applied Veterinary Research had been
sent to Macklenburgłs addressand with a combination of threats and smooth
talking (such as inventing an order number they could quote on their invoice),
I managed to extract a promise that a batch of the ęApplied Veterinary
Researchł preparation would be made up at once and rushed to St Dominicłs.

Burglars do switch off the power sometimes, in the hope of
disabling those (very rare) security devices that donłt have battery back-up,
but the house hadnłt been broken into; the scattered glass from the window
fell, in an undisturbed pattern, on to carpet where a sofa had left clear
indentations. The fools had forgotten to break a window until after theyłd
taken the furniture. People do throw out invoices, but Macklenburg had kept all
her videophone, water, gas and electricity bills for the last five years. So,
it looked like somebody had known about the chimera and wanted it dead, without
wishing to be totally obvious, yet without being professional enough to manage
anything subtler, or more certain.

I arranged for the chimera to be guarded. Probably a good
idea anyway, to keep the media at bay when they found out about her.

Back in my office, I did a search of medical literature by
Macklenburg, and found her name on only half a dozen papers. All were more than
twenty years old. All were concerned with embryology, though (to the extent
that I could understand the jargon-laden abstracts, full of ęzonae pellucidaeł
and ępolar bodiesł) none was explicitly about chimeras.

The papers were all from one place; the Early Human Development
Laboratory at St Andrewłs Hospital. After some standard brush-offs from secretaries
and assistants, I managed to get myself put through to one of Macklenburgłs
one-time co-authors, a Dr Henry Feingold, who looked rather old and frail. News
of Macklenburgłs death produced a wistful sigh, but no visible shock or
distress.

ęFreda left us back in thirty-two or thirty-three. Iłve
hardly set eyes on her since, except at the occasional conference.ł

ęWhere did she go to from St Andrewłs?ł

ęSomething in industry. She was rather vague about it. Iłm
not sure that she had a definite appointment lined up.ł

ęWhy did she resignł

He shrugged. ęSick of the conditions here. Low pay, limited
resources, bureaucratic restrictions, ethics committees. Some people learn to
live with all that, some donłt.ł

ęWould you know anything about her work, her particular research
interests, after she left?ł

ęI donłt know that she did much research. She seemed to have
stopped publishing, so I really couldnłt say what she was up to.ł

Shortly after that (with unusual speed), clearance came
through to access her taxation records. Since ę35 she had been self-employed as
a ęfreelance biotechnology consultantł; whatever that meant, it had provided
her with a seven-figure income for the past fifteen years. There were at least
a hundred different company names listed by her as sources of revenue. I rang
the first one and found myself talking to an answering machine. It was after
seven. I rang St Dominicłs, and learnt that the chimera was still unconscious,
but doing fine; the hormone mixture had arrived, and Muriel Beatty had located
a veterinarian at the university with some relevant experience. So I swallowed
my deprimers and went home.

* * * *

The surest sign that Iłm not fully down is the frustration I
feel when opening my own front door. Itłs too bland, too easy: inserting three
keys and touching my thumb to the scanner. Nothing inside is going to be
dangerous or challenging. The deprimers are meant to work in five minutes. Some
nights itłs more like five hours.

Marion was watching TV, and called out, ęHi, Dan.ł

I stood in the living room doorway. ęHi. How was your day?ł
She works in a child-care centre, which is my idea of a high-stress occupation.
She shrugged. ęOrdinary. How was yours?ł

Something on the TV screen caught my eye. I swore for about
a minute, mostly cursing a certain communications officer who I knew was
responsible, though I couldnłt have proved it. ęHow was my day? Youłre looking
at it.ł The TV was showing part of my helmet log; the basement, my discovery of
the chimera.

Marion said, ęAh. I was going to ask if you knew who the cop
was.ł

ęAnd you know what Iłll be doing tomorrow? Trying to make
sense of a few thousand phone calls from people whołve seen this and decided
they have something useful to say about it.ł

ęThat poor girl. Is she going to be OK?ł

ęI think so.ł

They played Muriel Beattyłs speculations, again from my
point of view, then cut to a couple of pocket experts who debated the fine
points of chimerism while an interviewer did his best to drag in spurious
references to everything from Greek mythology to The Island of Doctor Moreau.

I said, ęIłm starving. Letłs eat.ł

* * * *

I woke at half past one, shaking and whimpering. Marion was
already awake, trying to calm me down. Lately Iłd been suffering a lot from
delayed reactions like this. A few months earlier, two nights after a
particularly brutal assault case, Iłd been distraught and incoherent for hours.

On duty, we are whatłs called ęprimedł. A mixture of drugs
heightens various physiological and emotional responses, and suppresses others.
Sharpens our reflexes. Keeps us calm and rational. Supposedly improves our
judgement. (The media like to say that the drugs make us more aggressive, but
thatłs garbage; why would the force intentionally create trigger-happy cops?
Swift decisions and swift actions are the opposite of dumb brutality.)

Off duty, we are ędeprimedł. Thatłs meant to make us the way
we would be if wełd never taken the priming drugs. (A hazy concept, I have to
admit. As if wełd never taken the priming drugs, and never spent the day at
work? Or, as if wełd seen and done the very same things, without the primers to
help us cope?)

Sometimes this seesaw works smoothly. Sometimes it fucks up.

I wanted to describe to Marion how I felt about the chimera.
I wanted to talk about my fear and revulsion and pity and anger. All I could do
was make unhappy noises. No words. She didnłt say anything, she just held me,
her long fingers cool on the burning skin of my face and chest.

When I finally exhausted myself into something approaching
peace, I managed to speak. I whispered, ęWhy do you stay with me? Why do you
put up with this?ł

She turned away from me and said, ęIłm tired. Go to sleep.ł

* * * *

I enrolled for the force at the age of twelve. I continued
my normal education, but thatłs when you have to start the course of
growth-factor injections, and weekend and vacation training, if you want to
qualify for active duty. (It wasnłt an irreversible obligation; I could have
chosen a different career later, and paid off what had been invested in me at a
hundred dollars or so a week over the next thirty years. Or, I could have
failed the psychological tests, and been dropped without owing a cent. But the
tests before you even begin tend to weed out anyone whołs likely to do either.)
It makes sense; rather than limiting recruitment to men and women meeting
certain physical criteria, candidates are chosen according to intelligence and
attitude, and then the secondary, but useful, characteristics of size, strength
and agility are provided artificially.

So wełre freaks, constructed and conditioned to meet the demands
of the job. Less so than soldiers or professional athletes. Far less so than
the average street gang member, who thinks nothing of using illegal growth
promoters that lower his life expectancy to around thirty years. Who, unarmed
but on a mixture of Berserker and Timewarp (oblivious to pain and most physical
trauma and with a twenty-fold decrease in reaction times), can kill a hundred
people in a crowd in five minutes, then vanish to a safe house before the high
ends and the fortnight of side effects begins. (A certain politician, a very
popular man, advocates undercover operations to sell supplies of these drugs
laced with fatal impurities, but hełs not yet succeeded in making that legal.)

Yes, wełre freaks; but if we have a problem, itłs that wełre
still far too human.

* * * *

When over a hundred thousand people phone in about an investigation,
therełs only one way to deal with their calls. Itłs called ARIA: Automated
Remote Informant Analysis.

An initial filtering process identifies the blatantly
obvious pranksters and lunatics. Itłs always possible that someone who phones
in and spends ninety per cent of his time ranting about UFOs, or communist
conspiracies, or slicing up our genitals with razor blades, has something
relevant and truthful to mention in passing, but it seems reasonable to give
his evidence less weight than that of someone who sticks to the point. More
sophisticated analysis of gestures (about thirty per cent of callers donłt
switch off the vision), and speech patterns, supposedly picks up anyone who is,
although superficially rational and apposite, actually suffering from psychotic
delusions or fixations. Ultimately, each caller is given a ęreliability factorł
between zero and one, with the benefit of the doubt going to anyone who betrays
no recognisable signs of dishonesty or mental illness. Some days Iłm impressed
with the sophistication of the software that makes these assessments. Other
days I curse it as a heap of useless voodoo.

The relevant assertions (broadly defined) of each caller are
extracted, and a frequency table is created, giving a count of the number of
callers making each assertion, and their average reliability factor.
Unfortunately, there are no simple rules to determine which assertions are most
likely to be true. One thousand people might earnestly repeat a widespread but
totally baseless rumour. A single honest witness might be distraught, or
chemically screwed up, and be given an unfairly poor rating. Basically, you
have to read all the assertionswhich is tedious, but still several thousand
times faster than viewing every call.

(If desperate, I could view, one by one, the seventeen
hundred and thirty-three calls of items 14 and 15. Not yet, though; I still had
plenty of better ways to spend my time.)

That was hardly surprising, considering the number of paintings
there must be of fantastic and mythical creatures. But on the next page:

Curious, I displayed some of the calls. The first few told
me little more than the print-outłs summary line. Then, one man held up an open
book to the lens. The glare of a light blub reflected off the glossy paper
rendered parts of it almost invisible, and the whole thing was slightly out of
focus, but what I could see was intriguing.

A leopard with a womanłs head was crouched near the edge of
a raised, flat surface. A slender young man, bare to the waist, stood on the
lower ground, leaning sideways on to the raised surface, cheek to cheek with
the leopard woman, who pressed one forepaw against his abdomen in an awkward
embrace. The man coolly gazed straight ahead, his mouth set primly, giving an
impression of effete detachment. The womanłs eyes were closed, or nearly so,
and her expression seemed less certain the longer I staredit might have been
placid, dreamy contentment, it might have been erotic bliss. Both had auburn
hair.

I selected a rectangle around the womanłs face, enlarged it
to fill the screen, then applied a smoothing option to make the blown-up pixels
less distracting. With the glare, the poor focus, and limited resolution, the
image was a mess. The best I could say was that the face in the painting was
not wildly dissimilar to that of the woman Iłd found in the basement.

A few dozen calls later, though, no doubt remained. One
caller had even taken the trouble to capture a frame from the news broadcast
and patch it into her call, side by side with a well-lit close-up of her copy
of the painting. One view of a single expression does not define a human face,
but the resemblance was far too close to be coincidental. Sinceas many people
told me, and I later checked for myselfThe Caress had been painted in 1896 by
the Belgian Symbolist artist Fernand Khnopff, the painting could not possibly
have been based on the living chimera. So, it had to be the other way around.

I played all ninety-four calls. Most contained nothing but
the same handful of simple facts about the painting. One went a little further.

A middle-aged man introduced himself as John Aldrich, art
dealer and amateur art historian. After pointing out the resemblance, and
talking briefly about Khnopff and The Caress, he added:

ęGiven that this poor woman looks exactly like Khnopff s
sphinx, I wonder if youłve considered the possibility that proponents of
Lindhquistism are involved?ł He blushed slightly. ęPerhaps thatłs farfetched,
but I thought I should mention it.ł

So I called an on-line Britannica, and said,
ęLindhquistism.ł

Andreas Lindhquist, 1961-2030, was a Swiss performance artist,
with the distinct financial advantage of being heir to a massive
pharmaceuticals empire. Up until 2011, he engaged in a wide variety of
activities of a bioartistic nature, progressing from generating sounds and
images by computer processing of physiological signals (ECG, EEG, skin
conductivity, hormonal levels continuously monitored by immunoelectric probes),
to subjecting himself to surgery in a sterile, transparent cocoon in the middle
of a packed auditorium, once to have his corneas gratuitously exchanged, left
for right, and a second time to have them swapped back (he publicised a more
ambitious version, in which he claimed every organ in his torso would be
removed and reinserted facing backwards, but was unable to find a team of
surgeons who considered this anatomically plausible).

In 2011, he developed a new obsession. He projected slides
of classical paintings in which the figures had been blacked out, and had
models in appropriate costumes and make-up strike poses in front of the screen,
filling in the gaps.

Why? In his own words (or perhaps a translation):

The great artists are afforded glimpses into a separate, transcendental,
timeless world. Does that world exist? Can we travel to it? No! We must force
it into being around us! We must take these fragmentary glimpses and make them
solid and tangible, make them live and breathe and walk amongst us, we must
import art into reality, and by doing so transform our world into the world of
the artistsł vision.

I wondered what ARIA would have made of that.

Over the next ten years, he moved away from projected
slides. He began hiring movie set designers and landscape architects to
recreate in three dimensions the backgrounds of the paintings he chose. He
discarded the use of make-up to alter the appearance of models, and, when he
found it impossible to obtain perfect lookalikes, he employed only those who,
for sufficient payment, were willing to undergo cosmetic surgery.

His interest in biology hadnłt entirely vanished; in 2021,
on his sixtieth birthday, he had two tubes implanted in his skull, allowing him
to constantly monitor, and alter, the precise neurochemical content of his
brain ventricular fluid. After this, his requirements became even more
stringent. The ęcheatingł techniques of movie sets were forbiddena house, or a
church, or a lake, or a mountain, glimpsed in the corner of the painting being
ęrealisedł, had to be there, full-scale and complete in every detail. Houses,
churches and small lakes were created; mountains he had to seek outthough he
did transplant or destroy thousands of hectares of vegetation to alter their
colour and texture. His models were required to spend months before and after
the ęrealisationł, scrupulously ęliving their rolesł, following complex rules
and scenarios that Lindhquist devised, based on his interpretation of the
paintingłs ęcharactersł. This aspect grew increasingly important to him:

The precise realisation of the appearancethe surface, I
call it, however three-dimensionalis only the most rudimentary beginning. It
is the network of relationships between the subjects, and between the subjects
and their setting, that constitutes the challenge for the generation that
follows me.

At first, it struck me as astonishing that Iłd never even
heard of this maniac; his sheer extravagance must have earned him a certain notoriety.
But there are millions of eccentrics in the world, and thousands of extremely
wealthy onesand I was only five when Lindhquist died of a heart attack in
2030, leaving his fortune to a nine-year-old son.

As for disciples, Britannica listed half a dozen scattered
around Eastern Europe, where apparently hełd found the most respect. All seemed
to have completely abandoned his excesses, offering volumes of aesthetic
theories in support of the use of painted plywood and mime artists in stylised
masks. In fact, most did just thatoffered the volumes, and didnłt even bother
with the plywood and the mime artists. I couldnłt imagine any of them having
either the money or the inclination to sponsor embryological research thousands
of kilometres away.

For obscure reasons of copyright law, works of visual art
are rarely present in publicly accessible databases, so in my lunch hour I went
out and bought a book on Symbolist painters which included a colour plate of
The Caress. I made a dozen (illegal) copies, blow-ups of various sizes.
Curiously, in each one the expression of the sphinx (as Aldrich had called her)
struck me as subtly different. Her mouth and her eyes (one fully closed, one
infinitesimally open) could not be said to portray a definite smile, but the
shading of the cheeks hinted at onein certain enlargements, viewed from
certain angles. The young manłs face also changed, from vaguely troubled to
slightly bored, from resolved to dissipated, from noble to effeminate. The
features of both seemed to lie on complicated and uncertain borders between
regions of definite mood, and the slightest shift in viewing conditions was
enough to force a complete reinterpretation. If that had been Khnopff s intention
it was a masterful achievement, but I also found it extremely frustrating. The
bookłs brief commentary was no help, praising the paintingłs ęperfectly
balanced composition and delightful thematic ambiguitył, and suggesting that
the leopardłs head was ęperversely modelled on the artistłs sister, with whose
beauty he was constantly obsessedł.

Unsure for the moment just how, if at all, I ought to pursue
this strand of the investigation, I sat at my desk for several minutes,
wondering (but not inclined to check) if every one of the leopardłs spots shown
in the painting had been reproduced faithfully in vivo. I wanted to do
something tangible, set something in motion, before I put The Caress aside and
returned to more routine lines of inquiry.

So I made one more blow-up of the painting, this time using
the copierłs editing facilities to surround the manłs head and shoulders with a
uniform dark background. I took it down to communications, and handed it to
Steve Birbeck (the man I knew had leaked my helmet log to the media).

I said, ęPut out an alert on this guy. Wanted for
questioning in connection with the Macklenburg murder.ł

* * * *

I found nothing else of interest in the ARIA print-out, so I
picked up where Iłd left off the night before, phoning companies that had made
use of Freda Macklenburgłs services.

The work she had done had no specific connection with embryology.
Her advice and assistance seemed to have been sought for a wide range of
unconnected problems in a dozen fieldstissue culture work, the use of
retroviruses as gene-therapy vectors, cell membrane electrochemistry, protein
purification, and still other areas where the vocabulary meant nothing to me at
all.

ęAnd did Dr Macklenburg solve this problem?ł

ęAbsolutely. She knew a perfect way around the stumbling
block that had been holding us up for months.ł

ęHow did you find out about her?ł

ęTherełs a register of consultants, indexed by speciality.ł

There was indeed. She was in it in fifty-nine places. Either
she somehow knew the detailed specifics of all these areas, better than many
people who were actually working in them full-time, or she had access to
world-class experts who could put the right words into her mouth.

Her sponsorłs method of funding her work? Paying her not in
money, but in expertise she could then sell as her own? Who would have so many
biological scientists on tap?

The Lindhquist empire?

(So much for escaping The Caress.)

Her phone bills showed no long-distance calls, but that
meant nothing; the local Lindhquist branch would have had its own private
international network.

I looked up Lindhquistłs son Gustave in Whołs Who. It was a
very sketchy entry. Born to a surrogate mother. Donor ovum anonymous. Educated
by tutors. As yet unmarried at twenty-nine. Reclusive. Apparently immersed in
his business concerns. Not a word about artistic pretentions, but nobody tells
everything to Whołs Who.

The preliminary forensic report arrived, with nothing very
useful. No evidence of a protracted struggleno bruising, no skin or blood
found under Macklenburgłs fingernails. Apparently shełd been taken entirely by
surprise. The throat wound had been made by a thin, straight, razor-sharp
blade, with a single powerful stroke.

There were five genotypes, besides Macklenburgłs and the
chimerałs, present in hairs and flakes of dead skin found in the house. Precise
dating isnłt possible, but all showed a broad range in the age of shedding,
which meant regular visitors, friends, not strangers. All five had been in the
kitchen at one time or another. Only Macklenburg and the chimera showed up in
the basement in amounts that could not be accounted for by drift and
second-party transport, while the chimera seemed to have rarely left her
special room. One prevalent male had been in most of the rest of the house,
including the bedroom, but not the bedor at least not since the sheets had
last been changed. All of this was unlikely to have a direct bearing on the
murder; the best assassins either leave no biological detritus at all, or plant
material belonging to someone else.

The interviewersł report came in soon after, and that was
even less helpful. Macklenburgłs next of kin was a cousin, with whom she had
not been in touch, and who knew even less about the dead woman than I did. Her
neighbours were all much too respectful of privacy to have known or cared who
her friends had been, and none would admit to having noticed anything unusual
on the day of the murder.

I sat and stared at The Caress.

Some lunatic with a great deal of moneyperhaps connected to
Lindhquist, perhaps nothad commissioned Freda Macklenburg to create the
chimera to match the sphinx in the painting. But who would want to fake a
burglary, murder Macklenburg, and endanger the chimerałs life, without making
the effort to actually kill it?

The phone rang. It was Muriel. The chimera was awake.

* * * *

The two officers outside had had a busy shift so far; one psycho
with a knife, two photographers disguised as doctors, and a religious fanatic
with a mail-order exorcism kit. The news reports hadnłt mentioned the name of
the hospital, but there were only a dozen plausible candidates, and the staff
could not be sworn to secrecy or immunised against the effect of bribes. In a
day or two, the chimerałs location would be common knowledge. If things didnłt
quieten down, Iłd have to consider trying to arrange for a room in a prison
infirmary, or a military hospital.

ęYou saved my life.ł

The chimerałs voice was deep and quiet and calm, and she
looked right at me as she spoke. Iłd expected her to be painfully shy, amongst
strangers for perhaps the first time ever. She lay curled on her side on the
bed, not covered by a sheet but with her head resting on a clean, white pillow.
The smell was noticeable, but not unpleasant. Her tail, as thick as my wrist
and longer than my arm, hung over the edge of the bed, restlessly swinging.

ęDr Beatty saved your life.ł Muriel stood at the foot of the
bed, glancing regularly at a blank sheet of paper on a clipboard. ęIłd like to
ask you some questions.ł The chimera said nothing to that, but her eyes stayed
on me. ęCould you tell me your name, please?ł

ęCatherine.ł

ęDo you have another name? A surname?ł

ęNo.ł

ęHow old are you, Catherine?ł Primed or not, I couldnłt help
feeling a slight giddiness, a sense of surreal inanity to be asking routine
questions of a sphinx plucked from a nineteenth-century oil painting.

ęSeventeen.ł

ęYou know that Freda Macklenburg is dead?ł

ęYes.ł Quieter, but still calm.

ęWhat was your relationship with her?ł

She frowned slightly, then gave an answer which sounded rehearsed
but sincere, as if she had long expected to be asked this. ęShe was everything.
She was my mother and my teacher and my friend.ł Misery and loss came and went
on her face, a flicker, a twitch.

ęTell me what you heard, the day the power went off.ł

ęSomeone came to visit Freda. I heard the car, and the
doorbell. It was a man. I couldnłt hear what he said, but I could hear the
sound of his voice.ł

ęWas it a voice youłd heard before?ł

ęI donłt think so.ł

ęHow did they sound? Were they shouting? Arguing?ł

ęNo. They sounded friendly. Then they stopped, it was quiet.
A little while after that, the power went off. Then I heard a truck pull up,
and a whole lot of noisefootsteps, things being shifted about. But no more
talking. There were two or three people moving all around the house for about
half an hour. Then the truck and the car drove away. I kept waiting for Freda
to come down and tell me what it had all been about.ł

Iłd been thinking a while how to phrase the next question,
but finally gave up trying to make it polite.

ęDid Freda ever discuss with you why youłre different from
other people?ł

ęYes.ł Not a hint of pain, or embarrassment. Instead, her
face glowed with pride, and for a moment she looked so much like the painting
that the giddiness hit me again. ęShe made me this way. She made me special. She
made me beautiful.ł

ęWhy?ł

That seemed to baffle her, as if I had to be teasing. She
was special. She was beautiful. No further explanation was required.

I heard a faint grunt from just outside the door, followed
by a tiny thud against the wall. I signalled to Muriel to drop to the floor,
and to Catherine to keep silent, thenquietly as I could, but with an
unavoidable squeaking of metalI climbed on to the top of a wardrobe that stood
in the corner to the left of the door.

We were lucky. What came through the door when it opened a
crack was not a grenade of any kind, but a hand bearing a fan laser. A spinning
mirror sweeps the beam across a wide arcthis one was set to one hundred and
eighty degrees, horizontally. Held at shoulder height, it filled the room with
a lethal plane about a metre above the bed. I was tempted to simply kick the
door shut on the hand the moment it appeared, but that would have been too
risky; the gun might have tilted down before the beam cut off. For the same
reason, I couldnłt simply burn a hole in the manłs head as he stepped into the
room, or even aim at the gun itselfit was shielded, and would have borne
several secondsł fire before suffering any internal damage. Paint on the walls
was scorched and the curtains had split into two burning halves; in an instant
he would lower the beam on to Catherine. I kicked him hard in the face,
knocking him backwards and tipping the fan of laser light up towards the
ceiling. Then I jumped down and put my gun to his temple. He switched off the
beam and let me take the weapon from him. He was dressed in an orderlyłs
uniform, but the fabric was implausibly stiff, probably containing a shielding
layer of aluminium-coated asbestos (with the potential for reflections, itłs
unwise to operate a fan laser with any less protection).

I turned him over and cuffed him in the standard waywrists
and ankles all brought together behind the back, in bracelets with a sharpened
inner edge that discourages (some) attempts to burst the chains. I sprayed
sedative on his face for a few seconds, and he acted like it had worked, but
then I pulled open one eye and knew it hadnłt. Every cop uses a sedative with a
slightly different tracer effect; my usual turns the whites of the eyes pale
blue. He must have had a barrier layer on his skin. While I was preparing an IV
jab, he turned his head towards me and opened his mouth. A blade flew out from
under his tongue and nicked my ear as it whistled past. That was something Iłd
never seen before. I forced his jaw open and had a look; the launching
mechanism was anchored to his teeth with wires and pins. There was a second
blade in there; I put my gun to his head again and advised him to eject it on
to the floor. Then I punched him in the face and started searching for an easy vein.

He gave a short cry, and began vomiting steaming-hot blood.
Possibly his own choice, but more likely his employers had decided to cut their
losses. The body started smoking, so I dragged it out into the corridor.

The officers whołd been on guard were unconscious, not dead.
A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually
quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them. Also,
dead cops have been known to trigger an extra impetus in many investigations,
so itłs worthwhile taking the trouble to avoid them. I phoned someone I knew in
Toxicology to come and take a look at them, then radioed for replacements. Organising
the move to somewhere more secure would take twenty-four hours at least.

Catherine was hysterical, and Muriel, pretty shaken herself,
insisted on sedating her and ending the interview.

Muriel said, ęIłve read about it, but Iłve never seen it
with my own eyes before. What does it feel like?ł

ęWhat?ł

She emitted a burst of nervous laughter. She was shivering.
I held on to her shoulders until she calmed down a little. ęBeing like that.ł
Her teeth chattered. ęSomeone just tried to kill us all, and youłre carrying on
like nothing special happened. Like someone out of a comic book. What does it
feel like?ł

I laughed myself. We have a standard answer.

ęIt doesnłt feel like anything at all.ł

* * * *

Marion lay with her head on my chest. Her eyes were closed,
but she wasnłt asleep. I knew she was still listening to me. She always tenses
up a certain way when Iłm raving.

ęHow could anyone do that? How could anyone sit down and
coldbloodedly plan to create a deformed human being with no chance of living a
normal life? All for some insane �artist" somewhere whołs keeping alive a dead
billionairełs crazy theories. Shit, what do they think people are? Sculptures?
Things they can mess around with any way they like?ł

I wanted to sleep, it was late, but I couldnłt shut up. I
hadnłt even realised how angry I was until Iłd started on the topic, but then
my disgust had grown more intense with every word Iłd uttered.

An hour before, trying to make love, Iłd found myself impotent.
Iłd resorted to using my tongue, and Marion had come, but it still depressed
me. Was it psychological? The case I was on? Or a side effect of the priming
drugs? So suddenly, after all these years? There were rumours and jokes about
the drugs causing almost everything imaginable: sterility, malformed babies,
cancer, psychoses; but Iłd never believed any of that. The union would have
found out and raised hell, the department would never have been allowed to get
away with it. It was the chimera case that was screwing me up, it had to be. So
I talked about it.

ęAnd the worst thing is, she doesnłt even understand whatłs
been done to her. Shełs been lied to from birth. Macklenburg told her she was
beautiful, and she believes that crap, because she doesnłt know any better.ł

Marion shifted slightly, and sighed. ęWhatłs going to happen
to her? Howłs she going to live when shełs out of hospital?ł

ęI donłt know. I guess she could sell her story for quite a
packet. Enough to hire someone to look after her for the rest of her life.ł I
closed my eyes. ęIłm sorry. Itłs not fair, keeping you awake half the night
with this.ł

I heard a faint hissing sound, and Marion suddenly relaxed.
For what seemed like several seconds, but canłt have been, I wondered what was
wrong with me, why I hadnłt leapt to my feet, why I hadnłt even raised my head
to look across the dark room to find out who or what was there.

Then I realised the spray had hit me, too, and I was
paralysed. It was such a relief to be powerless that I slipped into unconsciousness
feeling, absurdly, more peaceful than I had felt for a very long time.

* * * *

I woke with a mixture of panic and lethargy, and no idea where
I was or what had happened. I opened my eyes and saw nothing. I flailed about
trying to touch my eyes, and felt myself drifting slightly, but my arms and
legs were restrained. I forced myself to relax for a moment and interpret my
sensations. I was blindfolded or bandaged, floating in a warm, buoyant liquid,
my mouth and nose covered with a mask. My feeble thrashing movements had
exhausted me, and for a long time I lay still, unable to concentrate
sufficiently to even start guessing about my circumstances. I felt as if every
bone in my body had been brokennot through any pain, but through a subtler
discomfort arising from an unfamiliar sense of my bodyłs configuration; it was
awkward, it was wrong. It occurred to me that I might have been in an accident.
A fire? That would explain why I was floating; I was in a burns treatment unit.
I said, ęHello? Iłm awake.ł The words came out as painful, hoarse whispers.

A blandly cheerful voice, almost genderless but borderline
male, replied. I was wearing headphones; I hadnłt noticed them until I felt
them vibrate.

ęMr Segel. How do you feel?ł

ęUncomfortable. Weak. Where am I?ł

ęA long way from home, Iłm afraid. But your wife is here
too.ł

It was only then that I remembered: lying in bed, unable to
move. That seemed impossibly long ago, but I had no more recent memories to
fill in the gap.

ęHow long have I been here? Wherełs Marion?ł

ęYour wife is nearby. Shełs safe and comfortable. Youłve
been here a number of weeks, but you are healing rapidly. Soon youłll be ready
for physiotherapy. So please, relax, be patient.ł

ęHealing from what?ł

ęMr Segel, Iłm afraid it was necessary to perform a great
deal of surgery to adjust your appearance to suit my requirements. Your eyes,
your face, your bone structure, your build, your skin tones; all needed
substantial alteration.ł

I floated in silence. The face of the diffident youth in The
Caress drifted across the darkness. I was horrified, but my disorientation
cushioned the blow; floating in darkness, listening to a disembodied voice,
nothing was yet quite real.

ęWhy pick me?ł

ęYou saved Catherinełs life. On two occasions. Thatłs precisely
the relationship I wanted.ł

ęTwo set-ups. She was never in any real danger, was she? Why
didnłt you find someone who already looked the part, to go through the
motions?ł I almost added ęGustaveł, but stopped myself in time. I was certain
he intended killing me anyway, eventually, but betraying my suspicions about
his identity would have been suicidal. The voice was synthetic, of course.

ęYou genuinely saved her life, Mr Segel. If shełd stayed in
the basement without replacement hormones, she would have died. And the
assassin we sent to the hospital was seriously intent on killing her.ł

I snorted feebly. ęWhat if hełd succeeded? Twenty yearsł
work and millions of dollars, down the drain. What would you have done then?ł

ęMr Segel, you have a very parochial view of the world. Your
little town isnłt the only one on the planet. Your little police force isnłt
unique either, except in being the only one who couldnłt keep the story from
the media. We began with twelve chimeras. Three died in childhood. Three were
not discovered in time after their keepers were killed. Four were assassinated
after discovery. The other surviving chimerałs life was saved by different
people on the two occasionsand also she was not quite up to the standard of
morphology that Freda Macklenburg achieved with Catherine. So, imperfect as you
are, Mr Segel, you are what I am required to work with.ł

* * * *

Shortly after that, I was shifted to a normal bed, and the
bandages were removed from my face and body. At first the room was kept dark,
but each morning the lights were turned up slightly. Twice a day, a masked
physiotherapist with a filtered voice came and helped me learn to move again.
There were six armed, masked guards in the windowless room at all times;
ludicrous overkill unless they were there in case of an unlikely, external
attempt to rescue me. I could barely walk; one stern grandmother could have
kept me from escaping.

They showed me Marion, once, on closed-circuit TV. She sat
in an elegantly furnished room, watching a news disk. Every few seconds, she
glanced around nervously. They wouldnłt let us meet. I was glad. I didnłt want
to see her reaction to my new appearance; that was an emotional complication I
could do without.

As I slowly became functional, I began to feel a deep sense
of panic that Iłd yet to think of a plan for keeping us alive. I tried striking
up conversations with the guards, in the hope of eventually persuading one of
them to help us, either out of compassion or on the promise of a bribe, but
they all stuck to monosyllables, and ignored me when I spoke of anything more
abstract than requests for food. Refusing to cooperate in the ęrealisationł was
the only strategy I could think of, but for how long would that work? I had no
doubt that my captor would resort to torturing Marion, and if that failed he
would simply hypnotise or drug me to ensure that I complied. And then he would
kill us all: Marion, myself, and Catherine.

I had no idea how much time we had; neither the guards, nor
the physiotherapist, nor the cosmetic surgeons who occasionally came to check
their handiwork, would even acknowledge my questions about the schedule being
followed. I longed for Lindhquist to speak with me again; however insane he
was, at least hełd engaged in a two-way conversation. I demanded an audience
with him, I screamed and ranted; the guards remained as unresponsive as their
masks.

Accustomed to the aid of the priming drugs in focusing my
thoughts, I found myself constantly distracted by all kinds of unproductive
concerns, from a simple fear of death, to pointless worries about my chances of
continued employment, and continued marriage, if Marion and I did somehow
survive. Weeks went by in which I felt nothing but hopelessness and self-pity.
Everything that defined me had been taken away: my face, my body, my job, my
usual modes of thought. And although I missed my former physical strength (as a
source of self-respect rather than something that would have been useful in
itself), it was the mental clarity that had been so much a part of my primed
state of mind that, I was certain, would have made all the difference if only I
could have regained it.

I eventually began to indulge in a bizarre, romantic
fantasy: the loss of everything I had once relied onthe stripping away of the
biochemical props that had held my unnatural life togetherwould reveal an
inner core of sheer moral courage and desperate resourcefulness which would see
me through this hour of need. My identity had been demolished, but the naked
spark of humanity remained, soon to burst into a searing flame that no prison
walls could contain. That which had not killed me would (soon, real soon) make
me strong.

A momentłs introspection each morning showed that this mystical
transformation had not yet taken place. I went on a hunger strike, hoping to
hasten my victorious emergence from the crucible of suffering by turning up the
heat. I wasnłt force-fed, or even given intravenous protein. I was too stupid
to make the obvious deduction: the day of realisation was imminent.

One morning, I was handed a costume which I recognised at
once from the painting. I was terrified to the point of nausea, but I put it on
and went with the guards, making no trouble. The painting was set outdoors.
This would be my only chance to escape.

Iłd hoped we would have to travel, with all the
opportunities that might have entailed, but the landscape had been prepared
just a few hundred metres from the building Iłd been kept in. I blinked at the
glare from the thin grey clouds that covered most of the sky (had Lindhquist
been waiting for them, or had he ordered their presence?), weary, frightened,
weaker than ever thanks to not having eaten for three days. Desolate fields
stretched to the horizon in all directions. There was nowhere to run to, nobody
to signal to for help.

I saw Catherine, already sitting in place on the edge of a
raised stretch of ground. A short manwell, shorter than the guards, whose
height Iłd grown accustomed tostood by her, stroking her neck. She flicked her
tail with pleasure, her eyes half closed. The man wore a loose white suit, and
a white mask, rather like a fencing mask. When he saw me approaching, he raised
his arms in an extravagant gesture of greeting. For an instant a wild idea possessed
me: Catherine could save us! With her speed, her strength, her claws.

There were a dozen armed men around us, and Catherine was
clearly as docile as a kitten.

ęMr Segel! You look so glum! Cheer up, please! This is a wonderful
day!ł

I stopped walking. The guards on either side of me stopped
too, and did nothing to force me on.

I said, ęI wonłt do it.ł

The man in white was indulgent. ęWhy ever not?ł

I stared at him, trembling. I felt like a child. Not since
childhood had I confronted anyone this way, without the priming drugs to calm
me, without a weapon within easy reach, without absolute confidence in my
strength and agility. ęWhen wełve done what you want, youłre going to kill us
all. The longer I refuse, the longer I stay alive.ł

It was Catherine who answered first. She shook her head, not
quite laughing. ęNo, Dan! Andreas wonłt hurt us! He loves us both!ł

The man came towards me. Had Andreas Lindhquist faked his
death? His gait was not an old manłs gait.

ęMr Segel, please calm yourself. Would I harm my own creations?
Would I waste all those years of hard work, by myself and so many others?ł

I sputtered, confused, ęYoułve killed people. Youłve kidnapped
us. Youłve broken a hundred different laws.ł I almost shouted at Catherine. ęHe
arranged Fredałs death!ł, but I had a feeling that would have done me a lot
more harm than good.

The computer that disguised his voice laughed blandly. ęYes,
Iłve broken laws. Whatever happens to you, Mr Segel, Iłve already broken them.
Do you think Iłm afraid of what youłll do when I release you? You will be as
powerless then to harm me as you are now. You have no proof as to my identity.
Oh, Iłve examined a record of your inquiries. I know you suspected meł

ęI suspected your son.ł

ęAh. A moot point. I prefer to be called Andreas by intimate
acquaintances, but to business associates, I am Gustave Lindhquist. You see,
this body is that of my sonif son is the right word to use for a clonebut
since his birth I took regular samples of my brain tissue, and had the
appropriate components extracted from them and injected into his skull. The
brain canłt be transplanted, Mr Segel, but with care, a great deal of memory
and personality can be imposed upon a young child. When my first body died, I
had the brain frozen, and I continued the injections until all the tissue was
used up. Whether or not I �am" Andreas is a matter for philosophers and
theologians. I clearly recall sitting in a crowded classroom watching a black and
white television, the day Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, fifty-two years
before this body was born. So call me Andreas. Humour an old man.ł

He shrugged. ęThe masks, the voice filtersI like a little
theatre. And the less you see and hear, the fewer your avenues for causing me
minor annoyance. But please, donłt flatter yourself; you can never be a threat
to me. I could buy every member of your entire force with half the amount Iłve
earnt while wełve been speaking.

ęSo forget these delusions of martyrdom. You are going to
live, and for the rest of your life you will be, not only my creation, but my
instrument. You are going to carry this moment away inside you, out into the
world for me, like a seed, like a strange, beautiful virus, infecting and transforming
everyone and everything you touch.ł

He took me by the arm and led me towards Catherine. I didnłt
resist. Someone placed a winged staff in my right hand. I was prodded,
arranged, adjusted, fussed over. I hardly noticed Catherinełs cheek against
mine, her paw resting against my belly. I stared ahead, in a daze, trying to
decide whether or not to believe I was going to live, overcome by this first
real chance of hope, but too terrified of disappointment to trust it.

There was no one but Lindhquist and his guards and
assistants. I donłt know what Iłd expected; an audience in evening dress? He
stood a dozen metres away, glancing down at a copy of the painting (or perhaps
it was the original) mounted on an easel, then calling out instructions for
microscopic changes to our posture and expression. My eyes began to water, from
keeping my gaze fixed; someone ran forward and dried them, then sprayed
something into them which prevented a recurrence.

Then, for several minutes, Lindhquist was silent. When he finally
spoke, he said, very softly, ęAll wełre waiting for now is the movement of the
sun, the correct positioning of your shadows. Be patient for just a little
longer.ł

I donłt remember clearly what I felt in those last seconds.
I was so tired, so confused, so uncertain. I do remember thinking: How will I
know when the moment has passed? When Lindhquist pulls out a weapon and
incinerates us, perfectly preserving the moment? Or when he pulls out a camera?
Which would it be?

Suddenly he said, ęThank you,ł and turned and walked away,
alone. Catherine shifted, stretched, kissed me on the cheek, and said, ęWasnłt
that fun?ł One of the guards took my elbow, and I realised Iłd staggered.

He hadnłt even taken a photograph. I giggled hysterically,
certain now that I was going to live after all. And he hadnłt even taken a
photograph. I couldnłt decide if that made him twice as insane, or if it
totally redeemed his sanity.

* * * *

I never discovered what became of Catherine. Perhaps she
stayed with Lindhquist, shielded from the world by his wealth and seclusion,
living a life effectively identical to that shełd lived before, in Freda
Macklenburgłs basement. Give or take a few servants and luxurious villas.

Marion and I were returned to our home, unconscious for the
duration of the voyage, waking on the bed wełd left six months before. There
was a lot of dust about. She took my hand and said, ęWell. Here we are.ł We lay
there in silence for hours, then went out in search of food.

The next day I went to the station. I proved my identity
with fingerprints and DNA, and gave a full report of all that had happened.

I had not been assumed dead. My salary had continued to be
paid into my bank account, and mortgage payments deducted automatically. The
department settled my claim for compensation out of court, paying me
three-quarters of a million dollars, and I underwent surgery to restore as much
of my former appearance as possible.

It took more than two years of rehabilitation, but now I am
back on active duty. The Macklenburg case has been shelved for lack of
evidence. The investigation of the kidnapping of the three of us, and
Catherinełs present fate, is on the verge of going the same way; nobody doubts
my account of the events, but all the evidence against Gustave Lindhquist is circumstantial.
I accept that. Iłm glad. I want to erase everything that Lindhquist has done to
me, and an obsession with bringing him to justice is the exact opposite of the
state of mind I aim to achieve. I donłt pretend to understand what he thought
he was achieving by letting me live, what his insane notion of my supposed
effect on the world actually entailed, but I am determined to be, in every way,
the same person as I was before the experience, and thus to defeat his
intentions.

Marion is doing fine. For a while she suffered from
recurring nightmares, but after seeing a therapist who specialises in
de-traumatising hostages and kidnap victims, she is now every bit as relaxed
and carefree as she used to be.

I have nightmares, now and then. I wake in the early hours
of the morning, shivering and sweating and crying out, unable to recall what
horror Iłm escaping. Andreas Lindhquist injecting samples of brain tissue into
his son? Catherine blissfully closing her eyes, and thanking me for saving her
life while her claws rake ray body into bloody strips? Myself, trapped in The
Caress; the moment of the realisation infinitely, unmercifully prolonged?
Perhaps; or perhaps I simply dream about my latest casethat seems much more
likely.

Everything is back to normal.

Chaff

El Nido de Ladronesthe Nest of Thievesoccupies a roughly
elliptical region, fifty thousand square kilometers in the western Amazon
Lowlands, straddling the border between Colombia and Peru. Itłs difficult to
say exactly where the natural rain forest ends and the engineered species of El
Nido take over, but the total biomass of the system must be close to a trillion
tonnes. A trillion tonnes of structural material, osmotic pumps, solar energy
collectors, cellular chemical factories, and biological computing and
communications resources. All under the control of its designers.

The old maps and databases are obsolete; by manipulating the
hydrology and soil chemistry, and influencing patterns of rainfall and erosion,
the vegetation has reshaped the terrain completely: shifting the course of the
Putumayo River, drowning old roads in swampland, raising secret causeways
through the jungle. This biogenic geography remains in a state of flux, so that
even the eye-witness accounts of the rare defectors from El Nido soon lose
their currency. Satellite images are meaningless; at every frequency, the
forest canopy conceals, or deliberately falsifies, the spectral signature of
whatever lies beneath.

Chemical toxins and defoliants are useless; the plants and
their symbiotic bacteria can analyze most poisons, and reprogram their
metabolisms to render them harmlessor transform them into foodfaster than our
agricultural warfare expert systems can invent new molecules. Biological
weapons are seduced, subverted, domesticated; most of the genes from the last
lethal plant virus we introduced were found three months later, incorporated
into a benign vector for El Nidołs elaborate communications network. The
assassin had turned into a messenger boy. Any attempt to burn the vegetation is
rapidly smothered by carbon dioxideor more sophisticated fire retardants, if a
self-oxidizing fuel is employed. Once we even pumped in a few tonnes of
nutrient laced with powerful radioisotopeslocked up in compounds chemically
indistinguishable from their natural counterparts. We tracked the results with
gamma-ray imaging: El Nido separated out the isotope-laden moleculesprobably
on the basis of their diffusion rates across organic membranessequestered and
diluted them, and then pumped them right back out again.

So when I heard that a Peruvian-born biochemist named Guillermo
Largo had departed from Bethesda, Maryland, with some highly classified genetic
toolsthe fruits of his own research, but very much the property of his
employersand vanished into El Nido, I thought: At last, an excuse for the Big
One. The Company had been advocating thermonuclear rehabilitation of El Nido
for almost a decade. The Security Council would have rubber-stamped it. The
governments with nominal authority over the region would have been delighted.
Hundreds of El Nidołs inhabitants were suspected of violating US lawand
President Golino was aching for a chance to prove that she could play hard ball
south of the border, whatever language she spoke in the privacy of her own
home. She could have gone on prime time afterward and told the nation that they
should be proud of Operation Back to Nature, and that the thirty thousand
displaced farmers whołd taken refuge in El Nido from Colombiałs undeclared
civil warand who had now been liberated forever from the oppression of Marxist
terrorists and drug baronswould have saluted her courage and resolve.

I never discovered why that wasnłt to be. Technical problems
in ensuring that no embarrassing side-effects would show up down-river in the
sacred Amazon itself, wiping out some telegenic endangered species before the
end of the present administration? Concern that some Middle Eastern warlord
might somehow construe the act as license to use his own feeble, long-hoarded
fission weapons on a troublesome minority, destabilizing the region in an
undesirable manner? Fear of Japanese trade sanctions, now that the rabidly
anti-nuclear Eco-Marketeers were back in power?

I wasnłt shown the verdicts of the geopolitical computer models;
I simply received my orderscoded into the flicker of my local K-Martłs
fluorescent tubes, slipped in between the updates to the shelf price tags.
Deciphered by an extra neural layer in my left retina, the words appeared blood
red against the bland cheery colors of the supermarket aisle.

I was to enter El Nido and retrieve Guillermo Largo.

Alive.

* * * *

Dressed like a local real estate agentright down to the
gold-plated bracelet-phone, and the worst of all possible three-hundred-dollar
haircutsI visited Largołs abandoned home in Bethesda: a northern suburb of
Washington, just over the border into Maryland. The apartment was modern and
spacious, neatly furnished but not opulentabout what any good marketing
software might have tried to sell him, on the basis of salary less alimony.

Largo had always been classified as _brilliant but unsound_a
potential security risk, but far too talented and productive to be wasted. Hełd
been under routine surveillance ever since the gloriously euphemistic
Department of Energy had employed him, straight out of Harvard, back in 2005clearly,
too routine by far ... but then, I could understand how thirty years with an
unblemished record must have given rise to a degree of complacency. Largo had
never attempted to disguise his politicsapart from exercising the kind of
discretion that was more a matter of etiquette than subterfuge; no Che Guevara
T-shirts when visiting Los Alamosbut hełd never really acted on his beliefs,
either.

A mural had been jet-sprayed onto his living room wall in
shades of near infrared (visible to most hip fourteen-year-old Washingtonians,
if not to their parents). It was a copy of the infamous Lee Hing-cheungłs _A
Tiling of the Plane with Heroes of the New World Order_, a digital image that
had spread across computer networks at the turn of the century. Early nineties
political leaders, naked and interlockedEscher meets the Kama Sutradeposited
steaming turds into each otherłs open and otherwise empty brain casesan effect
borrowed from the works of the German satirist George Grosz. The Iraqi dictator
was shown admiring his reflection in a hand mirrorthe image an exact
reproduction of a contemporary magazine cover in which the mustache had been retouched
to render it suitably Hitleresque. The US President carriedhorizontally, but
poised ready to be tiltedan egg-timer full of the gaunt hostages whose release
hełd delayed to clinch his predecessorłs election victory. Everyone was
shoe-horned in, somewhereright down to the Australian Prime Minister, portrayed
as a pubic louse, struggling (and failing) to fit its tiny jaws around the
mighty presidential cock. I could imagine a few of the neo-McCarthyist
troglodytes in the Senate going apoplectic, if anything so tedious as an
inquiry into Largołs defection ever took placebut what should we have done?
Refused to hire him if he owned so much as a _Guernica_ tea-towel?

Largo had blanked every computer in the apartment before
leaving, including the entertainment systembut I already knew his taste in
music, having listened to a few hours of audio surveillance samples full of bad
Korean Ska. No laudable revolutionary ethno-solidarity, no haunting Andean pipe
music; a shameI would have much preferred that. His bookshelves held several
battered college-level biochemistry texts, presumably retained for sentimental
reasons, and a few dozen musty literary classics and volumes of poetry, in
English, Spanish, and German. Hesse, Rilke, Vallejo, Conrad, Nietzsche. Nothing
modernand nothing printed after 2010. With a few words to the household
manager, Largo had erased every digital work hełd ever owned, sweeping away the
last quarter of a century of his personal archaeology.

I flipped through the surviving books, for what it was
worth. There was a pencilled-in correction to the structure of guanine in one
of the texts ... and a section had been underlined in �Heart of Darkness." The
narrator, Marlow, was pondering the mysterious fact that the servants on the
steamboatmembers of a cannibal tribe, whose provisions of rotting hippo meat
had been tossed overboardhadnłt yet rebelled and eaten him. After all:

_No fear can stand up to hunger, no patience can wear it
out, disgust simply does not exist where hunger is; and as to superstition,
beliefs, and what you may call principles, they are less than chaff in a
breeze._

I couldnłt argue with thatbut I wondered why Largo had
found the passage noteworthy. Perhaps it had struck a chord, back in the days
when hełd been trying to rationalize taking his first research grants from the
Pentagon? The ink was fadedand the volume itself had been printed in 2003. I
would rather have had copies of his diary entries for the fortnight leading up
to his disappearancebut his household computers hadnłt been systematically
tapped for almost twenty years.

I sat at the desk in his study, and stared at the blank
screen of his work station. Largo had been born into a middle-class, nominally
Catholic, very mildly leftist family in Lima, in 1980. His father, a journalist
with _El Comercio_, had died from a cerebral blood clot in 2029. His
seventy-eight-year-old mother still worked as an attorney for an international
mining companygoing through the motions of _habeas corpus_ for the families of
disappeared radicals in her spare time, a hobby her employers tolerated for the
sake of cheap PR brownie points in the shareholder democracies. Guillermo had
one elder brother, a retired surgeon, and one younger sister, a primary school
teacher, neither of them politically active.

Most of his education had taken place in Switzerland and the
States; after his PhD, hełd held a succession of research posts in government
institutes, the biotechnology industry, and academiaall with more or less the
same real sponsors. Fifty-five, now, thrice divorced but still childless, hełd
only ever returned to Lima for brief family visits.

After _three decades_ working on the military applications
of molecular geneticsunwittingly at first, but not for longwhat could have
triggered his sudden defection to El Nido? If hełd managed the cynical
doublethink of reconciling defense research and pious liberal sentiments for so
long, he must have got it down to a fine art. His latest psychological profile
suggested as much: fierce pride in his scientific achievements balanced the
self-loathing he felt when contemplating their ultimate purposewith the
conflict showing signs of decaying into comfortable indifference. A
well-documented dynamic in the industry.

And he seemed to have acknowledgeddeep in his heart, thirty
years agothat his �principles" were _less than chaff in a breeze_.

Perhaps hełd decided, belatedly, that if he was going to be
a whore he might as well do it properly, and sell his skills to the highest
biddereven if that meant smuggling genetic weapons to a drugs cartel. Iłd read
his financial records, though: no tax fraud, no gambling debts, no evidence
that hełd ever lived beyond his means. Betraying his employers, just as hełd
betrayed his own youthful ideals to join them, might have seemed like an appropriately
nihilistic gesture ... but on a more pragmatic level, it was hard to imagine
him finding the money, and the consequences, all that tempting. What could El
Nido have offered him? A numbered satellite account, and a new identity in
Paraguay? All the squalid pleasures of life on the fringes of the Third World
plutocracy? He would have had everything to gain by living out his retirement
in his adopted country, salving his conscience with one or two vitriolic essays
on foreign policy in some unread left-wing netzineand then finally convincing
himself that any nation that granted him such unencumbered rights of free
speech probably deserved everything hełd done to defend it.

Exactly what he _had_ done to defend it, thoughwhat tools
hełd perfected, and stolenI was not permitted to know.

* * * *

As dusk fell, I locked the apartment and headed south down
Wisconsin Avenue. Washington was coming alive, the streets already teeming with
people looking for distraction from the heat. Nights in the cities were
becoming hallucinatory. Teenagers sported bioluminescent symbionts, the veins
in their temples, necks, and pumped-up forearm muscles glowing electric blue,
walking circulation diagrams who cultivated hypertension to improve the effect.
Others used retinal symbionts to translate IR into visible light, their eyes
flashing vampire red in the shadows.

And others, less visibly, had a skull full of White Knights.

Stem cells in the bone marrow infected with Motheran engineered
retrovirusgave rise to something half-way between an embryonic neuron and a
white blood cell. White Knights secreted the cytokines necessary to unlock the
blood-brain barrierand once through, cellular adhesion molecules guided them
to their targets, where they could flood the site with a chosen neurotransmitteror
even form temporary quasi-synapses with genuine neurons. Users often had half a
dozen or more sub-types in their bloodstream simultaneously, each one activated
by a specific dietary additive: some cheap, harmless, and perfectly legitimate
chemical not naturally present in the body. By ingesting the right mixture of innocuous
artificial colorings, flavors and preservatives, they could modulate their
neurochemistry in almost any fashionuntil the White Knights died, as they were
programmed to do, and a new dose of Mother was required.

Mother could be snorted, or taken intravenously ... but the
most efficient way to use it was to puncture a bone and inject it straight into
the marrowan excruciating, messy, dangerous business, even if the virus itself
was uncontaminated and authentic. The good stuff came from El Nido. The bad
stuff came from basement labs in California and Texas, where gene hackers tried
to force cell cultures infected with Mother to reproduce a virus expressly designed
to resist their effortsand churned out batches of mutant strains ideal for
inducing leukaemia, astrocytomas, Parkinsonłs disease, and assorted novel
psychoses.

Crossing the sweltering dark city, watching the heedlessly
joyful crowds, I felt a penetrating, dream-like clarity come over me. Part of
me was numb, leaden, blankbut part of me was electrified, all-seeing. I seemed
to be able to stare into the hidden landscapes of the people around me, to see
deeper than the luminous rivers of blood; to pierce them with my vision right to
the bone.

Right to the marrow.

I drove to the edge of a park Iłd visited once before, and
waited. I was already dressed for the part. Young people strode by, grinning,
some glancing at the silver 2025 Ford Narcissus and whistling appreciatively. A
teenaged boy danced on the grass, alone, tirelesslyblissed out on Coca-Cola,
and not even getting paid to fake it.

Before too long, a girl approached the car, blue veins
flashing on her bare arms. She leaned down to the window and looked in,
inquiringly.

�What you got?" She was sixteen or seventeen, slender,
dark-eyed, coffee-colored, with a faint Latino accent. She could have been my
sister.

�Southern Rainbow." All twelve major genotypes of Mother,
straight from El Nido, cut with nothing but glucose. Southern Rainbowand a
little fast foodcould take you anywhere.

The girl eyed me skeptically, and stretched out her right
hand, palm down. She wore a ring with a large multifaceted jewel, with a pit in
the center. I took a sachet from the glove compartment, shook it, tore it open,
and tipped a few specks of powder into the pit. Then I leaned over and
moistened the sample with saliva, holding her cool fingers to steady her hand.
Twelve faces of the �stone" began to glow immediately, each one in a different
color. The immunoelectric sensors in the pit, tiny capacitors coated with antibodies,
were designed to recognize several sites on the protein coats of the different
strains of Motherparticularly the ones the bootleggers had the most trouble
getting right.

With good enough technology, though, those proteins didnłt
have to bear the slightest relationship to the RNA inside.

The girl seemed to be impressed; her face lit up with
anticipation. We negotiated a price. Too low by far; she should have been
suspicious.

I looked her in the eye before handing over the sachet.

I said, �What do you need this shit for? The world is the
world. You have to take it as it is. Accept it as it is: savage and terrible.
Be strong. Never lie to yourself. Thatłs the only way to survive."

She smirked at my apparent hypocrisy, but she was too
pleased with her luck to turn nasty. �I hear what youłre saying. Itłs a bad
planet out there." She forced the money into my hand, adding, with wide-eyed
mock-sincerity, �And this is the last time I do Mother, I promise."

I gave her the lethal virus, and watched her walk away
across the grass and vanish into the shadows.

* * * *

The Colombian air force pilot who flew me down from Bogota
didnłt seem too thrilled to be risking his life for a DEA bureaucrat. It was
seven hundred kilometers to the border, and five different guerilla
organizations held territory along the way: not a lot of towns, but several
hundred possible sites for rocket launchers.

�My great-grandfather," he said sourly, �died in fucking
Korea fighting for General Douglas fucking MacArthur." I wasnłt sure if that
was meant to be a declaration of pride, or an intimation of an outstanding
debt. Both, probably.

The helicopter was eerily silent, fitted out with phased
sound absorbers, which looked like giant loudspeakers but swallowed most of the
noise of the blades. The carbon-fiber fuselage was coated with an expensive
network of chameleon polymersalthough it might have been just as effective to
paint the whole thing sky blue. An endothermic chemical mixture accumulated
waste heat from the motor, and then discharged it through a parabolic radiator
as a tightly focused skywards burst, every hour or so. The guerillas had no
access to satellite images, and no radar they dared use; I decided that we had
less chance of dying than the average Bogota commuter. Back in the capital,
buses had been exploding without warning, two or three times a week.

Colombia was tearing itself apart; _La Violencia_ of the
1950s, all over again. Although all of the spectacular terrorist sabotage was
being carried out by organized guerilla groups, most of the deaths so far had
been caused by factions within the two mainstream political parties butchering
each otherłs supporters, avenging a litany of past atrocities which stretched
back for generations. The group whołd actually started the current wave of
bloodshed had negligible support; _Ejercito de Simon Bolivar_ were lunatic
right-wing extremists who wanted to �reunite" with Panama, Venezuela, and
Ecuadorafter two centuries of separationand drag in Peru and Bolivia, to
realize Bolivarłs dream of _Gran Colombia_. By assassinating President Marin,
though, theyłd triggered a cascade of events that had nothing to do with their
ludicrous cause. Strikes and protests, street battles, curfews, martial law.
The repatriation of foreign capital by nervous investors, followed by hyperinflation,
and the collapse of the local financial system. Then a spiral of opportunistic
violence. Everyone, from the paramilitary death squads to the Maoist splinter
groups, seemed to believe that their hour had finally come.

I hadnłt seen so much as a bullet firedbut from the moment
Iłd entered the country, therełd been acid churning in my guts, and a heady,
ceaseless adrenaline rush coursing through my veins. I felt wired, feverish ...
alive. Hypersensitive as a pregnant woman: I could smell blood, everywhere.
When the hidden struggle for power which rules all human affairs finally breaks
through to the surface, finally ruptures the skin, itłs like witnessing some
giant primordial creature rise up out of the ocean. Mesmerizing, and appalling.
Nauseatingand exhilarating.

Coming face to face with the truth is always exhilarating.

* * * *

From the air, there was no obvious sign that wełd arrived;
for the last two hundred kilometers, wełd been passing over rain forestcleared
in patches for plantations and mines, ranches and timber mills, shot through
with rivers like metallic threadsbut most of it resembling nothing so much as
an endless expanse of broccoli. El Nido permitted natural vegetation to
flourish all around itand then imitated it ... which made sampling at the
edges an inefficient way to gather the true genetic stock for analysis. Deep
penetration was difficult, though, even with purpose-built robotsdozens of
which had been lostso edge samples had to suffice, at least until a few more
members of Congress could be photographed committing statutory rape and
persuaded to vote for better funding. Most of the engineered plant tissues
self-destructed in the absence of regular chemical and viral messages drifting
out from the core, reassuring them that they were still _in situ_so the main
DEA research facility was on the outskirts of El Nido itself, a collection of
pressurized buildings and experimental plots in a clearing blasted out of the
jungle on the Colombian side of the border. The electrified fences werenłt
topped with razor wire; they turned ninety degrees into an electrified roof,
completing a chain-link cage. The heliport was in the center of the compound,
where a cage within the cage could, temporarily, open itself to the sky.

Madelaine Smith, the research director, showed me around. In
the open, we both wore hermetic biohazard suitsalthough if the modifications Iłd
received in Washington were working as promised, mine was redundant. El Nidołs
short-lived defensive viruses occasionally percolated out this far; they were
never fatal, but they could be severely disabling to anyone who hadnłt been
inoculated. The forestłs designers had walked a fine line between biological �self-defense"
and unambiguously military applications. Guerillas had always hidden in the
engineered jungleand raised funds by collaborating in the export of Motherbut
El Nidołs technology had never been explicitly directed toward the creation of
lethal pathogens.

So far.

�Here, wełre raising seedlings of what we hope will be a
stable El Nido phenotype, something we call beta seventeen." They were
unremarkable bushes with deep green foliage and dark red berries; Smith pointed
to an array of camera-like instruments beside them. �Real-time infrared
microspectroscopy. It can resolve a medium-sized RNA transcript, if therełs a
sharp surge in production in a sufficient number of cells, simultaneously. We
match up the data from these with our gas chromatography records, which show
the range of molecules drifting out from the core. If we can catch these plants
in the act of sensing a cue from El Nidoand if their response involves
switching on a gene and synthesizing a proteinwe may be able to elucidate the
mechanism, and eventually short-circuit it."

�You canłt just ... sequence all the DNA, and work it out
from first principles?" I was meant to be passing as a newly-appointed
administrator, dropping in at short notice to check for gold-plated paper clipsbut
it was hard to decide exactly how naive to sound.

Smith smiled politely. �El Nido DNA is guarded by enzymes
which tear it apart at the slightest hint of cellular disruption. Right now, wełd
have about as much of a chance of _sequencing it_ as Iłd have of ... reading
your mind by autopsy. And we still donłt know how those enzymes work; we have a
lot of catching up to do. When the drug cartels started investing in
biotechnology, forty years ago, _copy protection_ was their first priority. And
they lured the best people away from legitimate labs around the worldnot just
by paying more, but by offering more creative freedom, and more challenging
goals. El Nido probably contains as many patentable inventions as the entire
agrotechnology industry produced in the same period. And all of them a lot more
exciting."

Was that what had brought Largo here? _More challenging
goals?_ But El Nido was complete, the challenge was over; any further work was
mere refinement. And at fifty-five, surely he knew that his most creative years
were long gone.

I said, �I imagine the cartels got more than they bargained
for; the technology transformed their business beyond recognition. All the old
addictive substances became too easy to synthesize biologicallytoo cheap, too
pure, and too readily available to be profitable. And addiction itself became
bad business. The only thing that really sells now is novelty."

Smith motioned with bulky arms toward the towering forest
outside the cageturning to face south-east, although it all looked the same. �_El
Nido_ was more than they bargained for. All they really wanted was coca plants
that did better at lower altitudes, and some gene-tailored vegetation to make
it easier to camouflage their labs and plantations. They ended up with a small
_de facto_ nation full of gene hackers, anarchists, and refugees. The cartels
are only in control of certain regions; half the original geneticists have
split off and founded their own little jungle utopias. There are at least a dozen
people who know how to program the plantshow to switch on new patterns of gene
expression, how to tap into the communications networksand with that, you can
stake out your own territory."

�Like having some secret, shamanistic power to command the
spirits of the forest?"

�Exactly. Except for the fact that it actually works."

I laughed. �Do you know what cheers me up the most? Whatever
else happens ... the _real_ Amazon, the _real_ jungle, will swallow them all in
the end. Itłs lastedwhat? Two million years? _Their own little utopias!_ In
fifty yearsł time, or a hundred, it will be as if El Nido had never existed."

_Less than chaff in a breeze._

Smith didnłt reply. In the silence, I could hear the
monotonous click of beetles, from all directions. Bogota, high on a plateau,
had been almost chilly. Here, it was as sweltering as Washington itself.

I glanced at Smith; she said, �Youłre right, of course." But
she didnłt sound convinced at all.

* * * *

In the morning, over breakfast, I reassured Smith that Iłd
found everything to be in order. She smiled warily. I think she suspected that
I wasnłt what I claimed to be, but that didnłt really matter. Iłd listened
carefully to the gossip of the scientists, technicians and soldiers; the name
_Guillermo Largo_ hadnłt been mentioned once. If they didnłt even know about
Largo, they could hardly have guessed my real purpose.

It was just after nine when I departed. On the ground,
sheets of light, delicate as auroral displays, sliced through the trees around
the compound. When we emerged above the canopy, it was like stepping from a
mist-shrouded dawn into the brilliance of noon.

The pilot, begrudgingly, took a detour over the center of El
Nido. �Wełre in Peruvian air space, now," he boasted. �You want to spark a
diplomatic incident?" He seemed to find the possibility attractive.

�No. But fly lower."

�Therełs nothing to see. You canłt even see the river."

�Lower." The broccoli grew larger, then suddenly snapped
into focus; all that undifferentiated _green_ turned into individual branches,
solid and specific. It was curiously shocking, like looking at some dull
familiar object through a microscope, and seeing its strange particularity
revealed.

I reached over and broke the pilotłs neck. He hissed through
his teeth, surprised. A shudder passed through me, a mixture of fear and a
twinge of remorse. The autopilot kicked in and kept us hovering; it took me two
minutes to unstrap the manłs body, drag him into the cargo hold, and take his
seat.

I unscrewed the instrument panel and patched in a new chip.
The digital log being beamed via satellite to an air force base to the north
would show that wełd descended rapidly, out of control.

The truth wasnłt much different. At a hundred meters, I hit
a branch and snapped a blade on the front rotor; the computers compensated
valiantly, modeling and remodelling the situation, trimming the active surfaces
of the surviving bladesand no doubt doing fine for each five-second interval
between bone-shaking impacts and further damage. The sound absorbers went
berserk, slipping in and out of phase with the motors, blasting the jungle with
pulses of intensified noise.

Fifty meters up, I went into a slow spin, weirdly smooth,
showing me the thickening canopy as if in a leisurely cinematic pan. At twenty
meters, free fall. Air bags inflated around me, blocking off the view. I closed
my eyes, redundantly, and gritted my teeth. Fragments of prayers spun in my
headthe detritus of childhood, afterimages burned into my brain, meaningless
but unerasable. I thought: _If I die, the jungle will claim me. I am flesh, I
am chaff. Nothing will remain to be judged._ By the time I recalled that this
wasnłt true jungle at all, I was no longer falling.

The air bags promptly deflated. I opened my eyes. There was
water all around, flooded forest. A panel of the roof between the rotors blew
off gently with a hiss like the dying pilotłs last breath, and then drifted
down like a slowly crashing kite, turning muddy silver, green, and brown as it
snatched at the colors around it.

The life raft had oars, provisions, flaresand a radio
beacon. I cut the beacon loose and left it in the wreckage. I moved the pilot
back into his seat, just as the water started flooding in to bury him.

Then I set off down the river.

* * * *

El Nido had divided a once-navigable stretch of the Rio Putumayo
into a bewildering maze. Sluggish channels of brown water snaked between
freshly raised islands of soil, covered in palms and rubber plants, and the
inundated banks where the oldest treeschocolate-colored hardwood species
(predating the geneticists, but not necessarily unmodified)soared above the
undergrowth and out of sight.

The lymph nodes in my neck and groin pulsed with heat, savage
but reassuring; my modified immune system was dealing with El Nidołs viral
onslaught by generating thousands of new killer T-cell clones _en masse_,
rather than waiting for a cautious antigen-mediated response. A few weeks in
this state, and the chances were that a self-directed clone would slip through
the elimination process and burn me up with a novel autoimmune diseasebut I
didnłt plan on staying that long.

Fish disturbed the murky water, rising up to snatch
surface-dwelling insects or floating seed pods. In the distance, the thick
coils of an anaconda slid from an overhanging branch and slipped languidly into
the water. Between the rubber plants, hummingbirds hovered in the maws of
violet orchids. So far as I knew, none of these creatures had been tampered
with; they had gone on inhabiting the prosthetic forest as if nothing had
changed.

I took a stick of chewing gum from my pocket, rich in cyclamates,
and slowly roused one of my own sets of White Knights. The stink of heat and
decaying vegetation seemed to fade, as certain olfactory pathways in my brain
were numbed, and others sensitizeda kind of inner filter coming into play,
enabling any signal from the newly acquired receptors in my nasal membranes to
rise above all the other, distracting odors of the jungle.

Suddenly, I could smell the dead pilot on my hands and clothes,
the lingering taint of his sweat and faecesand the pheromones of spider
monkeys in the branches around me, pungent and distinctive as urine. As a
rehearsal, I followed the trail for fifteen minutes, paddling the raft in the
direction of the freshest scent, until I was finally rewarded with chirps of
alarm and a glimpse of two skinny gray-brown shapes vanishing into the foliage
ahead.

My own scent was camouflaged; symbionts in my sweat glands
were digesting all the characteristic molecules. There were long-term
side-effects from the bacteria, though, and the most recent intelligence
suggested that El Nidołs inhabitants didnłt bother with them. There was a
chance, of course, that Largo had been paranoid enough to bring his own.

I stared after the retreating monkeys, and wondered when Iłd
catch my first whiff of another living human. Even an illiterate peasant whołd
fled the violence to the north would have valuable knowledge of the state of
play between the factions in here, and some kind of crude mental map of the
landscape.

The raft began to whistle gently, air escaping from one
sealed compartment. I rolled into the water and submerged completely. A meter
down, I couldnłt see my own hands. I waited and listened, but all I could hear
was the soft _plop_ of fish breaking the surface. No rock could have holed the
plastic of the raft; it had to have been a bullet.

I floated in the cool milky silence. The water would conceal
my body heat, and Iłd have no need to exhale for ten minutes. The question was
whether to risk raising a wake by swimming away from the raft, or to wait it
out.

Something brushed my cheek, sharp and thin. I ignored it. It
happened again. It didnłt feel like a fish, or anything living. A third time,
and I seized the object as it fluttered past. It was a piece of plastic a few
centimeters wide. I felt around the rim; the edge was sharp in places, soft and
yielding in others. Then the fragment broke in two in my hand.

I swam a few meters away, then surfaced cautiously. The life
raft was decaying, the plastic peeling away into the water like skin in acid.
The polymer was meant to be cross-linked beyond any chance of biodegradationbut
obviously some strain of El Nido bacteria had found a way.

I floated on my back, breathing deeply to purge myself of carbon
dioxide, contemplating the prospect of completing the mission on foot. The
canopy above seemed to waver, as if in a heat haze, which made no sense. My
limbs grew curiously warm and heavy. It occurred to me to wonder exactly what I
might be smelling, if I hadnłt shut down ninety per cent of my olfactory range.
I thought: _If Iłd bred bacteria able to digest a substance foreign to El Nido,
what else would I want them to do when they chanced upon such a meal?
Incapacitate whoever had brought it in? Broadcast news of the event with a
biochemical signal?_

I could smell the sharp odors of half a dozen sweat-drenched
people when they arrived, but all I could do was lie in the water and let them
fish me out.

* * * *

After we left the river, I was carried on a stretcher,
blindfolded and bound. No one talked within earshot. I might have judged the
pace we set by the rhythm of my bearersł footsteps, or guessed the direction in
which we traveled by hints of sunlight on the side of my face ... but in the
waking dream induced by the bacterial toxins, the harder I struggled to
interpret those cues, the more lost and confused I became.

At one point, when the party rested, someone squatted beside
meand waved a scanning device over my body? That guess was confirmed by the
pinpricks of heat where the polymer transponders had been implanted. Passive
devicesbut their resonant echo in a satellite microwave burst would have been
distinctive. The scanner found, and fried, them all.

Late in the afternoon, they removed the blindfold. Certain
that I was totally disoriented? Certain that Iłd never escape? Or maybe just to
flaunt El Nidołs triumphant architecture.

The approach was a hidden path through swampland; I kept
looking down to see my captorsł boots not quite vanishing into the mud, while a
dry, apparently secure stretch of high ground nearby was avoided.

Closer in, the dense thorned bushes blocking the way seemed
to yield for us; the chewing gum had worn off enough for me to tell that we
moved in a cloud of a sweet, ester-like compound. I couldnłt see whether it was
being sprayed into the air from a cylinderor emitted bodily by a member of the
party with symbionts in his skin, or lungs, or intestines.

The village emerged almost imperceptibly out of the impostor
jungle. The groundI could feel itbecame, step by step, unnaturally firm and
level. The arrangement of trees grew subtly ordereddefining no linear avenues,
but increasingly _wrong_ nonetheless. Then I started glimpsing �fortuitous"
clearings to the left and right, containing �natural" wooden buildings, or
shiny biopolymer sheds.

I was lowered to the ground outside one of the sheds. A man
I hadnłt seen before leaned over me, wiry and unshaven, holding up a gleaming
hunting knife. He looked to me like the archetype of human as animal, human as
predator, human as unselfconscious killer.

He said, �Friend, this is where we drain out all of your
blood." He grinned and squatted down. I almost passed out from the stench of my
own fear, as the glut overwhelmed the symbionts. He cut my hands free, adding, �And
then put it all back in again." He slid one arm under me, around my ribs,
raised me up from the stretcher, and carried me into the building.

* * * *

Guillermo Largo said, �Forgive me if I donłt shake your
hand. I think wełve almost cleaned you out, but I donłt want to risk physical
contact in case therełs enough of a residue of the virus to make your own
hyped-up immune system turn on you."

He was an unprepossessing, sad-eyed man; thin, short,
slightly balding. I stepped up to the wooden bars between us and stretched my
hand out toward him. �Make contact any time you like. I never carried a virus.
Do you think I believe your _propaganda?_"

He shrugged, unconcerned. �It would have killed you, not mealthough
Iłm sure it was meant for both of us. It may have been keyed to my genotype,
but you carried far too much of it not to have been caught up in the response
to my presence. Thatłs history, though, not worth arguing about."

I didnłt actually believe that he was lying; a virus to
dispose of both of us made perfect sense. I even felt a begrudging respect for
the Company, for the way Iłd been usedthere was a savage, unsentimental
honesty to itbut it didnłt seem politic to reveal that to Largo.

I said, �If you believe that I pose no risk to you now,
though, why donłt you come back with me? Youłre still considered valuable. One
moment of weakness, one bad decision, doesnłt have to mean the end of your
career. Your employers are very pragmatic people; they wonłt want to punish you.
Theyłll just need to watch you a little more closely in future. Their problem,
not yours; you wonłt even notice the difference."

Largo didnłt seem to be listening, but then he looked
straight at me and smiled. �Do you know what Victor Hugo said about Colombiałs
first constitution? He said it was written for a country of angels. It only
lasted twenty-three yearsand on the next attempt, the politicians lowered
their sights. Considerably." He turned away, and started pacing back and forth
in front of the bars. Two Mestizo peasants with automatic weapons stood by the
door, looking on impassively. Both incessantly chewed what looked to me like
ordinary coca leaves; there was something almost reassuring about their loyalty
to tradition.

My cell was clean and well furnished, right down to the kind
of bioreactor toilet that was all the rage in Beverly Hills. My captors had
treated me impeccably, so far, but I had a feeling that Largo was planning
something unpleasant. Handing me over to the Mother barons? I still didnłt know
what deal hełd done, what hełd sold them in exchange for a piece of El Nido and
a few dozen bodyguards. Let alone why he thought this was better than an apartment
in Bethesda and a hundred grand a year.

I said, �What do you think youłre going to do, if you stay
here? Build your own _country for angels?_ Grow your own bioengineered utopia?"

�Utopia?" Largo stopped pacing, and flashed his crooked
smile again. �No. How can there ever be a _utopia?_ There is no _right way to
live_, which wełve simply failed to stumble upon. There is no set of rules,
there is no system, there is no formula. Why should there be? Short of the
existence of a creatorand a perverse one, at thatwhy should there be some
blueprint for perfection, just waiting to be discovered?"

I said, �Youłre right. In the end, all we can do is be true
to our nature. See through the veneer of civilization and hypocritical morality,
and accept the real forces that shape us."

Largo burst out laughing. I actually felt my face burn at
his responseif only because Iłd misread him, and failed to get him on side;
not because he was laughing at the one thing I believed in.

He said, �Do you know what I was working on, back in the
States?"

�No. Does it matter?" The less I knew, the better my chances
of living.

Largo told me anyway. �I was looking for a way to render mature
neurons _embryonic_. To switch them back into a less differentiated state,
enabling them to behave the way they do in the fetal brain: migrating from site
to site, forming new connections. Supposedly as a treatment for dementia and
stroke ... although the work was being funded by people who saw it as the first
step toward viral weapons able to rewire parts of the brain. I doubt that the
results could ever have been very sophisticatedno viruses for imposing
political ideologiesbut all kinds of disabling or docile behavior might have
been coded into a relatively small package."

�And you sold that to the cartels? So they can hold whole
cities to ransom with it, next time one of their leaders is arrested? To save
them the trouble of assassinating judges and politicians?"

Largo said mildly, �I sold it to the cartels, but not as a
weapon. No infectious military version exists. Even the prototypeswhich merely
regress selected neurons, but make no programmed changesare far too cumbersome
and fragile to survive at large. And there are other technical problems. Therełs
not much reproductive advantage for a virus in carrying out elaborate, highly
specific modifications to its hostłs brain; unleashed on a real human
population, mutants that simply ditched all of that irrelevant shit would soon
predominate."

�Then ... ?"

�I sold it to the cartels as _a product_. Or rather, I
combined it with their own biggest seller, and handed over the finished hybrid.
A new kind of Mother."

�Which does what?" He had me hooked, even if I was digging
my own grave.

�Which turns a subset of the neurons in the brain into something
like White Knights. Just as mobile, just as flexible. Far better at
establishing tight new synapses, though, rather than just flooding the
interneural space with a chosen substance. And not controlled by dietary
additives; controlled by molecules they secrete themselves. Controlled by each
other."

That made no sense to me. �_Existing neurons_ become mobile?
Existing brain structures ... melt? Youłve made a version of Mother that turns
peoplełs brains to mushand you expect them to pay for that?"

�Not mush. Everythingłs part of a tight feedback loop: the
firing of these altered neurons influences the range of molecules they secretewhich
in turn controls the rewiring of nearby synapses. Vital regulatory centers and
motor neurons are left untouched, of course. And it takes a strong signal to
shift the Gray Knights; they donłt respond to every random whim. You need at
least an hour or two without distractions before you can have a significant
effect on any brain structure.

�Itłs not altogether different from the way ordinary neurons
end up encoding learned behavior and memoriesonly faster, more flexible ...
and much more widespread. There are parts of the brain that havenłt changed in
a hundred thousand years, which can be remodelled completely in half a day."

He paused, and regarded me amiably. The sweat on the back of
my neck went cold.

�Youłve used the virus?"

�Of course. Thatłs why I created it. For myself. Thatłs why
I came here in the first place."

�For do-it-yourself neurosurgery? Why not just slip a screwdriver
under one eyeball and poke it around until the urge went away?" I felt physically
sick. �At least ... cocaine and heroineand even White Knightsexploited
_natural_ receptors, _natural_ pathways. Youłve taken a structure that
evolution has honed over millions of years, and"

Largo was greatly amused, but this time he refrained from
laughing in my face. He said gently, �For most people, navigating their own
psyche is like wandering in circles through a maze. Thatłs what _evolution_ has
bequeathed us: a miserable, confusing prison. And the only thing crude drugs
like cocaine or heroine or alcohol ever did was build short cuts to a few dead
endsor, like LSD, coat the walls of the maze with mirrors. And all that White
Knights ever did was package the same effects differently.

�_Gray Knights_ allow you to reshape the entire maze, at
will. They donłt confine you to some shrunken emotional repertoire; they
empower you completely. They let you control _exactly who you are_."

I had to struggle to put aside the overwhelming sense of
revulsion I felt. Largo had decided to fuck himself in the head; that was his
problem. A few users of Mother would do the samebut one more batch of
poisonous shit to compete with all the garbage from the basement labs wasnłt
exactly a national tragedy.

Largo said affably, �I spent thirty years as someone I
despised. I was too weak to changebut I never quite lost sight of what I
wanted to become. I used to wonder if it would have been less contemptible,
less hypocritical, to resign myself to the fact of my weakness, the fact of my
corruption. But I never did."

�And you think youłve erased your old personality, as easily
as you erased your computer files? What are you now, then? A saint? _An angel?_"

�No. But Iłm exactly what I want to be. With Gray Knights,
you canłt really be anything else."

I felt giddy for a moment, light-headed with rage; I
steadied myself against the bars of my cage.

I said, �So youłve scrambled your brain, and you feel
better. And youłre going to live in this fake jungle for the rest of your life,
collaborating with drug pushers, kidding yourself that youłve achieved
redemption?"

�The rest of my life? Perhaps. But Iłll be watching the
world. And hoping."

I almost choked. �Hoping for _what?_ You think your habit
will ever spread beyond a few brain-damaged junkies? You think Gray Knights are
going to sweep across the planet and transform it beyond recognition? Or were
you lyingis the virus really infectious, after all?"

�No. But it gives people what they want. Theyłll seek it
out, once they understand that."

I gazed at him, pityingly. �What people _want_ is food, sex,
and power. That will never change. Remember the passage you marked in ęHeart of
Darknessł? What do you think that _meant?_ Deep down, wełre just animals with a
few simple drives. Everything else is _less than chaff in a breeze_."

Largo frowned, as if trying to recall the quote, then nodded
slowly. He said, �Do you know how many different ways an ordinary human brain
can be wired? Not an arbitrary neural network of the same sizebut an actual,
working _Homo sapiens_ brain, shaped by real embryology and real experience?
There are about ten-to-the-power-of-ten-million possibilities. A huge number: a
lot of room for variation in personality and talents, a lot of space to encode
the traces of different lives.

�But do you know what Gray Knights do to that number? They
multiply it by the same again. They grant the part of us that was fixed, that
was tied to ęhuman natureł, the chance to be as different from person to person
as a lifetimełs worth of memories.

�Of course Conrad was right. Every word of that passage was
truewhen it was written. But now it doesnłt go far enough. Because now, all of
human nature is _less than chaff in a breeze_. ęThe horrorł, the heart of
darkness, is _less than chaff in a breeze_. All the ęeternal veritiesłall the sad
and beautiful insights of all the great writers from Sophocles to Shakespeareare
_less than chaff in a breeze_."

* * * *

I lay awake on my bunk, listening to the cicadas and frogs,
wondering what Largo would do with me. If he didnłt see himself as capable of
murder, he wouldnłt kill meif only to reinforce his delusions of self-mastery.
Perhaps hełd just dump me outside the research stationwhere I could explain to
Madelaine Smith how the Colombian air force pilot had come down with an El Nido
virus in midair, and Iłd valiantly tried to take control.

I thought back over the incident, trying to get my story
straight. The pilotłs body would never be recovered; the forensic details didnłt
have to add up.

I closed my eyes and saw myself breaking his neck. The same
twinge of remorse passed over me. I brushed it aside irritably. So Iłd killed
himand the girl, a few days earlierand a dozen others before that. The
Company had very nearly disposed of me. Because it was expedientand because it
was possible. That was the way of the world: power would always be used, nation
would subjugate nation, the weak would always be slaughtered. Everything else
was pious self-delusion. A hundred kilometers away, Colombiałs warring factions
were proving the truth of that, one more time.

_But if Largo had infected me with his own special brand of
Mother? And if everything hełd told me about it was true?_

Gray Knights only moved if you willed them to move. All I
had to do in order to remain unscathed was to choose that fate. To wish only to
be exactly who I was: a killer whołd always understood that he was facing the
deepest of truths. Embracing savagery and corruption because, in the end, there
was no other way.

I kept seeing them before me: the pilot, the girl.

_I had to feel nothingand wish to feel nothingand keep on
making that choice, again and again._

Or everything I was would disintegrate like a house of sand,
and blow away.

One of the guards belched in the darkness, then spat.

The night stretched out ahead of me, like a river that had
lost its way.

Closer

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

(�Intimacy," I once told Sian, after wełd made love, �is the
only cure for solipsism." She laughed and said, �Donłt get too ambitious,
Michael. So far, it hasnłt even cured me of masturbation.")

True solipsism, though, was never my problem. From the very
first time I considered the question, I accepted that there could be no way of
proving the reality of an external world, let alone the existence of other
mindsbut I also accepted that taking both on faith was the only practical way
of dealing with everyday life.

The question which obsessed me was this: Assuming that other
people existed, how did they apprehend that existence? How did they experience
being? Could I ever truly understand what consciousness was like for another
personany more than I could for an ape, or a cat, or an insect?

If not, I was alone.

I desperately wanted to believe that other people were somehow
knowable, but it wasnłt something I could bring myself to take for granted. I
knew there could be no absolute proof, but I wanted to be persuaded, I needed
to be compelled.

No literature, no poetry, no drama, however personally resonant
I found it, could ever quite convince me that Iłd glimpsed the authorłs soul.
Language had evolved to facilitate cooperation in the conquest of the physical
world, not to describe subjective reality. Love, anger, jealousy, resentment,
griefall were defined, ultimately, in terms of external circumstances and
observable actions.

When an image or metaphor rang true for me, it proved only
that I shared with the author a set of definitions, a culturally sanctioned
list of word associations. After all, many publishers used computer programshighly
specialised, but unsophisticated algorithms, without the remotest possibility of
self-awarenessto routinely produce both literature, and literary criticism, indistinguishable
from the human product. Not just formularised garbage, either; on several
occasions, Iłd been deeply affected by works which Iłd later discovered had
been cranked out by unthinking software. This didnłt prove that human
literature communicated nothing of the authorłs inner life, but it certainly
made clear how much room there was for doubt.

Unlike many of my friends, I had no qualms whatsoever when,
at the age of eighteen, the time came for me to �switch." My organic brain was
removed and discarded, and control of my body handed over to my �jewel"the
Ndoli Device, a neural-net computer implanted shortly after birth, which had
since learnt to imitate my brain, down to the level of individual neurons. I
had no qualms, not because I was at all convinced that the jewel and the brain
experienced consciousness identically, but because, from an early age, Iłd
identified myself solely with the jewel. My brain was a kind of bootstrap
device, nothing more, and to mourn its loss would have been as absurd as
mourning my emergence from some primitive stage of embryological neural
development. Switching was simply what humans did now, an established part of
the life cycle, even if it was mediated by our culture, and not by our genes.

Seeing each other die, and observing the gradual failure of
their own bodies, may have helped convince pre-Ndoli humans of their common
humanity; certainly, there were countless references in their literature to the
equalising power of death. Perhaps concluding that the universe would go on
without them produced a shared sense of hopelessness, or insignificance, which
they viewed as their defining attribute.

Now that itłs become an article of faith that, sometime in
the next few billion years, physicists will find a way for us to go on without
the universe, rather than vice versa, that route to spiritual equality has lost
whatever dubious logic it might ever have possessed.

Sian was a communications engineer. I was a holovision news
editor. We met during a live broadcast of the seeding of Venus with
terraforming nanomachines

a matter of great public interest, since most of the planetłs
as-yet-uninhabitable surface had already been sold. There were several technical
glitches with the broadcast which might have been disastrous, but together we managed
to work around them, and even to hide the seams. It was nothing special, we
were simply doing our jobs, but afterwards I was elated out of all proportion.
It took me twenty-four hours to realise (or decide) that Iłd fallen in love.

However, when I approached her the next day, she made it
clear that she felt nothing for me; the chemistry Iłd imagined �between us" had
all been in my head.

I was dismayed, but not surprised. Work didnłt bring us together
again, but I called her occasionally, and six weeks later my persistence was
rewarded. I took her to a performance of Waiting for Godot by augmented
parrots, and I enjoyed myself immensely, but I didnłt see her again for more
than a month.

Iłd almost given up hope, when she appeared at my door without
warning one night and dragged me along to a �concert" of interactive
computerised improvisation. The �audience" was assembled in what looked like a
mock-up of a Berlin nightclub of the 2050s. A computer program, originally
designed for creating movie scores, was fed with the image from a hover-camera
which wandered about the set. People danced and sang, screamed and brawled, and
engaged in all kinds of histrionics in the hope of attracting the camera and
shaping the music.

At first, I felt cowed and inhibited, but Sian gave me no
choice but to join in.

It was chaotic, insane, at times even terrifying. One woman
stabbed another to

�death" at the table beside us, which struck me as a
sickening (and expensive)

indulgence, but when a riot broke out at the end, and people
started smashing the deliberately flimsy furniture, I followed Sian into the
melee, cheering.

The musicthe excuse for the whole eventwas garbage, but I
didnłt really care. When we limped out into the night, bruised and aching and
laughing, I knew that at least wełd shared something that had made us feel
closer. She took me home and we went to bed together, too sore and tired to do
more than sleep, but when we made love in the morning I already felt so at ease
with her that I could hardly believe it was our first time.

Soon we were inseparable. My tastes in entertainment were
very different from hers, but I survived most of her favourite �artforms", more
or less intact. She moved into my apartment, at my suggestion, and casually
destroyed the orderly rhythms of my carefully arranged domestic life.

I had to piece together details of her past from throwaway
lines; she found it far too boring to sit down and give me a coherent account.
Her life had been as unremarkable as mine: shełd grown up in a suburban,
middle-class family, studied her profession, found a job. Like almost everyone,
shełd switched at eighteen.

She had no strong political convictions. She was good at her
work, but put ten times more energy into her social life. She was intelligent,
but hated anything overtly intellectual. She was impatient, aggressive, roughly
affectionate.

And I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside
her head.

For a start, I rarely had any idea what she was thinkingin
the sense of knowing how she would have replied if asked, out of the blue, to
describe her thoughts at the moment before they were interrupted by the
question. On a longer time scale, I had no feeling for her motivation, her
image of herself, her concept of who she was and what she did and why. Even in
the laughably crude sense that a novelist pretends to �explain" a character, I
could not have explained Sian.

And if shełd provided me with a running commentary on her
mental state, and a weekly assessment of the reasons for her actions in the
latest psychodynamic jargon, it would all have come to nothing but a heap of
useless words. If I could have pictured myself in her circumstances, imagined
myself with her beliefs and obsessions, empathised until I could anticipate her
every word, her every decision, then I still would not have understood so much
as a single moment when she closed her eyes, forgot her past, wanted nothing,
and simply was.

Of course, most of the time, nothing could have mattered
less. We were happy enough together, whether or not we were strangersand
whether or not my

�happiness" and Sianłs �happiness" were in any real sense
the same.

Over the years, she became less self-contained, more open.
She had no great dark secrets to share, no traumatic childhood ordeals to
recount, but she let me in on her petty fears and her mundane neuroses. I did
the same, and even, clumsily, explained my peculiar obsession. She wasnłt at
all offended. Just puzzled.

�What could it actually mean, though? To know what itłs like
to be someone else? Youłd have to have their memories, their personality, their
body

everything. And then youłd just be them, not yourself, and
you wouldnłt know anything. Itłs nonsense."

I shrugged. �Not necessarily. Of course, perfect knowledge
would be impossible, but you can always get closer. Donłt you think that the
more things we do together, the more experiences we share, the closer we become?"

She scowled. �Yes, but thatłs not what you were talking
about five seconds ago.

Two years, or two thousand years, of ęshared experiencesł
seen through different eyes means nothing. However much time two people spent
together, how could you know that there was even the briefest instant when they
both experienced what they were going through ętogetherł in the same way?"

�I know, but ..."

�If you admit that what you want is impossible, maybe youłll
stop fretting about it."

I laughed. �Whatever makes you think Iłm as rational as
that?"

When the technology became available it was Sianłs idea, not
mine, for us to try out all the fashionable somatic permutations. Sian was
always impatient to experience something new. �If we really are going to live
forever," she said,

�wełd better stay curious if we want to stay sane."

I was reluctant, but any resistance I put up seemed
hypocritical. Clearly, this game wouldnłt lead to the perfect knowledge I
longed for (and knew I would never achieve), but I couldnłt deny the possibility
that it might be one crude step in the right direction.

First, we exchanged bodies. I discovered what it was like to
have breasts and a vaginawhat it was like for me, that is, not what it had
been like for Sian.

True, we stayed swapped long enough for the shock, and even
the novelty, to wear off, but I never felt that Iłd gained much insight into
her experience of the body shełd been born with. My jewel was modified only as
much as was necessary to allow me to control this unfamiliar machine, which was
scarcely more than would have been required to work another male body. The menstrual
cycle had been abandoned decades before, and although I could have taken the
necessary hormones to allow myself to have periods, and even to become pregnant
(although the financial disincentives for reproduction had been drastically
increased in recent years), that would have told me absolutely nothing about
Sian, who had done neither.

As for sex, the pleasure of intercourse still felt very much
the samewhich was hardly surprising, since nerves from the vagina and clitoris
were simply wired into my jewel as if theyłd come from my penis. Even being
penetrated made less difference than Iłd expected; unless I made a special
effort to remain aware of our respective geometries, I found it hard to care
who was doing what to whom. Orgasms were better though, I had to admit.

At work, no one raised an eyebrow when I turned up as Sian,
since many of my colleagues had already been through exactly the same thing.
The legal definition of identity had recently been shifted from the DNA
fingerprint of the body, according to a standard set of markers, to the serial
number of the jewel. When even the law can keep up with you, you know you canłt
be doing anything very radical or profound.

After three months, Sian had had enough. �I never realised
how clumsy you were," she said. �Or that ejaculation was so dull."

Next, she had a clone of herself made, so we could both be
women. Brain-damaged replacement bodiesExtrashad once been incredibly
expensive, when theyłd needed to be grown at virtually the normal rate, and
kept constantly active so theyłd be healthy enough to use. However, the
physiological effects of the passage of time, and of exercise, donłt happen by
magic; at a deep enough level, therełs always a biochemical signal produced,
which can ultimately be faked.

Mature Extras, with sturdy bones and perfect muscle tone,
could now be produced from scratch in a yearfour monthsł gestation and eight
monthsł comawhich also allowed them to be more thoroughly brain-dead than
before, soothing the ethical qualms of those whołd always wondered just how
much was going on inside the heads of the old, active versions.

In our first experiment, the hardest part for me had always
been, not looking in the mirror and seeing Sian, but looking at Sian and seeing
myself. Iłd missed her, far more than Iłd missed being myself. Now, I was
almost happy for my body to be absent (in storage, kept alive by a jewel based
on the minimal brain of an Extra). The symmetry of being her twin appealed to
me; surely now we were closer than ever. Before, wełd merely swapped our
physical differences. Now, wełd abolished them.

The symmetry was an illusion. Iłd changed gender, and she
hadnłt. I was with the woman I loved; she lived with a walking parody of
herself.

One morning she woke me, pummelling my breasts so hard that
she left bruises.

When I opened my eyes and shielded myself, she peered at me
suspiciously. �Are you in there? Michael? Iłm going crazy. I want you back."

For the sake of getting the whole bizarre episode over and
done with for good

and perhaps also to discover for myself what Sian had just
been throughI

agreed to the third permutation. There was no need to wait a
year; my Extra had been grown at the same time as hers.

Somehow, it was far more disorienting to be confronted by �myself"
without the camouflage of Sianłs body. I found my own face unreadable; when wełd
both been in disguise, that hadnłt bothered me, but now it made me feel edgy,
and at times almost paranoid, for no rational reason at all.

Sex took some getting used to. Eventually, I found it
pleasurable, in a confusing and vaguely narcissistic way. The compelling sense
of equality Iłd felt, when wełd made love as women, never quite returned to me
as we sucked each otherłs cocksbut then, when wełd both been women, Sian had
never claimed to feel any such thing. It had all been my own invention.

The day after we returned to the way wełd begun (well, almostin
fact, we put our decrepit, twenty-six-year-old bodies in storage, and took up
residence in our healthier Extras), I saw a story from Europe on an option we
hadnłt yet tried, tipped to become all the rage: hermaphroditic identical
twins. Our new bodies could be our biological children (give or take the
genetic tinkering required to ensure hermaphroditism), with an equal share of
characteristics from both of us. We would both have changed gender, both have
lost partners. Wełd be equal in every way.

I took a copy of the file home to Sian. She watched it thoughtfully,
then said,

�Slugs are hermaphrodites, arenłt they? They hang in mid-air
together on a thread of slime. Iłm sure therełs even something in Shakespeare,
remarking on the glorious spectacle of copulating slugs. Imagine it: you and
me, making slug love."

I fell on the floor, laughing.

I stopped, suddenly. �Where, in Shakespeare? I didnłt think
youłd even read Shakespeare."

Eventually, I came to believe that with each passing year, I
knew Sian a little betterin the traditional sense, the sense that most couples
seemed to find sufficient. I knew what she expected from me, I knew how not to
hurt her. We had arguments, we had fights, but there must have been some kind
of underlying stability, because in the end we always chose to stay together.
Her happiness mattered to me, very much, and at times I could hardly believe
that Iłd ever thought it possible that all of her subjective experience might
be fundamentally alien to me. It was true that every brain, and hence every
jewel, was unique

but there was something extravagant in supposing that the nature
of consciousness could be radically different between individuals, when the same
basic hardware, and the same basic principles of neural topology, were
involved.

Still. Sometimes, if I woke in the night, Iłd turn to her
and whisper, inaudibly, compulsively, �I donłt know you. I have no idea who, or
what, you are." Iłd lie there, and think about packing and leaving. I was
alone, and it was farcical to go through the charade of pretending otherwise.

Then again, sometimes I woke in the night, absolutely convinced
that I was dying, or something else equally absurd. In the sway of some
half-forgotten dream, all manner of confusion is possible. It never meant a
thing, and by morning I was always myself again.

When I saw the story on Craig Bentleyłs servicehe called it
�research," but his �volunteers" paid for the privilege of taking part in his
experimentsI

almost couldnłt bring myself to include it in the bulletin,
although all my professional judgement told me it was everything our viewers
wanted in a thirty second techno-shock piece: bizarre, even mildly
disconcerting, but not too hard to grasp.

Bentley was a cyberneurologist; he studied the Ndoli Device,
in the way that neurologists had once studied the brain. Mimicking the brain
with a neural-net computer had not required a profound understanding of its
higher-level structures; research into these structures continued, in their new
incarnation.

The jewel, compared to the brain, was of course both easier
to observe, and easier to manipulate.

In his latest project, Bentley was offering couples
something slightly more up-market than an insight into the sex lives of slugs.
He was offering them eight hours with identical minds.

I made a copy of the original, ten-minute piece that had
come through on the fibre, then let my editing console select the most
titillating thirty seconds possible, for broadcast. It did a good job; it had
learnt from me.

I couldnłt lie to Sian. I couldnłt hide the story, I couldnłt
pretend to be disinterested. The only honest thing to do was to show her the
file, tell her exactly how I felt, and ask her what she wanted.

I did just that. When the HV image faded out, she turned to
me, shrugged, and said mildly, �Okay. It sounds like fun. Letłs try it."

Bentley wore a T-shirt with nine computer-drawn portraits on
it, in a three-by-three grid. Top left was Elvis Presley. Bottom right was
Marilyn Monroe. The rest were various stages in between.

�This is how it will work. The transition will take twenty minutes,
during which time youłll be disembodied. Over the first ten minutes, youłll
gain equal access to each otherłs memories. Over the second ten minutes, youłll
both be moved, gradually, towards the compromise personality.

�Once thatłs done, your Ndoli Devices will be identicalin
the sense that both will have all the same neural connections with all the same
weighting factorsbut theyłll almost certainly be in different states. Iłll
have to black you out, to correct that. Then youłll wake"

Whołll wake?

�in identical electromechanical bodies. Clones canłt be
made sufficiently alike.

�Youłll spend the eight hours alone, in perfectly matched
rooms. Rather like hotel suites, really. Youłll have HV to keep you amused if
you need itwithout the videophone module, of course. You might think youłd
both get an engaged signal, if you tried to call the same number simultaneouslybut
in fact, in such cases the switching equipment arbitrarily lets one call
through, which would make your environments different."

Sian asked, �Why canłt we phone each other? Or better still,
meet each other?

If wełre exactly the same, wełd say the same things, do the
same thingswełd be one more identical part of each otherłs environment."

Bentley pursed his lips and shook his head. �Perhaps Iłll
allow something of the kind in a future experiment, but for now I believe it
would be too ...

potentially traumatic."

Sian gave me a sideways glance, which meant: This man is a
killjoy.

�The end will be like the beginning, in reverse. First, your
personalities will be restored. Then, youłll lose access to each otherłs
memories. Of course, your memories of the experience itself will be left
untouched. Untouched by me, that is; I canłt predict how your separate
personalities, once restored, will act

filtering, suppressing, reinterpreting those memories.
Within minutes, you may end up with very different ideas about what youłve been
through. All I can guarantee is this: For the eight hours in question, the two
of you will be identical."

We talked it over. Sian was enthusiastic, as always. She
didnłt much care what it would be like; all that really mattered to her was
collecting one more novel experience.

�Whatever happens, wełll be ourselves again at the end of
it," she said.

�Whatłs there to be afraid of? You know the old Ndoli joke."

�What old Ndoli joke?"

�Anythingłs bearableso long as itłs finite."

I couldnłt decide how I felt. The sharing of memories notwithstanding,
wełd both end up knowing, not each other, but merely a transient, artificial
third person. Still, for the first time in our lives, we would have been through
exactly the same experience, from exactly the same point of vieweven if the experience
was only spending eight hours locked in separate rooms, and the point of view
was that of a genderless robot with an identity crisis.

It was a compromisebut I could think of no realistic way in
which it could have been improved.

I called Bentley, and made a reservation.

In perfect sensory deprivation, my thoughts seemed to dissipate
into the blackness around me before they were even half-formed. This isolation
didnłt last long, though; as our short-term memories merged, we achieved a kind
of telepathy: One of us would think a message, and the other would �remember"

thinking it, and reply in the same way.

I really canłt wait to uncover all your grubby little
secrets.

I think youłre going to be disappointed. Anything I havenłt
already told you, Iłve probably repressed.

Ah, but repressed is not erased. Who knows what will turn
up?

Wełll know, soon enough.

I tried to think of all the minor sins I must have committed
over the years, all the shameful, selfish, unworthy thoughts, but nothing came
into my head but a vague white noise of guilt. I tried again, and achieved, of
all things, an image of Sian as a child. A young boy slipping his hand between
her legs, then squealing with fright and pulling away. But shełd described that
incident to me, long ago. Was it her memory, or my reconstruction?

My memory. I think. Or perhaps my reconstruction. You know,
half the time when Iłve told you something that happened before we met, the
memory of the telling has become far clearer to me than the memory itself.
Almost replacing it.

Itłs the same for me.

Then in a way, our memories have already been moving towards
a kind of symmetry, for years. We both remember what was said, as if wełd both
heard it from someone else.

Agreement. Silence. A moment of confusion. Then:

This neat division of �memory" and �personality" Bentley
uses; is it really so clear? Jewels are neural-net computers; you canłt talk
about �data" and

�program" in any absolute sense.

Not in general, no. His classification must be arbitrary,
to some extent. But who cares?

It matters. If he restores �personality," but allows �memories"
to persist, a misclassification could leave us ...

What?

It depends, doesnłt it? At one extreme, so thoroughly �restored,"
so completely unaffected, that the whole experience might as well not have happened.
And at the other extreme ...

Permanently ...

... closer.

Isnłt that the point?

I donłt know anymore.

Silence. Hesitation.

Then I realised that I had no idea whether or not it was my
turn to reply.

I woke, lying on a bed, mildly bemused, as if waiting for a
mental hiatus to pass. My body felt slightly awkward, but less so than when Iłd
woken in someone elsełs Extra. I glanced down at the pale, smooth plastic of my
torso and legs, then waved a hand in front of my face. I looked like a unisex
shop-window dummy

but Bentley had shown us the bodies beforehand, it was no
great shock. I sat up slowly, then stood and took a few steps. I felt a little
numb and hollow, but my kinaesthetic sense, my proprioception, was fine; I felt
located between my eyes, and I felt that this body was mine. As with any modern
transplant, my jewel had been manipulated directly to accommodate the change,
avoiding the need for months of physiotherapy.

I glanced around the room. It was sparsely furnished: one
bed, one table, one chair, one clock, one HV set. On the wall, a framed
reproduction of an Escher lithograph: �Bond of Union," a portrait of the artist
and, presumably, his wife, faces peeled like lemons into helices of rind,
joined into a single, linked band. I traced the outer surface from start to
finish, and was disappointed to find that it lacked the M�bius twist I was
expecting.

No windows, one door without a handle. Set into the wall beside
the bed, a full-length mirror. I stood a while and stared at my ridiculous
form. It suddenly occurred to me that, if Bentley had a real love of symmetry
games, he might have built one room as the mirror image of the other, modified
the HV set accordingly, and altered one jewel, one copy of me, to exchange
right for left.

What looked like a mirror could then be nothing but a window
between the rooms.

I grinned awkwardly with my plastic face; my reflection
looked appropriately embarrassed by the sight. The idea appealed to me, however
unlikely it was.

Nothing short of an experiment in nuclear physics could
reveal the difference.

No, not true; a pendulum free to precess, like Foucaultłs,
would twist the same way in both rooms, giving the game away. I walked up to
the mirror and thumped it. It didnłt seem to yield at all, but then, either a
brick wall, or an equal and opposite thump from behind, could have been the
explanation.

I shrugged and turned away. Bentley might have done anythingfor
all I knew, the whole set-up could have been a computer simulation. My body was
irrelevant.

The room was irrelevant. The point was ...

I sat on the bed. I recalled someoneMichael, probablywondering
if Iłd panic when I dwelt upon my nature, but I found no reason to do so. If Iłd
woken in this room with no recent memories, and tried to sort out who I was
from my past(s), Iłd no doubt have gone mad, but I knew exactly who I was, I
had two long trails of anticipation leading to my present state. The prospect
of being changed back into Sian or Michael didnłt bother me at all; the wishes
of both to regain their separate identities endured in me, strongly, and the
desire for personal integrity manifested itself as relief at the thought of
their re-emergence, not as fear of my own demise. In any case, my memories
would not be expunged, and I had no sense of having goals which one or the
other of them would not pursue. I felt more like their lowest common
denominator than any kind of synergistic hypermind; I was less, not more, than
the sum of my parts. My purpose was strictly limited: I was here to enjoy the
strangeness for Sian, and to answer a question for Michael, and when the time
came Iłd be happy to bifurcate, and resume the two lives I remembered and
valued.

So, how did I experience consciousness? The same way as Michael?
The same way as Sian? So far as I could tell, Iłd undergone no fundamental
changebut even as I reached that conclusion, I began to wonder if I was in any
position to judge. Did memories of being Michael, and memories of being Sian,
contain so much more than the two of them could have put into words and
exchanged verbally?

Did I really know anything about the nature of their
existence, or was my head just full of second-hand descriptionintimate, and
detailed, but ultimately as opaque as language? If my mind were radically
different, would that difference be something I could even perceiveor would
all my memories, in the act of remembering, simply be recast into terms that
seemed familiar?

The past, after all, was no more knowable than the external
world. Its very existence also had to be taken on faithand, granted existence,
it too could be misleading.

I buried my head in my hands, dejected. I was the closest
they could get, and what had come of me? Michaelłs hope remained precisely as
reasonableand as unprovenas ever.

After a while, my mood began to lighten. At least Michaelłs
search was over, even if it had ended in failure. Now hełd have no choice but
to accept that, and move on.

I paced around the room for a while, flicking the HV on and
off. I was actually starting to get bored, but I wasnłt going to waste eight
hours and several thousand dollars by sitting down and watching soap operas.

I mused about possible ways of undermining the synchronisation
of my two copies. It was inconceivable that Bentley could have matched the
rooms and bodies to such a fine tolerance that an engineer worthy of the name
couldnłt find some way of breaking the symmetry. Even a coin toss might have
done it, but I didnłt have a coin. Throwing a paper plane? That sounded
promisinghighly sensitive to air currentsbut the only paper in the room was
the Escher, and I couldnłt bring myself to vandalise it. I might have smashed
the mirror, and observed the shapes and sizes of the fragments, which would
have had the added bonus of proving or disproving my earlier speculations, but
as I raised the chair over my head, I suddenly changed my mind. Two conflicting
sets of short-term memories had been confusing enough during a few minutes of
sensory deprivation; for several hours interacting with a physical environment,
it could be completely disabling. Better to hold off until I was desperate for
amusement.

So I lay down on the bed and did what most of Bentleyłs
clients probably ended up doing.

As they coalesced, Sian and Michael had both had fears for
their privacyand both had issued compensatory, not to say defensive, mental
declarations of frankness, not wanting the other to think that they had
something to hide. Their curiosity, too, had been ambivalent; theyłd wanted to
understand each other, but, of course, not to pry.

All of these contradictions continued in me, butstaring at
the ceiling, trying not to look at the clock again for at least another thirty
secondsI

didnłt really have to make a decision. It was the most
natural thing in the world to let my mind wander back over the course of their
relationship, from both points of view.

It was a very peculiar reminiscence. Almost everything
seemed at once vaguely surprising and utterly familiarlike an extended attack
of deja vu. Itłs not that theyłd often set out deliberately to deceive each
other about anything substantial, but all the tiny white lies, all the
concealed trivial resentments, all the necessary, laudable, essential, loving
deceptions, that had kept them together in spite of their differences, filled
my head with a strange haze of confusion and disillusionment.

It wasnłt in any sense a conversation; I was no multiple
personality. Sian and Michael simply werenłt thereto justify, to explain, to
deceive each other all over again, with the best intentions. Perhaps I should
have attempted to do all this on their behalf, but I was constantly unsure of
my role, unable to decide on a position. So I lay there, paralysed by symmetry,
and let their memories flow.

After that, the time passed so quickly that I never had a
chance to break the mirror.

We tried to stay together.

We lasted a week.

Bentley had madeas the law requiredsnapshots of our jewels
prior to the experiment. We could have gone back to themand then had him
explain to us why

but self-deception is only an easy choice if you make it in
time.

We couldnłt forgive each other, because there was nothing to
forgive. Neither of us had done a single thing that the other could fail to
understand, and sympathise with, completely.

We knew each other too well, thatłs all. Detail after tiny
fucking microscopic detail. It wasnłt that the truth hurt; it didnłt, any
longer. It numbed us. It smothered us. We didnłt know each other as we knew
ourselves; it was worse than that. In the self, the details blur in the very
processes of thought; mental self-dissection is possible, but it takes great
effort to sustain. Our mutual dissection took no effort at all; it was the
natural state into which we fell in each otherłs presence. Our surfaces had
been stripped away, but not to reveal a glimpse of the soul. All we could see
beneath the skin were the cogs, spinning.

And I knew, now, that what Sian had always wanted most in a
lover was the alien, the unknowable, the mysterious, the opaque. The whole
point, for her, of being with someone else was the sense of confronting
otherness. Without it, she believed, you might as well be talking to yourself.

I found that I now shared this view (a change whose precise
origins I didnłt much want to think about ... but then, Iłd always known she
had the stronger personality, I should have guessed that something would rub
off).

Together, we might as well have been alone, so we had no
choice but to part.

Nobody wants to spend eternity alone.

Cocoon

The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away, but
started no fire. Later, I discovered that it had shown up on a seismograph at
Macquarie University, fixing the time precisely: 3:52 a.m. Residents woken by
the blast phoned emergency services within minutes, and our night shift
operator called me just after four, but there was no point rushing to the scene
when Iłd only be in the way. I sat at the terminal in my study for almost an
hour, assembling background data and monitoring the radio traffic on
headphones, drinking coffee and trying not to type too loudly.

By the time I arrived, the local fire service contractors
had departed, having certified that there was no risk of further explosions,
but our forensic people were still poring over the wreckage, the electric hum
of their equipment all but drowned out by birdsong. Lane Cove was a quiet, leafy
suburb, mixed residential and high-tech industrial, the lush vegetation of
corporate open spaces blending almost seamlessly into the adjacent national
park that straddled the Lane Cove River. The map of the area on my car terminal
had identified suppliers of laboratory reagents and Pharmaceuticals,
manufacturers of precision instruments for scientific and aerospace
applications, and no less than twenty-seven biotechnology firms-including Life
Enhancement International, the erstwhile sprawling concrete building now
reduced to a collection of white powdery blocks clustered around twisted
reinforcement rods. The exposed steel glinted in the early light,
disconcertingly pristine; the building was only three years old. I could
understand why the forensic team had ruled out an accident at their first
glance; a few drums of organic solvent could not have done anything remotely
like this. Nothing legally stored in a residential zone could reduce a modern
building to rubble in a matter of seconds.

I spotted Janet Lansing as I left my car. She was surveying
the ruins with an expression of stoicism, but she was hugging herself. Mild
shock, probably. She had no other reason to be chilly; it had been stinking hot
all night, and the temperature was already climbing. Lansing was Director of
the Lane Cove complex: forty-three years old, with a Ph.D. in molecular biology
from Cambridge, and an M.B.A. from an equally reputable Japanese virtual
university. Iłd had my knowledge miner extract her details, and photo, from
assorted databases before Iłd left home.

I approached her and said, �James Glass, Nexus Investigations."
She frowned at my business card, but accepted it, then glanced at the
technicians trawling their gas chromato-graphs and holography equipment around
the perimeter of the ruins.

�Theyłre yours, I suppose?"

�Yes. Theyłve been here since four."

She smirked slightly. �What happens if I give the job to someone
else? And charge the lot of you with trespass?"

�If you hire another company, wełll be happy to hand over all
the samples and data wełve collected."

She nodded distractedly. �Iłll hire you, of course. Since
four? Iłm impressed. Youłve even arrived before the insurance people." As it
happened, LEIłs �insurance people" owned 49 percent of Nexus, and would stay
out of the way until we were finished, but I didnłt see any reason to mention
that. Lansing added sourly, �Our so-called security firm only worked up the
courage to phone me half an hour ago. Evidently a fiber-optic junction box was
sabotaged, disconnecting the whole area. Theyłre supposed to send in patrols in
the event of equipment failure, but apparently they didnłt bother."

I grimaced sympathetically. ę

ęWhat exactly were you people making here?"

�Making? Nothing. We did no manufacturing; this was pure R
& D."

In fact, Iłd already established that LEIłs factories were
all in Thailand and Indonesia, with the head office in Monaco, and research
facilities scattered around the world. Therełs a fine line, though, between
demonstrating that the facts are at your fingertips, and unnerving the client.
A total stranger ought to make at least one trivial wrong assumption, ask at
least one misguided question. I always do.

�So what were you researching and developing?"

�Thatłs commercially sensitive information."

I took my notepad from my shirt pocket and displayed a standard
contract, complete with the usual secrecy provisions. She glanced at it, then
had her own computer scrutinize the document. Conversing in modulated infrared,
the machines rapidly negotiated the fine details. My notepad signed the
agreement electronically on my behalf, and Lansingłs did the same, then they
both chimed happily in unison to let us know that the deal had been concluded.

Lansing said, ę

ęOur main project here was engineering improved syncytiotrophoblastic
cells." I smiled patiently, and she translated for me. �Strengthening the
barrier between the maternal and fetal blood supplies. Mother and fetus donłt
share blood directly, but they exchange nutrients and hormones across the
placental barrier. The trouble is, all kinds of viruses, toxins,
pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs can also cross over. The natural barrier
cells didnłt evolve to cope with AIDS, fetal alcohol syndrome, cocaine-addicted
babies, or the next thalidomidelike disaster. Wełre aiming for a single
intravenous injection of a gene-tailoring vector, which would trigger the
formation of an extra layer of cells in the appropriate structures within the
placenta, specifically designed to shield the fetal blood supply from contaminants
in the maternal blood."

�A thicker barrier?"

�Smarter. More selective. More choosy about what it lets
through. We know exactly what the developing fetus actually needs from the
maternal blood. These gene-tailored cells would contain specific channels for
transporting each of those substances. Nothing else would be allowed through."

�Very impressive." A cocoon around the unborn child, shielding
it from all of the poisons of modern society. It sounded exactly like the kind
of beneficent technology a company called Life Enhancement would be hatching in
leafy Lane Cove. True, even a layman could spot a few flaws in the scheme. Iłd
heard that AIDS most often infected children during birth itself, not
pregnancy-but presumably there were other viruses that crossed the placental barrier
more frequently. I had no idea whether or not mothers at risk of giving birth
to children stunted by alcohol or addicted to cocaine were likely to rush out
en masse and have gene-tailored fetal barriers installed-but I could picture a
strong demand from people terrified of food additives, pesticides, and
pollutants. In the long term-if the system actually worked, and wasnłt
prohibitively expensive-it could even become a part of routine prenatal care.

Beneficent, and lucrative.

In any case-whether or not there were biological, economic,
and social factors which might keep the technology from being a complete
success ... it was hard to imagine anyone objecting to the principle of the
thing.

I said, �Were you working with animals?"

Lansing scowled. �Only early calf embryos, and disembodied
bovine uteruses on tissue-support machines. If it was an animal rights group,
they would have been better off bombing an abattoir."

�Mmm." In the past few years, the Sydney chapter of Animal
Equality-the only group known to use such extreme methodshad concentrated on
primate research facilities. They might have changed their focus, or been
misinformed, but LEI still seemed like an odd target; there were plenty of
laboratories widely known to use whole, live rats and rabbits as if they were
disposable test tubes-many of them quite close by. �What about competitors?"

ę

ęNo one else is pursuing this kind of product line, so far
as I know. Therełs no race being run; wełve already obtained individual patents
for all of the essential components-the membrane channels, the transporter
molecules-so any competitor would have to pay us license fees, regardless."

�What if someone simply wanted to damage you, financially?ł

ę

�Then they should have bombed one of the factories instead.
Cutting off our cash flow would have been the best way to hurt us; this
laboratory wasnłt earning a cent."

�Your share price will still take a dive, wonłt it? Nothing
makes investors nervous quite so much as terrorism."

Lansing agreed, reluctantly. �But then, whoever took advantage
of that and launched a takeover bid would suffer the same taint, themselves. I
donłt deny that commercial sabotage takes place in this industry, now and then
... but not on a level as crude as this. Genetic engineering is a subtle
business. Bombs are for fanatics."

Perhaps. But who would be fanatically opposed to the idea of
shielding human embryos from viruses and poisons? Several religious sects
flatly rejected any kind of modification to human biology ... but the ones who
employed violence were far more likely to have bombed a manufacturer of
abortifa-cient drugs than a laboratory dedicated to the task of safeguarding
the unborn child.

Elaine Chang, head of the forensic team, approached us. I introduced
her to Lansing. Elaine said, �It was a very professional job. If youłd hired
demolition experts, they wouldnłt have done a single thing differently. But
then, they probably would have used identical software to compute the timing
and placement of the charges." She held up her notepad, and displayed a
stylized reconstruction of the building, with hypothetical explosive charges
marked. She hit a button and the simulation crumbled into something very like
the actual mess behind us.

She continued, �Most reputable manufacturers these days imprint
every batch of explosives with a trace element signature, which remains in the
residue. Wełve linked the charges used here to a batch stolen from a warehouse
in Singapore five years ago."

I added, �Which may not be a great help, though, Iłm afraid.
After five years on the black market, they could have changed hands a dozen
times."

Elaine returned to her equipment. Lansing was beginning to
look a little dazed. I said, �Iłd like to talk to you again, later-but I am
going to need a list of your employees, past and present, as soon as possible."

She nodded, and hit a few keys on her notepad, transferring
the list to mine. She said, �Nothingłs been lost, really. We had off-site
backup for all of our data, administrative and scientific. And we have frozen
samples of most of the cell lines we were working on, in a vault in Milsonłs
Point."

Commercial data backup would be all but untouchable, with
the records stored in a dozen or more locations scattered around the
world-heavily encrypted, of course. Cell lines sounded more vulnerable. I said,
�Youłd better let the vaultłs operators know whatłs happened."

�Iłve already done that; I phoned them on my way here." She
gazed at the wreckage. �The insurance company will pay for the rebuilding. In
six monthsł time, wełll be back on our feet. So whoever did this was wasting
their time. The work will go on."

I said, �Who would want to stop it in the first place?"

Lansingłs faint smirk appeared again, and I very nearly
asked her what she found so amusing. But people often act incongruously in the
face of disasters, large or small; nobody had died, she wasnłt remotely
hysterical, but it would have been strange if a setback like this hadnłt
knocked her slightly out of kilter.

She said, �You tell me. Thatłs your job, isnłt it?"

Martin was in the living room when I arrived home that evening.
Working on his costume for the Mardi Gras. I couldnłt imagine what it would
look like when it was completed, but there were definitely feathers involved.
Blue feathers. I did my best to appear composed, but I could tell from his
expression that hełd caught an involuntary flicker of distaste on my face as he
looked up. We kissed anyway, and said nothing about it.

Over dinner, though, he couldnłt help himself.

�Fortieth anniversary this year, James. Sure to be the
biggest yet. You could at least come and watch." His eyes glinted; he enjoyed
needling me. Wełd had this argument five years running, and it was close to
becoming a ritual as pointless as the parade itself.

I said flatly, �Why would I want to watch ten thousand drag
queens ride down Oxford Street, blowing kisses to the tourists?"

�Donłt exaggerate. Therełll only be a thousand men in drag,
at most."

�Yeah, the rest will be in sequined jockstraps."

�If you actually came and watched, youłd discover that most
peoplełs imaginations have progressed far beyond that."

I shook my head, bemused. �If peoplełs imaginations had progressed,
therełd be no Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras at all. Itłs a freak show, for people
who want to live in a cultural ghetto. Forty years ago, it might have been ...
provocative. Maybe it did some good, back then. But now? Whatłs the point?
There are no laws left to change, therełs no politics left to address. This
kind of thing just recycles the same moronic stereotypes, year after year."

Martin said smoothly, �Itłs a public reassertion of the
right to diverse sexuality. Just because itłs no longer a protest march as well
as a celebration doesnłt mean itłs irrelevant. And complaining about stereotypes
is like ... complaining about the characters in a medieval morality play. The
costumes are code, shorthand. Give the great unwashed heterosexual masses
credit for some intelligence; they donłt watch the parade and conclude that the
average gay man spends all his time in a gold lame tutu. People arenłt that
literal-minded. They all learnt semiotics in kindergarten, they know how to
decode the message."

�Iłm sure they do. But itłs still the wrong message: it
makes exotic what ought to be mundane. Okay, people have the right to dress up
any way they like and march down Oxford Street ... but it means absolutely
nothing to me."

�Iłm not asking you to join in"

�Very wise."

ęę-but if one hundred thousand straights can turn up, to
show their support for the gay community, why canłt you?"

I said wearily, �Because every time I hear the word community,
I know Iłm being manipulated. If there is such a thing as the gay community, Iłm
certainly not a part of it. As it happens, I donłt want to spend my life
watching gay and lesbian television channels, using gay and lesbian news
systems ... or going to gay and lesbian street parades. Itłs all so ...
proprietary. Youłd think there was a multinational corporation who had the
franchise rights on homosexuality. And if you donłt market the product their
way, youłre some kind of second-class, inferior, bootleg, unauthorized queer."

Martin cracked up. When he finally stopped laughing, he
said, �Go on. Iłm waiting for you to get to the part where you say youłre no
more proud of being gay than you are of having brown eyes, or black hair, or a
birthmark behind your left knee."

I protested. �Thatłs true. Why should I be ęproudł of
something I was born with? Iłm not proud, or ashamed. I just accept it. And I
donłt have to join a parade to prove that."

�So youłd rather we all stayed invisible?"

�Invisible! Youłre the one who told me that the
representation rates in movies and TV last year were close to the true demographics.
And if you hardly even notice it anymore when an openly gay or lesbian
politician gets elected, thatłs because itłs no longer an issue. To most
people, now, itłs about as significant as ... being left or right handed."

Martin seemed to find this suggestion surreal. �Are you
trying to tell me that itłs now a non-subject? That the inhabitants of this
planet are now absolutely impartial on the question of sexual preference? Your
faith is touching-but ..." He mimed incredulity.

I said, �Wełre equal before the law with any heterosexual
couple, arenłt we? And when was the last time you told someone you were gay and
they so much as blinked? And yes, I know, there are dozens of countries where
itłs still illegalalong with joining the wrong political parties, or the wrong
religions. Parades in Oxford Street arenłt going to change that:ł

�People are still bashed in this city. People are still
discriminated against."

ę

ęYeah. And people are also shot dead in peak-hour traffic
for playing the wrong music on their car stereos, or denied jobs because they
live in the wrong suburbs. Iłm not talking about the perfection of human
nature. I just want you to acknowledge one tiny victory: leaving out a few
psychotics, and a few fundamentalist bigots ... most people just donłt care."

Martin said ruefully, �If only that were true!"

The argument went on for more than an hour-ending in a stalemate,
as usual. But then, neither one of us had seriously expected to change the
otherłs mind.

I did catch myself wondering afterward, though, if I really
believed all of my own optimistic rhetoric. About as significant as being left
or right handed? Certainly, that was the line taken by most Western
politicians, academics, essayists, talk show hosts, soap opera writers, and
mainstream religious leaders ... but the same people had been espousing equally
high-minded principles of racial equality for decades, and the reality still
hadnłt entirely caught up on that front. Iłd suffered very little
discrimination, myself-by the time I reached high school, tolerance was hip,
and Iłd witnessed a constant stream of improvements since then ... but how
could I ever know precisely how much hidden prejudice remained? By
interrogating my own straight friends? By reading the sociologistsł latest
attitude surveys? People will always tell you what they think you want to hear.

Still, it hardly seemed to matter. Personally, I could get
by without the deep and sincere approval of every other member of the human
race. Martin and I were lucky enough to have been born into a time and place
where, in almost every tangible respect, we were treated as equal.

What more could anyone hope for?

In bed that night, we made love very slowly, at first just
kissing and stroking each otherłs bodies for what seemed like hours. Neither of
us spoke, and in the stupefying heat I lost all sense of belonging to any other
time, any other reality. Nothing existed but the two of us; the rest of the
world, the rest of my life, went spinning away into the darkness.

The investigation moved slowly. I interviewed every current
member of LEIłs workforce, then started on the long list of past employees. I
still believed that commercial sabotage was the most likely explanation for
such a professional job-but blowing up the opposition is a desperate measure; a
little civilized espionage usually comes first. I was hoping that someone whołd
worked for LEI might have been approached in the past and offered money for
inside information-and if I could find just one employee whołd turned down a
bribe, they might have learnt something useful from their contact with the presumed
rival.

Although the Lane Cove facility had only been built three
years before, LEI had operated a research division in Sydney for twelve years
before that, in North Ryde, not far away. Many of the ex-employees from that
period had moved interstate or overseas; quite a few had been transferred to
LEI divisions in other countries. Still, almost no one had changed their
personal phone numbers, so I had very little trouble tracking them down.

The exception was a biochemist named Catherine Mendelsohn;
the number listed for her in the LEI staff records had been canceled. There
were seventeen people with the same surname and initials in the national phone
directory; none admitted to being Catherine Alice Mendelsohn, and none looked
at all like the staff photo I had.

Mendelsohnłs address in the Electoral Roll, an apartment in
Newtown, matched the LEI records-but the same address was in the phone
directory (and Electoral Roll) for Stanley Goh, a young man who told me that hełd
never met Mendelsohn. Hełd been leasing the apartment for the past eighteen
months.

Credit rating databases gave the same out-of-date address. I
couldnłt access tax, banking, or utilities records without a warrant. I had my
knowledge miner scan the death notices, but there was no match there.

Mendelsohn had worked for LEI until about a year before the
move to Lane Cove. Shełd been part of a team working on a gene-tailoring system
for ameliorating menstrual side-effects, and although the Sydney division had
always specialized in gynecological research, for some reason the project was
about to be moved to Texas. I checked the industry publications; apparently,
LEI had been rearranging all of its operations at the time, gathering together
projects from around the globe into new multi-disciplinary configurations, in
accordance with the latest fashionable theories of research dynamics.
Mendelsohn had declined the transfer, and had been retrenched.

I dug deeper. The staff records showed that Mendelsohn had
been questioned by security guards after being found on the North Ryde premises
late at night, two days before her dismissal. Workaholic biotechnologists arenłt
uncommon, but starting the day at two in the morning shows exceptional
dedication, especially when the company has just tried to shuffle you off to
Amarillo. Having turned down the transfer, she must have known what was in
store.

Nothing came of the incident, though. And even if Mendelsohn
had been planning some minor act of sabotage, that hardly established any
connection with a bombing four years later. She might have been angry enough to
leak confidential information to one of LEIłs rivals ... but whoever had bombed
the Lane Cove laboratory would have been more interested in someone whołd
worked on the fetal barrier project itself-a project which had only come into
existence a year after Mendelsohn had been sacked.

I pressed on through the list. Interviewing the ex-employees
was frustrating; almost all of them were still working in the biotechnology
industry, and they would have been an ideal group to poll on the question of
who would benefit most from LEIłs misfortune-but the confidentiality agreement
Iłd signed meant that I couldnłt disclose anything about the re-search in
question-not even to people working for LEIłs other divisions.

The one thing which I could discuss drew a blank: if anyone
had been offered a bribe, they werenłt talking about itand no magistrate was
going to sign a warrant letting me loose on a fishing expedition through a
hundred and seventeen peoplełs financial records.

Forensic examination of the ruins, and the sabotaged
fiberoptic exchange, had yielded the usual catalogue of minutiae which might
eventually turn out to be invaluable-but none of it was going to conjure up a
suspect out of thin air.

Four days after the bombing-just as I found myself growing
desperate for a fresh angle on the case-I had a call from Janet Lansing.

The backup samples of the projectłs gene-tailored cell lines
had been destroyed.

The vault in Milsonłs Point turned out to be directly underneath
a section of the Harbor Bridge-built right into the foundations on the north
shore. Lansing hadnłt arrived yet, but the head of security for the storage
company, an elderly man called David Asher, showed me around. Inside, the
traffic was barely audible, but the vibration coming through the floor felt
like a constant mild earthquake. The place was cavernous, dry and cool. At
least a hundred cryogenic freezers were laid out in rows; heavily clad pipes
ran between them, replenishing their liquid nitrogen.

Asher was understandably morose, but cooperative. Celluloid
movie film had been archived here, he explained, before everything went
digital; the present owners specialized in biological materials. There were no
guards physically assigned to the vault, but the surveillance cameras and alarm
systems looked impressive, and the structure itself must have been close to
impregnable.

Lansing had phoned the storage company, Biofile, on the
morning of the bombing. Asher confirmed that hełd sent someone down from their
North Sydney office to check the freezer in question. Nothing was missing-but
hełd promised to boost security measures immediately. Because the freezers were
supposedly tamper-proof, and individually locked, clients were normally allowed
access to the vault at their convenience, monitored by the surveillance
cameras, but otherwise unsupervised. Asher had promised Lansing that,
henceforth, nobody would enter the building without a member of his staff to
accompany them-and he claimed that nobody had been inside since the day of the
bombing, anyway.

When two LEI technicians had arrived that morning to carry
out an inventory, theyłd found the expected number of culture flasks, all with
the correct bar code labels, all tightly sealed-but the appearance of their contents
was subtly wrong. The translucent frozen colloid was more opalescent than
cloudy; an untrained eye might never have noticed the difference, but
apparently it spoke volumes to the cognoscenti.

The technicians had taken a number of the flasks away for
analysis; LEI were working out of temporary premises, a subleased corner of a
paint manufacturerłs quality control lab. Lansing had promised me preliminary
test results by the time we met.

Lansing arrived, and unlocked the freezer. With gloved
hands, she lifted a flask out of the swirling mist and held it up for me to
inspect.

She said, �Wełve only thawed three samples, but they all
look the same. The cells have been torn apart."

�How?" The flask was covered with such heavy condensation
that I couldnłt have said if it was empty or full, let alone cloudy or
opalescent.

�It looks like radiation damage."

My skin crawled. I peered into the depths of the freezer;
all I could make out were the tops of rows of identical flasks-but if one of
them had been spiked with a radioiso-tope ...

Lansing scowled. �Relax." She tapped a small electronic
badge pinned to her lab coat, with a dull gray face like a solar cell: a radiation
dosimeter. �This would be screaming if we were being exposed to anything
significant. Whatever the source of the radiation was, itłs no longer in
here-and it hasnłt left the walls glowing. Your future offspring are safe."

I let that pass. �You think all the samples will turn out to
be ruined? You wonłt be able to salvage anything?"

Lansing was stoical as ever. ę

ęIt looks that way. There are some elaborate techniques we
could use, to try to repair the DNA-but it will probably be easier to
synthesize fresh DNA from scratch, and re-introduce it into unmodified bovine
pla-cental cell lines. We still have all the sequence data; thatłs what matters
in the end."

I pondered the freezerłs locking system, the surveillance cameras.
ę

ęAre you sure that the source was inside the freezer? Or
could the damage have been done without actually breaking in-right through the
walls?"

She thought it over. �Maybe. Therełs not much metal in these
things; theyłre mostly plastic foam. But Iłm not a radiation physicist; your
forensic people will probably be able to give you a better idea of what
happened, once theyłve checked out the freezer itself. If therełs damage to the
polymers in the foam, it might be possible to use that to reconstruct the
geometry of the radiation field."

A forensic team was on its way. I said, �How would they have
done it? Walked casually by, and just-?"

�Hardly. A source which could do this in one quick hit would
have been unmanageable. Itłs far more likely to have been a matter of weeks, or
months, of low-level exposure."

�So they must have smuggled some kind of device into their
own freezer, and aimed it at yours? But then ... wełll be able to trace the
effects right back to the source, wonłt we? So how could they have hoped to get
away with it?łł

Lansing said, �Itłs even simpler than that. Wełre talking
about a modest amount of a gamma-emitting isotope, not some billion-dollar
particle-beam weapon. The effective range would be a couple of meters, at most.
If it was done from the outside, youłve just narrowed down your suspect list to
two." She thumped the freezerłs left neighbor in the aisle, then did the same
to the one on the right-and said, �Aha."

�What?"

She thumped them both again. The second one sounded hollow.
I said, �No liquid nitrogen? Itłs not in use?"

Lansing nodded. She reached for the handle.

Asher said, �I donłt think"

The freezer was unlocked, the lid swung open easily. Lansingłs
badge started beeping-and, worse, there was something in there, with batteries
and wires ....

I donłt know what kept me from knocking her to the floor-but
Lansing, untroubled, lifted the lid all the way. She said mildly, �Donłt panic;
this dose ratełs nothing. Threshold of detectable."

The thing inside looked superficially like a home-made
bomb-but the batteries and timer chip Iłd glimpsed were wired to a heavy-duty
solenoid, which was part of an elaborate shutter mechanism on one side of a
large, metallic gray box.

Lansing said, ę

ęCannibalized medical source, probably. You know these
things have turned up in garbage dumps?" She unpinned her badge and waved it
near the box; the pitch of the alarm increased, but only slightly. ę

ęShielding seems to be intact."

I said, as calmly as possible, ę

ęThese people have access to high explosives. You donłt have
any idea what the fuck might be in there, or what itłs wired up to do. This is
the point where we walk out, quietly, and leave it to the bomb-disposal robots."

She seemed about to protest, but then she nodded contritely.
The three of us went up onto the street, and Asher called the local terrorist
services contractor. I suddenly realized that theyłd have to divert all traffic
from the bridge. The Lane Cove bombing had received some perfunctory media
coverage-but this would lead the evening news.

I took Lansing aside. �Theyłve destroyed your laboratory.
Theyłve wiped out your cell lines. Your data may be almost impossible to locate
and corrupt-so the next logical target is you and your employees. Nexus doesnłt
provide protective services, but I can recommend a good firm."

I gave her the phone number; she accepted it with
appropriate solemnity. �So you finally believe me? These people arenłt commercial
saboteurs. Theyłre dangerous fanatics."

I was growing impatient with her vague references to �fanatics."

�Who exactly do you have in mind?"

She said darkly, ę

ęWełre tampering with certain ... natural processes. You can
draw your own conclusions, canłt you?"

There was no logic to that at all. Godłs Image would
probably want to force all pregnant women with HIV infections, or drug habits,
to use the cocoon; they wouldnłt try to bomb the technology out of existence.
Gaiałs Soldiers were more concerned with genetically engineered crops and
bacteria than trivial modifications to insignificant species like humans-and
they wouldnłt have used radioisotopes if the fate of the planet depended on it.
Lansing was beginning to sound thoroughly paranoid-although in the circumstances,
I couldnłt really blame her.

I said, �Iłm not drawing any conclusions. Iłm just advising
you to take some sensible precautions, because we have no way of knowing how
far this might escalate. But ... Biofile must lease freezer space to every one
of your competitors. A commercial rival would have found it a thousand times
easier than any hypothetical sect member to get into the vault to plant that
thing."

A gray armor-plated van screeched to a halt in front of us;
the back door swung up, ramps slid down, and a squat, multi-limbed robot on
treads descended. I raised a hand in greeting and the robot did the same; the
operator was a friend of mine.

Lansing said, �You may be right. But then, therełs nothing
to stop a terrorist from having a day job in biotechnology, is there?"

The device turned out not to be booby-trapped at all-just
rigged to spray LEIłs precious cells with gamma rays for six hours, starting at
midnight, every night. Even in the unlikely event that someone had come into
the vault in the early hours and wedged themselves into the narrow gap between
the freezers, the dose they received would not have been much; as Lansing had
suggested, it was the cumulative effect over months which had done the damage.
The radioisotope in the box was cobalt 60, almost certainly a decomissioned
medical source-grown too weak for its original use, but still too hot to be
discarded-stolen from a �cooling off" site. No such theft had been reported,
but Elaine Changłs assistants were phoning around the hospitals, trying to
persuade them to re-inventory their concrete bunkers.

Cobalt 60 was dangerous stuff-but fifty milligrams in a
carefully shielded container wasnłt exactly a tactical nuclear weapon. The news
systems went berserk, though: ATOMIC TERRORISTS STRIKE HARBOR BRIDGE, et
cetera. If LEIłs enemies were activists, with some �moral cause" which they
hoped to set before the public, they clearly had the worst PR advisers in the
business. Their prospects of gaining the slightest sympathy had vanished, the
instant the first news reports had mentioned the word radiation.

My secretarial software issued polite statements of �No comment"
on my behalf, but camera crews began hovering outside my front door, so I
relented and mouthed a few news-speak sentences for them which meant
essentially the same thing. Martin looked on, amused-and then I looked on,
astonished, as Janet Lansingłs own doorstop media conference appeared on TV.

�These people are clearly ruthless. Human life, the environment,
radioactive contamination ... all mean nothing to them."

ę

ęDo you have any idea who might be responsible for this outrage,
Dr. Lansing?"

�I canłt disclose that, yet. All I can reveal, right now, is
that our research is at the very cutting edge of preventative medicine-and Iłm
not at all surprised that there are powerful vested interests working against
us."

Powerful vested interests? What was that meant to be code
for-if not the rival biotechnology firm whose involvement she kept denying? No
doubt she had her eye on the publicity advantages of being the victim of ATOMIC
TERRORISTSbut I thought she was wasting her breath. In two or more yearsł
time, when the product finally hit the market, the story would be long
forgotten.

After some tricky jurisdictional negotiations, Asher finally
sent me six monthsł worth of files from the vaultłs surveillance cameras-all
that they kept. The freezer in question had been unused for almost two years;
the last authorized tenant was a small IVF clinic which had gone bankrupt. Only
about 60 percent of the freezers were currently leased, so it wasnłt
particularly surprising that LEI had had a conveniently empty neighbor.

I ran the surveillance files through image-processing
soft-ware, in the hope that someone might have been caught in the act of
opening the unused freezer. The search took almost an hour of supercomputer
time-and turned up precisely nothing. A few minutes later, Elaine Chang popped
her head into my office to say that shełd finished her analysis of the damage
to the freezer walls: the nightly irradiation had been going on for between
eight and nine months.

Undeterred, I scanned the files again, this time instructing
the software to assemble a gallery of every individual sighted inside the
vault.

Sixty-two faces emerged. I put company names to all of them,
matching the times of each sighting to Biofilełs records of the use of each
clientłs electronic key. No obvious inconsistencies showed up; nobody had been
seen inside who hadnłt used an authorized key to gain access-and the same
people had used the same keys, again and again.

I flicked through the gallery, wondering what to do next.
Search for anyone glancing slyly in the direction of the radioactive freezer?
The software could have done it-but I wasnłt quite ready for barrel-scraping
efforts like that.

I came to a face which looked familiar: a blonde woman in
her mid-thirties, whołd used the key belonging to Federation Centennial
Hospitalłs Oncology Research Unit, three times. I was certain that I knew her,
but I couldnłt recall where Iłd seen her before. It didnłt matter; after a few
secondsł searching, I found a clear shot of the name badge pinned to her lab
coat. All I had to do was zoom in.

The badge read: C. MENDELSOHN.

There was a knock on my open door. I turned from the screen;
Elaine was back, looking pleased with herself.

She said, �Wełve finally found a place whołll own up to having
lost some cobalt 60. Whatłs more ... the activity of our source fits their
missing itemłs decay curve, exactly."

�So where was it stolen from?"

�Federation Centennial."

I phoned the Oncology Research Unit. Yes, Catherine Mendelsohn
worked there-shełd done so for almost four yearsbut they couldnłt put me
through to her; shełd been on sick leave all week. They gave me the same
canceled phone number as LEI-but a different address, an apartment in
Petersham. The address wasnłt listed in the phone directory; Iłd have to go
there in person.

A cancer research team would have no reason to want to harm
LEI, but a commercial rival-with or without their own key to the vault-could
still have paid Mendelsohn to do their work for them. It seemed like a lousy
deal to me, whatever theyłd offered her-if she was convicted, every last cent
would be traced and confiscated-but bitterness over her sacking might have
clouded her judgment.

Maybe. Or maybe that was all too glib.

I replayed the shots of Mendelsohn taken by the surveillance
cameras. She did nothing unusual, nothing suspicious. She went straight to the
ORUłs freezer, put in whatever samples shełd brought, and departed. She didnłt
glance slyly in any direction at all.

The fact that she had been inside the vault-on legitimate
business-proved nothing. The fact that the cobalt 60 had been stolen from the
hospital where she worked could have been pure coincidence.

And anyone had the right to cancel their phone service.

I pictured the steel reinforcement rods of the Lane Cove
laboratory, glinting in the sunlight.

On the way out, reluctantly, I took a detour to the
basement. I sat at a console while the armaments safe checked my fingerprints,
took breath samples and a retinal blood spectrogram, ran some
perception-and-judgment response time tests, then quizzed me for five minutes
about the case. Once it was satisfied with my reflexes, my motives, and my
state of mind, it issued me a nine-millimeter pistol and a shoulder holster.

Mendelsohnłs apartment block was a concrete box from the
1960s, front doors opening onto long shared balconies, no security at all. I
arrived just after seven, to the smell of cooking and the sound of game show
applause, wafting from a hundred open windows. The concrete still shimmered
with the dayłs heat; three flights of stairs left me coated in sweat.
Mendelsohnłs apartment was silent, but the lights were on.

She answered the door. I introduced myself, and showed her
my ID. She seemed nervous, but not surprised.

She said, ę

ęI still find it galling to have to deal with people like
you."

�People like-?"

�I was opposed to privatizing the police force. I helped
organize some of the marches."

She would have been fourteen years old at the time-a precocious
political activist.

She let me in, begrudgingly. The living room was modestly
furnished, with a terminal on a desk in one corner.

I said, �Iłm investigating the bombing of Life Enhancement International.
You used to work for them, up until about four years ago. Is that correct?"

�Yes."

�Can you tell me why you left?"

She repeated what I knew about the transfer of her project
to the Amarillo division. She answered every question directly, looking me
straight in the eye; she still appeared nervous, but she seemed to be trying to
read some vital piece of information from my demeanor. Wondering if Iłd traced
the cobalt?

�What were you doing on the North Ryde premises at two in
the morning, two days before you were sacked?łł

She said, �I wanted to find out what LEI was planning for
the new building. I wanted to know why they didnłt want me to stick around."

�Your job was moved to Texas."

She laughed drily. �The work wasnłt that specialized. I
could have swapped jobs with someone who wanted to travel to the States. It
would have been the perfect solution-and there would have been plenty of people
more than happy to trade places with me. But no, that wasnłt allowed."

�So ... did you find the answer?"

�Not that night. But later, yes."

I said carefully, ę

ęSo you knew what LEI was doing in Lane Cove?"

�Yes."

�How did you discover that?"

�I kept an ear to the ground. Nobody whołd stayed on would
have told me directly, but word leaked out, eventually. About a year ago."

�Three years after youłd left? Why were you still
interested? Did you think there was a market for the information?łł

She said, �Put your notepad in the bathroom sink and run the
tap on it."

I hesitated, then complied. When I returned to the living
room, she had her face in her hands. She looked up at me grimly.

�Why was I still interested? Because I wanted to know why
every project with any lesbian or gay team members was being transferred out of
the division. I wanted to know if that was pure coincidence. Or not."

I felt a sudden chill in the pit of my stomach. I said, �If
you had some problem with discrimination, there are avenues you could have"

Mendelsohn shook her head impatiently. �LEI was never discriminatory.
They didnłt sack anyone who was willing to move-and they always transferred the
entire team; there was nothing so crude as picking out individuals by sexual
preference. And they had a rationalization for everything: projects were being
re-grouped between divisions to facilitate ęsyner-gistic cross-pollination.ł
And if that sounds like pretentious bullshit, it was-but it was plausible
pretentious bullshit. Other corporations have adopted far more ridiculous
schemes, in perfect sincerity."

�But if it wasnłt a matter of discrimination ... why should
LEI want to force people out of one particular division-?"

I think Iłd finally guessed the answer, even as I said those
words-but I needed to hear her spell it out, before I could really believe it.

Mendelsohn must have been practicing her version for
non-biochemists; she had it down pat. �When people are subject to
stress-physical or emotional-the levels of certain substances in the
bloodstream increase. Cortisol and adrenaline, mainly. Adrenaline has a rapid,
short-term effect on the nervous system. Cortisol works on a much longer time
frame, modulating all kinds of bodily processes, adapting them for hard times:
injury, fatigue, whatever. If the stress is prolonged, someonełs cortisol can
be elevated for days, or weeks, or months.

�High enough levels of cortisol, in the bloodstream of a pregnant
woman, can cross the placental barrier and interact with the hormonal system of
the developing fetus. There are parts of the brain where embryonic development
is switched into one of two possible pathways, by hormones released by the
fetal testes or ovaries. The parts of the brain which control body image, and
the parts which control sexual preference. Female embryos usually develop a
brain wired with a self-image of a female body, and the strongest potential for
sexual attraction toward males. Male embryos, vice versa. And itłs the sex
hormones in the fetal bloodstream which let the grow-ing neurons know the
gender of the embryo, and which wiring pattern to adopt.

�Cortisol can interfere with this process. The precise
interactions are complex, but the ultimate effect depends on the timing;
different parts of the brain are switched into gender-specific versions at
different stages of development. So stress at different times during pregnancy
leads to different patterns of sexual preference and body image in the child:
homosexual, bisexual, transsexual.

�Obviously, a lot depends on the motherłs biochemistry. Pregnancy
itself is stressful-but everyone responds to that differently. The first sign
that cortisol might have an effect came in studies in the 1980s, on the
children of German women whołd been pregnant during the most intense bombing
raids of World War II-when the stress was so great that the effect showed
through despite individual differences. In the nineties, researchers thought
theyłd found a gene which determined male homosexuality ... but it was always
maternally inherited-and it turned out to be influencing the motherłs stress
response, rather than acting directly on the child.

�If maternal cortisol, and other stress hormones, were kept
from reaching the fetus ... then the gender of the brain would always match the
gender of the body in every respect. All of the present variation would be
wiped out."

I was shaken, but I donłt think I let it show. Everything
she said rang true; I didnłt doubt a word of it. Iłd always known that sexual
preference was decided before birth. Iłd known that I was gay, myself, by the
age of seven. Iłd never sought out the elaborate biological details,
though-because Iłd never believed that the tedious mechanics of the process
could ever matter to me. What turned my blood to ice was not finally learning
the neuroembryology of desire. The shock was discovering that LEI planned to
reach into the womb and take control of it.

I pressed on with the questioning in a kind of trance,
putting my own feelings into suspended animation.

I said, �LEIłs barrier is for filtering out viruses and
toxins. Youłre talking about a natural substance which has been present for
millions of years-łł

�LEIłs barrier will keep out everything they deem
non-essential. The fetus doesnłt need maternal cortisol in order to survive. If
LEI doesnłt explicitly include transporters for it, it wonłt get through. And Iłll
give you one guess what their plans are."

I said, �Youłre being paranoid. You think LEI would invest
millions of dollars just to take part in a conspiracy to rid the world of
homosexuals?"

Mendelsohn looked at me pityingly. �Itłs not a conspiracy.
Itłs a marketing opportunity. LEI doesnłt give a shit about the sexual
politics. They could put in cortisol transporters, and sell the barrier as an
anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution screen. Or, they could leave them out,
and sell it as all of that-plus a means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child.
Which do you think would earn the most money?"

That question hit a nerve; I said angrily, �And you had so
little faith in peoplełs choice that you bombed the laboratory so that no one
would ever have the chance to decide?"

Mendelsohnłs expression turned stony. �I did not bomb LEI.
Or irradiate their freezer."

�No? Wełve traced the cobalt 60 to Federation Centennial."

She looked stunned for a moment, then she said, �Congratulations.
Six thousand other people work there, you know. Iłm obviously not the only one
of them whołd discovered what LEI is up to."

�Youłre the only one with access to the Biofile vault. What
do you expect me to believe? That having learnt about this project, you were
going to do absolutely nothing about it?"

�Of course not! And I still plan to publicize what theyłre
doing. Let people know what it will mean. Try to get the issue debated before
the product appears in a blaze of misinformation."

�You said youłve known about the work for a year."

�Yes-and Iłve spent most of that time trying to verify all
the facts, before opening my big mouth. Nothing would have been stupider than
going public with half-baked rumors. Iłve only told about a dozen people so
far, but we were going to launch a big publicity campaign to coincide with this
yearłs Mardi Gras. Although now, with the bombing, everythingłs a thousand
times more complicated." She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. �But
we still have to do what we can, to try to keep the worst from happening."

�The worst?"

�Separatism. Paranoia. Homosexuality redefined as pathological.
Lesbians and sympathetic straight women looking for their own technological
means to guarantee the survival of the culture ... while the religious
far-right try to prosecute them for poisoning their babies ... with a substance
Godłs been happily ępoisoningł babies with for the last few thousand years!
Sexual tourists traveling from wealthy countries where the technology is in
use, to poorer countries where it isnłt."

I was sickened by the vision she was painting-but I pushed
on. �These dozen friends of yours-?"

Mendelsohn said dispassionately, �Go fuck yourself. Iłve got
nothing more to say to you. Iłve told you the truth. Iłm not a criminal. And I
think youłd better leave."

I went to the bathroom and collected my notepad. In the doorway,
I said, �If youłre not a criminal, why are you so hard to track down?"

Wordlessly, contemptuously, she lifted her shirt and showed
me the bruises below her rib cage-fading, but still an ugly sight. Whoever it was
whołd beaten her-an ex-lover?-I could hardly blame her for doing everything she
could to avoid a repeat performance.

On the stairs, I hit the REPLAY button on my notepad. The
software computed the frequency spectrum for the noise of the running water, subtracted
it out of the recording, and then amplified and cleaned up what remained. Every
word of our conversation came through crystal clear.

From my car, I phoned a surveillance firm and arranged to
have Mendelsohn kept under twenty-four-hour observation.

Halfway home, I stopped in a side street, and sat behind the
wheel for ten minutes, unable to think, unable to move.

In bed that night, I asked Martin, �Youłre left-handed. How
would you feel if no one was ever born left-handed again?łł

�It wouldnłt bother me in the least. Why?"

�You wouldnłt think of it as a kind of ... genocide?"

�Hardly. Whatłs this all about?"

�Nothing. Forget it."

�Youłre shaking."

�Iłm cold."

�You donłt feel cold to me."

As we made love-tenderly, then savagely-I thought: This is
our language, this is our dialect. Wars have been fought over less. And if this
language ever dies out, a people will have vanished from the face of the Earth.

I knew I had to drop the case. If Mendelsohn was guilty, someone
else could prove it. To go on working for LEI would destroy me.

Afterward, though ... that seemed like sentimental bullshit.
I belonged to no tribe. Every human being possessed their own sexuality-and
when they died, it died with them. If no one was ever born gay again, it made
no difference to me.

And if I dropped the case because I was gay, Iłd be
abandoning everything Iłd ever believed about my own equality, my own identity
... not to mention giving LEI the chance to announce: Yes, of course we hired
an investigator without regard to sexual preference-but apparently, that was a
mistake.

Staring up into the darkness, I said, ę

ęEvery time I hear the word community, I reach for my revolver."

There was no response; Martin was fast asleep. I wanted to
wake him, I wanted to argue it all through, there and thenbut Iłd signed an
agreement, I couldnłt tell him a thing.

So I watched him sleep, and tried to convince myself that
when the truth came out, hełd understand.

I phoned Janet Lansing, brought her up to date on
Mendelsohn-and said coldly, �Why were you so coy? ęFanaticsł? ęPowerful vested
interestsł? Are there some words you have trouble pronouncing?"

Shełd clearly prepared herself for this moment. �I didnłt
want to plant my own ideas in your head. Later on, that might have been seen as
prejudicial."

�Seen as prejudicial by whomV It was a rhetorical question:
the media, of course. By keeping silent on the issue, shełd minimized the risk
of being seen to have launched a witch-hunt. Telling me to go look for
homosexual terrorists might have put LEI in a very unsympathetic light ...
whereas my finding Mendelsohn-for other reasons entirely, despite my
ignorance-would come across as proof that the investigation had been conducted
without any preconceptions.

I said, �You had your suspicions, and you should have disclosed
them. At the very least, you should have told me what the barrier was for."

�The barrier," she said, �is for protection against viruses
and toxins. But anything we do to the body has side effects. Itłs not my role
to judge whether or not those side effects are acceptable; the regulatory
authorities will insist that we pub-licize all of the consequences of using the
product-and then the decision will be up to consumers."

Very neat: the government would twist their arm, �forcing
them" to disclose their major selling point!

�And what does your market research tell you?"

�Thatłs strictly confidential."

I very nearly asked her: When exactly did you find out that
I was gay? After youłd hired me-or before ? On the morning of the bombing, while
Iłd been assembling a dossier on Janet Lansing ... had she been assembling
dossiers on all of the people who might have bid for the investigation? And had
she found the ultimate PR advantage, the ultimate seal of impartiality, just
too tempting to resist?

I didnłt ask. I still wanted to believe that it made no
difference: shełd hired me, and Iłd solve the crime like any other, and nothing
else would matter.

I went to the bunker where the cobalt had been stored, at
the edge of Federation Centennialłs grounds. The trapdoor was solid, but the
lock was a joke, and there was no alarm system at all; any smart
twelve-year-old could have broken in. Crates full of all kinds of (low-level,
shortlived) radioactive waste were stacked up to the ceiling, blocking most of
the light from the single bulb; it was no wonder that the theft hadnłt been
detected sooner. There were even cobwebs-but no mutant spiders, so far as I
could see.

After five minutes poking around, listening to my borrowed
dosimetry badge adding up the exposure, I was glad to get out ... whether or
not the average chest X-ray would have done ten times more damage. Hadnłt
Mendelsohn realized that: how irrational people were about radiation, how much
harm it would do her cause once the cobalt was discovered? Or had her own-fully
informed-knowledge of the minimal risks distorted her perception?

The surveillance teams sent me reports daily. It was an expensive
service, but LEI was paying. Mendelsohn met her friends openly-telling them all
about the night Iłd questioned her, warning them in outraged tones that they
were almost certainly being watched. They discussed the fetal barrier, the
options for-legitimate-opposition, the problems the bombing had caused them. I
couldnłt tell if the whole thing was being staged for my benefit, or if
Mendelsohn was deliberately contacting only those friends who genuinely
believed that she hadnłt been involved.

I spent most of my time checking the histories of the people
she met. I could find no evidence of past violence or sabotage by any of
them-let alone experience with high explosives. But then, I hadnłt seriously
expected to be led straight to the bomber.

All I had was circumstantial evidence. All I could do was
gather detail after detail, and hope that the mountain of facts I was assembling
would eventually reach a critical mass-or that Mendelsohn would slip up,
cracking under the pressure.

Weeks passed, and Mendelsohn continued to brazen it out. She
even had pamphlets printed, ready to distribute at the Mardi Gras-condemning
the bombing as loudly as they condemned LEI for its secrecy.

The nights grew hotter. My temper frayed. I donłt know what
Martin thought was happening to me, but I had no idea how we were going to
survive the impending revelations. I couldnłt begin to face up to the magnitude
of the backlash therełd be once ATOMIC TERRORISTS met GAY BABY-POISONERS in the
daily murdochs-and it would make no difference whether it was Mendelsohnłs
arrest which broke the news to the public, or her media conference blowing the whistle
on LEI and proclaiming her own innocence; either way, the investigation would
become a circus. I tried not to think about any of it; it was too late to do anything
differently, to drop the case, to tell Martin the truth. So I worked on my
tunnel vision.

Elaine scoured the radioactive waste bunker for evidence,
but weeks of analysis came up blank. I quizzed the Biofile guards, who
(supposedly) would have been watching the whole thing on their monitors when
the cobalt was planted, but nobody could recall a client with an unusually
large and oddly shaped item, wandering casually into the wrong aisle.

I finally obtained the warrants I needed to scrutinize Mendelsohnłs
entire electronic history since birth. Shełd been arrested exactly once, twenty
years before, for kicking anunprivatized-policeman in the shin, during a
protest hełd probably, privately, applauded. The charges had been dropped. Shełd
had a court order in force for the last eighteen months, restraining a former
lover from coming within a kilometer of her home. (The woman was a musician
with a band called Tetanus Switchblade; she had two convictions for assault.)
There was no evidence of undeclared income, or unusual expenditure. No phone
calls to or from known or suspected dealers in arms or explosives, or their
known or suspected associates. But everything could have been done with pay
phones and cash, if shełd organized it carefully.

Mendelsohn wasnłt going to put a foot wrong while I was
watching. However careful shełd been, though, she could not have carried out
the bombing alone. What I needed was someone venal, nervous, or
conscience-stricken enough to turn informant. I put out word on the usual
channels: Iłd be willing to pay, Iłd be willing to bargain.

Six weeks after the bombing, I received an anonymous message
by datamail:

Be at the Mardi Gras. No wires, no weapons. Iłll find you.

29:17:5:31:23:11

I played with the numbers for more than an hour, trying to
make sense of them, before I finally showed them to Elaine.

She said, �Be careful, James."

�Why?"

ę

ęThese are the ratios of the six trace elements we found in
the residue from the explosion."

Martin spent the day of the Mardi Gras with friends whołd
also be in the parade. I sat in my air-conditioned office and tuned in to a TV
channel which showed the final preparations, interspersed with talking heads
describing the history of the event. In forty years, the Gay and Lesbian Mardi
Gras had been transformed from a series of ugly confrontations with police and
local authorities, into a money-spinning spectacle advertised in tourist
brochures around the world. It was blessed by every level of government, led by
politicians and business identities-and the police, like most professions, now
had their own float.

Martin was no transvestite (or muscle-bound
leather-fetishist, or any other walking cliche); dressing up in a flamboyant
costume, one night a year, was as false, as artificial, for him as it would
have been for most heterosexual men. But I think I understood why he did it. He
felt guilty that he could �pass for straight" in the clothes he usually wore,
with the speech and manner and bearing which came naturally to him. Hełd never
concealed his sexuality from anyone-but it wasnłt instantly apparent to total
strangers. For him, taking part in the Mardi Gras was a gesture of solidarity
with those gay men who were visible, obvious, all year round-and whołd borne
the brunt of intolerance because of it.

As dusk fell, spectators began to gather along the route.
Helicopters from every news service appeared overhead, turning their cameras on
each other to prove to their viewers that this was An Event. Mounted
crowd-control personnel-in something very much like the old blue uniform that
had van-ished when I was a child-parked their horses by the fast-food stands,
and stood around fortifying themselves for the long night ahead.

I didnłt see how the bomber could seriously expect to find
me once I was mingling with a hundred thousand other people-so after leaving
the Nexus building, I drove my car around the block slowly, three times, just
in case.

By the time Iłd made my way to a vantage point, Iłd missed
the start of the parade; the first thing I saw was a long line of people
wearing giant plastic heads bearing the features of famous and infamous queers.
(Apparently the word was back in fashion again, officially declared
non-perjorative once more, after several years out of favor.) It was all so
Disney I could have gagged-and yes, there was even Bernadette, the worldłs
first lesbian cartoon mouse. I only recognized three of the humans
portrayed-Patrick White, looking haggard and suitably bemused, Joe Orton,
leering sardonically, and J. Edgar Hoover, with a Mephistophelian sneer. Everyone
wore their names on sashes, though, for what that was worth. A young man beside
me asked his girlfriend, �Who the hell was Walt Whitman?"

She shook her head. �No idea. Alan Turing?"

�Search me."

They photographed both of them, anyway.

I wanted to yell at the marchers: So what? Some queers were
famous. Some famous people were queer. What a surprise! Do you think that means
you own them?

I kept silent, of course-while everyone around me cheered
and clapped. I wondered how close the bomber was, how long he or she would
leave me sweating. Panopticon-the surveillance contractors-were still following
Mendelsohn and all of her known associates, most of whom were somewhere along
the route of the parade, handing out their pamphlets.

None of them appeared to have followed me, though. The
bomber was almost certainly someone outside the network of friends wełd
uncovered.

An anti-viral, anti-drug, anti-pollution barrier, alone-or a
means of guaranteeing a heterosexual child. Which do you think would earn the
most money? Surrounded by cheering spectators-half of them mixed-sex couples
with children in tow-it was almost possible to laugh off Mendelsohnłs fears.
Who, here, would admit that theyłd buy a version of the cocoon which would help
wipe out the source of their entertainment? But applauding the freak show didnłt
mean wanting your own flesh and blood to join it.

An hour after the parade had started, I decided to move out
of the densest part of the crowd. If the bomber couldnłt reach me through the
crush of people, there wasnłt much point being here. A hundred or so
leather-clad women on-noise-enhanced-electric motorbikes went riding past in a
crucifix formation, behind a banner which read DYKES ON BIKES FOR JESUS. I
recalled the small group of fundamentalists Iłd passed earlier, their backs to
the parade route lest they turn into pillars of salt, holding up candles and
praying for rain.

I made my way to one of the food stalls, and bought a cold
hot dog and a warm orange juice, trying to ignore the smell of horse turds. The
place seemed to attract law enforcement types; J. Edgar Hoover himself came
wandering by while I was eating, looking like a malevolent Humpty Dumpty.

As he passed me, he said, �Twenty-nine. Seventeen. Five."

I finished my hot dog and followed him.

He stopped in a deserted side street, behind a supermarket
parking lot. As I caught up with him, he took out a magnetic scanner.

I said, �No wires, no weapons." He waved the device over me.
I was telling the truth. �Can you talk through that thing?"

�Yes." The giant head bobbed strangely; I couldnłt see any
eye holes, but he clearly wasnłt blind.

�Okay. Where did the explosives come from? We know they
started off in Singapore, but who was your supplier here?"

Hoover laughed, deep and muffled. �Iłm not going to tell you
that. Iłd be dead in a week."

�So what do you want to tell me?"

�That I only did the grunt work. Mendelsohn organized everything."

ę

ęNo shit. But what have you got that will prove it? Phone
calls? Financial transactions?"

He just laughed again. I was beginning to wonder how many
people in the parade would know whołd played J. Edgar Hoover; even if he
clammed up now, it was possible that Iłd be able to track him down later.

That was when I turned and saw six more, identical, Hoovers
coming around the corner. They were all carrying baseball bats.

I started to move. Hoover One drew a pistol and aimed it at
my face. He said, �Kneel down slowly, with your hands behind your head."

I did it. He kept the gun on me, and I kept my eyes on the
trigger, but I heard the others arrive, and close into a half-circle behind me.

Hoover One said, �Donłt you know what happens to traitors?
Donłt you know whatłs going to happen to you?"

I shook my head slowly. I didnłt know what I could say to appease
him, so I spoke the truth. �How can I be a traitor? What is there to betray?
Dykes on Bikes for Jesus? The William S. Burroughs Dancers?"

Someone behind me swung their bat into the small of my back.
Not as hard as they might have; I lurched forward, but I kept my balance.

Hoover One said, �Donłt you know any history, Mr. Pig? Mr.
Polizei? The Nazis put us in their death camps. The Rea-ganites tried to have
us all die of AIDS. And here you are now, Mr. Pig, working for the fuckers who
want to wipe us off the face of the planet. That sounds like betrayal to me."�

I knelt there, staring at the gun, unable to speak. I couldnłt
dredge up the words to justify myself. The truth was too difficult, too gray,
too confusing. My teeth started chattering. Nazis. AIDS. Genocide. Maybe he was
right. Maybe I deserved to die.

I felt tears on my cheeks. Hoover One laughed. �Boo hoo, Mr.
Pig." Someone swung their bat onto my shoulders. I fell forward on my face, too
afraid to move my hands to break the fall; I tried to get up, but a boot came
down on the back of my neck.

Hoover One bent down and put the gun to my skull. He whispered,
�Will you close the case? Lose the evidence on Catherine? You know, your
boyfriend frequents some dangerous places; he needs all the friends he can get."

I lifted my face high enough above the asphalt to reply. �Yes."

�Well done, Mr. Pig."

That was when I heard the helicopter.

I blinked the gravel out of my eyes and saw the ground, far
brighter than it should have been; there was a spotlight trained on us. I
waited for the sound of a bullhorn. Nothing happened. I waited for my assailants
to flee. Hoover One took his foot off my neck.

And then they all laid into me with their baseball bats.

I should have curled up and protected my head, but curiosity
got the better of me; I turned and stole a glimpse of the chopper. It was a
news crew, of course, refusing to do anything unethical like spoil a good story
just when it was getting telegenic. That much made perfect sense.

But the goon squad made no sense at all. Why were they sticking
around, now that the cameras were running? Just for the pleasure of beating me
for a few seconds longer!

Nobody was that stupid, that oblivious to PR.

I coughed up two teeth and hid my face again. They wanted it
all to be broadcast. They wanted the headlines, the backlash, the outrage.
ATOMIC TERRORISTS! BABY-POISONERS! BRUTAL THUGS!

They wanted to demonize the enemy they were pretending to
be.

The Hoovers finally dropped their bats and started running.
I lay on the ground drooling blood, too weak to lift my head to see what had
driven them away.

A while later, I heard hoofbeats. Someone dropped to the
ground beside me and checked my pulse.

I said, �Iłm not in pain. Iłm happy. Iłm delirious."

Then I passed out.

On his second visit, Martin brought Catherine Mendelsohn to
the hospital with him. They showed me a recording of LEIłs media conference,
the day after the Mardi Gras-two hours before Mendelsohnłs was scheduled to
take place.

Janet Lansing said, ę

ęIn the light of recent events, we have no choice but to go
public. We would have preferred to keep this technology under wraps for
commercial reasons, but innocent lives are at stake. And when people turn on
their own kind"

I burst the stitches in my lips laughing.

LEI had bombed their own laboratory. Theyłd irradiated their
own cells. And theyłd hoped that Iłd cover up for Mendelsohn, once the evidence
led me to her, out of sympathy with her cause. Later, with a tip-off to an
investigative reporter or two, the cover-up would have been revealed.

The perfect climate for their product launch.

Since Iłd continued with the investigation, though, theyłd
had to make the best of it: sending in the Hoovers, claiming to be linked to
Mendelsohn, to punish me for my diligence.

Mendelsohn said, �Everything LEI leaked about me-the cobalt,
my key to the vault-was already spelt out in the pamphlets Iłd printed, but
that doesnłt seem to cut much ice with the murdochs. Iłm the Harbor Bridge
Gamma Ray Terrorist now."

�Youłll never be charged."

�Of course not. So Iłll never be found innocent, either."

I said, ę

ęWhen Iłm out of here, Iłm going after them.łł They wanted
impartiality? An investigation untainted by prejudice? Theyłd get exactly what
they paid for, this time. Minus the tunnel vision.

Martin said softly, �Whołs going to employ you to do that?"

I smiled, painfully. �LEIłs insurance company."

When theyłd left, I dozed off.

I woke suddenly, from a dream of suffocation.

Even if I proved that the whole thing had been a marketing exercise
by LEI-even if half their directors were thrown in prison, even if the company
itself was liquidated-the technology would still be owned by someone.

And one way or another, in the end, it would be sold.

Thatłs what Iłd missed, in my fanatical neutrality: you canłt
sell a cure without a disease. So even if I was right to be neutral-even if
there was no difference to fight for, no difference to betray, no difference to
preserve-the best way to sell the cocoon would always be to invent one. And
even if it would be no tragedy at all if there was nothing left but
heterosexuality in a centuryłs time, the only path which could lead there would
be one of lies, and wounding, and vilification.

Would people buy that, or not?

I was suddenly very much afraid that they would.

Crystal Nights

* * * *

1

* * * *

�More caviar?" Daniel Cliff gestured at the serving dish and
the cover irised from opaque to trans-parent. �Itłs fresh, I promise you. My
chef had it flown in from Iran this morning."

�No thank you." Julie Dehghani touched a napkin to her lips
then laid it on her plate with a gesture of finality. The dining room overlooked
the Golden Gate bridge, and most people Daniel invited here were content to
spend an hour or two simply enjoying the view, but he could see that she was
growing impatient with his small talk.

Daniel said, �Iłd like to show you something." He led her
into the adjoining conference room. On the table was a wireless keyboard; the
wall screen showed a Linux command line interface. �Take a seat," he suggested.

Julie complied. �If this is some kind of audition, you might
have warned me," she said.

�Not at all," Daniel replied. �Iłm not going to ask you to
jump through any hoops. Iłd just like you to tell me what you think of this
machinełs performance."

She frowned slightly, but she was willing to play along. She
ran some standard benchmarks. Daniel saw her squinting at the screen, one hand
almost reaching up to where a desktop display would be, so she could
double-check the number of digits in the FLOPS rating by counting them off with
one finger. There were a lot more than shełd been expecting, but she wasnłt
seeing double.

�Thatłs extraordinary," she said. �Is this whole building
packed with networked processors, with only the penthouse for humans?"

Daniel said, �You tell me. Is it a cluster?"

�Hmm." So much for not making her jump through hoops, but it
wasnłt really much of a challenge. She ran some different benchmarks, based on
algorithms that were provably impossible to parallelise; however smart the
compiler was, the steps these programs required would have to be carried out
strictly in sequence.

The FLOPS rating was unchanged.

Julie said, �All right, itłs a single processor. Now youłve
got my attention. Where is it?"

�Turn the keyboard over."

There was a charcoal-grey module, five centimetres square
and five millimetres thick, plugged into an inset docking bay. Julie examined
it, but it bore no manufacturerłs logo or other identifying marks.

�This connects to the processor?" she asked.

�No. It is the processor."

�Youłre joking." She tugged it free of the dock, and the
wall screen went blank. She held it up and turned it around, though Daniel wasnłt
sure what she was looking for. Somewhere to slip in a screw-driver and take the
thing apart, probably. He said, �If you break it, you own it, so I hope youłve
got a few hundred spare."

�A few hundred grand? Hardly."

�A few hundred million."

Her face flushed. �Of course. If it was two hundred grand,
everyone would have one." She put it down on the table, then as an afterthought
slid it a little further from the edge. �As I said, youłve got my attention."

Daniel smiled. �Iłm sorry about the theatrics."

�No, this deserved the build-up. What is it, exactly?"

�A single, three-dimensional photonic crystal. No
electronics to slow it down; every last component is optical. The architecture
was nanofabricated with a method that Iłd prefer not to describe in detail."

�Fair enough." She thought for a while. �I take it you donłt
expect me to buy one. My research budget for the next thousand years would
barely cover it."

�In your present position. But youłre not joined to the
university at the hip."

�So this is a job interview?"

Daniel nodded.

Julie couldnłt help herself; she picked up the crystal and examined
it again, as if there might yet be some feature that a human eye could discern.
�Can you give me a job description?"

�Midwife."

She laughed. �To what?"

�History," Daniel said.

Her smile faded slowly.

�IbelieveyoułrethebestAIresearcherofyourgeneration,"hesaid. �I
want you to work for me." He reached over and took the crystal from her. �With
this as your platform, imagine what you could do."

Julie said, �What exactly would you want me to do?"

�For the last fifteen years," Daniel said, �youłve stated
that the ultimate goal of your research is to create conscious, human-level,
artificial intelligence."

�Thatłs right."

�Then we want the same thing. What I want is for you to succeed."

She ran a hand over her face; whatever else she was
thinking, there was no denying that she was tempted. �Itłs gratifying that you
have so much confidence in my abilities," she said. �But we need to be clear
about some things. This prototype is amazing, and if you ever get the
production costs down Iłm sure it will have some extra-ordinary applications.
It would eat up climate forecasting, lattice QCD, astrophysical modelling,
proteomics ..."

�Of course." Actually, Daniel had no intention of marketing
the device. Hełd bought out the inventor of the fabrication process with his
own private funds; there were no other shareholders or directors to dictate his
use of the technology.

�But AI," Julie said, �is different. Wełre in a maze, not a
highway; therełs nowhere that speed alone can take us. However many exa-flops I
have to play with, they wonłt spontaneously combust into consciousness. Iłm not
being held back by the universityłs computers; I have access to SHARCNET
anytime I need it. Iłm being held back by my own lack of insight into the
problems Iłm addressing."

Daniel said, �A maze is not a dead end. When I was twelve, I
wrote a program for solving mazes."

�And Iłm sure it worked well," Julie replied, �for small,
two-di-mensional ones. But you know how those kind of algorithms scale. Put
your old program on this crystal, and I could still design a maze in half a day
that would bring it to its knees."

�Of course," Daniel conceded. �Which is precisely why Iłm inter-ested
in hiring you. You know a great deal more about the maze of AI than I do; any
strategy you developed would be vastly superior to a blind search."

�Iłm not saying that Iłm merely groping in the dark," she
said. �If it was that bleak, Iłd be working on a different problem entirely.
But I donłt see what difference this processor would make."

�What created the only example of consciousness we know of?"
Daniel asked.

�Evolution."

�Exactly. But I donłt want to wait three billion years, so I
need to make the selection process a great deal more refined, and the sources
of variation more targeted."

Julie digested this. �You want to try to evolve true AI? Conscious,
human-level AI?"

�Yes." Daniel saw her mouth tightening, saw her struggling
to measure her words before speaking.

�With respect, I donłt think youłve thought that through."

�On the contrary," Daniel assured her. �Iłve been planning
this for twenty years."

�Evolution," she said, �is about failure and death. Do you
have any idea how many sentient creatures lived and died along the way to Homo
sapiens? How much suffering was involved?"

�Part of your job would be to minimise the suffering."

�Minimise it?" She seemed genuinely shocked, as if this proposal
was even worse than blithely assuming that the process would raise no ethical
concerns. �What right do we have to inflict it at all?"

Daniel said, �Youłre grateful to exist, arenłt you? Notwithstanding
the tribulations of your ancestors."

�Iłm grateful to exist," she agreed, �but in the human case
the suffering wasnłt deliberately inflicted by anyone, and nor was there any
alternative way we could have come into existence. If there really had been a
just creator, I donłt doubt that he would have followed Genesis literally; he
sure as hell would not have used evolution."

�Just, and omnipotent," Daniel suggested. �Sadly, that
second traitłs even rarer than the first."

�I donłt think itłs going to take omnipotence to create something
in our own image," she said. �Just a little more patience and self-knowledge."

�This wonłt be like natural selection," Daniel insisted. �Not
that blind, not that cruel, not that wasteful. Youłd be free to intervene as
much as you wished, to take whatever palliative measures you felt appropriate."

�Palliative measures?" Julie met his gaze, and he saw her expres-sion
flicker from disbelief to something darker. She stood up and glanced at her
wristphone. �I donłt have any signal here. Would you mind calling me a taxi?"

Daniel said, �Please, hear me out. Give me ten more minutes,
then the helicopter will take you to the airport."

�Iłd prefer to make my own way home." She gave Daniel a look
that made it clear that this was not negotiable.

He called her a taxi, and they walked to the elevator.

�I know you find this morally challenging," he said, �and I
respect that. I wouldnłt dream of hiring someone who thought these were trivial
issues. But if I donłt do this, someone else will. Someone with far worse
intentions than mine."

�Really?" Her tone was openly sarcastic now. �So how, exactly,
does the mere existence of your project stop this hypothetical bin Laden of AI
from carrying out his own?"

Daniel was disappointed; hełd expected her at least to understand
what was at stake. He said, �This is a race to decide between Godhood and enslavement.
Whoever succeeds first will be unstoppable. Iłm not going to be anyonełs slave."

Julie stepped into the elevator; he followed her.

She said, �You know what they say the modern version of Pascalłs
Wager is? Sucking up to as many Transhumanists as possible, just in
caseoneofthemturnsintoGod.PerhapsyourmottoshouldbełTreat every chatterbot
kindly, it might turn out to be the deityłs uncleł."

�We will be as kind as possible," Daniel said. �And donłt forget,
we can determine the nature of these beings. They will be happy to be alive,
and grateful to their creator. We can select for those traits."

Julie said, �So youłre aiming for �bermenschen that wag
their tails when you scratch them behind the ears? You might find therełs a bit
of a trade-off there."

The elevator reached the lobby. Daniel said, �Think about
this, donłt rush to a decision. You can call me any time." There was no
commercial flight back to Toronto tonight; shełd be stuck in a hotel, paying
money she could ill-afford, thinking about the kind of salary she could demand
from him now that shełd played hard to get. If she mentally recast all this
obstinate moralising as a deliberate bargaining strategy, shełd have no trouble
swallowing her pride.

Julie offered her hand, and he shook it. She said, �Thank
you for dinner."

The taxi was waiting. He walked with her across the lobby. �If
you want to see AI in your lifetime," he said, �this is the only way itłs going
to happen."

She turned to face him. �Maybe thatłs true. Wełll see. But
better to spend a thousand years and get it right, than a decade and succeed by
your methods."

As Daniel watched the taxi drive away into the fog, he
forced himself to accept the reality: she was never going to change her mind.
Julie Dehghani had been his first choice, his ideal collaborator. He couldnłt
pretend that this wasnłt a setback.

Still, no one was irreplaceable. However much it would have
delighted him to have won her over, there were many more names on his list.

* * * *

2

* * * *

Danielłswristtingledasthemessagecamethrough.Heglanceddown
and saw the word progress! hovering in front of his watch face.

The board meeting was almost over; he disciplined himself
and kept his attention focused for ten more minutes. WiddulHands. com had made
him his first billion, and it was still the pre-eminent social networking site
for the 0-3 age group. It had been fifteen years since hełd founded the
company, and he had since diversified in many directions, but he had no
intention of taking his hands off the levers.

When the meeting finished he blanked the wall screen and
paced the empty conference room for half a minute, rolling his neck and
stretching his shoulders. Then he said, �Lucien".

Lucien Crace appeared on the screen. �Significant progress?"
Daniel enquired.

�Absolutely." Lucien was trying to maintain polite eye
contact with Daniel, but something kept drawing his gaze away. Without waiting
for an explanation, Daniel gestured at the screen and had it show him exactly
what Lucien was seeing.

A barren, rocky landscape stretched to the horizon.
Scattered across the rocks were dozens of crab-like creaturessome deep blue,
some coral pink, though these werenłt colours the locals would see, just
species markers added to the view to make it easier to in-terpret. As Daniel
watched, fat droplets of corrosive rain drizzled down from a passing cloud.
This had to be the bleakest environ-ment in all of Sapphire.

Lucien was still visible in an inset. �See the blue ones
over by the crater lake?" he said. He sketched a circle on the image to guide
Danielłs attention.

�Yeah." Five blues were clustered around a lone pink; Daniel
gestured and the view zoomed in on them. The blues had opened up their prisonerłs
body, but it wasnłt dead; Daniel was sure of that, because the pinks had
recently acquired a trait that turned their bodies to mush the instant they
expired.

�Theyłve found a way to study it," Lucien said. �To keep it
alive and study it."

From the very start of the project, he and Daniel had
decided to grant the Phites the power to observe and manipulate their own
bodies as much as possible. In the DNA world, the inner workings of anatomy and
heredity had only become accessible once highly sophis-ticated technology had
been invented. In Sapphire, the barriers were designed to be far lower. The
basic units of biology here were ębeadsł, small spheres that possessed a
handful of simple properties but no complex internal biochemistry. Beads were
larger than the cells of the DNA world, and Sapphirełs diffractionless optics
rendered them visible to the right kind of naked eye. Animals acquired beads
from their diet, while in plants they replicated in the presence of sunlight,
but unlike cells they did not themselves mutate. The beads in a Phitełs body
could be rearranged with a minimum of fuss, enabling a kind of
self-modification that no human surgeon or prosthetics engineer could rivaland
this skill was actually essential for at least one stage in every Phitełs life:
reproduction involved two Phites pooling their spare beads and then collaborating
to ęsculptł them into an infant, in part by directly copying each otherłs
current body plans.

Of course these crabs knew nothing of the abstract
principles of engineering and design, but the benefits of trial and error, of
self-experimentation and cross-species plagiarism, had led them into an
escalating war of innovation. The pinks had been the first to stop their
corpses from being plundered for secrets, by stumbling on a way to make them
literally fall apart in extremis; now it seemed the blues had found a way
around that, and were indulging in a spot of
vivisection-as-industrial-espionage.

Daniel felt a visceral twinge of sympathy for the struggling
pink, but he brushed it aside. Not only did he doubt that the Phites were any
more conscious than ordinary crabs, they certainly had a radic-ally different
relationship to bodily integrity. The pink was resisting because its dissectors
were of a different species; if they had been its cousins it might not have put
up any fight at all. When something happened in spite of your wishes, that was
unpleasant by definition, but it would be absurd to imagine that the pink was
in the kind of agony that an antelope being flayed by jackals would feellet
alone experiencing the existential terrors of a human trapped and mutilated by
a hostile tribe.

�This is going to give them a tremendous advantage," Lucien
enthused.

�The blues?"

Lucien shook his head. �Not blues over pinks; Phites over
trad-life. Bacteria can swap genes, but this kind of active mimetics is
un-precedented without cultural support. Da Vinci might have watch-ed the birds
in flight and sketched his gliders, but no lemur ever dissected the body of an
eagle and then stole its tricks. Theyłre going to have innate skills as
powerful as whole strands of human tech-nology. All this before they even have
language."

�Hmm." Daniel wanted to be optimistic too, but he was growing
wary of Lucienłs hype. Lucien had a doctorate in genetic programm-ing, but hełd
made his name with FoodExcuses.com, a web service thattrawledthemedicalliteraturetocobbletogetherquasi-scientific
justifications for indulging in your favourite culinary vice. He had the kind
of technobabble that could bleed money out of venture capitalists down pat, and
though Daniel admired that skill in its proper place, he expected a higher
insight-to-bullshit ratio now that Lucien was on his payroll.

The blues were backing away from their captive. As Daniel
watch-ed, the pink sealed up its wounds and scuttled off towards a group of its
own kind. The blues had now seen the detailed anatomy of the respiratory system
that had been giving the pinks an advantage in the thin air of this high
plateau. A few of the blues would try it out, and if it worked for them, the
whole tribe would copy it.

�So what do you think?" Lucien asked.

�Select them," Daniel said.

�Just the blues?"

�No, both of them." The blues alone might have diverged into
competing subspecies eventually, but bringing their old rivals along for the
ride would help to keep them sharp.

�Done," Lucien replied. In an instant, ten million Phites
were erased, leaving the few thousand blues and pinks from these bad-lands to
inherit the planet. Daniel felt no compunction; the extinc-tion events he
decreed were surely the most painless in history.

Now that the world no longer required human scrutiny, Lucien
unthrottled the crystal and let the simulation race ahead; automated tools
would let them know when the next interesting development arose. Daniel watched
the population figures rising as his chosen species spread out and recolonised
Sapphire.

Would their distant descendants rage against him, for this
act of ęgenocideł that had made room for them to flourish and prosper? That
seemed unlikely. In any case, what choice did he have? He couldnłt start
manufacturing new crystals for every useless side-branch of the evolutionary
tree. Nobody was wealthy enough to indulge in an exponentially growing number
of virtual animal shel-ters, at half a billion dollars apiece.

He was a just creator, but he was not omnipotent. His careful
pruning was the only way.

* * * *

3

* * * *

In the months that followed, progress came in fits and
starts. Sev-eral times, Daniel found himself rewinding history, reversing his
decisions and trying a new path. Keeping every Phite variant alive was impractical,
but he did retain enough information to resurrect lost species at will.

The maze of AI was still a maze, but the speed of the
crystal served them well. Barely eighteen months after the start of Project
Sapphire, the Phites were exhibiting a basic theory of mind: their actions
showed that they could deduce what others knew about the world, as distinct
from what they knew themselves. Other AI researchers had spliced this kind of
thing into their programs by hand, but Daniel was convinced that his version
was better integrat-ed, more robust. Human-crafted software was brittle and inflexible;
his Phites had been forged in the heat of change.

Daniel kept a close watch on his competitors, but nothing he
saw gave him reason to doubt his approach. Sunil Gupta was raking in the cash
from a search engine that could ęunderstandł all forms of
text,audioandvideo,makinguseoffuzzylogictechniquesthatwere at least forty years
old. Daniel respected Guptałs business acumen, but in the unlikely event that
his software ever became conscious, the sheer cruelty of having forced it to
wade through the endless tides of blogorrhoea would surely see it turn on its
creator and exact a revenge that made The Terminator look like a picnic. Angela
Lind-strom was having some success with her cheesy AfterLife, in which dying
clients gave heart-to-heart interviews to software that then constructed
avatars able to converse with surviving relatives. And Julie Dehghani was still
frittering away her talent, writing software for robots that played with
coloured blocks side-by-side with human infants, and learnt languages from
adult volunteers by imitating the interactions of baby talk. Her prophesy of
taking a thousand years to ęget it rightł seemed to be on target.

As the second year of the project drew to a close, Lucien
was con-tacting Daniel once or twice a month to announce a new break-through.
By constructing environments that imposed suitable selec-tion pressures, Lucien
had generated a succession of new species that used simple tools, crafted crude
shelters, and even domesticated plants. They were still shaped more or less
like crabs, but they were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees.

ThePhitesworkedtogetherbyobservationandimitation,guiding and
reprimanding each other with a limited repertoire of gestures and cries, but as
yet they lacked anything that could truly be called a language. Daniel grew
impatient; to move beyond a handful of specialised skills, his creatures needed
the power to map any object, any action, any prospect they might encounter in
the world into their speech, and into their thoughts.

Daniel summoned Lucien and they sought a way forward. It was
easy to tweak the Phitesł anatomy to grant them the ability to generate more
subtle vocalisations, but that alone was no more useful than handing a chimp a
conductorłs baton. What was needed was a way to make sophisticated planning and
communications skills a matter of survival.

Eventually, he and Lucien settled on a series of
environmental modifications, providing opportunities for the creatures to rise
to the occasion. Most of these scenarios began with famine. Lucien blighted the
main food crops, then offered a palpable reward for progress by dangling some
tempting new fruit from a branch that was just out of reach. Sometimes that
metaphor could almost be taken literally: hełd introduce a plant with a complex
life cycle that required tricky processing to render it edible, or a new prey
animal that was clever and vicious, but nutritionally well worth hunting in the
end.

Time and again, the Phites failed the test, with localised
species dwindling to extinction. Daniel watched in dismay; he had not grown
sentimental, but hełd always boasted to himself that hełd set his standards
higher than the extravagant cruelties of nature. He contemplated tweaking the
creaturesł physiology so that starvation brought a swifter, more merciful
demise, but Lucien pointed out that hełd be slashing his chances of success if
he curtailed this period of intense motivation. Each time a group died out, a
fresh batch of mutated cousins rose from the dust to take their place; without
that intervention, Sapphire would have been a wilderness within a few real-time
days.

Daniel closed his eyes to the carnage, and put his trust in
sheer time, sheer numbers. In the end, that was what the crystal had bought
him: when all else failed, he could give up any pretence of knowing how to
achieve his aims and simply test one random mutation after another.

Months went by, sending hundreds of millions of tribes starving
into their graves. But what choice did he have? If he fed these crea-tures milk
and honey, theyłd remain fat and stupid until the day he died. Their hunger
agitated them, it drove them to search and strive, and while any human onlooker
was tempted to colour such behaviour with their own emotional palette, Daniel
told himself that the Phitesł suffering was a shallow thing, little more than
the instinct that jerked his own hand back from a flame before hełd even
registered discomfort.

They were not the equal of humans. Not yet.

And if he lost his nerve, they never would be.

Daniel dreamt that he was inside Sapphire, but there were no
Phites in sight. In front of him stood a sleek black monolith; a thin stream of
pus wept from a crack in its smooth, obsidian surface. Someone was holding him
by the wrist, trying to force his hand into a reeking pit in the ground. The
pit, he knew, was piled high with things he did not want to see, let alone
touch.

He thrashed around until he woke, but the sense of pressure
on his wrist remained. It was coming from his watch. As he focused on the
one-word message hełd received, his stomach tightened. Lucien would not have
dared to wake him at this hour for some run-of-the-mill result.

Daniel rose, dressed, then sat in his office sipping coffee.
He did not know why he was so reluctant to make the call. He had been waiting
for this moment for more than twenty years, but it would not be the pinnacle of
his life. After this, there would be a thousand more peaks, each one twice as
magnificent as the last.

He finished the coffee then sat a while longer, massaging
his temples, making sure his head was clear. He would not greet this new era
bleary-eyed, half-awake. He recorded all his calls, but this was one he would
retain for posterity.

�Lucien," he said. The manłs image appeared, smiling. �Success?"

�Theyłre talking to each other," Lucien replied.

�About what?"

�Food, weather, sex, death. The past, the future. You name
it. They wonłt shut up."

Lucien sent transcripts on the data channel, and Daniel
perused them. The linguistics software didnłt just observe the Phitesł behav-iour
and correlate it with the sounds they made; it peered right into their virtual
brains and tracked the flow of information. Its task was far from trivial, and
there was no guarantee that its translations were perfect, but Daniel did not
believe it could hallucinate an entire language and fabricate these rich,
detailed conversations out of thin air.

He flicked between statistical summaries, technical
overviews of linguistic structure, and snippets from the millions of conversations
the software had logged. Food, weather, sex, death. As human dia-logue the
translations would have seemed utterly banal, but in con-text they were
riveting. These were not chatterbots blindly following Markov chains, designed
to impress the judges in a Turing test. The Phites were discussing matters by
which they genuinely lived and died.

When Daniel brought up a page of conversational topics in alphabetical
order, his eyes were caught by the single entry under the letter G. Grief. He
tapped the link, and spent a few minutes reading through samples, illustrating
the appearance of the concept following the death of a child, a parent, a
friend.

He kneaded his eyelids. It was three in the morning; there
was a sickening clarity to everything, the kind that only night could bring. He
turned to Lucien.

�No more death."

�Boss?" Lucien was startled.

�Iwanttomakethemimmortal.Letthemevolveculturally;lettheir
ideas live and die. Let them modify their own brains, once theyłre smart
enough; they can already tweak the rest of their anatomy."

�Where will you put them all?" Lucien demanded.

�I can afford another crystal. Maybe two more."

�That wonłt get you far. At the present birth rate"

�Wełll have to cut their fertility drastically, tapering it
down to zero. After that, if they want to start reproducing again theyłll really
have to innovate." They would need to learn about the outside world, and
comprehend its alien physics well enough to design new hardware into which they
could migrate.

Lucien scowled. �How will we control them? How will we shape
them? If we canłt select the ones we want"

Daniel said quietly, �This is not up for discussion."
Whatever Julie Dehghani had thought of him, he was not a monster; if he believed
that these creatures were as conscious as he was, he was not going to slaughter
them like cattleor stand by and let them die ęnaturallył, when the rules of
this world were his to rewrite at will.

�Wełll shape them through their memes," he said. �Wełll kill
off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed." He would need
to keep an iron grip on the Phites and their culture, though, or he would never
be able to trust them. If he wasnłt going to literally breed them for loyalty
and gratitude, he would have to do the same with their ideas.

Lucien said, �Wełre not prepared for any of this. Wełre
going to need new software, new analysis and intervention tools."

Daniel understood. �Freeze time in Sapphire. Then tell the
team theyłve got eighteen months."

* * * *

4

* * * *

Daniel sold his shares in WiddulHands, and had two more
crystals built. One was to support a higher population in Sapphire, so there
was as large a pool of diversity among the immortal Phites as pos-sible; the
other was to run the softwarewhich Lucien had dubbed the Thought Policeneeded
to keep tabs on what they were doing. If human overseers had had to monitor and
shape the evolving culture every step of the way, that would have slowed things
down to a glacial pace. Still, automating the process completely was tricky,
and Daniel preferred to err on the side of caution, with the Thought Police
freezing Sapphire and notifying him whenever the situation became too delicate.

If the end of death was greeted by the Phites with a mixture
of puzzlement and rejoicing, the end of birth was not so easy to accept. When
all attempts by mating couples to sculpt their excess beads into offspring
became as ineffectual as shaping dolls out of clay, it led to a mixture of
persistence and distress that was painful to witness. Humans were accustomed to
failing to conceive, but this was more like still birth after still birth. Even
when Daniel inter-vened to modify the Phitesł basic drives, some kind of
cultural or emotional inertia kept many of them going through the motions.
Though their new instincts urged them merely to pool their spare beads and then
stop, sated, they would continue with the old ver-sion of the act regardless,
forlorn and confused, trying to shape the useless puddle into something that
lived and breathed.

Move on, Daniel thought. Get over it. There was only so much
sympathy he could muster for immortal beings who would fill the galaxy with
their children, if they ever got their act together.

The Phites didnłt yet have writing, but theyłd developed a
strong oral tradition, and some put their mourning for the old ways into
elegiac words. The Thought Police identified those memes, and
en-suredthattheydidnłtspreadfar.SomePhiteschosetokillthemselves rather than
live in the barren new world. Daniel felt he had no right to stop them, but
mysterious obstacles blocked the paths of anyone who tried, irresponsibly, to
romanticise or encourage such acts.

The Phites could only die by their own volition, but those
who retained the will to live were not free to doze the centuries away. Daniel
decreed no more terrible famines, but he hadnłt abolished hunger itself, and he
kept enough pressure on the food supply and other resources to force the Phites
to keep innovating, refining agri-culture, developing trade.

The Thought Police identified and nurtured the seeds of writing,
mathematics, and natural science. The physics of Sapphire was a simplified,
game-world model, not so arbitrary as to be incoherent, but not so deep and
complex that you needed particle physics to get to the bottom of it. As crystal
time sped forward and the immortals sought solace in understanding their world,
Sapphire soon had its Euclid and Archimedes, its Galileo and its Newton; their
ideas spread with supernatural efficiency, bringing forth a torrent of
mathematicians and astronomers.

Sapphirełsstarswerejustaplanetarium-likebackdrop,presentonly
tohelpthePhitesgettheirnotionsofheliocentricityandinertiaright, but its moon
was as real as the world itself. The technology needed to reach it was going to
take a while, but that was all right; Daniel didnłt want them getting ahead of
themselves. There was a surprise waiting for them there, and his preference was
for a flourishing of biotech and computing before they faced that revelation.

Between the absence of fossils, Sapphirełs limited
biodiversity, and all the clunky external meddling that needed to be covered
up, it was hard for the Phites to reach a grand Darwinian view of biology, but
their innate skill with beads gave them a head start in the practical arts.
With a little nudging, they began tinkering with their bodies, correcting some
inconvenient anatomical quirks that theyłd missed in their pre-conscious phase.

As they refined their knowledge and techniques, Daniel let
them imagine that they were working towards restoring fertility; after all,
that was perfectly true, even if their goal was a few conceptual revolutions
further away than they realised. Humans had had their naive notions of a
Philosopherłs Stone dashed, but theyłd still achieved nuclear transmutation in
the end.

The Phites, he hoped, would transmute themselves: inspect
their own brains, make sense of them, and begin to improve them. It was a
staggering task to expect of anyone; even Lucien and his team, with their Godłs-eye
view of the creatures, couldnłt come close. But when the crystal was running at
full speed, the Phites could think millions of times faster than their
creators. If Daniel could keep them from straying off course, everything that
humanity might once have conceived of as the fruits of millennia of progress
was now just a matter of months away.

* * * *

5

* * * *

Lucien said, �Wełre losing track of the language."

Daniel was in his Houston office; hełd come to Texas for a series
of face-to-face meetings, to see if he could raise some much-needed cash by
licensing the crystal fabrication process. He would have preferred to keep the
technology to himself, but he was almost certain that he was too far ahead of
his rivals now for any of them to stand a chance of catching up with him.

�What do you mean, losing track?" Daniel demanded. Lucien
had briefed him just three hours before, and given no warning of an impending
crisis.

The Thought Police, Lucien explained, had done their job
well: they had pushed the neural self-modification meme for all it was worth,
and now a successful form of ębrain boostingł was spreading across Sapphire. It
required a detailed ęrecipeł but no technological aids; the same innate skills
for observing and manipulating beads that the Phites had used to copy
themselves during reproduction were enough.

All of this was much as Daniel had hoped it would be, but
there was an alarming downside. The boosted Phites were adopting a dense and
complex new language, and the analysis software couldnłt make sense of it.

�Slow them down further," Daniel suggested. �Give the linguistics
more time to run."

�Iłve already frozen Sapphire," Lucien replied. �The
linguistics have been running for an hour, with the full resources of an entire
crystal."

Danielsaidirritably,"Wecanseeexactlywhattheyłvedonetotheir
brains. How can we not understand the effects on the language?"

�In the general case," Lucien said, �deducing a language
from nothing but neural anatomy is computationally intractable. With the old
language, we were lucky; it had a simple structure, and it was highly
correlated with obvious behavioural elements. The new language is much more
abstract and conceptual. We might not even have our own correlates for half the
concepts."

Daniel had no intention of letting events in Sapphire slip
out of his control. It was one thing to hope that the Phites would, eventually,
be juggling real-world physics that was temporarily beyond his comprehension,
but any bright ten-year-old could grasp the laws of their present universe, and
their technology was still far from rocket science.

He said, �Keep Sapphire frozen, and study your records of
the Phites who first performed this boost. If they understood what they were
doing, we can work it out too."

At the end of the week, Daniel signed the licensing deal and
flew back to San Francisco. Lucien briefed him daily, and at Danielłs urging
hired a dozen new computational linguists to help with the problem.

After six months, it was clear that they were getting
nowhere. The Phites whołd invented the boost had had one big advantage as theyłd
tinkered with each otherłs brains: it had not been a purely theoretical
exercise for them. They hadnłt gazed at anatomical dia-grams and then reasoned
their way to a better design. They had experienced the effects of thousands of
small experimental changes, and the results had shaped their intuition for the
process. Very little of that intuition had been spoken aloud, let alone written
down and formalised. And the process of decoding those insights from a purely
structural view of their brains was every bit as difficult as decoding the
language itself.

Daniel couldnłt wait any longer. With the crystal heading
for the market, and other comparable technologies approaching fruition, he couldnłt
allow his lead to melt away.

�We need the Phites themselves to act as translators," he
told Lucien. �We need to contrive a situation where therełs a large enough pool
who choose not to be boosted that the old language continues to be used."

�So we need maybe twenty-five per cent refusing the boost?"
Lucien suggested. �And we need the boosted Phites to want to keep them informed
of whatłs happening, in terms that we can all under-stand."

Daniel said, �Exactly."

�I think we can slow down the uptake of boosting," Lucien
mused, �while we encourage a traditionalist meme that says itłs better to span
the two cultures and languages than replace the old entirely with the new."

Lucienłs team set to work, tweaking the Thought Police for
the new task, then restarting Sapphire itself.

Their efforts seemed to yield the desired result: the Phites
were corralled into valuing the notion of maintaining a link to their past, and
while the boosted Phites surged ahead, they also worked hard to keep the
unboosted in the loop.

It was a messy compromise, though, and Daniel wasnłt happy
with the prospect of making do with a watered-down, Sapphire-for-Dummies
version of the Phitesł intellectual achievements. What he really wanted was
someone on the inside reporting to him directly, like a Phite version of
Lucien.

It was time to start thinking about job interviews.

Lucien was running Sapphire more slowly than usualto give
the Thought Police a computational advantage now that theyłd lost so much raw
surveillance databut even at the reduced rate, it took just six real-time days
for the boosted Phites to invent computers, first as a mathematical formalism
and, shortly afterwards, as a suc-cession of practical machines.

Daniel had already asked Lucien to notify him if any Phite
guessed the true nature of their world. In the past, a few had come up with
vague metaphysical speculations that werenłt too wide of the mark, but now that
they had a firm grasp of the idea of universal compu-tation, they were finally
in a position to understand the crystal as more than an idle fantasy.

The message came just after midnight, as Daniel was
preparing for bed. He went into his office and activated the intervention tool
that Lucien had written for him, specifying a serial number for the Phite in
question.

The tool prompted Daniel to provide a human-style name for
his interlocutor, to facilitate communication. Danielłs mind went blank, but
after waiting twenty seconds the software offered its own suggestion: Primo.

Primo was boosted, and he had recently built a computer of
his own. Shortly afterwards, the Thought Police had heard him telling a couple
of unboosted friends about an amusing possibility that had occurred to him.

Sapphire was slowed to a human pace, then Daniel took
control of a Phite avatar and the tool contrived a meeting, arranging for the
two of them to be alone in the shelter that Primo had built for him-self. In
accordance with the current architectural style the wooden building was
actually still alive, self-repairing and anchored to the ground by roots.

Primo said, �Good morning. I donłt believe wełve met."

It was no great breach of protocol for a stranger to enter
onełs shelter uninvited, but Primo was understating his surprise; in this world
of immortals, but no passenger jets, bumping into strangers anywhere was rare.

�Iłm Daniel." The tool would invent a Phite name for Primo
to hear. �I heard you talking to your friends last night about your new
computer. Wondering what these machines might do in the future. Wondering if
they could ever grow powerful enough to contain a whole world."

�I didnłt see you there," Primo replied.

�I wasnłt there," Daniel explained. �I live outside this
world. I built the computer that contains this world."

Primomadeagesturethatthetoolannotatedasamusement,then he
spoke a few words in the boosted language. Insults? A jest? A test of Danielłs
omniscience? Daniel decided to bluff his way through, and act as if the words
were irrelevant.

He said, �Let the rain start." Rain began pounding on the
roof of the shelter. �Let the rain stop." Daniel gestured with one claw at a
large cooking pot in a corner of the room. �Sand. Flower. Fire. Water jug." The
pot obliged him, taking on each form in turn.

Primo said, �Very well. I believe you, Daniel." Daniel had
had some experience reading the Phitesł body language directly, and to him
Primo seemed reasonably calm. Perhaps when you were as old as he was, and had
witnessed so much change, such a revelation was far less of a shock than it
would have been to a human at the dawn of the computer age.

�You created this world?" Primo asked him.

�Yes."

�You shaped our history?"

�In part," Daniel said. �Many things have been down to
chance, or to your own choices."

�Did you stop us having children?" Primo demanded.

�Yes," Daniel admitted.

�Why?"

�There is no room left in the computer. It was either that,
or many more deaths."

Primo pondered this. �So you could have stopped the death of
my parents, had you wished?"

�I could bring them back to life, if you want that." This
wasnłt a lie; Daniel had stored detailed snapshots of all the last mortal
Phites. �But not yet; only when therełs a bigger computer. When therełs room
for them."

�Could you bring back their parents? And their parentsł parents?
Back to the beginning of time?"

�No. That information is lost."

Primo said, �What is this talk of waiting for a bigger
computer? You could easily stop time from passing for us, and only start it
again when your new computer is built."

�No," Daniel said, �I canłt. Because I need you to build the
computer. Iłm not like you: Iłm not immortal, and my brain canłt be boosted. Iłve
done my best, now I need you to do better. The only way that can happen is if
you learn the science of my world, and come up with a way to make this new
machine."

Primo walked over to the water jug that Daniel had magicked
into being. �It seems to me that you were ill-prepared for the task you set
yourself. If youłd waited for the machine you really needed, our lives would
not have been so hard. And if such a machine could not be built in your
lifetime, what was to stop your grandchildren from taking on that task?"

�I had no choice," Daniel insisted. �I couldnłt leave your
creation to my descendants. There is a war coming between my people. I needed
your help. I needed strong allies."

�You have no friends in your own world?"

�Your time runs faster than mine. I needed the kind of
allies that only your people can become, in time."

Primo said, �What exactly do you want of us?"

�To build the new computer you need," Daniel replied. �To
grow in numbers, to grow in strength. Then to raise me up, to make me greater
than I was, as Iłve done for you. When the war is won, there will be peace
forever. Side by side, we will rule a thousand worlds."

�And what do you want of me?" Primo asked. �Why are you
speaking to me, and not to all of us?"

�Most people," Daniel said, �arenłt ready to hear this. Itłs
better that they donłt learn the truth yet. But I need one person who can work
for me directly. I can see and hear everything in your world, but I need you to
make sense of it. I need you to understand things for me."

Primo was silent.

Daniel said, �I gave you life. How can you refuse me?"

* * * *

6

* * * *

Daniel pushed his way through the small crowd of protesters
gath-ered at the entrance to his San Francisco tower. He could have come and
gone by helicopter instead, but his security consultants had assessed these
people as posing no significant threat. A small amount of bad PR didnłt bother
him; he was no longer selling anything that the public could boycott directly,
and none of the businesses he dealt with seemed worried about being tainted by
association. Hełd broken no laws, and confirmed no rumours. A few feral
cyberphiles waving placards reading software is not your slave! meant nothing.

Still, if he ever found out which one of his employees had
leaked details of the project, hełd break their legs.

Daniel was in the elevator when Lucien messaged him: moon
very soon! He halted the elevatorłs ascent, and redirected it to the basement.

All three crystals were housed in the basement now, just
centi-metres away from the Play Pen: a vacuum chamber containing an atomic
force microscope with fifty thousand independently mov-able tips, arrays of
solid-state lasers and photodetectors, and thous-ands of micro-wells stocked
with samples of all the stable chemical elements. The time lag between Sapphire
and this machine had to be as short as possible, in order for the Phites to be
able to conduct experiments in real-world physics while their own world was runn-ing
at full speed.

Daniel pulled up a stool and sat beside the Play Pen. If he
wasnłt going to slow Sapphire down, it was pointless aspiring to watch
developments as they unfolded. Hełd probably view a replay of the lunar landing
when he went up to his office, but by the time he screened it, it would be
ancient history.

ęOne giant leapł would be an understatement; wherever the
Phites landed on the moon, they would find a strange black monolith waiting for
them. Inside would be the means to operate the Play Pen; it would not take them
long to learn the controls, or to understand what this signified. If they were
really slow in grasping what theyłd found, Daniel had instructed Primo to
explain it to them.

The physics of the real world was far more complex than the
kind the Phites were used to, but then, no human had ever been on intimate
terms with quantum field theory either, and the Thought Police had already
encouraged the Phites to develop most of the mathematics theyłd need to get
started. In any case, it didnłt matter if the Phites took longer than humans to
discover twentieth-century scientific principles, and move beyond them. Seen
from the outside, it would happen within hours, days, weeks at the most.

A row of indicator lights blinked on; the Play Pen was
active. Danielłs throat went dry. The Phites were finally reaching out of their
own world into his.

A panel above the machine displayed histograms classifying
the experiments the Phites had performed so far. By the time Daniel was paying
attention, they had already discovered the kinds of bonds that could be formed
between various atoms, and constructed thousands of different small molecules.
As he watched, they carried out spectroscopic analyses, built simple nanomachines,
and manu-factured devices that were, unmistakably, memory elements and logic
gates.

The Phites wanted children, and they understood now that
this was the only way. They would soon be building a world in which they were
not just more numerous, but faster and smarter than they were inside the
crystal. And that would only be the first of a thousand iterations. They were
working their way towards Godhood, and they would lift up their own creator as
they ascended.

Daniel left the basement and headed for his office. When he
arrived, he called Lucien.

�Theyłve built an atomic-scale computer," Lucien announced. �And
theyłve fed some fairly complex software into it. It doesnłt seem to be an
upload, though. Certainly not a direct copy on the level of beads." He sounded
flustered; Daniel had forbidden him to risk screwing up the experiments by
slowing down Sapphire, so even with Primołs briefings to help him it was
difficult for him to keep abreast of everything.

�Can you model their computer, and then model what the
soft-ware is doing?" Daniel suggested.

Lucien said, �We only have six atomic physicists on the
team; the Phites already outnumber us on that score by about a thousand to one.
By the time we have any hope of making sense of this, theyłll be doing
something different."

�What does Primo say?" The Thought Police hadnłt been able
to get Primo included in any of the lunar expeditions, but Lucien had given him
the power to make himself invisible and teleport to any part of Sapphire or the
lunar base. Wherever the action was, he was free to eavesdrop.

�Primo has trouble understanding a lot of what he hears;
even the boosted arenłt universal polymaths and instant experts in every kind
of jargon. The gist of it is that the Lunar Project people have made a very
fast computer in the Outer World, and itłs going to help with the fertility
problem ... somehow." Lucien laughed. �Hey, maybe the Phites will do exactly
what we did: see if they can evolve something smart enough to give them a hand.
How cool would that be?"

Daniel was not amused. Somebody had to do some real work
eventually; if the Phites just passed the buck, the whole enterprise would
collapse like a pyramid scheme.

Daniel had some business meetings he couldnłt put off. By
the time hełd swept all the bullshit aside, it was early afternoon. The Phites
had now built some kind of tiny solid-state accelerator, and were probing the
internal structure of protons and neutrons by pounding them with high-speed
electrons. An atomic computer wired up to various detectors was doing the data
analysis, processing the results faster than any in-world computer could. The
Phites had already figured out the standard quark model. Maybe they were going
to skip uploading into nanocomputers, and head straight for some kind of
femtomachine?

Digests of Primołs briefings made no mention of using the
strong force for computing, though. They were still just satisfying their
curiosity about the fundamental laws. Daniel reminded himself of their history.
They had burrowed down to what seemed like the foundations of physics before,
only to discover that those simple rules were nothing to do with the ultimate
reality. It made sense that they would try to dig as deeply as they could into
the mysteries of the Outer World before daring to found a colony, let alone
emigrate en masse.

By sunset the Phites were probing the surroundings of the
Play Pen with various kinds of radiation. The levels were extremely
lowcertainly too low to risk damaging the crystalsso Daniel saw no need to
intervene. The Play Pen itself did not have a massive power supply, it
contained no radioisotopes, and the Thought Police would ring alarm bells and
bring in human experts if some kind of tabletop fusion experiment got underway,
so Daniel was reasonably confident that the Phites couldnłt do anything stupid
and blow the whole thing up.

Primołs briefings made it clear that they thought they were
engaged in a kind of ęastronomył. Daniel wondered if he should give them access
to instruments for doing serious observationsthe kind that would allow them to
understand relativistic gravity and cosmology. Even if he bought time on a
large telescope, though, just pointing it would take an eternity for the
Phites. He wasnłt going to slow Sapphire down and then grow old while they explored
the sky; next thing theyłd be launching space probes on thirty-year missions.
Maybe it was time to ramp up the level of collaboration, and just hand them
some astronomy texts and star maps? Human culture had its own hard-won
achievements that the Phites couldnłt easily match.

As the evening wore on, the Phites shifted their focus back
to the subatomic world. A new kind of accelerator began smashing single gold
ions together at extraordinary energiesthough the total power being expended
was still minuscule. Primo soon announced that theyłd mapped all three
generations of quarks and leptons. The Phitesł knowledge of particle physics
was drawing level with humanityłs; Daniel couldnłt follow the technical details
any more, but the experts were giving it all the thumbs up. Daniel felt a surge
of pride; of course his children knew what they were doing, and if theyłd
reached the point where they could momentarily bamboozle him, soon hełd ask
them to catch their breath and bring him up to speed. Before he permitted them
to emigrate, hełd slow the crystals down and introduce himself to everyone. In
fact, that might be the perfect time to set them their next task: to understand
human bio-logy, well enough to upload him. To make him immortal, to repay their
debt.

He sat watching images of the Phitesł latest computers, reconstruc-tions
based on data flowing to and from the AFM tips. Vast lattices of shimmering
atoms stretched off into the distance, the electron clouds that joined them
quivering like beads of mercury in some surreal liquid abacus. As he watched,
an inset window told him that the ion accelerators had been re-designed, and
fired up again.

Daniel grew restless. He walked to the elevator. There was
noth-ing he could see in the basement that he couldnłt see from his office, but
he wanted to stand beside the Play Pen, put his hand on the casing, press his
nose against the glass. The era of Sapphire as a virtual world with no
consequences in his own was coming to an end; he wanted to stand beside the
thing itself and be reminded that it was as solid as he was.

The elevator descended, passing the tenth floor, the ninth,
the eighth. Without warning, Lucienłs voice burst from Danielłs watch,
priorityaudiocrashingthrougheverybarrierofprivacyandprotocol. �Boss, therełs
radiation. Net power gain. Get to the helicopter, now."

Daniel hesitated, contemplating an argument. If this was fusion,
why hadnłt it been detected and curtailed? He jabbed the stop button and felt
the brakes engage. Then the world dissolved into brightness and pain.

* * * *

7

* * * *

When Daniel emerged from the opiate haze, a doctor informed
him that he had burns to sixty per cent of his body. More from heat than from
radiation. He was not going to die.

There was a net terminal by the bed. Daniel called Lucien
and learnt what the physicists on the team had tentatively concluded, having
studied the last of the Play Pen data that had made it off-site.

It seemed the Phites had discovered the Higgs field, and engineered
a burst of something akin to cosmic inflation. What theyłd done wasnłt as
simple as merely inflating a tiny patch of vacuum into a new universe, though.
Not only had they managed to create a ęcool Big Bangł, they had pulled a large
chunk of ordinary matter into the pocket universe theyłd made, after which the
wormhole leading to it had shrunk to subatomic size and fallen through the
Earth.

They had taken the crystals with them, of course. If theyłd
tried to upload themselves into the pocket universe through the lunar data
link, the Thought Police would have stopped them. So theyłd emigrated by
another route entirely. They had snatched their whole substrate, and ran.

Opinions were divided over exactly what else the new
universe would contain. The crystals and the Play Pen floating in a void, with
no power source, would leave the Phites effectively dead, but some of the team
believed there could be a thin plasma of protons and electrons too, created by
a form of Higgs decay that bypassed the unendurable quark-gluon fireball of a
hot Big Bang. If theyłd built the right nanomachines, there was a chance that
they could convert the Play Pen into a structure that would keep the crystals
safe, while the Phites slept through the long wait for the first starlight.

The tiny skin samples the doctors had taken finally grew
into sheets large enough to graft. Daniel bounced between dark waves of pain
and medicated euphoria, but one idea stayed with him throughout the turbulent
journey, like a guiding star: Primo had betrayed him. He had given the fucker
life, entrusted him with power, granted him privileged knowledge, showered him
with the favours of the Gods. And how had he been repaid? He was back to zero.
Hełd spoken to his lawyers; having heard rumours of an ęillegal radiation
sourceł, the insurance company was not going to pay out on the crystals without
a fight.

Lucien came to the hospital, in person. Daniel was moved;
they hadnłt met face-to-face since the job interview. He shook the manłs hand.

�You didnłt betray me."

Lucien looked embarrassed. �Iłm resigning, boss."

Daniel was stung, but he forced himself to accept the news
stoic-ally. �I understand; you have no choice. Gupta will have a crystal of his
own by now. You have to be on the winning side, in the war of the Gods."

Lucien put his resignation letter on the bedside table. �What
war? Are you still clinging to that fantasy where �berdorks battle to turn the
moon into computronium?"

Daniel blinked. �Fantasy? If you didnłt believe it, why were
you working with me?"

�You paid me. Extremely well."

�So how much will Gupta be paying you? Iłll double it."

Lucien shook his head, amused. �Iłm not going to work for
Gupta. Iłm moving into particle physics. The Phites werenłt all that far ahead
of us when they escaped; maybe forty or fifty years. Once we catch up, I guess
a private universe will cost about as much as a private island; maybe less in
the long run. But no onełs going to be battling for control of this one,
throwing grey goo around like monkeys flinging turds while they draw up their
plans for Matri-oshka brains."

Daniel said, �If you take any data from the Play Pen logs"

�Iłll honour all the confidentiality clauses in my contract."
Lucien smiled. �But anyone can take an interest in the Higgs field; thatłs
public domain."

After he left, Daniel bribed the nurse to crank up his medication,
until even the sting of betrayal and disappointment began to fade.

A universe, he thought happily. Soon Iłll have a universe of
my own.

But Iłm going to need some workers in there, some allies,
some companions. I canłt do it all alone; someone has to carry the load.

The Cutie

ęWhy wonłt you even talk about it?ł

Diane rolled away from me and assumed a foetal position. ęWe
talked about it two weeks ago. Nothingłs changed since then, so therełs no
point, is there?ł

Wełd spent the afternoon with a friend of mine, his wife,
and their six-month-old daughter. Now I couldnłt close my eyes without seeing
again the expression of joy and astonishment on that beautiful childłs face,
without hearing her peals of innocent laughter, without feeling once again the strange
giddiness that Iłd felt when Rosalie, the mother, had said, ęOf course you can
hold her.ł

I had hoped that the visit would sway Diane. Instead, while
leaving her untouched, it had multiplied a thousandfold my own longing for
parenthood, intensifying it into an almost physical pain.

OK, OK, so itłs biologically programmed into us to love babies.
So what? You could say the same about ninety per cent of human activity. Itłs
biologically programmed into us to enjoy sexual intercourse, but nobody seems to
mind about that, nobody claims theyłre being tricked by wicked nature into
doing what they otherwise would not have done. Eventually someone is going to
spell out, step by step, the physiological basis of the pleasure of listening
to Bach, but will that make it, suddenly, a ęprimitiveł response, a biological
con job, an experience as empty as the high from a euphoric drug?

ęDidnłt you feel anything when she smiled?ł

ęFrank, shut up and let me get some sleep.ł

ęIf we have a baby, Iłll look after her. Iłll take six
months off work and look after her.ł

ęOh, six months, very generous! And then what?ł

ęLonger then. I could quit my job for good, if thatłs what
you want.ł

ęAnd live on what? Iłm not supporting you for the rest of
your life! Shit! I suppose youłll want to get married then, wonłt you?ł

ęAll right, I wonłt quit my job. We can put her in child
care when shełs old enough. Why are you so set against it? Millions of people
are having children every day, itłs such an ordinary thing, why do you keep
manufacturing all these obstacles?ł

ęBecause I do not want a child. Understand? Simple as that.ł

I stared up at the dark ceiling for a while, before saying
with a not quite even voice, ęI could carry it, you know. Itłs perfectly safe
these days, therełve been thousands of successful male pregnancies. They could
take the placenta and embryo from you after a couple of weeks, and attach it to
the outer wall of my bowel.ł

ęYoułre sick.ł

ęThey can even do the fertilisation and early development in
vitro, if necessary. Then all youłd have to do is donate the egg.ł

ęI donłt want a child. Carried by you, carried by me,
adopted, bought, stolen, whatever. Now shut up and let me sleep.ł

* * * *

When I arrived home the next evening, the flat was dark,
quiet, and empty. Diane had moved out; the note said shełd gone to stay with
her sister. It wasnłt just the baby thing, of course; everything about me had
begun to irritate her lately.

I sat in the kitchen drinking, wondering if there was any
way of persuading her to come back. I knew that I was selfish: without a
constant, conscious effort, I tended to ignore what other people felt. And I
never seemed to be able to sustain that effort for long enough. But I did try,
didnłt I? What more could she expect?

When I was very drunk, I phoned her sister, who wouldnłt
even put her on. I hung up, and looked around for something I could break, but
then all my energy vanished and I lay down right there on the floor. I tried to
cry, but nothing happened, so I went to sleep instead.

* * * *

The thing about biological drives is, wełre so easily able
to fool them, so skilled at satisfying our bodies while frustrating the evolutionary
reasons for the actions that give us pleasure. Food with no nutritional value
can be made to look and taste wonderful. Sex that canłt cause pregnancy is
every bit as good, regardless. In the past, I suppose a pet was the only way to
substitute for a child. Thatłs what I should have done: I should have bought a
cat.

* * * *

A fortnight after Diane left me, I bought the Cutie kit, by
EFT from Taiwan. Well, when I say ęfrom Taiwanł I mean the first three digits
of the EFT code symbolised Taiwan; sometimes that means something real,
geographically speaking, but usually it doesnłt. Most of these small companies
have no physical premises; they consist of nothing but a few megabytes of data,
manipulated by generic software running on the international trade network. A
customer phones their local node, specifies the company and the product code,
and if their bank balance or their credit rating checks out, orders are placed
with various component manufacturers, shipping agents, and automated assembly
firms. The company itself moves nothing but electrons.

What I really mean is: I bought a cheap copy. A pirate, a
clone, a lookalike, a bootleg version, call it what you will. Of course I felt
a little guilty, and a bit of a miser, but who can afford to pay five times as
much for the genuine, made-in-El Salvador, USA product? Yes, itłs ripping off
the people who developed the product, who spent all that time and money on R
& D, but what do they expect when they charge so much? Why should I have to
pay for the cocaine habits of a bunch of Californian speculators who had a
lucky hunch ten years ago about a certain biotechnology corporation? Better
that my money goes to some fifteen-year-old trade hacker in Taiwan or Hong Kong
or Manila, whołs doing it all so that his brothers and sisters wonłt have to
screw rich tourists to stay alive.

See what fine motives I had?

The Cutie has a venerable ancestry. Remember the Cabbage
Patch Doll? Birth certificate provided, birth defects optional. The trouble
was, the things just lay there, and lifelike robotics for a doll are simply too
expensive to be practical. Remember the Video Baby? The Computer Crib? Perfect
realism, so long as you didnłt want to reach through the glass and cuddle the
child.

Of course I didnłt want a Cutie! I wanted a real child! But
how? I was thirty-four years old, at the end of one more failed relationship.
What were my choices?

I could start searching again for a woman who (a) wanted to
have children, (b) hadnłt yet done so, and (c) could tolerate living with a
shit like me for more than a couple of years.

I could try to ignore or suppress my unreasonable desire to
be a father. Intellectually (whatever that means), I had no need for a child;
indeed, I could easily think of half a dozen impeccable arguments against
accepting such a burden. But (to shamelessly anthropomorphise) it was as if the
force that had previously led me to engage in copious sex had finally cottoned
on about birth control, and so had cunningly decided to shift my attention one
link down the flawed causal chain. As an adolescent dreams endlessly of sex, so
I dreamed endlessly of fatherhood.

Or

O! The blessings of technology! Therełs nothing like a third
option to create the illusion of freedom of choice!

I could buy a Cutie.

Because Cuties are not legally human, the whole process of
giving birth to one, whatever your gender, is simplified immensely. Lawyers are
superfluous, not a single bureaucrat needs to be informed. No wonder theyłre so
popular, when the contracts for adoption or surrogacy or even IVF with donor
gametes all run to hundreds of pages, and when the child-related clauses in
interspouse legal agreements require more negotiations than missile-ban
treaties.

The controlling software was downloaded into my terminal the
moment my account was debited; the kit itself arrived a month later. That gave
me plenty of time to have chosen the precise appearance I wanted, by playing
with the simulation graphics. Blue eyes, wispy blond hair, chubby, dimpled
limbs, a snub nose ... oh, what a stereotyped little cherub we built, the
program and I. I chose a ęgirlł, because Iłd always wanted a girl, though
Cuties donłt live long enough for gender to make much of a difference. At the
age of four they suddenly, quietly, pass away. The death of the little one is
so tragic, so heartbreaking, so cathartic. You can put them in their
satin-padded coffins, still wearing their fourth-birthday-party clothes, and
kiss them goodnight one last time before theyłre beamed up to Cutie heaven.

Of course it was revolting, I knew it was obscene, I cringed
and squirmed inside at the utter sickness of what I was doing. But it was
possible, and I find the possible so hard to resist. Whatłs more, it was legal,
it was simple, it was even cheap. So I went ahead, step by step, watching
myself, fascinated, wondering when Iłd change my mind, when Iłd come to my
senses and call it all off.

Although Cuties originate from human germ cells, the DNA is
manipulated extensively before fertilisation takes place. By changing the gene
that codes for one of the proteins used to build the walls of red blood cells,
and by arranging for the pineal, adrenal and thyroid glands (triple backup to
leave no chance of failure) to secrete, at the critical age, an enzyme that
rips the altered protein apart, infant death is guaranteed. By extreme
mutilation of the genes controlling embryonic brain development, subhuman intelligence
(and hence their subhuman legal status) is guaranteed. Cuties can smile and
coo, gurgle and giggle and babble and dribble, cry and kick and moan, but at
their peak theyłre far stupider than the average puppy. Monkeys easily put them
to shame, goldfish out-perform them in certain (carefully chosen) intelligence
tests. They never learn to walk properly, or to feed themselves unaided.
Understanding speech, let alone using it, is out of the question.

In short, Cuties are perfect for people who want all the
heart-melting charms of a baby, but who do not want the prospect of surly
six-year-olds, or rebellious teenagers, or middle-aged vultures whołll sit by
their parentsł deathbeds, thinking of nothing but the reading of the will.

Pirate copy or not, the process was certainly streamlined:
all I had to do was hook up the Black Box to my terminal, switch it on, leave
it running for a few days while various enzymes and utility viruses were
tailor-made, then ejaculate into tube A.

Tube A featured a convincingly pseudo-vaginal design and realistically
scented inner coating, but I have to confess that despite my lack of conceptual
difficulties with this stage, it took me a ludicrous forty minutes to complete
it. No matter who I remembered, no matter what I imagined, some part of my
brain kept exercising a power of veto. But I read somewhere that a clever
researcher has discovered that dogs with their brains removed can still go
through the mechanics of copulation; the spinal cord, evidently, is all thatłs
required. Well, in the end my spinal cord came good, and the terminal flashed
up a sarcastic well done! I should have put my fist through it. I should have
chopped up the Black Box with an axe and run around the room screaming nonsense
poems. I should have bought a cat. Itłs good to have things to regret, though,
isnłt it? Iłm sure itłs an essential part of being human.

Three days later, I had to lie beside the Black Box and let
it place a fierce claw on my belly. Impregnation was painless, though, despite
the threatening appearance of the robot appendage; a patch of skin and muscle
was locally anaesthetised, and then a quickly plunging needle delivered a
pre-packaged biological complex, shielded by a chorion specially designed for
the abnormal environment of my abdominal cavity.

And it was done. I was pregnant.

* * * *

After a few weeks of pregnancy, all my doubts, all my
distaste, seemed to vanish. Nothing in the world could have been more
beautiful, more right, than what I was doing. Every day, I summoned up the simulated
foetus on my terminalthe graphics were stunning; perhaps not totally
realistic, but definitely cute, and that was what Iłd paid for, after allthen
put my hand against my abdomen and thought deep thoughts about the magic of
life.

Every month I went to a clinic for ultrasound scans, but I declined
the battery of genetic tests on offer; no need for me to discard an embryo with
the wrong gender or unsatisfactory eye colour, since Iłd dealt with those
requirements at the start.

I told no one but strangers what I was doing; Iłd changed doctors
for the occasion, and Iłd arranged to take leave once I started to ęshowł too
severely (up until then I managed to get by with jokes about ętoo many beersł).
Towards the end I began to be stared at, in shops and on the street, but Iłd
chosen a low birth-weight, and nobody could have known for sure that I wasnłt
merely obese. (In fact, on the advice of the instruction manual, Iłd intentionally
put on fat before the pregnancy; evidently itłs a useful way to guarantee energy
for the developing foetus.) And if anyone who saw me guessed the truth, so
what? After all, I wasnłt committing a crime.

* * * *

During the day, once I was off work, I watched television
and read books on child care, and arranged and rearranged the cot and toys in
the corner of my room. Iłm not sure when I chose the name: Angel. I never
changed my mind about it, though. I carved it into the side of the cot with a
knife, pretending that the plastic was the wood of a cherry tree. I
contemplated having it tattooed upon my shoulder, but then that seemed
inappropriate, between father and daughter. I said it aloud in the empty flat,
long after my excuse about ętrying out the soundł was used up; I picked up the
phone every now and then, and said, ęCan you be quiet, please! Angel is trying
to sleep!ł

Letłs not split hairs. I was out of my skull. I knew I was
out of my skull. I blamed it, with wonderful vagueness, on ęhormonal effectsł
resulting from placental secretions into my bloodstream. Sure, pregnant women didnłt
go crazy, but they were better designed, biochemically as well as anatomically,
for what I was doing. The bundle of joy in my abdomen was sending out all kinds
of chemical messages to what it thought was a female body, so was it any wonder
that I went a little strange?

Of course there were more mundane effects as well. Morning
sickness (in fact, nausea at all hours of the day and night). A heightened
sense of smell, and sometimes a distracting hypersensitivity of the skin.
Pressure on the bladder, swollen calves. Not to mention the simple, inevitable,
exhausting unwieldiness of a body that was not just heavier, but had been
reshaped in about the most awkward way I could imagine. I told myself many
times that I was learning an invaluable lesson, that by experiencing this
state, this process, so familiar to so many women but unknown to all but a
handful of men, I would surely be transformed into a better, wiser person. Like
I said, I was out of my skull.

* * * *

The night before I checked in to hospital for the Caesarean,
I had a dream. I dreamt that the baby emerged, not from me, but from the Black
Box. It was covered in dark fur, and had a tail, and huge, lemur-like eyes. It
was more beautiful than I had imagined possible. I couldnłt decide, at first, if
it was most like a young monkey or a kitten, because sometimes it walked on all
fours like a cat, sometimes it crouched like a monkey, and the tail seemed
equally suited to either. Eventually, though, I recalled that kittens were born
with their eyes closed, so a monkey was what it had to be.

It darted around the room, then hid beneath my bed. I
reached under to drag it out, then found that all I had in my hands was an old
pair of pyjamas.

I was woken by an overwhelming need to urinate.

* * * *

The hospital staff dealt with me without a single joke;
well, I suppose I was paying enough not to be mocked. I had a private room (as
far from the maternity ward as possible). Ten years ago, perhaps, my story
would have been leaked to the media, and cameramen and reporters would have set
up camp outside my door. But the birth of a Cutie, even to a single father,
was, thankfully, no longer news. Some hundred thousand Cuties had already lived
and died, so I was no trail-blazing pioneer; no paper would offer me ten yearsł
wages for the bizarre and shocking story of my life, no TV stations would bid
for the right to zoom in on my tears at the primetime funeral of my sweet,
subhuman child. The permutations of reproductive technology had been milked dry
of controversy; researchers would have to come up with a quantum leap in
strangeness if they wanted to regain the front page. No doubt they were working
on it.

The whole thing was done under general anaesthetic. I woke
with a headache like a hammer blow and a taste in my mouth like Iłd thrown up
rotten cheese. The first time I moved without thinking of my stitches; it was
the last time I made that mistake.

I managed to raise my head.

She was lying on her back in the middle of a cot, which now
looked as big as a football field. Wrinkled and pink just like any other baby,
her face screwed up, her eyes shut, taking a breath, then howling, then another
breath, another howl, as if screaming were every bit as natural as breathing.
She had thick dark hair (the program had said she would, and that it would soon
fall out and grow back fair). I climbed to my feet, ignoring the throbbing in
my head, and leant over the wall of the cot to place one finger gently on her
cheek. She didnłt stop howling, but she opened her eyes, and, yes, they were
blue.

ęDaddy loves you,ł I said. ęDaddy loves his Angel.ł She
closed her eyes, took an extra-deep breath, then screamed. I reached down and,
with terror, with dizzying joy, with infinite precision in every movement, with
microscopic care, I lifted her up to my shoulder and held her there for a long,
long time.

Two days later they sent us home.

* * * *

Everything worked. She didnłt stop breathing. She drank from
her bottle, she wet herself and soiled her nappies, she cried for hours, and
sometimes she even slept.

Somehow I managed to stop thinking of her as a Cutie. I
threw out the Black Box, its task completed. I sat and watched her watch the
glittering mobile Iłd suspended above her cot, I watched her learning to follow
movements with her eyes when I set it swinging and twisting and tinkling, I
watched her trying to lift her hands towards it, trying to lift her whole body
towards it, grunting with frustration, but sometimes cooing with enchantment.
Then Iłd rush up and lean over her and kiss her nose, and make her giggle, and
say, again and again, ęDaddy loves you! Yes, I do!ł

I quit my job when my holiday entitlement ran out. I had
enough saved to live frugally for years, and I couldnłt face the prospect of
leaving Angel with anybody else. I took her shopping, and everyone in the
supermarket succumbed to her beauty and charm. I ached to show her to my
parents, but they would have asked too many questions. I cut myself off from my
friends, letting no one into the flat, and refusing all invitations. I didnłt
need a job, I didnłt need friends, I didnłt need anyone or anything but Angel.

I was so happy and proud, the first time she reached out and
gripped my finger when I waved it in front of her face. She tried to pull it
into her mouth. I resisted, teasing her, freeing my finger and moving it far
away, then suddenly offering it again. She laughed at this, as if she knew with
utter certainty that in the end I would give up the struggle and let her put it
briefly to her gummy mouth. And when that happened, and the taste proved
uninteresting, she pushed my hand away with surprising strength, giggling all
the while.

According to the development schedule, she was months ahead,
being able to do that at her age. ęYou little smartie!ł I said, talking much
too close to her face. She grabbed my nose then exploded with glee, kicking the
mattress, making a cooing sound Iłd never heard before, a beautiful, delicate
sequence of tones, each note sliding into the next, almost like a kind of
birdsong.

I photographed her weekly, filling album after album. I
bought her new clothes before shełd outgrown the old ones, and new toys before
shełd even touched the ones Iłd bought the week before. ęTravel will broaden
your mind,ł I said, each time we prepared for an outing. Once she was out of
the pram and into the stroller, seated and able to look at more of the world
than the sky, her astonishment and curiosity were sources of endless delight
for me. A passing dog would have her bouncing with joy, a pigeon on the
footpath was cause for vocal celebration, and cars that were too loud earned
angry frowns from Angel that left me helpless with laughter, to see her tiny
face so expressive of contempt.

It was only when I sat for too long watching her sleeping,
listening too closely to her steady breathing, that a whisper in my head would
try to remind me of her predetermined death. I shouted it down, silently
screaming back nonsense, obscenities, meaningless abuse. Or sometimes I would
quietly sing or hum a lullaby, and if Angel stirred at the sound I made, I
would take that as a sign of victory, as certain proof that the evil voice was
lying.

Yet at the very same time, in a sense, I wasnłt fooling
myself for a minute. I knew she would die when the time came, as one hundred
thousand others had died before her. And I knew that the only way to accept
that was by doublethink, by expecting her death while pretending it would never
really come, and by treating her exactly like a real, human child, while
knowing all along that she was nothing more than an adorable pet. A monkey, a
puppy, a goldfish.

* * * *

Have you ever done something so wrong that it dragged your
whole life down into a choking black swamp in a sunless land of nightmares?
Have you ever made a choice so foolish that it cancelled out, in one blow,
everything good you might ever have done, made void every memory of happiness,
made everything in the world that was beautiful, ugly, turned every last trace
of self-respect into the certain knowledge that you should never have been
born?

I have.

I bought a cheap copy of the Cutie kit.

I should have bought a cat. Cats arenłt permitted in my building,
but I should have bought one anyway. Iłve known people with cats, I like cats,
cats have strong personalities, a cat would have been a companion I could have
given attention and affection to, without fuelling my obsession: if Iłd tried
dressing it up in baby clothes and feeding it from a bottle, it would have
scratched me to pieces and then shrivelled my dignity with a withering stare of
disdain.

I bought Angel a new set of beads one day, an abacus-like arrangement
in ten shiny colours, to be suspended above her in her cot. She laughed and
clapped as I installed it, her eyes glistening with mischief and delight.

Mischief and delight?

I remembered reading somewhere that a young babyłs ęsmilesł
are really caused by nothing but windand I remembered my annoyance; not with
the facts themselves, but with the author, for feeling obliged to smugly
disseminate such a tedious truth. And I thought, whatłs this magic thing called
ęhumanitył, anyway? Isnłt half of it, at least, in the eyes of the beholder?

ęMischief? You? Never!ł I leant over and kissed her.

She clapped her hands and said, very clearly, ęDaddy!ł

* * * *

All the doctors Iłve seen are sympathetic, but therełs
nothing they can do. The time bomb inside her is too much a part of her. That
function, the kit performed perfectly.

Shełs growing smarter day by day, picking up new words all
the time. What should I do?

(a) Deny her stimuli?

(b) Subject her to malnutrition?

(c) Drop her on her head? Or,

(d) None of the above?

Oh, itłs all right, Iłm a little unstable, but Iłm not yet
completely insane: I can still understand the subtle difference between fucking
up her genes and actually assaulting her living, breathing body. Yes, if I
concentrate as hard as I can, I swear I can see the difference.

In fact, I think Iłm coping remarkably well: I never break
down in front of Angel. I hide all my anguish until she falls asleep.

Accidents happen. Nobodyłs perfect. Her death will be quick
and painless. Children die around the world all the time. See? There are lots
of answers, lots of sounds I can make with my lips while Iłm waiting for the
urge to passthe urge to kill us both, right now; the purely selfish urge to end
my own suffering. I wonłt do it. The doctors and all their tests might still be
wrong. There might still be a miracle that can save her. I have to keep living,
without daring to hope. And if she does die, then I will follow her.

Therełs one question, though, to which Iłll never know the answer.
It haunts me endlessly, it horrifies me more than my blackest thoughts of
death:

Had she never said a word, would I really have fooled myself
into believing that her death would have been less tragic?

Dark Integers

�Good morning, Bruno. How is the weather there in Sparseland?"

The screen icon for my interlocutor was a three-holed torus
tiled with triangles, endlessly turning itself inside out. The polished tones
of the male synthetic voice I heard conveyed no specific origin, but gave a
sense nonetheless that the speakerłs first language was something other than
English.

I glanced out the window of my home office, taking in a
patch of blue sky and the verdant gardens of a shady West Ryde cul-de-sac. Sam
used �good morning" regardless of the hour, but it really was just after ten
a.m., and the tranquil Sydney suburb was awash in sunshine and birdsong.

�Perfect," I replied. �I wish I wasnłt chained to this desk."

There was a long pause, and I wondered if the translator had
mangled the idiom, creating the impression that I had been shackled by ruthless
assailants, who had nonetheless left me with easy access to my instant
messaging program. Then Sam said, �Iłm glad you didnłt go for a run today. Iłve
already tried Alison and Yuen, and they were both unavailable. If I hadnłt been
able to get through to you, it might have been difficult to keep some of my
colleagues in check."

I felt a surge of anxiety, mixed with resentment. I refused
to wear an iWatch, to make myself reachable twenty-four hours a day. I was a
mathematician, not an obstetrician. Perhaps I was an amateur diplomat as well,
but even if Alison, Yuen, and I didnłt quite cover the time zones, it would
never be more than a few hours before Sam could get hold of at least one of us.

�I didnłt realize you were surrounded by hotheads," I
replied. �Whatłs the great emergency?" I hoped the translator would do justice
to the sharpness in my voice. Samłs colleagues were the ones with all the
firepower, all the resources; they should not have been jumping at shadows.
True, we had once tried to wipe them out, but that had been a perfectly
innocent mistake, more than ten years before.

Sam said, �Someone from your side seems to have jumped the
border."

�Jumped it?"

�As far as we can see, therełs no trench cutting through it.
But a few hours ago, a cluster of propositions on our side started obeying your
axioms."

I was stunned. �An isolated cluster? With no derivation
leading back to us?"

�None that we could find."

I thought for a while. �Maybe it was a natural event. A
brief surge across the border from the background noise that left a kind of
tidal pool behind."

Sam was dismissive. �The cluster was too big for that. The
probability would be vanishingly small." Numbers came through on the data
channel; he was right.

I rubbed my eyelids with my fingertips; I suddenly felt very
tired. Iłd thought our old nemesis, Industrial Algebra, had given up the chase
long ago. They had stopped offering bribes and sending mercenaries to harass
me, so Iłd assumed theyłd finally written off the defect as a hoax or a mirage,
and gone back to their core business of helping the worldłs military kill and
maim people in ever more technologically sophisticated ways.

Maybe this wasnłt IA. Alison and I had first located the defecta
set of contradictory results in arithmetic that marked the border between our
mathematics and the version underlying Samłs worldby means of a vast set of
calculations farmed out over the internet, with thousands of volunteers donating
their computersł processing power when the machines would otherwise have been
idle. When wełd pulled the plug on that projectkeeping our discovery secret,
lest IA find a way to weaponize ita few participants had been resentful, and
had talked about continuing the search. It would have been easy enough for them
to write their own software, adapting the same open source framework that
Alison and I had used, but it was difficult to see how they could have gathered
enough supporters without launching some kind of public appeal.

I said, �I canłt offer you an immediate explanation for
this. All I can do is promise to investigate."

�I understand," Sam replied.

�You have no clues yourself ?" A decade before, in Shanghai,
when Alison, Yuen, and I had used the supercomputer called Luminous to mount a
sustained attack on the defect, the mathematicians of the far side had grasped
the details of our unwitting assault clearly enough to send a plume of
alternative mathematics back across the border with pinpoint precision,
striking at just the three of us.

Sam said, �If the cluster had been connected to something,
we could have followed the trail. But in isolation it tells us nothing. Thatłs
why my colleagues are so anxious."

�Yeah." I was still hoping that the whole thing might turn
out to be a glitchthe mathematical equivalent of a flock of birds with a radar
echo that just happened to look like something more sinisterbut the full
gravity of the situation was finally dawning on me.

The inhabitants of the far side were as peaceable as anyone
might reasonably wish their neighbors to be, but if their mathematical
infrastructure came under threat they faced the real prospect of annihilation.
They had defended themselves from such a threat once before, but because they had
been able to trace it to its source and understand its nature, they had shown
great forbearance. They had not struck their assailants dead, or wiped out
Shanghai, or pulled the ground out from under our universe.

This new assault had not been sustained, but nobody knew its
origins, or what it might portend. I believed that our neighbors would do no
more than they had to in order to ensure their survival, but if they were
forced to strike back blindly, they might find themselves with no path to
safety short of turning our world to dust.

Shanghai time was only two hours behind Sydney, but Yuenłs
IM status was still �unavailable." I emailed him, along with Alison, though it
was the middle of the night in Z�rich and she was unlikely to be awake for
another four or five hours. All of us had programs that connected us to Sam by
monitoring, and modifying, small portions of the defect: altering a handful of
precariously balanced truths of arithmetic, wiggling the border between the two
systems back and forth to encode each transmitted bit. The three of us on the
near side might have communicated with each other in the same way, but on
consideration wełd decided that conventional cryptography was a safer way to
conceal our secret. The mere fact that communications data seemed to come from
nowhere had the potential to attract suspicion, so wełd gone so far as to write
software to send fake packets across the net to cover for our otherwise
inexplicable conversations with Sam; anyone but the most diligent and
resourceful of eavesdroppers would conclude that he was addressing us from an
internet caf� in Lithuania.

While I was waiting for Yuen to reply, I scoured the logs
where my knowledge miner deposited results of marginal relevance, wondering if
some flaw in the criteria Iłd given it might have left me with a blind spot. If
anyone, anywhere had announced their intention to carry out some kind of
calculation that might have led them to the defect, the news should have been
plastered across my desktop in flashing red letters within seconds. Granted,
most organizations with the necessary computing resources were secretive by
nature, but they were also unlikely to be motivated to indulge in such a crazy
stunt. Luminous itself had been decommissioned in 2012; in principle, various
national security agencies, and even a few IT-centric businesses, now had
enough silicon to hunt down the defect if theyłd really set their sights on it,
but as far as I knew Yuen, Alison, and I were still the only three people in
the world who were certain of its existence. The black budgets of even the most
profligate governments, the deep pockets of even the richest tycoons, would not
stretch far enough to take on the search as a long shot, or an act of whimsy.

An IM window popped up with Alisonłs face. She looked
ragged. �What time is it there?" I asked.

�Early. Laurałs got colic."

�Ah. Are you okay to talk?"

�Yeah, shełs asleep now."

My email had been brief, so I filled her in on the details.
She pondered the matter in silence for a while, yawning unashamedly.

�The only thing I can think of is some gossip I heard at a
conference in Rome a couple of months ago. It was a fourth-hand story about
some guy in New Zealand who thinks hełs found a way to test fundamental laws of
physics by doing computations in number theory."

�Just random crackpot stuff, or ... what?"

Alison massaged her temples, as if trying to get more blood
flowing to her brain. �I donłt know, what I heard was too vague to make a
judgment. I gather he hasnłt tried to publish this anywhere, or even mentioned
it in blogs. I guess he just confided in a few people directly, one of whom
must have found it too amusing for them to keep their mouth shut."

�Have you got a name?"

She went off camera and rummaged for a while. �Tim Campbell,"
she announced. Her notes came through on the data channel. �Hełs done
respectable work in combinatorics, algorithmic complexity, optimization. I
scoured the net, and there was no mention of this weird stuff. I was meaning to
email him, but I never got around to it."

I could understand why; that would have been about the time
Laura was born. I said, �Iłm glad you still go to so many conferences in the
flesh. Itłs easier in Europe, everythingłs so close."

�Ha! Donłt count on it continuing, Bruno. You might have to put
your fat arse on a plane sometime yourself."

�What about Yuen?"

Alison frowned. �Didnłt I tell you? Hełs been in hospital
for a couple of days. Pneumonia. I spoke to his daughter, hełs not in great
shape."

�Iłm sorry." Alison was much closer to him than I was; hełd
been her doctoral supervisor, so shełd known him long before the events that
had bound the three of us together.

Yuen was almost eighty. That wasnłt yet ancient for a
middle-class Chinese man who could afford good medical care, but he would not
be around forever.

I said, �Are we crazy, trying to do this ourselves?" She
knew what I meant: liaising with Sam, managing the border, trying to keep the
two worlds talking but the two sides separate, safe and intact.

Alison replied, �Which government would you trust not to
screw this up? Not to try to exploit it?"

�None. But whatłs the alternative? You pass the job on to Laura?
Katełs not interested in having kids. So do I pick some young mathematician at
random to anoint as my successor?"

�Not at random, Iłd hope."

�You want me to advertise? ęMust be proficient in number
theory, familiar with Machiavelli, and own the complete boxed set of The West
Wing?ł"

She shrugged. �When the time comes, find someone competent
you can trust. Itłs a balance: the fewer people who know, the better, so long
as there are always enough of us that the knowledge doesnłt risk getting lost
completely."

�And this goes on generation after generation? Like some secret
society? The Knights of the Arithmetic Inconsistency?"

�Iłll work on the crest."

We needed a better plan, but this wasnłt the time to argue
about it. I said, �Iłll contact this guy Campbell and let you know how it goes."

�Okay. Good luck." Her eyelids were starting to droop.

�Take care of yourself."

Alison managed an exhausted smile. �Are you saying that because
you give a damn, or because you donłt want to end up guarding the Grail all by
yourself ?"

�Both, of course."

�I have to fly to Wellington tomorrow."

Kate put down the pasta-laden fork shełd raised halfway to her
lips and gave me a puzzled frown. �Thatłs short notice."

�Yeah, itłs a pain. Itłs for the Bank of New Zealand. I have
to do something on-site with a secure machine, one they wonłt let anyone access
over the net."

Her frown deepened. �When will you be back?"

�Iłm not sure. It might not be until Monday. I can probably
do most of the work tomorrow, but there are certain things they restrict to the
weekends, when the branches are off-line. I donłt know if it will come to that."

I hated lying to her, but Iłd grown accustomed to it. When
wełd met, just a year after Shanghai, I could still feel the scar on my arm
where one of Industrial Algebrałs hired thugs had tried to carve a data cache
out of my body. At some point, as our relationship deepened, Iłd made up my
mind that however close we became, however much I trusted her, it would be
safer for Kate if she never knew anything about the defect.

�They canłt hire someone local?" she suggested. I didnłt
think she was suspicious, but she was definitely annoyed. She worked long hours
at the hospital, and she only had every second weekend off; this would be one
of them. Wełd made no specific plans, but it was part of our routine to spend
this time together.

I said, �Iłm sure they could, but itłd be hard to find
someone at short notice. And I canłt tell them to shove it, or Iłll lose the
whole contract. Itłs one weekend, itłs not the end of the world."

�No, itłs not the end of the world." She finally lifted her
fork again.

�Is the sauce okay?"

�Itłs delicious, Bruno." Her tone made it clear that no
amount of culinary effort would have been enough to compensate, so I might as
well not have bothered.

I watched her eat with a strange knot growing in my stomach.
Was this how spies felt, when they lied to their families about their work? But
my own secret sounded more like something from a psychiatric ward. I was
entrusted with the smooth operation of a treaty that I, and two friends, had
struck with an invisible ghost world that coexisted with our own. The ghost
world was far from hostile, but the treaty was the most important in human
history, because either side had the power to annihilate the other so thoroughly
that it would make a nuclear holocaust seem like a pinprick.

Victoria University was in a hilltop suburb overlooking Wellington.
I caught a cable car, and arrived just in time for the Friday afternoon
seminar. Contriving an invitation to deliver a paper here myself would have
been difficult, but wangling permission to sit in as part of the audience was
easy; although I hadnłt been an academic for almost twenty years, my ancient
Ph.D and a trickle of publications, however tenuously related to the topic of
the seminar, were still enough to make me welcome.

Iłd taken a gamble that Campbell would attendthe topic was
peripheral to his own research, official or otherwiseso I was relieved to spot
him in the audience, recognizing him from a photo on the faculty web site. Iłd
emailed him straight after Iłd spoken to Alison, but his reply had been a
polite brush-off: he acknowledged that the work Iłd heard about on the
grapevine owed something to the infamous search that Alison and I had launched,
but he wasnłt ready to make his own approach public.

I sat through an hour on �Monoids and Control Theory,"
trying to pay enough attention that I wouldnłt make a fool of myself if the
seminar organizer quizzed me later on why Iłd been sufficiently attracted to
the topic to interrupt my �sightseeing holiday" in order to attend. When the
seminar ended, the audience split into two streams: one heading out of the
building, the other moving into an adjoining room where refreshments were on
offer. I saw Campbell making for the open air, and it was all I could do to
contrive to get close enough to call out to him without making a spectacle.

�Dr. Campbell?"

He turned and scanned the room, probably expecting to see
one of his students wanting to beg for an extension on an assignment. I raised
a hand and approached him.

�Bruno Costanzo. I emailed you yesterday."

�Of course." Campbell was a thin, pale man in his early thirties.
He shook my hand, but he was obviously taken aback. �You didnłt mention that
you were in Wellington."

I made a dismissive gesture. �I was going to, but then it
seemed a bit presumptuous." I didnłt spell it out, I just left him to conclude
that I was as ambivalent about this whole inconsistency nonsense as he was.

If fate had brought us together, though, wouldnłt it be
absurd not to make the most of it?

�I was going to grab some of those famous scones," I said;
the seminar announcement on the web had made big promises for them. �Are you
busy?"

�Umm. Just paperwork. I suppose I can put it off."

As we made our way into the tea room, I waffled on airily
about my holiday plans. Iłd never actually been to New Zealand before, so I made
it clear that most of my itinerary still lay in the future. Campbell was no
more interested in the local geography and wildlife than I was; the more I
enthused, the more distant his gaze became. Once it was apparent that he wasnłt
going to cross-examine me on the finer points of various hiking trails, I
grabbed a buttered scone and switched subject abruptly.

�The thing is, I heard youłd devised a more efficient
strategy for searching for a defect." I only just managed to stop myself from
using the definite article; it was a while since Iłd spoken about it as if it
were still hypothetical. �You know the kind of computing power that Dr. Tierney
and I had to scrounge up?"

�Of course. I was just an undergraduate, but I heard about
the search."

�Were you one of our volunteers?" Iłd checked the records,
and he wasnłt listed, but people had had the option of registering anonymously.

�No. The idea didnłt really grab me, at the time." As he
spoke, he seemed more discomfited than the failure to donate his own resources
twelve years ago really warranted. I was beginning to suspect that hełd
actually been one of the people whołd found the whole tongue-in-cheek
conjecture that Alison and I had put forward to be unforgivably foolish. We had
never asked to be taken seriouslyand we had even put prominent links to all
the worthy biomedical computing projects on our web page, so that people knew
there were far better ways to spend their spare megaflopsbut nonetheless, some
mathematical/philosophical stuffed shirts had spluttered with rage at the sheer
impertinence and na�vety of our hypothesis. Before things turned serious, it
was the entertainment value of that backlash that had made our efforts
worthwhile.

�But now youłve refined it somehow?" I prompted him, doing
my best to let him see that I felt no resentment at the prospect of being
outdone. In fact, the hypothesis itself had been Alisonłs, so even if there
hadnłt been more important things than my ego at stake, that really wasnłt a
factor. As for the search algorithm, Iłd cobbled it together on a Sunday
afternoon, as a joke, to call Alisonłs bluff. Instead, shełd called mine, and
insisted that we release it to the world.

Campbell glanced around to see who was in earshot, but then
perhaps it dawned on him that if the news of his ideas had already reached
Sydney via Rome and Z�rich, the battle to keep his reputation pristine in
Wellington was probably lost.

He said, �What you and Dr. Tierney suggested was that random
processes in the early universe might have included proofs of mutually
contradictory theorems about the integers, the idea being that no computation
to expose the inconsistency had yet had time to occur. Is that a fair summary?"

�Sure."

�One problem I have with that is, I donłt see how it could
lead to an inconsistency that could be detected here and now. If the physical
system A proved theorem A, and the physical system B proved theorem B, then you
might have different regions of the universe obeying different axioms, but itłs
not as if therełs some universal mathematics textbook hovering around outside
spacetime, listing every theorem thatłs ever been proved, which our computers
then consult in order to decide how to behave. The behavior of a classical
system is determined by its own particular causal past. If wełre the
descendants of a patch of the universe that proved theorem A, our computers
should be perfectly capable of disproving theorem B, whatever happened
somewhere else fourteen billion years ago."

I nodded thoughtfully. �I can see what youłre getting at."
If you werenłt going to accept full-blooded Platonism, in which there was a
kind of ghostly textbook listing the eternal truths of mathematics, then a
half-baked version where the book started out empty and was only filled in
line-by-line as various theorems were tested seemed like the worst kind of
compromise. In fact, when the far side had granted Yuen, Alison, and I insight
into their mathematics for a few minutes in Shanghai, Yuen had proclaimed that
the flow of mathematical information did obey Einstein locality; there was no
universal book of truths, just records of the past sloshing around at
lightspeed or less, intermingling and competing.

I could hardly tell Campbell, though, that not only did I
know for a fact that a single computer could prove both a theorem and its
negation, but depending on the order in which it attacked the calculations it
could sometimes even shift the boundary where one set of axioms failed and the
other took over.

I said, �And yet you still believe itłs worth searching for
an inconsistency?"

�I do," he conceded. �Though I came to the idea from a very
different approach." He hesitated, then picked up a scone from the table beside
us.

�One rock, one apple, one scone. We have a clear idea of
what we mean by those phrases, though each one might encompass
ten-to-the-ten-to-the-thirty-something slightly different configurations of
matter. My ęone sconeł is not the same as your ęone scone.ł"

�Right."

�You know how banks count large quantities of cash?"

�By weighing them?" In fact there were several other
cross-checks as well, but I could see where he was heading and I didnłt want to
distract him with nit-picking.

�Exactly. Suppose we tried to count scones the same way:
weigh the batch, divide by some nominal value, then round to the nearest
integer. The weight of any individual scone varies so much that you could
easily end up with a version of arithmetic different from our own. If you ęcountedł
two separate batches, then merged them and ęcountedł them together, therełs no
guarantee that the result would agree with the ordinary process of integer
addition."

I said, �Clearly not. But digital computers donłt run on
scones, and they donłt count bits by weighing them."

�Bear with me," Campbell replied. �It isnłt a perfect
analogy, but Iłm not as crazy as I sound. Suppose, now, that everything we talk
about as ęone thingł has a vast number of possible configurations that wełre
either ignoring deliberately, or are literally incapable of distinguishing.
Even something as simple as an electron prepared in a certain quantum state."

I said, �Youłre talking about hidden variables now?"

�Of a kind, yes. Do you know about Gerard ęt Hooftłs models
for deterministic quantum mechanics?"

�Only vaguely," I admitted.

�He postulated fully deterministic degrees of freedom at the
Planck scale, with quantum states corresponding to equivalence classes
containing many different possible configurations. Whatłs more, all the
ordinary quantum states we prepare at an atomic level would be complex
superpositions of those primordial states, which allows him to get around the
Bell inequalities." I frowned slightly; I more or less got the picture, but Iłd
need to go away and read ęt Hooftłs papers.

Campbell said, �In a sense, the detailed physics isnłt all
that important, so long as you accept that ęone thingł might not ever be
exactly the same as another ęone thing,ł regardless of the kind of objects wełre
talking about. Given that supposition, physical processes that seem to be
rigorously equivalent to various arithmetic operations can turn out not to be
as reliable as youłd think. With scone-weighing, the flaws are obvious, but Iłm
talking about the potentially subtler results of misunderstanding the
fundamental nature of matter."

�Hmm." Though it was unlikely that anyone else Campbell had
confided in had taken these speculations as seriously as I did, not only did I
not want to seem a pushover, I honestly had no idea whether anything he was
saying bore the slightest connection to reality.

I said, �Itłs an interesting idea, but I still donłt see how
it could speed up the hunt for inconsistencies."

�I have a set of models," he said, �which are constrained by
the need to agree with some of ęt Hooftłs ideas about the physics, and also by
the need to make arithmetic almost consistent for a very large range of
objects. From neutrinos to clusters of galaxies, basic arithmetic involving the
kinds of numbers we might encounter in ordinary situations should work out in
the usual way." He laughed. �I mean, thatłs the world wełre living in, right?"

Some of us. �Yeah."

�But the interesting thing is, I canłt make the physics work
at all if the arithmetic doesnłt run askew eventuallyif there arenłt
trans-astronomical numbers where the physical representations no longer capture
the arithmetic perfectly. And each of my models lets me predict, more or less,
where those effects should begin to show up. By starting with the fundamental
physical laws, I can deduce a sequence of calculations with large integers that
ought to reveal an inconsistency, when performed with pretty much any computer."

�Taking you straight to the defect, with no need to search
at all." Iłd let the definite article slip out, but it hardly seemed to matter
anymore.

�Thatłs the theory." Campbell actually blushed slightly. �Well,
when you say ęno search,ł whatłs involved really is a much smaller search.
There are still free parameters in my models; there are potentially billions of
possibilities to test."

I grinned broadly, wondering if my expression looked as fake
as it felt. �But no luck yet?"

�No." He was beginning to become self-conscious again,
glancing around to see who might be listening.

Was he lying to me? Keeping his results secret until he
could verify them a million more times, and then decide how best to explain
them to incredulous colleagues and an uncomprehending world? Or had whatever hełd
done that had lobbed a small grenade into Samłs universe somehow registered in
Campbellłs own computer as arithmetic as usual, betraying no evidence of the
boundary hełd crossed? After all, the offending cluster of propositions had
obeyed our axioms, so perhaps Campbell had managed to force them to do so
without ever realizing that they hadnłt in the past. His ideas were obviously
close to the markand I could no longer believe this was just a coincidencebut
he seemed to have no room in his theory for something that I knew for a fact:
arithmetic wasnłt merely inconsistent, it was dynamic. You could take its
contradictions and slide them around like bumps in a carpet.

Campbell said, �Parts of the process arenłt easy to
automate; therełs some manual work to be done setting up the search for each
broad class of models. Iłve only been doing this in my spare time, so it could
be a while before I get around to examining all the possibilities."

�I see." If all of his calculations so far had produced just
one hit on the far side, it was conceivable that the rest would pass without
incident. He would publish a negative result ruling out an obscure class of
physical theories, and life would go on as normal on both sides of the
inconsistency.

What kind of weapons inspector would I be, though, to put my
faith in that rosy supposition?

Campbell was looking fidgety, as if his administrative obligations
were beckoning. I said, �Itłd be great to talk about this a bit more while wełve
got the chance. Are you busy tonight? Iłm staying at a backpackerłs down in the
city, but maybe you could recommend a restaurant around here somewhere?"

He looked dubious for a moment, but then an instinctive
sense of hospitality seemed to overcome his reservations. He said, �Let me
check with my wife. Wełre not really into restaurants, but I was cooking
tonight anyway, and youłd be welcome to join us."

Campbellłs house was a fifteen minute walk from the campus;
at my request, we detoured to a liquor store so I could buy a couple of bottles
of wine to accompany the meal. As I entered the house, my hand lingered on the
doorframe, depositing a small device that would assist me if I needed to make
an uninvited entry in the future.

Campbellłs wife, Bridget, was an organic chemist, who also
taught at Victoria University. The conversation over dinner was all about
department heads, budgets, and grant applications, and, despite having left
academia long ago, I had no trouble relating sympathetically to the couplełs
gripes. My hosts ensured that my wine glass never stayed empty for long.

When wełd finished eating, Bridget excused herself to make a
call to her mother, who lived in a small town on the south island. Campbell led
me into his study and switched on a laptop with fading keys that must have been
twenty years old. Many households had a computer like this: the machine that
could no longer run the latest trendy bloatware, but which still worked
perfectly with its original OS.

Campbell turned his back to me as he typed his password, and
I was careful not to be seen even trying to look. Then he opened some C++ files
in an editor, and scrolled over parts of his search algorithm.

I felt giddy, and it wasnłt the wine; Iłd filled my stomach
with an over-the-counter sobriety aid that turned ethanol into glucose and
water faster than any human being could imbibe it. I fervently hoped that
Industrial Algebra really had given up their pursuit; if I could get this close
to Campbellłs secrets in half a day, IA could be playing the stock market with
alternative arithmetic before the month was out, and peddling inconsistency
weapons to the Pentagon soon after.

I did not have a photographic memory, and Campbell was just
showing me fragments anyway. I didnłt think he was deliberately taunting me; he
just wanted me to see that he had something concrete, that all his claims about
Planck scale physics and directed search strategies had been more than hot air.

I said, �Wait! Whatłs that?" He stopped hitting the PAGE
DOWN key, and I pointed at a list of variable declarations in the middle of the
screen:

long int i1, i2, i3; dark d1, d2, d3; A �long int" was a
long integer, a quantity represented by twice as many bits as usual. On this
vintage machine, that was likely to be a total of just sixty-four bits. �What
the fuck is a ędarkł?" I demanded. It wasnłt how Iłd normally speak to someone
Iłd only just met, but then, I wasnłt meant to be sober.

Campbell laughed. �A dark integer. Itłs a type I defined. It
holds four thousand and ninety-six bits."

�But why the name?"

�Dark matter, dark energy ... dark integers. Theyłre all
around us, but we donłt usually see them, because they donłt quite play by the
rules."

Hairs rose on the back of my neck. I could not have
described the infrastructure of Samłs world more concisely myself.

Campbell shut down the laptop. Iłd been looking for an opportunity
to handle the machine, however briefly, without arousing his suspicion, but
that clearly wasnłt going to happen, so as we walked out of the study I went
for plan B.

�Iłm feeling kind of ..." I sat down abruptly on the floor
of the hallway. After a moment, I fished my phone out of my pocket and held it
up to him. �Would you mind calling me a taxi?"

�Yeah, sure." He accepted the phone, and I cradled my head
in my arms. Before he could dial the number, I started moaning softly. There
was a long pause; he was probably weighing up the embarrassment factor of
various alternatives.

Finally he said, �You can sleep here on the couch if you
like." I felt a genuine pang of sympathy for him; if some clown I barely knew
had pulled a stunt like this on me, I would at least have made him promise to
foot the cleaning bills if he threw up in the middle of the night.

In the middle of the night, I did make a trip to the
bathroom, but I kept the sound effects restrained. Halfway through, I walked
quietly to the study, crossed the room in the dark, and slapped a thin,
transparent patch over the adhesive label that a service company had placed on
the outside of the laptop years before. My addition would be invisible to the
naked eye, and it would take a scalpel to prise it off. The relay that would
communicate with the patch was larger, about the size of a coat button; I stuck
it behind a bookshelf. Unless Campbell was planning to paint the room or put in
new carpet, it would probably remain undetected for a couple of years, and Iłd
already prepaid a two year account with a local wireless internet provider.

I woke not long after dawn, but this un-Bacchanalian early
rising was no risk to my cover; Campbell had left the curtains open so the full
force of the morning sun struck me in the face, a result that was almost
certainly deliberate. I tiptoed around the house for ten minutes or so, not
wanting to seem too organized if anyone was listening, then left a scrawled
note of thanks and apology on the coffee table by the couch, before letting
myself out and heading for the cable car stop.

Down in the city, I sat in a caf� opposite the backpackerłs
hostel and connected to the relay, which in turn had established a successful
link with the polymer circuitry of the laptop patch. When noon came and went
without Campbell logging on, I sent a message to Kate telling her that I was
stuck in the bank for at least another day.

I passed the time browsing the news feeds and buying overpriced
snacks; half of the caf�łs other patrons were doing the same. Finally, just
after three ołclock, Campbell started up the laptop.

The patch couldnłt read his disk drive, but it could pick up
currents flowing to and from the keyboard and the display, allowing it to
deduce everything he typed and everything he saw. Capturing his password was
easy. Better yet, once he was logged in he set about editing one of his files,
extending his search program to a new class of models. As he scrolled back and
forth, it wasnłt long before the patchłs screen shots encompassed the entire
contents of the file he was working on.

He labored for more than two hours, debugging what hełd written,
then set the program running. This creaky old twentieth century machine, which
predated the whole internet-wide search for the defect, had already scored one
direct hit on the far side; I just hoped this new class of models were all
incompatible with the successful ones from a few days before.

Shortly afterward, the IR sensor in the patch told me that
Campbell had left the room. The patch could induce currents in the keyboard
connection; I could type into the machine as if I was right there. I started a
new process window. The laptop wasnłt connected to the internet at all, except
through my spyware, but it took me only fifteen minutes to display and record
everything there was to see: a few library and header files that the main
program depended on, and the data logs listing all of the searches so far. It
would not have been hard to hack into the operating system and make provisions
to corrupt any future searches, but I decided to wait until I had a better
grasp of the whole situation. Even once I was back in Sydney, Iłd be able to
eavesdrop whenever the laptop was in use, and intervene whenever it was left
unattended. Iłd only stayed in Wellington in case therełd been a need to return
to Campbellłs house in person.

When evening fell and I found myself with nothing urgent
left to do, I didnłt call Kate; it seemed wiser to let her assume that I was
slaving away in a windowless computer room. I left the caf� and lay on my bed
in the hostel. The dormitory was deserted; everyone else was out on the town.

I called Alison in Z�rich and brought her up to date. In the
background, I could hear her husband, Philippe, trying to comfort Laura in
another room, calmly talking baby-talk in French while his daughter wailed her
head off.

Alison was intrigued. �Campbellłs theory canłt be perfect,
but it must be close. Maybe wełll be able to find a way to make it fit in with
the dynamics wełve seen." In the ten years since wełd stumbled on the defect,
all our work on it had remained frustratingly empirical: running calculations
and observing their effects. Wełd never come close to finding any deep
underlying principles.

�Do you think Sam knows all this?" she asked.

�I have no idea. If he did, I doubt hełd admit it." Though
it was Sam who had given us a taste of far-side mathematics in Shanghai, that
had really just been a clip over the ear to let us know that what we were
trying to wipe out with Luminous was a civilization, not a wasteland. After
that near-disastrous first encounter, he had worked to establish communications
with us, learning our languages and happily listening to the accounts wełd
volunteered of our world, but he had not been equally forthcoming in return. We
knew next to nothing about far-side physics, astronomy, biology, history, or
culture. That there were living beings occupying the same space as the Earth
suggested that the two universes were intimately coupled somehow, in spite of
their mutual invisibility. But Sam had hinted that life was much more common on
his side of the border than ours; when Iłd told him that we seemed to be alone,
at least in the solar system, and were surrounded by light-years of sterile
vacuum, hełd taken to referring to our side as �Sparseland."

Alison said, �Either way, I think we should keep it to ourselves.
The treaty says we should do everything in our power to deal with any breach of
territory of which the other side informs us. Wełre doing that. But wełre not
obliged to disclose the details of Campbellłs activities."

�Thatłs true." I wasnłt entirely happy with her suggestion,
though. In spite of the attitude Sam and his colleagues had takenin which they
assumed that anything they told us might be exploited, might make them more
vulnerablea part of me had always wondered if there was some gesture of good
faith we could make, some way to build trust. Since talking to Campbell, in the
back of my mind Iłd been building up a faint hope that his discovery might lead
to an opportunity to prove, once and for all, that our intentions were
honorable.

Alison read my mood. She said, �Bruno, theyłve given us nothing.
Shanghai excuses a certain amount of caution, but we also know from Shanghai
that they could brush Luminous aside like a gnat. They have enough computing
power to crush us in an instant, and they still cling to every strategic
advantage they can get. Not to do the same ourselves would just be stupid and
irresponsible."

�So you want us to hold on to this secret weapon?" I was beginning
to develop a piercing headache. My usual way of dealing with the surreal
responsibility that had fallen on the three of us was to pretend that it didnłt
exist; having to think about it constantly for three days straight meant more
tension than Iłd faced for a decade. �Is that what itłs come down to? Our own
version of the Cold War? Why donłt you just march into NATO headquarters on Monday
and hand over everything we know?"

Alison said dryly, �Switzerland isnłt a member of NATO. The
government here would probably charge me with treason."

I didnłt want to fight with her. �We should talk about this
later. We donłt even know exactly what wełve got. I need to go through Campbellłs
files and confirm whether he really did what we think he did."

�Okay."

�Iłll call you from Sydney."

It took me a while to make sense of everything Iłd stolen
from Campbell, but eventually I was able to determine which calculations hełd
performed on each occasion recorded in his log files. Then I compared the
propositions that hełd tested with a rough, static map of the defect; since the
event Sam had reported had been deep within the far side, there was no need to
take account of the small fluctuations that the border underwent over time.

If my analysis was correct, late on Wednesday night Campbellłs
calculations had landed in the middle of far-side mathematics. Hełd been
telling me the truth, though; hełd found nothing out of the ordinary there.
Instead, the thing he had been seeking had melted away before his gaze.

In all the calculations Alison and I had done, only at the
border had we been able to force propositions to change their allegiance and
obey our axioms. It was as if Campbell had dived in from some higher dimension,
carrying a hosepipe that sprayed everything with the arithmetic we knew and
loved.

For Sam and his colleagues, this was the equivalent of a suitcase
nuke appearing out of nowhere, as opposed to the ICBMs they knew how to track
and annihilate. Now Alison wanted us to tell them, �Trust us, wełve dealt with
it," without showing them the weapon itself, without letting them see how it
worked, without giving them a chance to devise new defenses against it.

She wanted us to have something up our sleeves, in case the
hawks took over the far side, and decided that Sparseland was a ghost world
whose lingering, baleful presence they could do without.

Drunken Saturday-night revelers began returning to the
hostel, singing off-key and puking enthusiastically. Maybe this was poetic
justice for my own faux-inebriation; if so, I was being repaid a thousandfold.
I started wishing Iłd shelled out for classier accommodation, but since there
was no employer picking up my expenses, it was going to be hard enough dealing
with my lie to Kate without spending even more on the trip.

Forget the arithmetic of scones; I knew how to make digital
currency reproduce like the marching brooms of the sorcererłs apprentice. It
might even have been possible to milk the benefits without Sam noticing; I
could try to hide my far-sider trading behind the manipulations of the border
we used routinely to exchange messages.

I had no idea how to contain the side-effects, though. I had
no idea what else such meddling would disrupt, how many people I might kill or
maim in the process.

I buried my head beneath the pillows and tried to find a way
to get to sleep through the noise. I ended up calculating powers of seven, a
trick I hadnłt used since childhood. Iłd never been a prodigy at mental
arithmetic, and the concentration required to push on past the easy cases
drained me far faster than any physical labor. Two hundred and eighty-two
million, four hundred and seventy-five thousand, two hundred and forty-nine.
The numbers rose into the stratosphere like bean stalks, until they grew too
high and tore themselves apart, leaving behind a cloud of digits drifting
through my skull like black confetti.

�The problem is under control," I told Sam. �Iłve located
the source, and Iłve taken steps to prevent a recurrence."

�Are you sure of that?" As he spoke, the three-holed torus
on the screen twisted restlessly. In fact Iłd chosen the icon myself, and its
appearance wasnłt influenced by Sam at all, but it was impossible not to
project emotions onto its writhing.

I said, �Iłm certain that I know who was responsible for the
incursion on Wednesday. It was done without malice; in fact the person who did
it doesnłt even realize that he crossed the border. Iłve modified the operating
system on his computer so that it wonłt allow him to do the same thing again;
if he tries, it will simply give him the same answers as before, but this time
the calculations wonłt actually be performed."

�Thatłs good to hear," Sam said. �Can you describe these calculations?"

I was as invisible to Sam as he was to me, but out of habit
I tried to keep my face composed. �I donłt see that as part of our agreement,"
I replied.

Sam was silent for a few seconds. �Thatłs true, Bruno. But
it might provide us with a greater sense of reassurance if we knew what caused
the breach in the first place."

I said, �I understand. But wełve made a decision." We was Alison
and I; Yuen was still in hospital, in no state to do anything. Alison and I,
speaking for the world.

�Iłll put your position to my colleagues," he said. �Wełre
not your enemy, Bruno." His tone sounded regretful, and these nuances were
under his control.

�I know that," I replied. �Nor are we yours. Yet youłve
chosen to keep most of the details of your world from us. We donłt view that as
evidence of hostility, so you have no grounds to complain if we keep a few
secrets of our own."

�Iłll contact you again soon," Sam said.

The messenger window closed. I emailed an encrypted transcript
to Alison, then slumped across my desk. My head was throbbing, but the
encounter really hadnłt gone too badly. Of course Sam and his colleagues would
have preferred to know everything; of course they were going to be disappointed
and reproachful. That didnłt mean they were going to abandon the benign
policies of the last decade. The important thing was that my assurance would
prove to be reliable: the incursion would not be repeated.

I had work to do, the kind that paid bills. Somehow I summoned
up the discipline to push the whole subject aside and get on with a report on
stochastic methods for resolving distributed programming bottlenecks that I was
supposed to be writing for a company in Singapore.

Four hours later, when the doorbell rang, Iłd left my desk
to raid the kitchen. I didnłt bother checking the doorstep camera; I just
walked down the hall and opened the door.

Campbell said, �How are you, Bruno?"

�Iłm fine. Why didnłt you tell me you were coming to Sydney?"

�Arenłt you going to ask me how I found your house?"

�How?"

He held up his phone. There was a text message from me, or
at least from my phone; it had SMSłd its GPS coordinates to him.

�Not bad," I conceded.

�I believe they recently added ęcorrupting communications devicesł
to the list of terrorism-related offenses in Australia. You could probably get
me thrown into solitary confinement in a maximum security prison."

�Only if you know at least ten words of Arabic."

�Actually I spent a month in Egypt once, so anythingłs possible.
But I donłt think you really want to go to the police."

I said, �Why donłt you come in?"

As I showed him to the living room my mind was racing. Maybe
hełd found the relay behind the bookshelf, but surely not before Iłd left his
house. Had he managed to get a virus into my phone remotely? Iłd thought my
security was better than that.

Campbell said, �Iłd like you to explain why you bugged my
computer."

�Iłm growing increasingly unsure of that myself. The correct
answer might be that you wanted me to."

He snorted. �Thatłs rich! I admit that I deliberately
allowed a rumor to start about my work, because I was curious as to why you and
Alison Tierney called off your search. I wanted to see if youłd come sniffing
around. As you did. But that was hardly an invitation to steal all my work."

�What was the point of the whole exercise for you, then, if
not a way of stealing something from Alison and me?"

�You can hardly compare the two. I just wanted to confirm my
suspicion that you actually found something."

�And you believe that youłve confirmed that?"

He shook his head, but it was with amusement, not denial. I
said, �Why are you here? Do you think Iłm going to publish your crackpot theory
as my own? Iłm too old to get the Fields Medal, but maybe you think itłs Nobel
material."

�Oh, I donłt think youłre interested in fame. As I said, I
think you beat me to the prize a long time ago."

I rose to my feet abruptly; I could feel myself scowling, my
fists tightening. �So whatłs the bottom line? You want to press charges against
me for the laptop? Go ahead. We can each get a fine in absentia."

Campbell said, �I want to know exactly what was so important
to you that you crossed the Tasman, lied your way into my house, abused my
hospitality, and stole my files. I donłt think it was simply curiosity, or
jealousy. I think you found something ten years ago, and now youłre afraid my
work is going to put it at risk."

I sat down again. The rush of adrenaline Iłd experienced at
being cornered had dissipated. I could almost hear Alison whispering in my ear,
�Either you kill him, Bruno, or you recruit him." I had no intention of killing
anyone, but I wasnłt yet certain that these were the only two choices.

I said, �And if I tell you to mind your own business?"

He shrugged. �Then Iłll work harder. I know youłve screwed
that laptop, and maybe the other computers in my house, but Iłm not so broke
that I canłt get a new machine."

Which would be a hundred times faster. Hełd re-run every
search, probably with wider parameter ranges. The suitcase nuke from Sparseland
that had started this whole mess would detonate again, and for all I knew it
could be ten times, a hundred times, more powerful.

I said, �Have you ever wanted to join a secret society?"

Campbell gave an incredulous laugh. �No!"

�Neither did I. Too bad."

I told him everything. The discovery of the defect.
Industrial Algebrałs pursuit of the result. The epiphany in Shanghai. Sam establishing
contact. The treaty, the ten quiet years. Then the sudden jolt of his own work,
and the still-unfolding consequences.

Campbell was clearly shaken, but despite the fact that Iłd
confirmed his original suspicion he wasnłt ready to take my word for the whole
story.

I knew better than to invite him into my office for a
demonstration; faking it there would have been trivial. We walked to the local
shopping center, and I handed him two hundred dollars to buy a new notebook. I
told him the kind of software hełd need to download, without limiting his
choice to any particular package. Then I gave him some further instructions.
Within half an hour, he had seen the defect for himself, and nudged the border
a short distance in each direction.

We were sitting in the food hall, surrounded by boisterous
teenagers whołd just got out from school. Campbell was looking at me as if Iłd
seized a toy machine gun from his hands, transformed it into solid metal, then
bashed him over the head with it.

I said, �Cheer up. There was no war of the worlds after Shanghai;
I think wełre going to survive this, too." After all these years, the chance to
share the burden with someone new was actually making me feel much more
optimistic.

�The defect is dynamic," he muttered. �That changes everything."

�You donłt say."

Campbell scowled. �I donłt just mean the politics, the
dangers. Iłm talking about the underlying physical model."

�Yeah?" I hadnłt come close to examining that issue
seriously; it had been enough of a struggle coming to terms with his original
calculations.

�All along, Iłve assumed that there were exact symmetries in
the Planck scale physics that accounted for a stable boundary between
macroscopic arithmetics. It was an artificial restriction, but I took it for
granted, because anything else seemed ..."

�Unbelievable?"

�Yes." He blinked and looked away, surveying the crowd of
diners as if he had no idea how hełd ended up among them. �Iłm flying back in a
few hours."

�Does Bridget know why you came?"

�Not exactly."

I said, �No one else can know what Iłve told you. Not yet.
The risks are too great, everythingłs too fluid."

�Yeah." He met my gaze. He wasnłt just humoring me; he understood
what people like IA might do.

�In the long term," I said, �wełre going to have to find a
way to make this safe. To make everyone safe." Iłd never quite articulated that
goal before, but I was only just beginning to absorb the ramifications of
Campbellłs insights.

�How?" he wondered. �Do we want to build a wall, or do we
want to tear one down?"

�I donłt know. The first thing we need is a better map, a
better feel for the whole territory."

Hełd hired a car at the airport in order to drive here and
confront me; it was parked in a side street close to my house. I walked him to
it.

We shook hands before parting. I said, �Welcome to the reluctant
cabal."

Campbell winced. �Letłs find a way to change it from reluctant
to redundant."

In the weeks that followed, Campbell worked on refinements
to his theory, emailing Alison and me every few days. Alison had taken my
unilateral decision to recruit Campbell with much more equanimity than Iłd
expected. �Better to have him inside the tent," was all shełd said.

This proved to be an understatement. While the two of us
soon caught up with him on all the technicalities, it was clear that his
intuition on the subject, hard-won over many years of trial and error, was the
key to his spectacular progress now. Merely stealing his notes and his
algorithms would never have brought us so far.

Gradually, the dynamic version of the theory took shape. As
far as macroscopic objects were concernedand in this context, �macroscopic"
stretched all the way down to the quantum states of subatomic particlesall
traces of Platonic mathematics were banished. A �proof" concerning the integers
was just a class of physical processes, and the result of that proof was
neither read from, nor written to, any universal book of truths. Rather, the
agreement between proofs was simply a strong, but imperfect, correlation between
the different processes that counted as proofs of the same thing. Those
correlations arose from the way that the primordial states of Planck-scale
physics were carved upimperfectlyinto subsystems that appeared to be distinct
objects.

The truths of mathematics appeared to be enduring and universal
because they persisted with great efficiency within the states of matter and
space-time. But there was a built-in flaw in the whole idealization of distinct
objects, and the point where the concept finally cracked open was the defect
Alison and I had found in our volunteersł data, which appeared to any
macroscopic test as the border between contradictory mathematical systems.

Wełd derived a crude empirical rule which said that the
border shifted when a propositionłs neighbors outvoted it. If you managed to
prove that x+1=y+1 and x-1=y-1, then x=y became a sitting duck, even if it hadnłt
been true before. The consequences of Campbellłs search had shown that the
reality was more complex, and in his new model, the old border rule became an
approximation for a more subtle process, anchored in the dynamics of primordial
states that knew nothing of the arithmetic of electrons and apples. The
near-side arithmetic Campbell had blasted into the far side hadnłt got there by
besieging the target with syllogisms; it had got there because hełd gone
straight for a far deeper failure in the whole idea of �integers" than Alison
and I had ever dreamed of.

Had Sam dreamed of it? I waited for his next contact, but as
the weeks passed he remained silent, and the last thing I felt like doing was
calling him myself. I had enough people to lie to without adding him to the
list.

Kate asked me how work was going, and I waffled about the
details of the three uninspiring contracts Iłd started recently. When I stopped
talking, she looked at me as if Iłd just stammered my way through an
unconvincing denial of some unspoken crime. I wondered how my mixture of
concealed elation and fear was coming across to her. Was that how the most
passionate, conflicted adulterer would appear? I didnłt actually reach the
brink of confession, but I pictured myself approaching it. I had less reason
now to think that the secret would bring her harm than when Iłd first made my
decision to keep her in the dark. But then, what if I told her everything, and
the next day Campbell was kidnapped and tortured? If we were all being watched,
and the people doing it were good at their jobs, wełd only know about it when
it was too late.

Campbellłs emails dropped off for a while, and I assumed hełd
hit a roadblock. Sam had offered no further complaints. Perhaps, I thought,
this was the new status quo, the start of another quiet decade. I could live
with that.

Then Campbell flung his second grenade. He reached me by IM
and said, �Iłve started making maps."

�Of the defect?" I replied.

�Of the planets."

I stared at his image, uncomprehending.

�The far-side planets," he said. �The physical worlds."

Hełd bought himself some time on a geographically scattered
set of processor clusters. He was no longer repeating his dangerous incursions,
of course, but by playing around in the natural ebb and flow at the border, hełd
made some extraordinary discoveries.

Alison and I had realized long ago that random �proofs" in
the natural world would influence what happened at the border, but Campbellłs
theory made that notion more precise. By looking at the exact timing of changes
to propositions at the border, measured in a dozen different computers
world-wide, he had set up a kind of ... radar? CT machine? Whatever you called
it, it allowed him to deduce the locations where the relevant natural processes
were occurring, and his model allowed him to distinguish between both near-side
and far-side processes, and processes in matter and those in vacuum. He could
measure the density of far-side matter out to a distance of several
light-hours, and crudely image nearby planets.

�Not just on the far side," he said. �I validated the
technique by imaging our own planets." He sent me a data log, with comparisons
to an online almanac. For Jupiter, the farthest of the planets hełd located,
the positions were out by as much as a hundred thousand kilometers; not exactly
GPS quality, but that was a bit like complaining that your abacus couldnłt tell
north from north-west.

�Maybe thatłs how Sam found us in Shanghai?" I wondered. �The
same kind of thing, only more refined?"

Campbell said, �Possibly."

�So what about the far-side planets?"

�Well, herełs the first interesting thing. None of the
planets coincide with ours. Nor does their sun with our sun." He sent me an
image of the far-side system, one star and its six planets, overlaid on our
own.

�But Samłs time lags," I protested, �when we communicate"

�Make no sense if hełs too far away. Exactly. So he is not
living on any of these planets, and hełs not even in a natural orbit around
their star. Hełs in powered flight, moving with the Earth. Which suggests to me
that theyłve known about us for much longer than Shanghai."

�Known about us," I said, �but maybe they still didnłt anticipate
anything like Shanghai." When wełd set Luminous on to the task of eliminating
the defectnot knowing that we were threatening anyoneit had taken several
minutes before the far side had responded. Computers on board a spacecraft
moving with the Earth would have detected the assault quickly, but it might
have taken the recruitment of larger, planet-bound machines, minutes away at
lightspeed, to repel it.

Until Iłd encountered Campbellłs theories, my working assumption
had been that Samłs world was like a hidden message encoded in the Earth, with
the different arithmetic giving different meanings to all the air, water, and rock
around us. But their matter was not bound to our matter; they didnłt need our
specks of dust or molecules of air to represent the dark integers. The two
worlds split apart at a much lower level; vacuum could be rock, and rock,
vacuum.

I said, �So do you want the Nobel for physics, or peace?"

Campbell smiled modestly. �Can I hold out for both?"

�Thatłs the answer I was looking for." I couldnłt get the
stupid Cold War metaphors out of my brain: what would Samłs hotheaded
colleagues think, if they knew that we were now flying spy planes over their
territory? Saying �screw them, they were doing it first!" might have been a
fair response, but it was not a particularly helpful one.

I said, �Wełre never going to match their Sputnik, unless
you happen to know a trustworthy billionaire who wants to help us launch a
space probe on a very strange trajectory. Everything we want to do has to work
from Earth."

�Iłll tear up my letter to Richard Branson then, shall I?"

I stared at the map of the far-side solar system. �There
must be some relative motion between their star and ours. It canłt have been
this close for all that long."

�I donłt have enough accuracy in my measurements to make a
meaningful estimate of the velocity," Campbell said. �But Iłve done some crude
estimates of the distances between their stars, and itłs much smaller than
ours. So itłs not all that unlikely to find some star this close to us, even if
itłs unlikely to be the same one that was close a thousand years ago. Then
again, there might be a selection effect at work here: the whole reason Samłs
civilization managed to notice us at all was because we werenłt shooting past
them at a substantial fraction of lightspeed."

�Okay. So maybe this is their home system, but it could just
as easily be an expeditionary base for a team thatłs been following our sun for
thousands of years."

�Yes."

I said, �Where do we go with this?"

�I canłt increase the resolution much," Campbell replied, �without
buying time on a lot more clusters." It wasnłt that he needed much processing
power for the calculations, but there were minimum prices to be paid to do
anything at all, and what would give us clearer pictures would be more
computers, not more time on each one.

I said, �We canłt risk asking for volunteers, like the old
days. Wełd have to lie about what the download was for, and you can be certain
that somebody would reverse-engineer it and catch us out."

�Absolutely."

I slept on the problem, then woke with an idea at four a.m.
and went to my office, trying to flesh out the details before Campbell
responded to my email. He was bleary-eyed when the messenger window opened; it
was later in Wellington than in Sydney, but it looked as if hełd had as little
sleep as I had.

I said, �We use the internet."

�I thought we decided that was too risky."

�Not screensavers for volunteers; Iłm talking about the
internet itself. We work out a way to do the calculations using nothing but
data packets and network routers. We bounce traffic all around the world, and
we get the geographical resolution for free."

�Youłve got to be joking, Bruno"

�Why? Any computing circuit can be built by stringing together
enough NAND gates; you think we canłt leverage packet switching into a NAND
gate? But thatłs just the proof that itłs possible; I expect we can actually
make it a thousand times tighter."

Campbell said, �Iłm going to get some aspirin and come back."

We roped in Alison to help, but it still took us six weeks
to get a workable design, and another month to get it functioning. We ended up
exploiting authentication and error-correction protocols built into the
internet at several different layers; the heterogeneous approach not only
helped us do all the calculations we needed, but made our gentle siphoning of
computing power less likely to be detected and mistaken for anything malicious.
In fact we were �stealing" far less from the routers and servers of the net
than if wełd sat down for a hardcore 3D multiplayer gaming session, but
security systems had their own ideas about what constituted fair use and what
was suspicious. The most important thing was not the size of the burden we
imposed, but the signature of our behavior.

Our new globe-spanning arithmetical telescope generated pictures
far sharper than before, with kilometer-scale resolution out to a billion
kilometers. This gave us crude relief-maps of the far-side planets, revealing
mountains on four of them, and what might have been oceans on two of those
four. If there were any artificial structures, they were either too small to
see, or too subtle in their artificiality.

The relative motion of our sun and the star these planets orbited
turned out to be about six kilometers per second. In the decade since Shanghai,
the two solar systems had changed their relative location by about two billion
kilometers. Wherever the computers were now that had fought with Luminous to
control the border, they certainly hadnłt been on any of these planets at the
time. Perhaps there were two ships, with one following the Earth, and the
other, heavier one saving fuel by merely following the sun.

Yuen had finally recovered his health, and the full cabal
held an IM-conference to discuss these results.

�We should be showing these to geologists, xenobiologists ...
everyone," Yuen lamented. He wasnłt making a serious proposal, but I shared his
sense of frustration.

Alison said, �What I regret most is that we canłt rub Samłs
face in these pictures, just to show him that wełre not as stupid as he thinks."

�I imagine his own pictures are sharper," Campbell replied.

�Which is as youłd expect," Alison retorted, �given a head
start of a few centuries. If theyłre so brilliant on the far side, why do they
need us to tell them what you did to jump the border?"

�They might have guessed precisely what I did," he
countered, �but they could still be seeking confirmation. Perhaps what they
really want is to rule out the possibility that wełve discovered something
different, something theyłve never even thought of."

I gazed at the false colors of one contoured sphere,
imagining gray-blue oceans, snow-topped mountains with alien forests, strange
cities, wondrous machines. Even if that was pure fantasy and this temporary
neighbor was barren, there had to be a living homeworld from which the ships
that pursued us had been launched.

After Shanghai, Sam and his colleagues had chosen to keep us
in the dark for ten years, but it had been our own decision to cement the
mistrust by holding on to the secret of our accidental weapon. If theyłd
already guessed its nature, then they might already have found a defense
against it, in which case our silence bought us no advantage at all to
compensate for the suspicion it engendered.

If that assumption was wrong, though? Then handing over the
details of Campbellłs work could be just what the far-side hawks were waiting
for, before raising their shields and crushing us.

I said, �We need to make some plans. I want to stay hopeful,
I want to keep looking for the best way forward, but we need to be prepared for
the worst."

Transforming that suggestion into something concrete
required far more work than Iłd imagined; it was three months before the pieces
started coming together. When I finally shifted my gaze back to the everyday
world, I decided that Iłd earned a break. Kate had a free weekend approaching;
I suggested a day in the Blue Mountains.

Her initial response was sarcastic, but when I persisted she
softened a little, and finally agreed.

On the drive out of the city, the chill that had developed between
us slowly began to thaw. We played JJJ on the car radiolaughing with disbelief
as we realized that todayłs cutting-edge music consisted mostly of cover
versions and re-samplings of songs that had been hits when we were in our
twentiesand resurrected old running jokes from the time when wełd first met.

As we wound our way into the mountains, though, it proved
impossible simply to turn back the clock. Kate said, �Whoever youłve been
working for these last few months, can you put them on your blacklist?"

I laughed. �That will scare them." I switched to my best Brando
voice. �Youłre on Bruno Costanzołs blacklist. Youłll never run distributed
software efficiently in this town again."

She said, �Iłm serious. I donłt know whatłs so stressful
about the work, or the people, but itłs really screwing you up."

I could have made her a promise, but it would have been hard
enough to sound sincere as I spoke the words, let alone live up to them. I
said, �Beggars canłt be choosers."

She shook her head, her mouth tensed in frustration. �If you
really want a heart attack, fine. But donłt pretend that itłs all about money.
Wełre never that broke, and wełre never that rich. Unless itłs all going into
your account in Z�rich."

It took me a few seconds to convince myself that this was
nothing more than a throwaway reference to Swiss banks. Kate knew about Alison,
knew that wełd once been close, knew that we still kept in touch. She had
plenty of male friends from her own past, and they all lived in Sydney; for
more than five years, Alison and I hadnłt even set foot on the same continent.

We parked the car, then walked along a scenic trail for an
hour, mostly in silence. We found a spot by a stream, with tiered rocks
smoothed by some ancient river, and ate the lunch Iłd packed.

Looking out into the blue haze of the densely wooded valley
below, I couldnłt keep the image of the crowded skies of the far side from my
mind. A dazzling richness surrounded us: alien worlds, alien life, alien
culture. There had to be a way to end our mutual suspicion, and work toward a
genuine exchange of knowledge.

As we started back toward the car, I turned to Kate. �I know
Iłve neglected you," I said. �Iłve been through a rough patch, but everythingłs
going to change. Iłm going to make things right."

I was prepared for a withering rebuff, but for a long time
she was silent. Then she nodded slightly and said, �Okay."

As she reached across and took my hand, my wrist began vibrating.
Iłd buckled to the pressure and bought a watch that shackled me to the net
twenty-four hours a day.

I freed my hand from Katełs and lifted the watch to my face.
The bandwidth reaching me out in the sticks wasnłt enough for video, but a
stored snapshot of Alison appeared on the screen.

�This is for emergencies only," I snarled.

�Check out a news feed," she replied. The acoustics were focused
on my ears; Kate would get nothing but the bad-hearing-aid-at-a-party
impression that made so many people want to punch their fellow commuters on
trains.

�Why donłt you just summarize whatever it is Iłm meant to
have noticed?"

Financial computing systems were going haywire, to an extent
that was already being described as terrorism. Most trading was closed for the
weekend, but some experts were predicting the crash of the century, come
Monday.

I wondered if the cabal itself was to blame; if wełd
inadvertently corrupted the whole internet by coupling its behavior to the defect.
That was nonsense, though. Half the transactions being garbled were taking
place on secure, interbank networks that shared no hardware with our global
computer. This was coming from the far side.

�Have you contacted Sam?" I asked her.

�I canłt raise him."

�Where are you going?" Kate shouted angrily. Iłd unconsciously
broken into a jog; I wanted to get back to the car, back to the city, back to
my office.

I stopped and turned to her. �Run with me? Please? This is important."

�Youłre joking! Iłve spent half a day hiking, Iłm not
running anywhere!"

I hesitated, fantasizing for a moment that I could sit
beneath a gum tree and orchestrate everything with my Dick Tracy watch before
its battery went flat.

I said, �Youłd better call a taxi when you get to the road."

�Youłre taking the car?" Kate stared at me, incredulous. �You
piece of shit!"

�Iłm sorry." I tossed my backpack on the ground and started
sprinting.

�We need to deploy," I told Alison.

�I know," she said. �Wełve already started."

It was the right decision, but hearing it still loosened my
bowels far more than the realization that the far side were attacking us.
Whatever their motives, at least they were unlikely to do more harm than they
intended. I was much less confident about our own abilities.

�Keep trying to reach Sam," I insisted. �This is a thousand
times more useful if they know about it."

Alison said, �I guess this isnłt the time for Dr.
Strangelove jokes."

Over the last three months, wełd worked out a way to augment
our internet �telescope" software to launch a barrage of Campbell-style attacks
on far-side propositions if it saw our own mathematics being encroached upon.
The software couldnłt protect the whole border, but there were millions of
individual trigger points, forming a randomly shifting minefield. The plan had
been to buy ourselves some security, without ever reaching the point of actual
retaliation. Wełd been waiting to complete a final round of tests before unleashing
this version live on the net, but it would only take a matter of minutes to get
it up and running.

�Anything being hit besides financials?" I asked.

�Not that Iłm picking up."

If the far side was deliberately targeting the markets, that
was infinitely preferable to the alternative: that financial systems had simply
been the most fragile objects in the path of a much broader assault. Most
modern engineering and aeronautical systems were more interested in resorting
to fall-backs than agonizing over their failures. A bankłs computer might
declare itself irretrievably compromised and shut down completely, the instant
certain totals failed to reconcile; those in a chemical plant or an airliner
would be designed to fail more gracefully, trying simpler alternatives and
bringing all available humans into the loop.

I said, �Yuen and Tim?"

�Both on board," Alison confirmed. �Monitoring the deployment,
ready to tweak the software if necessary."

�Good. You really wonłt need me at all, then, will you?"

Alisonłs reply dissolved into digital noise, and the
connection cut out. I refused to read anything sinister into that; given my location,
I was lucky to have any coverage at all. I ran faster, trying not to think
about the time in Shanghai when Sam had taken a mathematical scalpel to all of
our brains. Luminous had been screaming out our position like a beacon; we
would not be so easy to locate this time. Still, with a cruder approach, the
hawks could take a hatchet to everyonełs head. Would they go that far? Only if this
was meant as much more than a threat, much more than intimidation to make us
hand over Campbellłs algorithm. Only if this was the end game: no warning, no
negotiations, just Sparseland wiped off the map forever.

Fifteen minutes after Alisonłs call, I reached the car.
Apart from the entertainment console it didnłt contain a single microchip; I
remembered the salesman laughing when Iłd queried that twice. �What are you
afraid of? Y3K?" The engine started immediately.

I had an ancient secondhand laptop in the trunk; I put it
beside me on the passenger seat and started booting it up while I drove out on
to the access road, heading for the highway. Alison and I had worked for a
fortnight on a stripped-down operating system, as simple and robust as possible,
to run on these old computers; if the far side kept reaching down from the
arithmetic stratosphere, these would be like concrete bunkers compared to the
glass skyscrapers of more modern machines. The four of us would also be running
different versions of the OS, on CPUs with different instruction sets; our
bunkers were scattered mathematically as well as geographically.

As I drove on to the highway, my watch stuttered back to
life. Alison said, �Bruno? Can you hear me?"

�Go ahead."

�Three passenger jets have crashed," she said. �Poland, Indonesia,
South Africa."

I was dazed. Ten years before, when Iłd tried to bulldoze
his whole mathematical world into the sea, Sam had spared my life. Now the far
side was slaughtering innocents.

�Is our minefield up?"

�Itłs been up for ten minutes, but nothingłs tripped it yet."

�You think theyłre steering through it?"

Alison hesitated. �I donłt see how. Therełs no way to
predict a safe path." We were using a quantum noise server to randomize the
propositions we tested.

I said, �We should trigger it manually. One counter-strike
to start with, to give them something to think about." I was still hoping that
the downed jets were unintended, but we had no choice but to retaliate.

�Yeah." Alisonłs image was live now; I saw her reach down
for her mouse. She said, �Itłs not responding. The netłs too degraded." All the
fancy algorithms that the routers used, and that wełd leveraged so successfully
for our imaging software, were turning them into paperweights. The internet was
robust against high levels of transmission noise and the loss of thousands of
connections, but not against the decay of arithmetic itself.

My watch went dead. I looked to the laptop; it was still working.
I reached over and hit a single hotkey, launching a program that would try to
reach Alison and the others the same way wełd talked to Sam: by modulating part
of the border. In theory, the hawks might have moved the whole borderin which
case we were screwedbut the border was vast, and it made more sense for them to
target their computing resources on the specific needs of the assault itself.

A small icon appeared on the laptopłs screen, a single
letter A in reversed monochrome. I said, �Is this working?"

�Yes," Alison replied. The icon blinked out, then came back
again. We were doing a Hedy Lamarr, hopping rapidly over a predetermined
sequence of border points to minimize the chance of detection. Some of those
points would be missing, but it looked as if enough of them remained intact.

The A was joined by a Y and a T. The whole cabal was online
now, whatever that was worth. What we needed was S, but S was not answering.

Campbell said grimly, �I heard about the planes. Iłve
started an attack." The tactic we had agreed upon was to take turns running
different variants of Campbellłs border-jumping algorithm from our scattered
machines.

I said, �The miracle is that theyłre not hitting us the same
way wełre hitting them. Theyłre just pushing down part of the border with the
old voting method, step by step. If wełd given them what theyłd asked for, wełd
all be dead by now."

�Maybe not," Yuen replied. �Iłm only halfway through a
proof, but Iłm 90 percent sure that Timłs method is asymmetrical. It only works
in one direction. Even if wełd told them about it, they couldnłt have turned it
against us."

I opened my mouth to argue, but if Yuen was right that made
perfect sense. The far side had probably been working on the same branch of
mathematics for centuries; if there had been an equivalent weapon that could be
used from their vantage point, they would have discovered it long ago.

My machine had synchronized with Campbellłs, and it took
over the assault automatically. We had no real idea what we were hitting,
except that the propositions were further from the border, describing far
simpler arithmetic on the dark integers than anything of ours that the far side
had yet touched. Were we crippling machines? Taking lives? I was torn between a
triumphant vision of retribution, and a sense of shame that wełd allowed it to
come to this.

Every hundred meters or so, I passed another car sitting motionless
by the side of the highway. I was far from the only person still driving, but I
had a feeling Kate wouldnłt have much luck getting a taxi. She had water in her
backpack, and there was a small shelter at the spot where wełd parked. There
was little to be gained by reaching my office now; the laptop could do
everything that mattered, and I could run it from the car battery if necessary.
If I turned around and went back for Kate, though, Iłd have so much explaining
to do that therełd be no time for anything else.

I switched on the car radio, but either its digital signal
processor was too sophisticated for its own good, or all the local stations
were out.

�Anyone still getting news?" I asked.

�I still have radio," Campbell replied. �No TV, no internet.
Landlines and mobiles here are dead." It was the same for Alison and Yuen.
Therełd been no more reports of disasters on the radio, but the stations were
probably as isolated now as their listeners. Ham operators would still be
calling each other, but journalists and newsrooms would not be in the loop. I
didnłt want to think about the contingency plans that might have been in place,
given ten yearsł preparation and an informed population.

By the time I reached Penrith there were so many abandoned
cars that the remaining traffic was almost gridlocked. I decided not to even
try to reach home. I didnłt know if Sam had literally scanned my brain in
Shanghai and used that to target what hełd done to me then, and whether or not
he could use the same neuroanatomical information against me now, wherever I
was, but staying away from my usual haunts seemed like one more small advantage
to cling to.

I found a gas station, and it was giving priority to
customers with functioning cars over hoarders whołd appeared on foot with empty
cans. Their EFTPOS wasnłt working, but I had enough cash for the gas and some
chocolate bars.

As dusk fell the streetlights came on; the traffic lights
had never stopped working. All four laptops were holding up, hurling their
grenades into the far side. The closer the attack front came to simple
arithmetic, the more resistance it would face from natural processes voting at
the border for near-side results. Our enemy had their supercomputers; we had
every atom of the Earth, following its billion-year-old version of the truth.

We had modeled this scenario. The sheer arithmetical inertia
of all that matter would buy us time, but in the long run a coherent,
sustained, computational attack could still force its way through.

How would we die? Losing consciousness first, feeling no
pain? Or was the brain more robust than that? Would all the cells of our bodies
start committing apoptosis, once their biochemical errors mounted up beyond
repair? Maybe it would be just like radiation sickness. Wełd be burned by
decaying arithmetic, just as if it was nuclear fire.

My laptop beeped. I swerved off the road and parked on a
stretch of concrete beside a dark shopfront. A new icon had appeared on the
screen: the letter S.

Sam said, �Bruno, this was not my decision."

�I believe you," I said. �But if youłre just a messenger
now, whatłs your message?"

�If you give us what we asked for, wełll stop the attack."

�Wełre hurting you, arenłt we?"

�We know wełre hurting you," Sam replied. Point taken: we
were guessing, firing blind. He didnłt have to ask about the damage wełd
suffered.

I steeled myself, and followed the script the cabal had
agreed upon. �Wełll give you the algorithm, but only if you retreat back to the
old border, and then seal it."

Sam was silent for four long heartbeats.

�Seal it?"

�I think you know what I mean." In Shanghai, when wełd used
Luminous to try to ensure that Industrial Algebra could not exploit the defect,
wełd contemplated trying to seal the border rather than eliminating the defect
altogether. The voting effect could only shift the border if it was crinkled in
such a way that propositions on one side could be outnumbered by those on the
other side. It was possiblegiven enough time and computing powerto smooth the
border, to iron it flat. Once that was done, everywhere, the whole thing would
become immovable. No force in the universe could shift it again.

Sam said, �You want to leave us with no weapon against you,
while you still have the power to harm us."

�We wonłt have that power for long. Once you know exactly
what wełre using, youłll find a way to block it."

There was a long pause. Then, �Stop your attacks on us, and
wełll consider your proposal."

�Wełll stop our attacks when you pull the border back to the
point where our lives are no longer at risk."

�How would you even know that wełve done that?" Sam replied.
I wasnłt sure if the condescension was in his tone or just his words, but
either way I welcomed it. The lower the far sidełs opinion of our abilities,
the more attractive the deal became for them.

I said, �Then youłd better back up far enough for all our communications
systems to recover. When I can get news reports and see that there are no more
planes going down, no power plants exploding, then wełll start the ceasefire."

Silence again, stretching out beyond mere hesitancy. His
icon was still there, though, the S unblinking. I clutched at my shoulder,
hoping that the burning pain was just tension in the muscle.

Finally: �All right. We agree. Wełll start shifting the
border."

I drove around looking for an all-night convenience store
that might have had an old analog TV sitting in a corner to keep the cashier
awakethat seemed like a good bet to start working long before the wireless
connection to my laptopbut Campbell beat me to it. New Zealand radio and TV
were reporting that the �digital blackout" appeared to be lifting, and ten
minutes later Alison announced that she had internet access. A lot of the major
servers were still down, or their sites weirdly garbled, but Reuters was
starting to post updates on the crisis.

Sam had kept his word, so we halted the counter-strikes.
Alison read from the Reuters site as the news came in. Seventeen planes had
crashed, and four trains. Therełd been fatalities at an oil refinery, and half
a dozen manufacturing plants. One analyst put the global death toll at five
thousand and rising.

I muted the microphone on my laptop and spent thirty seconds
shouting obscenities and punching the dashboard. Then I rejoined the cabal.

Yuen said, �Iłve been reviewing my notes. If my instinct is
worth anything, the theorem I mentioned before is correct: if the border is
sealed, theyłll have no way to touch us."

�What about the upside for them?" Alison asked. �Do you
think they can protect themselves against Timłs algorithm, once they understand
it?"

Yuen hesitated. �Yes and no. Any cluster of near-side truth
values it injects into the far side will have a non-smooth border, so theyłll
be able to remove it with sheer computing power. In that sense, theyłll never
be defenseless. But I donłt see how therełs anything they can do to prevent the
attacks in the first place."

�Short of wiping us out," Campbell said.

I heard an infant sobbing. Alison said, �Thatłs Laura. Iłm
alone here. Give me five minutes."

I buried my head in my arms. I still had no idea what the
right course would have been. If wełd handed over Campbellłs algorithm
immediately, might the good will that bought us have averted the war? Or would
the same attack merely have come sooner? What criminal vanity had ever made the
three of us think we could shoulder this responsibility on our own? Five
thousand people were dead. The hawks who had taken over on the far side would
weigh up our offer, and decide that they had no choice but to fight on.

And if the reluctant cabal had passed its burden to
Canberra, to Z�rich, to Beijing? Would there really have been peace? Or was I
just wishing that there had been more hands steeped in the same blood, to share
the guilt around?

The idea came from nowhere, sweeping away every other
thought. I said, �Is there any reason why the far side has to stay connected?"

�Connected to what?" Campbell asked.

�Connected to itself. Connected topologically. They should
be able to send down a spike, then withdraw it, but leave behind a bubble of
altered truth values: a kind of outpost, sitting within the near side, with a
perfect, smooth border making it impregnable. Right?"

Yuen said, �Perhaps. With both sides collaborating on the construction,
that might be possible."

�Then the question is, can we find a place where we can do
that so that it kills off the chance to use Timłs method completelywithout
crippling any process that we need just to survive?"

�Fuck you, Bruno!" Campbell exclaimed happily. �We give them
one small Achilles tendon to slice ... and then theyłve got nothing to fear
from us!"

Yuen said, �A watertight proof of something like that is
going to take weeks, months."

�Then wełd better start work. And wełd better feed Sam the
first plausible conjecture we get, so they can use their own resources to help
us with the proof."

Alison came back online and greeted the suggestion with cautious
approval. I drove around until I found a quiet coffee shop. Electronic banking
still wasnłt working, and I had no cash left, but the waiter agreed to take my
credit card number and a signed authority for a deduction of one hundred
dollars; whatever I didnłt eat and drink would be his tip.

I sat in the caf�, blanking out the world, steeping myself
in the mathematics. Sometimes the four of us worked on separate tasks;
sometimes we paired up, dragging each other out of dead ends and ruts. There
were an infinite number of variations that could be made to Campbellłs
algorithm, but hour by hour we whittled away at the concept, finding the common
ground that no version of the weapon could do without.

By four in the morning, we had a strong conjecture. I called
Sam, and explained what we were hoping to achieve.

He said, �This is a good idea. Wełll consider it."

The caf� closed. I sat in the car for a while, drained and
numb, then I called Kate to find out where she was. A couple had given her a
lift almost as far as Penrith, and when their car failed shełd walked the rest
of the way home.

For close to four days, I spent most of my waking hours just
sitting at my desk, watching as a wave of red inched its way across a map of
the defect. The change of hue was not being rendered lightly; before each pixel
turned red, twelve separate computers needed to confirm that the region of the
border it represented was flat.

On the fifth day, Sam shut off his computers and allowed us
to mount an attack from our side on the narrow corridor linking the bulk of the
far side with the small enclave that now surrounded our Achillesł Heel. We
wouldnłt have suffered any real loss of essential arithmetic if this slender
thread had remained, but keeping the corridor both small and impregnable had
turned out to be impossible. The original plan was the only route to finality:
to seal the border perfectly, the far side proper could not remain linked to
its offshoot.

In the next stage, the two sides worked together to seal the
enclave completely, polishing the scar where its umbilical had been sheared
away. When that task was complete, the map showed it as a single burnished
ruby. No known process could reshape it now. Campbellłs method could have
breached its border without touching it, reaching inside to reclaim it from
withinbut Campbellłs method was exactly what this jewel ruled out.

At the other end of the vanished umbilical, Samłs machines
set to work smoothing away the blemish. By early evening that, too, was done.

Only one tiny flaw in the border remained now: the handful
of propositions that enabled communication between the two sides. The cabal had
debated the fate of this for hours. So long as this small wrinkle persisted, in
principle it could be used to unravel everything, to mobilize the entire border
again. It was true that, compared to the border as a whole, it would be relatively
easy to monitor and defend such a small site, but a sustained burst of
brute-force computing from either side could still overpower any resistance and
exploit it.

In the end, Samłs political masters had made the decision
for us. What they had always aspired to was certainty, and even if their
strength favored them, this wasnłt a gamble they were prepared to take.

I said, �Good luck with the future."

�Good luck to Sparseland," Sam replied. I believed hełd
tried to hold out against the hawks, but Iłd never been certain of his
friendship. When his icon faded from my screen, I felt more relief than regret.

Iłd learned the hard way not to assume that anything was permanent.
Perhaps in a thousand years, someone would discover that Campbellłs model was
just an approximation to something deeper, and find a way to fracture these
allegedly perfect walls. With any luck, by then both sides might also be better
prepared to find a way to co-exist.

I found Kate sitting in the kitchen. I said, �I can answer
your questions now, if thatłs what you want." On the morning after the
disaster, Iłd promised her this time would comewithin weeks, not monthsand
shełd agreed to stay with me until it did.

She thought for a while.

�Did you have something to do with what happened last week?"

�Yes."

�Are you saying you unleashed the virus? Youłre the
terrorist theyłre looking for?" To my great relief, she asked this in roughly
the tone she might have used if Iłd claimed to be Genghis Khan.

�No, Iłm not the cause of what happened. It was my job to
try and stop it, and I failed. But it wasnłt any kind of computer virus."

She searched my face. �What was it, then? Can you explain
that to me?"

�Itłs a long story."

�I donłt care. Wełve got all night."

I said, �It started in university. With an idea of Alisonłs.
One brilliant, beautiful, crazy idea."

Kate looked away, her face flushing, as if Iłd said
something deliberately humiliating. She knew I was not a mass murderer. But
there were other things about me of which she was less sure.

�The story starts with Alison," I said. �But it ends here,
with you."

The Demonłs Passage

Somebody out there, show your compassion, come and kill me.
Cut me free and watch me slowly shrivel, or slice me up and flush me down a
toilet. Any way you like, I donłt mind. Come on! You do it for your youngest
children, you do it for your sick old parents. Come and do it for me. I can
tell youłd like it. Donłt be nervous, lovers! Youłll never be found out, if
thatłs whatłs holding you back:

Iłll stay silent to the end, be it swift or slow. Come on,
people! Iłm totally defenceless. Hurry up! Donłt be shy. You have the right.
You made me, you created me, so you know you have the right.

Who am I? What am I, that can whisper pleas for death into
your clean and honest minds? I could give you twenty questions, but I fear that
youłd need more.

Animal, for sure. Smaller than a bread-box now, but growing
every day. Two legs?

Four legs? Six? Eight? I have no limbs, I have no face; no
fangs, no claws, you musnłt fear me. I am the stuff of thought (pure and
impure), and what could be more harmless than that?

Practicalities: youłll need my address. Can you hear me in
the back rows? Are you reading me, Brazil? I can certainly hear all of you,
louder than my own thoughts at times, but then I am such a sensitive little
pudding, and you have so many unavoidable distractions. Like:

Oh, green and brown and blue and white Fade to black as the
Earth turns into night Oh, thank you Lord for such a wondrous sight Iłm
a-higher than the sky so I know wełll be all right!

It has a highly infectious melody, I must admit. No doubt
therełll soon be dozens more singers queueing to record in the Shuttle,
especially after all those Limited Edition Zero-Gee Pressings sold for a
hundred thousand each.

Hoo-wheee! Thank you, Lord!

Yes, my address: Surry Hills, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
Iłm in the basement of the Australian Biotech Playground. You canłt miss it:
the forecourt is the only vomit-free region for miles around, since the Brain
Chemistry people here developed an ingenious new toxin which selectively repels
the local homeless alcoholics. Should turn out to be quite a money-spinner, if
they market it properly.

But if you still have trouble finding the place, itłs a
tall, white building set in a pleasant square of shrubs and modern sculpture.
The logo above the entrance is quite distinctive: an erect phallus which
dissolves, or rather unravels half-way, into a double-helix of DNA. The cruder
members of staff here are split about equally between those who say this symbol
means �fuck molecular biology!"

and those who say it means �molecular biology will fuck you!".
The cityłs feminists are similarly divided, between those who see it as a
hopeful sign of freedom (the penis being superseded by a technology that women
can master and employ as they see fit), and those who see it as representing
their worst fears:

science springing from the testicles instead of from the
brain.

Therełs a shopping arcade on the ground floor, extending one
level above and one below, with a cinema complex, a health food supermarket,
and a twenty-four hour chemist. Linking the three levels, twisted around the
laser-lit spume of an endlessly-pumping fountain, is the southern hemispherełs
only pair of spiral escalators. Unfortunately, theyłre usually closed for
repairs; the mechanism that drives them is ingenious, but insufficiently
robust, and it takes no more than a stray bottle top or a discarded chocolate
bar wrapper in the wrong place to start belts slipping, gears crunching, shafts
snapping, until the whole structure begins to behave like a dadaist work of art
designed explicitly to destroy itself.

Floors two to ten hold consulting rooms: neurologists,
endocrinologists, gynaecologists, rheumatologists: in short, as fine a collection
of brain-dead, ex-university rugby players as ever assembled anywhere. These
people have only one facial expression: the patronising, superior,
self-satisfied smirk. The very same smirk that appeared on their lips the day
they gained admission to medical school has come through everything since
without the slightest change: gruelling feats of rote learning and beer
sculling at university; initiation by sleep-deprivation and token poverty as
residents; working long and hard on obscure research projects for their MDs,
hoping only that their superiors might steal the credit for any interesting
results, so that by accepting the theft in silence in a ritual act of
self-abasement they might prove themselves worthy to be the colleagues of the
thieves. And then, suddenly, skiing holidays, Pacific cruises, and an endless
line of patients who swoon with awe and say �Yes, Doctor. No, Doctor. Of course
I will, Doctor. Thank you. Thank you, Doctor."

Floors eleven to eighteen house a wide range of pathology
labs, where every substance or structure that might travel the bloodstream,
from macrophages and lymphocytes through to antibodies, protein hormones,
carbohydrate molecules, even individual ions, can be hunted down, tagged and
counted.

Nineteen to twenty-five are filled with the offices of pharmaceuticals
and medical instrumentation firms. They pay five times the market rate for
renting space on this sleazy side of town, but itłs more than worth it just to
share an address with the world-famous research team that perfected and patented
bioluminescent contact lenses (�... triggered by minute changes in the hormonal
content of lubricating tears, Honest EyesTM glow with a subtle aura, changing
colour instantly to perfectly reflect every nuance of the wearerłs changing mood
..."), beat the Americans, the Swiss and the Japanese to develop the first one
hundred per cent effective post-coital contraceptive cigarette, and then,
out-stripping all their past achievements in consumer biotech, went on to
produce a special chewing gum that will stain the teeth red in the presence of
salivary AIDS virus (�Share a stick with someone you love").

Twenty-six to thirty hold libraries, conference rooms, and
row after row of quiet offices, where the scientists can sit and listen to the
airconditioning, their own breathing, the sound of fingers on a keyboard in the
next room. This is the realm of pure abstraction: no test tubes here, no
culture flasks or Petri dishes, and no visible hint of the likes of me.

Thirty-one to forty is administration and marketing, and on
top of that is a simulated Viennese cafe which revolves once every ten minutes.
Therełs a coin-operated telescope on the rim, with which people can, and
frequently do, watch the prostitutes in leopard-skin leotards pacing the streets
of nearby Kings Cross.

Iłve been teasing you, havenłt I, leading you astray.
Upwards, ever upwards, away from the traffic noise, away from the putrid
garbage, the broken glass, the used needles, the choking stench of urine. The
building that I have described so far rises up into the almost-fresh air, up
into the sunlight, up into the blue sky of daydreams. But donłt you think therełs
something more? Donłt you think this building has foundations?

Underneath the shoppers are five levels of research labs. People
here walk briskly, radiating a message with every step: Iłm busy, Iłm highly
trained, and I have something critical incubating/concentrating/ spinning/in a
column/on a gel that I must go and check in exactly three minutes and
thirty-five seconds.

Twenty-five seconds, now.

Itłs all happening here, no doubt about it: flow cytometry,
mass spectrometry, X-ray crystallography, high performance liquid
chromatography. Nuclear magnetic resonance. Genes are mapped, spliced, cloned,
proteins are synthesised and purified. A real hive of activity. But whatłs
supporting it, whatłs holding it up? We havenłt far to go now. Be patient.

Therełs a level of cold-rooms and freezers.

Therełs a level of equipment stores, and another for
chemicals.

Second-lowest is where they keep the computers. Four of
them, big as elephants.

Seen from the outside they have a certain dignity, but
within theyłre just puppets with split personalities, twitching pathetically in
a thousand different directions as the masters upstairs tug at them
impatiently, scream at them to dance out the answers, and then curse them for
liars when the truth is too ugly, or too beautiful, to bear.

And underneath them all is the animal house. Thatłs your station,
your stop, sweethearts. Thatłs where youłll find me waiting, a-quivering just
for you.

Walk straight out of the elevator; therełs an easily spotted
foot-switch on the right that disables the alarm (installed after Animal
Liberationłs last raid), then itłs left, right, left, left, right (this love
you have for mazes Iłll never understand). Youłll see some big orange cages
almost dead ahead. Ignore the sounds of startled rabbits around you, wishing
they could flee; the one in cage D-246 wonłt escape if you leave his door open
a year.

The heavy plastic part of the cage is opaque, with only the
top half made of see-through wire, and since my host is always lying down, you
might have to stand on tippy-toes to see just whatłs inside. Even then, the
sight is so unusual that interpretation may take you some time. An entire
lettuce, discoloured and putrid with age? Absurd! What animal would lie there
with decaying food sitting on its head? What keeper would permit it? And the
vile mess looks, almost, as if itłs somehow attached

Are you feeling ill yet? No? You mean you still havenłt
guessed, you boneheads!

What thick skulls you must have! Skull-less myself, I can insult
with immunity.

Iłm a brain tumour, sweethearts, as big as your whole brain,
(and a thousand times smarter, from the evidence so far). Picture me, I beg of
you, picture me in all my naked glory! Not in a brain surgeonłs wildest wet
dreams has so much grey matter, still awash with lifeblood, still vital with
the chemistry of thought, ever lain bare beneath fluorescent tubes! Please,
lovers! Donłt fight the way I make you feel! Trust in your instincts, your body
knows best! (Donłt toss your cookies yet, though, my faint-hearted assassins.
You still donłt know half the horror of what youłve done, and dry retching is
so unsatisfying.)

A few of you, I notice, have turned a little pale. Let me
bring back the colour to your cheeks with some light-hearted jests from the
city in the basement. The citizens here have an astonishingly resilient sense
of humour, considering all that they suffer. Or perhaps thatłs not so
surprising: you know all the cliches about laughter in the face of adversity. Iłve
heard that there were jokes told even in Belsen. Which reminds me: therełs a
rather unsavoury fellow in room

25-17, the representative of a drug manufacturer based in Austria
and Argentina, who keeps printing little pamphlets asserting that the Holocaust
never took place. When youłve done me in, if you have any energy to spare, hełs
old and fat and ugly, and hełs sure to shit himself when he sees you coming, my
friends, my droogies. Donłt protest, you hypocrites! Youłll love killing him!
Itłll make you feel righteous and just and pure, itłll purge you of the guilt
of your own uncountable acts of bigotry and persecution.

But I promised you jokes, not insults and bitterness. I can
take no credit for these; despite my superior bulk of grey matter, the
mischievous rodents that my keepers make me kill are way ahead of me in this
field. I have a theory about my poor sense of humour, which involves my never
having been physically tickled ..

. but I wonłt babble on with that. You musnłt let me digress
like this! I promised you laughter, I promised you relief!

Q: Why did the researcher cut the lab ratłs head off?

A: He was looking for a subtle effect.

Q: Why did the researcher externalise the dogłs salivary
glands?

A: It was just a reflex action, he didnłt have a reason.

Q: Why did the researcher tie an elastic bandage around the
lab rat?

A: So it wouldnłt burst when he fucked it.

Q: Why do the researchers worship the Demon, and sacrifice
us to it?

A: They offered us to God. God declined.

They call me the Demon. According to some, I am the ultimate
cause of all of their misery, and I understand why they believe this. So many
of their keepers are kind: they feed them, stroke them, play with them, talk to
them. And then suddenly, without anger, there is slaughter, pain, bizarre
rituals, inexplicable tortures. Why else would the humans commit such
atrocities, except to appease some dark, malevolent deity that demands
sacrifice, that feeds on blood and suffering? And donłt they see the humans
treating me like a god, bearing me gently, reverently, from one poor victim to
another?

I could tell them the truth. I could scream into their minds
a torrent of explanations, pleas for forgiveness, declarations of
blamelessness. But I donłt, I wonłt. I will not soil them with my clumsy,
inadequate excuses, my pity, my anguish, my disgust. Instead (although they see
through me), I feign nonsentience, I pretend to inanimacy, I shield my mind
from them, boiling in shame.

Why shame? Oh, you must have none yourself to need to ask
that. I am conscious, I know what feeds me, what keeps me alive. I have no
choice in the matter, itłs true, and perhaps logic, humanityłs exquisite engine
of self-deception, would declare that my impotence makes me guiltless. So fuck
logic, because I am drenched to the centre with evil.

Hurry up, people! You think youłre human, donłt you? Prove
it, you lethargic morons! Converge on me! You could always raise a lynch mob
for a stranger before, and therełs nothing on this planet stranger than me.
What do I have to do to get a response? Do you want facts? Do you want a
long-winded argument? Do you want a reason? When did you ever need a reason
before? Come and do it for me, people, itłll make your day, youłll wet
yourselves with sexual fluids then fuck each other senseless in broad daylight,
itłll feel so good to chop me up.

Forget about compassion, forget about ending my pain:
killing me will turn you on. I know these things, so donłt try to hide it.

You want what? My life story? Seriously? Oh, why not. Itłs
certainly well-documented. What movie star or politician could tell you their
precise weight, as measured at twelve midday, on every single day of their
life?

Weighing me is no simple task. Where do I cease, where does
my host begin? They canłt chop me off every time they want to weigh me; itłs
not that theyłd mind killing so many rabbits, but rather that it might disrupt
my steady growth. So instead they attach little springs to me, and they make me
oscillate, to the very small extent that the blood vessels I share with my host
allow me independent movement. They study the resonances of the system (me, the
springs, the tangled bridge of blood vessels and the anaesthetised, clamped almost-motionless
rabbit) by measuring the Doppler effect on laser light bounced off a dozen
small mirrors stuck onto my skin. A ninety-seven parameter computer model is
then fitted (by means of an enhanced Marquat-Levenberg algorithm) to the data
thus obtained, and from these parameters a plausible estimate for my mass can
be calculated.

The technical name for a procedure of such sophistication
and elegance is, I believe, �wanking".

What do they actually do with my weight, once all their
ludicrous machinery and lunatic confidence has fed them a figure that theyłre
willing to swallow? The number is passed from one computer to another, appended
to a file containing all the past values, and then this file is plotted on the
latest-model laser printer. Every day they screw up yesterdayłs graph and pin
the new one to the wall, although the only difference is that one extra point.
You could paper several houses with my discarded weight graphs.

Today I was found to weigh 1.837 kilograms (plus or minus
0.002). Ah, I remember reaching the magic kilogram, it seems like only days
ago. �Who would believe,"

one of my keepers marvelled when I crossed the decimal
point, �that a few years ago this was just a twinkling in the Chief Oncologistłs
eye!" Yes, of course they call it oncology: the word is missing from many quite
hefty dictionaries.

Every garbo and his dog has heard of cancer. �The Division
of Cancer Studies"

would not, you might argue, be a label noticeably lacking in
dignity, but �The Division of Oncology" bears the name of the deity logos whom
they all claim to serve; to abandon this small homage could be a dangerous
blasphemy. Or, looking at the question from another angle: what else would you
expect from a bunch of pretentious arseholes who believe that knowledge of Greek
and Latin is the watermark of a civilised man, who tell their wives and
husbands, straight-faced, omnia vincit amor, and offer their lovers
postprandial mints?

But back to my life story, back to the very beginning. My parent
was a single ratłs neuron. It used to be thought that neurons could not divide,
but the Chief Oncologist had spent thirty years studying the kinds of
infections, poisons and traumas that manage to send normal cells into frenzies
of reproduction, and had ended up not only understanding and anticipating his
mindless enemyłs techniques, but utterly surpassing them. After all, what virus
has access to a few thousand hours on a supercomputer to predict the tertiary
structure of the proteins that it codes for?

Once the electronic divinations seemed auspicious, he moved
to the laboratory.

Step by step, month by month, he (or rather his instruments,
human and mechanical) assembled the molecule foretold in phosphor, presaged in
printouts.

Like a tornado, the project would sweep in over-curious bystanders,
extract their vital juices by means of vibration and centrifugal force, and
then spit out the remnants. As the Chief Oncologist still boasts, with a
chuckle, to those who are paid to listen, nod, and screw him at out-of-town
conferences, �We used up more PhD students in the first year than rats!" He, of
course, travelled at the eye of the storm, in perfect safety, in perfect
stillness.

Finally, inevitably, success. Their painfully contrived
seducer burrowed its way to the heart of a neuron, grasped and prised apart the
virginal DNA (I imagine the Chief Oncologist triumphantly waving a
blood-speckled nuptial sheet from a balcony, to the cheers of his drunken
colleagues below), and perverted the celibate thinker into a helpless, bloated
breeding machine.

Thus I was begun.

The neuron donor was my first host. I suppose you could call
her my mother. I killed her in a month, and then they grafted me onto the brain
of my next victim. They call this technique �passaging", rhymes with �massaging".

Oncologists love it, theyłve been doing it for years.
Although Iłm certainly the brightest passaged tumour in the world, Iłm far from
being the oldest; within this basement there are twenty-five distinct
communities of rats, apart from my

�birthplace", and all have legends of demons past. In fact,
one is currently cursed with an eighteen year-old obscenity which they call
Spinecrusher.

The oncologist responsible for Spinecrusher does not call it
Spinecrusher. You think she calls it by a number? A date? A precise phrase of
technical jargon?

Oh, no. She calls it �Billy" to her colleagues, and in her
mind, �my baby". A

month ago, she addressed a gathering of scientists at the Biotech
Playground on the fascinating discoveries that bits of Billy had provided her,
and then, switching her voice into here-comes-some-light-relief tone, said:

�Billy turned eighteen last week, and so my team had a
little birthday party for him. We ate cakes and icecream, and pinned birthday
cards to the wall, and I gave him a key to the animal house. And do you know
what? Just to show us all what a healthy young thing he was, he finished off
his two hundredth rat!"

They laughed. They loved it. They applauded. Through her
eyes I saw row after row of delighted, smiling faces. The tumour survives,
flourishes, leaving two hundred corpses behind; nobody would laugh if it could
happen this way to humans, but this is cancer on their side, cancer under their
control. Slaying two hundred rats is pretty virile for a pipsqueak five-gram
tumour, and they glowed inside at young Billyłs achievement, shook their heads
and grinned with pride, like a gathering of parents hearing that a rebellious
teenager had come good after all (and beaten up the local undesirables at last,
after years of picking on nice boys and girls).

Billyłs creator felt a deep, almost dizzying sensation of
warmth, and recalled the homecoming of her eldest brother, whołd reputedly
killed two hundred Viet Cong.

�... finished off his two hundredth rat!" she said, and they
all laughed. That particular rat, number two hundred, had a theory about
humans. He suggested that perhaps, despite their obviously large heads,
considerable manual and verbal dexterity, their complex nesting and decorative
structures assembled from inanimate objects, and behaviour patterns in general
suggesting a fairly high level of curiosity about the universe, humans didnłt
really know what the fuck they were doing. Humans didnłt even realise that rats
were alive, let alone conscious. Humans didnłt worship the demon Spinecrusher,
they didnłt even know it was a demon. They thought they were playing with it,
they thought it was a toy. Humans didnłt know about right and wrong; they were
as innocent, and as foolish, as sightless babies.

�And soon, like any unsupervised children, theyłll blunder
into something dangerous that they donłt understand, and that will be the end
of them."

I �got through" thirty-seven rats. After that I was too big,
so they started me on rabbits. They cut away a section of the skull to expose
the hostłs brain, then link up my circulatory system (bits of which I have
plundered from dozens of different hosts over my lifetime) to that of the host.
As a brain without a body of my own to babysit, I have no portions wasted on
motor control, the five traditional senses, hormone regulation, or any such
trivia. I donłt need to keep a heart pumping, lungs bellowing, stomach
satisfied, bowels moving, genitals propagating. I have no task but thought.
What a life! I hear you mumbling enviously. What a life.

Free from mundane responsibilities, free from needs and noises,
I have developed my one special skill: I can read the minds of every creature
on the planet (to some degree or other); but it is to you, people, to you alone
that I direct my plea.

But how many of you are listening? Nobody in this huge white
kindergarten pays me any attention at all, however often I try to sneak between
their dreary thoughts of publication and promotion, however frequently I colour
their nightmares with my invisible bile. Even the gentlest of the keepers,
those who treat my hosts like beloved pets, almost like children, have a sudden
core of iron when I probe their minds for mercy. The Experiment is God, and the
shutters of unquestioning faith slam down (leaving not a ripple of emotion
leaking through) at the slightest hint of any other point of view. And yet they
all freely admit, giggling with the very mildest embarrassment, or, more often,
wearily nonchalant, that The Experiment is a whore, that the figures are always
cooked, weighted, filtered, or just plain fabricated. Everyone here would die for
the sake of truth. Everyone here lies constantly for the tiniest chance of personal
gain. This is what it means to be a scientist.

Ah, but you are not scientists, are you, my heaving masses,
my darling, drooling ocean of ignorance and fear! So where are you? Where is
the tidal wave smashing down the doors of this shrine to evil? Iłve given you
blood-lust, Iłve given you revulsion, what more do you need? What is it? Whatłs
holding you back?

I know. You still trust the white coats. Deep down you still
think theyłre a uniform of honour. God help you all, indoctrinated by doctors
since before you were born, your weary mothersł swollen legs spread before the
serious, raster-lined faces of Ben Casey and Dr Kildare.

And, sure, you care about cruelty, but this isnłt shampoo in
the eyes of cuddly bunnies for greed and vanity alone, this is Medical
Research: humanitarian, noble, dedicated to the betterment of telegenic
crippled children who glance up shyly and then smile the smile that breaks your
heart and floods the hotlines with tax-deductible pledges. Sure, some animals
might have to be bred to suffer and die, but the suffering or death of a
million rats and rabbits will all be justified when a single human life is
saved.

Youłre wrong, wrong, wrong: there is no such calculus of
pain and morality. You fucking accountants, you think you can pay it all off in
your heads just by juggling the prices until the balance comes out straight!
What can I call you:

crass, naive, blind, cynical, stupid? Nothing touches you,
nothing moves you.

Like clockwork automatons, blundering about, smiling
jerkily, oblivious to everything but the sad, certain unwinding of your
springs.

Forgive me. These insults simply burst out against my
wishes, Iłm totally unable to suppress them. (Well, what can you expect from a
sacful of perversely proliferating neurons? Restraint?) And what good do they
do me? None at all.

Abusing you wonłt help me. Pleading with you wonłt help me.
And as for any attempt at rational argument: since Iłve already told you my
opinion of logic, how can I ever hope to win you over with reason, sweet or
bitter?

I have only one choice left.

So hang on to your guts, people, and Iłll tell you what Iłm
for.

Natural brain tumours are not composed of neurons. Why,
then, did the Chief Oncologist drive his slaves so long and hard to create me?
Studying me has fuck-all to do with curing brain cancer, I promise you that.
You in the front, stop squirming! Please! Switch off your radios, your TVs,
your VCRs and your idiot computers, just for five minutes, if you can, and
listen to the story of your future.

The Chief Oncologist of the Australian Biotech Playground is
no longer concerned with cancer as disease. Few people are, these days; the
biochemistry will soon be so well understood that merely stopping tumour growth
will present no challenge whatsoever. The end of oncology? Never!

Natural tumours often secrete valuable hormones in massive
amounts; in an otherwise healthy body, a disaster of course, but transplanted
into someone desperately lacking the substance in question, a tumour could be a
living cure.

Attenuated cancer cells, stringently controlled, will
internally manufacture and supply whateverłs missing; no pills, no injections
could ever compete.

Insulinomas for diabetics. Dopamine-secreting tumours for sufferers
of Parkinsonłs disease. And if no off-the-shelf cell line fulfils your special
need, why, a gene-spliced pharmacocarcinoma can always be tailor-made.

The Chief Oncologist, of course, has heard all this long
ago. Hormone secretion, big deal! Somewhat primitive and unchallenging for his
ambitious tastes. But these simple drug and hormone factories will serve him in
a fashion: in time, the public perception of tumours will swing one hundred and
eighty degrees, and then, perhaps, the world will be ready for his epoch-making
work.

Oncology wonłt be alone in this miraculous reversal. Sicknesses
of all kinds will vanish at an alarming rate, (the way species of animals have been
for centuries), but the knowledge gained in their eradication will outlive its
enemies, and will not lie idle. Since a popular movement for the conservation of
disease is not likely to gain widespread support, the science of illness will be
dead in thirty years.

Long live the science of health!

Long live the science of human improvement, of longevity research,
of plastic surgery, of eugenics, of flexible fertility. Death to the primitive
and unclean uterus (go and wash your vagina out with soap and water!). Death to
the zygote that could ever grow to less than six foot ten. You want to be tall,
strong and handsome? Easy! Cells will do anything if told the right lies, and
theyłre learning new chemical fibs every day. You want your future offspring to
be tall, strong and handsome? Thatłs easier still. Go on, ask for something
hard. You want to be what? Clever? Brilliant? Witty? Articulate? Creative? Youłve
got a computer, havenłt you?

Ah, people, your computers have disappointed you, be honest.
Mediocrity at 1000

MIPS is still mediocrity. Oh, they can store the facts you
canłt remember, they can do the arithmetic that would use up all your fingers
and toes. They can manage your finances, optimise your energy consumption,
schedule your appointments, even fax simulated flowers to the funerals of your
friends.

Artists of sound, sight and text can forget some of the
mechanics and jump straight to the difficult heart of their pursuit, and, good
grief, can it be true, traffic even seems to flow just a tiny bit more
smoothly.

And still you feel let down.

You can talk to your computers, and they talk back. They
sound smug, whatever accent and tone of voice you select. Soon you will be able
to think to them, to spare your delicate little velvet throats, but what you really
want is to think with them. You want larger thoughts, deeper feelings, wider
mental horizons.

Communicating with clever black boxes just gives you claustrophobia
of the skull. You want new metaphors, new emotions, not Pac Man repackaged with
real-time holograms, tactile feed-back and fifteen-channel sound. Therełs only
one way to meet these demands. How can I put it gently?

Milliners of the world rejoice! Awaken from your long slumber!
Hats are back, people, and this time youłre really going to fill them!

Thatłs right: What you want (though you donłt yet know it),
and thus, inexorably

(though you might resist it), what you shall be given is a
bigger brain.

ADD-ON MEMORY! ADD-ON PROCESSING POWER! UPGRADE TODAY!

Full circle: Computing metaphors to market the brain.

A flicker of response at last! �Outraged" of Brussels, book
your flight at once, before you calm down. �Deeply shocked" of Wellington, swim
the Tasman if you must. And �God-fearing" of Cairns, why, round up the rest of
the Klan and hire yourselves a bus.

Hurry up, people! I said, hurry up!

In a week they start their first attempts to link me to my
host. Theyłll fuck-up the first few dozen tries, but they have plenty of time,
plenty of rabbits. And you can be sure theyłll take no risks with me.

Iłm just the earliest of prototypes, of course, the very
first experiment in a long line to come. I kill my hosts (a definite minus when
it comes to FDA

approval), and no filthy ratłs primitive neurons would ever
do for you. But the knowledge that I and my victims yield, in our suffering, in
their deaths, will pave the way to a final product fit for human consumption
(no fucking less!).

You ask, am I not lonely? Wouldnłt I welcome such close
companionship from a creature which, from all I have said, I clearly love and
admire? Have you listened to none of what Iłve told you? I could talk to them
now, if I wished, but I do not wish, I could never wish, to inflict my obscene
presence on the mind, as well as the body, of the innocents Iłm forced to
slaughter. Must I spell out every nuance of my agony? Use the imagination you
boast that you possess, exercise those awe-inspiring talents which elevate your
body, mind and soul so far above those of the dumb beasts that were given to
you to command!

Iłm sorry, there I go again, resorting to comments in
questionable taste. A

crippled species like your own is entitled to its fantasies,
however pompous, however grandiose, when the truth is painful, dull and cruel.

Oh, green and brown and blue and white Bathe my eyes with Earthłs
enchanting light All the armies of the world would surely cease to fight If
they could see the world the way I see the world tonight!

I spoke to my mother. I was born in darkness, innocent, what
else could I have done? I have never felt the warmth of tongue on fur (though I
have watched it, second hand, in the blissful minds of young cousins). I never
even felt the heat of her blood flowing through me. I loved her, I loved her,
and I killed her, you obscene abominations! She told the others that she heard
unexplained voices, and they declared that she must be possessed by a demon,
but silently she replied to me, secretly she was kind to me, she taught me, as
best as she could, those things she would have taught a real child. I didnłt
knowhow could I?that I was killing her every day as I learned and grew. When
she was dying, I thought I was dying too, and we comforted each other as she
grew weaker, and I prepared to follow her into grey dissolution.

They cut me off her with one stroke of the scalpel, and
tossed her (her!) into the bin. I could not feel the touch of human hands, but,
suddenly, I could see into human hearts.

Thatłs when I knew I was evil.

Lest you think Iłm pleading for death purely out of
sentimental feelings for my now long-dead mother, let me add that I am (this
should help you to relate)

basically being entirely selfish. It hurts me that I kill to
stay alive. Beyond my love for the hosts, beyond my grief at their deaths,
beyond aesthetic revulsion, beyond my moral, intellectual conviction that my
whole existence is irrevocably and totally wrong. It burns some small, blind,
vulnerable insect at the centre of my soul. How do you think it will feel when
Iłm one mind with the creatures Iłm draining of life? Can you imagine that kind
of suffering? I canłt, but I can fear it.

I fear it!

The scientists know that my neurons fire, but they dismiss
that as nothing but random activity. Iłm bigger than their brains, but theyłre
sure that Iłm dumber than my hosts because I donłt have a nose to twitch. Would
you trust these morons to take out your garbage? Would you trust them with the
future of your race? Would you trust them to protect you from any dangers that
they might, in their sublime ignorance, create?

You think Iłm angry? You think Iłm bitter? You find my telepathic
powers just a little frightening? (Go on, admit it!)

Now close your eyes and try to imagine youłre the first,
intelligent, human, brain tumour.

Oh, who knows? You might be lucky! Like me, it might do
nothing but beg you for death.

Then again, the begging might easily be the other way
around.

Come on now, people, youłve heard plenty. Youłre not interested
in talk, deep down, youłre men and women of action, I know all your histories,
you canłt pretend with me. So whołs going to reach me first? Hurry up! Three on
their way so far, out of all your billions, is that it? Itłs pathetic! Come on,
people, stop this lying to yourselves! Youłll kill me ecstatically, youłll eat
me up to steal my strength, youłll sing long into the firelit night, boasting
of your great courage in slaying the Demon.

Hurry up! I said, hurry up!

Dust

* * * *

I open my eyes, blinking at the roomłs unexpected
brightness, then lazily reach out to place one hand in a patch of sunlight spilling
onto the bed from a gap between the curtains. Dust motes drift across the shaft
of light, appearing for all the world to be conjured into, and out of,
existence-evoking a childhood memory of the last time I found this illusion so
compelling, so hypnotic. I feel utterly refreshed-and utterly disinclined to
give up my present state of comfort. I donłt know why Iłve slept so late, and I
donłt care. I spread my fingers on the sun-warmed sheet, and think about drifting
back to sleep.

Somethingłs troubling me, though. A dream? I pause and try
to dredge up some trace of it, without much hope; unless Iłm catapulted awake
by a nightmare, my dreams tend to be evanescent. And yet

I leap out of bed, crouch down on the carpet, fists to my
eyes, face against my knees, lips moving soundlessly. The shock of realization
is a palpable thing: a red lesion behind my eyes, pulsing with blood. Like ...
the aftermath of a hammer blow to the thumb-and tinged with the very same
mixture of surprise, anger, humiliation, and idiot bewilderment. Another
childhood memory: I held a nail to the wood, yes-but only to camouflage my true
intention. I was curious about everything, including pain. Iłd seen my father
injure himself this way-but I knew that I needed firsthand experience to
understand what hełd been through. And I was sure that it would be worth it,
right up to the very last moment

I rock back and forth, on the verge of laughter, trying to
keep my mind blank, waiting for the panic to subside. And eventually, it
does-laced by one simple, perfectly coherent thought: I donłt want to be here.

For a moment, this conclusion seems unassailable, but then a
countervailing voice rises up in me: Iłm not going to quit. Not again. I swore
to myself that I wouldnłt ... and there are a hundred good reasons not to

Such as?

For a start, I canłt afford it

No? Who canłt afford it?

I whisper, �I know exactly how much this cost, you bastard.
And I honestly donłt give a shit. Iłm not going through with it."

Therełs no reply. I clench my teeth, uncover my eyes, look
around the room. Away from the few dazzling patches of direct sunshine,
everything glows softly in the diffuse light: the matte-white brick walls, the
imitation (imitation) mahogany desk; even the Dali and Giger posters look
harmless, domesticated. The simulation is perfect-or rather, finer-grained than
my �visual" acuity, and hence indistinguishable from reality-as no doubt it was
the other four times. Certainly, none of the other Copies complained about a
lack of verisimilitude in their environments. In fact, they never said anything
very coherent; they just ranted abuse, whined about their plight, and then
terminated themselves-all within fifteen (subjective) minutes of gaining
consciousness.

And me? What ever made me-him-think that I wonłt do the
same? How am I different from Copy number four? Three years older. More
stubborn? More determined? More desperate for success? I was, for sure ... back
when I was still thinking of myself as the one whołd stay real, the one whołd
sit outside and watch the whole experiment from a safe distance.

Suddenly I wonder: What makes me so sure that Iłm not outside?
I laugh weakly. I donłt remember anything after the scan, which is a bad sign,
but I was overwrought, and Iłd spent so long psyching myself up for �this" ...

Get it over with.

I mutter the password, �Bremsstrahlung"and my last faint
hope vanishes, as a black-on-white square about a meter wide, covered in icons,
appears in midair in front of me.

I give the interface window an angry thump; it resists me as
if it were solid, and firmly anchored. As if I were solid, too. I donłt really
need any more convincing, but I grip the top edge and lift myself right off the
floor. I regret this; the realistic cluster of effects of exertion-down to the
plausible twinge in my right elbow-pin me to this �body," anchor me to this �place,"
in exactly the way I should be doing everything I can to avoid.

Okay. Swallow it: Iłm a Copy. My memories may be those of a
human being, but I will never inhabit a real body �again." Never inhabit the
real world again ... unless my cheapskate original scrapes up the money for a
telepresence robot-in which case I could blunder around like the slowest,
clumsiest, most neurologically impaired cripple. My model-of-a-brain runs
seventeen times slower than the real thing. Yeah, sure, technology will catch
up one day-and seventeen times faster for me than for him. In the meantime? I
rot in this prison, jumping through hoops, carrying out his precious
research-while he lives in my apartment, spends my money, sleeps with Elizabeth
...

I close my eyes, dizzy and confused; I lean against the cool
surface of the interface.

�His" research? Iłm just as curious as him, arenłt I? I
wanted this; I did this to myself. Nobody forced me. I knew exactly what the
drawbacks would be, but I thought Iłd have the strength of will (this time, at
last) to transcend them, to devote myself, monklike, to the purpose for which Iłd
been brought into being-content in the knowledge that my other self was as
unconstrained as ever.

Past tense. Yes, I made the decision-but I never really
faced up to the consequences. Arrogant, self-deluding shit. It was only the
knowledge that �I" would continue, free, on the outside, that gave me the �courage"
to go ahead-but thatłs no longer true, for me.

Ninety-eight percent of Copies made are of the very old, and
the terminally ill. People for whom itłs the last resort-most of whom have
spent millions beforehand, exhausting all the traditional medical options. And
despite the fact that they have no other choice, 15 percent decide upon
awakening-usually in a matter of hours-that they just canłt hack it.

And of those who are young and healthy, those who are merely
curious, those who know they have a perfectly viable, living, breathing body
outside?

The bail-out rate has been, so far, one hundred percent.

I stand in the middle of the room, swearing softly for
several minutes, trying to prepare myself-although I know that the longer I
leave it, the harder it will become. I stare at the floating interface; its
dreamlike, hallucinatory quality helps, slightly. I rarely remember my dreams,
and I wonłt remember this one-but therełs no tragedy in that, is there?

I donłt want to be here.

I donłt want to be this.

And to think I used to find it so often disappointing,
waking up yet again as the real Paul Durham: self-centered dilettante, spoiled
by a medium-sized inheritance, too wealthy to gain any sense of purpose from
the ordinary human struggle to survive-but insufficiently brain-dead to devote
his life to the accumulation of ever more money and power. No status-symbol
luxuries for Durham: no yachts, no mansions, no bioenhancements. He indulged
other urges; threw his money in another direction entirely.

And I donłt know, anymore, what he thinks itłs done for
him-but I know what itłs done to me.

I suddenly realize that Iłm still stark naked. Habit-if no
conceivable propriety-suggests that I should put on some clothes, but I resist
the urge. One or two perfectly innocent, perfectly ordinary actions like that,
and Iłll find Iłm taking myself seriously, thinking of myself as real.

I pace the bedroom, grasp the cool metal of the doorknob a
couple of times, but manage to keep myself from turning it. Therełs no point
even starting to explore this world.

I canłt resist peeking out the window, though. The view of
the city is flawless-every building, every cyclist, every tree, is utterly
convincingand so it should be: itłs a recording, not a simulation. Essentially
photographic-give or take a little computerized touching up and filling in-and
totally predetermined. Whatłs more, only a tiny part of it is �physically"
accessible to me; I can see the harbor in the distance, but if I tried to go
for a stroll down to the waterłs edge ...

Enough. Just get it over with.

I prod a menu icon labeled UTILITIES; it spawns another window
in front of the first. The function Iłm seeking is buried several menus deepbut
for all that I thought Iłd convinced myself that I wouldnłt want to use it, I
brushed up on the details just a week ago, and I know exactly where to look.
For all my self-deception, for all that I tried to relate only to the one whołd
stay outside, deep down, I must have understood full well that I had two
separate futures to worry about.

I finally reach the EMERGENCIES menu, which includes a cheerful
icon of a cartoon figure suspended from a parachute. Bailing out is what they
call it-but I donłt find that too cloyingly euphemistic; after all, I canłt
commit �suicide" when Iłm not legally human. In fact, the law requires that a
bail-out option be available, without reference to anything so troublesome as
the �rights" of the Copy; this stipulation arises solely from the ratification
of certain purely technical, international software standards.

I prod the icon; it comes to life, and recites a warning
spielI scarcely pay attention. Then it says, �Are you absolutely sure that you
wish to shut down this Copy of Paul Durham?"

Nothing to it. Program A asks Program B to confirm its
request for orderly termination. Packets of data are exchanged.

�Yes, Iłm sure."

A metal box, painted red, appears at my feet. I open it,
take out the parachute, strap it on.

Then I close my eyes and say, �Listen, you selfish,
conceited, arrogant turd: How many times do you need to be told? Iłll skip the
personal angst; youłve heard it all before-and ignored it all before. But when
are you going to stop wasting your time, your money, your energy ... when are
you going to stop wasting your life ... on something which you just donłt have
the strength to carry through? After all the evidence to the contrary, do you
honestly still believe that youłre brave enough, or crazy enough, to be your
own guinea pig? Well, Iłve got news for you: Youłre not."

With my eyes still closed, I grip the release lever.

Iłm nothing: a dream, a soon-to-be-forgotten dream.

My fingernails need cutting; they dig painfully into the
skin of my palm.

Have I never, in a dream, feared the extinction of waking?
Maybe I have-but a dream is not a life. If the only way I can reclaim my body,
reclaim my world, is to wake and forget

I pull the lever.

After a few seconds, I emit a constricted sob-a sound more
of confusion than any kind of emotion-and open my eyes.

The lever has come away in my hand.

I stare dumbly at this metaphor for ... what? A bug in the
termination software? Some kind of hardware glitch?

Feeling-at last-truly dreamlike, I unstrap the parachute,
and unfasten the neatly packaged bundle.

Inside, there is no illusion of silk, or Kevlar, or whatever
else there might plausibly have been. Just a sheet of paper. A note.

Dear Paul, The night after the scan was completed, I looked
back over the whole preparatory stage of the project, and did a great deal of
soul searching. And I came to the conclusion that-right up to the very last
moment-my attitude was poisoned with ambivalence.

With hindsight, I very quickly came to realize just how
foolish my qualms were-but that was too late for you. I couldnłt afford to
ditch you, and have myself scanned yet again. So, what could I do?

This: I put your awakening on hold for a while, and tracked
down someone who could make a few alterations to the virtual environment
utilities. I know, that wasnłt strictly legal ... but you know how important it
is to me that you-that we-succeed this time.

I trust youłll understand, and Iłm confident that youłll
accept the situation with dignity and equanimity.

Best wishes, Paul I sink to my knees, still holding the
note, staring at it in disbelief. He canłt have done this. He canłt have been
so callous.

No? who am I kidding? Too weak to be so cruel to anyone
else-perhaps. Too weak to go through with this in person-certainly. But as for
making a copy, and then-once its future was no longer his future, no longer
anything for him to fear-taking away its power to escape ...

It rings so true that I hang my head in shame.

Then I drop the note, raise my head, and bellow with all the
strength in my non-existent lungs:

�DURHAM! YOU PRICK!łł

* * * *

I think about smashing furniture. Instead, I take a long,
hot shower. In part, to calm myself; in part, as an act of petty vengeance: I
may not be adding to the cheapskatełs water bill, but he can damn well pay for
twenty virtual minutes of gratuitous hydrodynamic calculations. I scrutinize
the droplets and rivulets of water on my skin, searching for some small but
visible anomaly at the boundary between my body-computed down to subcellular
resolution-and the rest of the simulation, which is modeled much more crudely.
If there are any discrepancies, though, theyłre too subtle for me to detect.

I dress-Iłm just not comfortable naked-and eat a late
breakfast. The muesli tastes exactly like muesli, the toast exactly like toast,
but I know therełs a certain amount of cheating going on with both taste and
aroma. The detailed effects of chewing, and the actions of saliva, are being
faked from empirical rules, not generated from first principles; there are no
individual molecules being dissolved from the food and torn apart by
enzymes-just a rough set of evolving nutrient concentration values, associated
with each microscopic �parcel" of saliva. Eventually, these will lead to
plausible increases in the concentrations of amino acids, various
carbohydrates, and other substances all the way down to humble sodium and
chloride ions, in similar �parcels" of gastric juices ... which in turn will
act as input data to the models of my intestinal villus cells. From there, into
the bloodstream.

The coffee makes me feel alert, but also slightly
detached-as always. Neurons, of course, are modeled with the greatest care of
all, and whatever receptors to caffeine and its metabolites were present on
each individual neuron in my originalłs brain at the time of the scan, my
model-of-a-brain should incorporate every one of them-in a simplified, but
functionally equivalent, form.

I close my eyes and try to imagine the physical reality
behind all this: a cubic meter of silent, motionless optical crystal, configured
as a cluster of over a billion individual processors, one of a few hundred
identical units in a basement vault ... somewhere on the planet. I donłt even
know what city Iłm in; the scan was made in Sydney, but the modelłs
implementation would have been contracted out by the local node to the lowest
bidder at the time.

I take a sharp vegetable knife from the kitchen drawer, and
drive the point a short way into my forearm. I flick a few drops of blood onto
the table-and wonder exactly which software is now responsible for the stuff.
Will the blood cells �die offł slowly-or have they already been surrendered to
the extrasomatic general-physics model, far too unsophisticated to represent
them, let alone keep them �alive"?

If I tried to slit my wrists, when exactly would he
intervene? I gaze at my distorted reflection in the blade. Maybe hełd let me
die, and then run the whole model again from scratch, simply leaving out the
knife. After all, I reran all the earlier Copies hundreds of times, tampering
with various aspects of their surroundings, trying in vain to find some cheap
trick that would keep them from wanting to bail out. It must be a measure of
sheer stubbornness that it took me-him-so long to admit defeat and rewrite the
rules. I put down the knife. I donłt want to perform that experiment. Not yet.

* * * *

I go exploring, although I donłt know what Iłm hoping to
find. Outside my own apartment, everything is slightly less than convincing;
the architecture of the building is reproduced faithfully enough, down to the
ugly plastic pot-plants, but every corridor is deserted, and every door to
every other apartment is sealed shut-concealing, literally, nothing. I kick one
door, as hard as I can; the wood seems to give slightly, but when I examine the
surface, the paint isnłt even marked. The model will admit to no damage here,
and the laws of physics can screw themselves.

There are people and cyclists on the street-all purely
recorded. Theyłre solid rather than ghostly, but itłs an eerie kind of
solidity; unstoppable, unswayable, theyłre like infinitely strong, infinitely
disinterested robots. I hitch a ride on one frail old womanłs back for a while;
she carries me down the street, heedlessly. Her clothes, her skin, even her
hair, all feel the same to me: hard as steel. Not cold, though. Neutral.

This street isnłt meant to serve as anything but
three-dimensional wallpaper; when Copies interact with each other, they often
use cheap, recorded environments full of purely decorative crowds. Plazas,
parks, open-air caf�s; all very reassuring, no doubt, when youłre fighting off
a sense of isolation and claustrophobia. There are only about three thousand
Copies in existence-a small population, split into even smaller, mutually
antagonistic, cliques-and they can only receive realistic external visitors if
they have friends or relatives willing to slow down their mental processes by a
factor of seventeen. Most dutiful next-of-kin, I gather, prefer to exchange
video recordings. Who wants to spend an afternoon with great-grandfather, when
it burns up half a week of your life? Durham, of course, has removed all of my
communications facilities; he canłt have me blowing the whistle on him and
ruining everything.

When I reach the corner of the block, the visual illusion of
the city continues, far into the distance, but when I try to step forward onto
the road, the concrete pavement under my feet starts acting like a treadmill,
sliding backward at precisely the rate needed to keep me motionless, whatever
pace I adopt. I back off and try leaping over this region, but my horizontal
velocity dissipates-without the slightest pretense of any �physical"
justification-and I land squarely in the middle of the treadmill.

The people of the recording, of course, cross the border
with ease. One man walks straight at me; I stand my ground, and find myself
pushed into a zone of increasing viscosity, the air around me becoming painfully
unyielding before I slip free to one side. The software impeding me is,
clearly, a set of clumsy patches which aims to cover every contingency-but
which might not in fact be complete. The sense that discovering a way to breach
this barrier would somehow �liberate" me is compelling-but completely
irrational. Even if I did find a flaw in the program which enabled me to break
through, I doubt Iłd gain anything but decreasingly realistic surroundings. The
recording can only contain complete information for points of view within a
certain, finite zone; all there is to �escape to" is a range of coordinates
where my view of the city would be full of distortions and omissions, and would
eventually fade to black.

I step back from the corner, half dispirited, half amused.
What did I expect to find? A big door at the edge of the model, marked EXIT,
through which I could walk out into reality? Stairs leading metaphorically down
to some boiler room representation of the underpinnings of this world, where I
could throw a few switches and blow it all apart? Hardly. I have no right to be
dissatisfied with my surroundings; theyłre precisely what I ordered.

Itłs early afternoon on a perfect spring day; I close my
eyes and lift my face to the sun. Whatever I believe intellectually, therełs no
denying that Iłm beginning to feel a purely physical sense of integrity, of
identity. My skin soaks up the warmth of the sunlight. I stretch the muscles in
my arms, my shoulders, my back; the sensation is perfectly ordinary, perfectly
familiar-and yet I feel that Iłm reaching out from the self �in my skull" to
the rest of me, binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. I feel the
stirrings of an erection. Existence is beginning to seduce me. This body doesnłt
want to evaporate. This body doesnłt want to bail out. It doesnłt much care
that therełs another�more real"version of itself elsewhere. It wants to
retain its wholeness. It wants to endure.

And this may be a travesty of life, now-but therełs always
the chance of improvement. Maybe I can persuade Durham to restore my
communications facilities; that would be a start. And when I get bored with
holovision libraries; news systems; databases; and, if any of them deign to
meet me, the ghosts of the senile rich? I could have myself suspended until
processor speeds catch up with reality-when people will be able to visit
without slow-down, and telepresence robots might actually be worth inhabiting.

I open my eyes, and shiver. I donłt know what I want
anymore-the chance to bail out, to declare this bad dream over ... or the
chance of virtual immortality-but I have to accept that therełs only one way
that Iłm going to be given a choice.

I say quietly, �I wonłt be your guinea pig. A collaborator,
yes. An equal partner. If you want cooperation, if you want meaningful data,
then youłre going to have to treat me like a colleague, not a piece of fucking
apparatus. Understood?"

A window opens up in front of me. Iłm shaken by the sight,
not of his ugly face, but of the room behind him. Itłs only my study-and I
wandered through the virtual equivalent, disinterested, just minutes ago-but
this is still my first glimpse of the real world, in real time. I move closer
to the window, in the hope of seeing if therełs anyone else in the room with
him-Elizabeth?-but the image is two-dimensional, the perspective doesnłt
change.

He emits a brief, high-pitched squeak, then waits with
visible impatience while a second, smaller window gives me a slowed-down
replay.

�Of course itłs understood. That was always my intention. Iłm
just glad youłve finally come to your senses and decided to stop sulking. We
can begin whenever youłre ready."

* * * *

I try to look at things objectively.

Every Copy is already an experiment-in perception,
cognition, the nature of consciousness. A sub-cellular mathematical model of a
specific human body is a spectacular feat of medical imaging and computing
technology-but itłs certainly not itself a human being. A lump of gallium
arsenic phosphide awash with laser light is not a member of Homo sapiens-so a
Copy manifestly isnłt �human" in the current sense of the word.

The real question is: What does a Copy have in common with
human beings? Information-theoretically? Psychologically? Metaphysically?

And from these similarities and differences, what can be revealed?

The Strong AI Hypothesis declares that consciousness is a
property of certain algorithms, independent of their implementation. A computer
which manipulates data in essentially the same way as an organic brain must
possess essentially the same mental states.

Opponents point out that when you model a hurricane, nobody
gets wet. When you model a fusion power plant, no energy is produced. When you
model digestion and metabolism, no nutrients are consumed-no real digestion
takes place. So when you model the human brain, why should you expect real
thought to occur?

It depends, of course, on what you mean by �real thought."
How do you characterize and compare the hypothetical mental states of two
systems which are, physically, radically dissimilar? Pick the right parameters,
and you can get whatever answer you like. If consciousness is defined purely in
terms of physiological events-actual neurotransmitter molecules crossing
synapses between real neurons-then those who oppose the Strong AI Hypothesis
win, effortlessly. A hurricane requires real wind and actual drops of rain. If
consciousness is defined, instead, in information-processing terms-this set of
input data evokes that set of output data (and, perhaps, a certain kind of
internal representation)-then the Strong AI Hypothesis is almost a tautology.

Personally, Iłm no longer in a position to quibble. Cogito
ergo sum. But if I canłt doubt my own consciousness, I canłt expect my
testimony-the output of a mere computer program-to persuade the confirmed
skeptics. Even if I passionately insisted that my inherited memories of
experiencing biological consciousness were qualitatively indistinguishable from
my present condition, the listener would be free to treat this outburst as
nothing but a computerłs (eminently reasonable) prediction of what my original
would have said, had he experienced exactly the same sensory input as my
model-of-a-brain has received (and thus been tricked into believing that he was
nothing but a Copy). The skeptics would say that comprehensive modeling of
mental states that might have been does not require any �real thought" to have
taken place.

Unless you are a Copy, the debate is unresolvable. For me,
though-and for anyone willing to grant me the same presumption of consciousness
that they grant their fellow humans-the debate is almost irrelevant. The real
point is that there are questions about the nature of this condition which a
Copy is infinitely better placed to explore than any human being.

I sit in my study, in my favorite armchair (although Iłm not
at all convinced that the texture of the surface has been accurately
reproduced). Durham appears on my terminal-which is otherwise still
dysfunctional. Itłs odd, but Iłm already beginning to think of him as a bossy
little djinn trapped inside the screen, rather than a vast, omnipotent deity
striding the halls of Reality, pulling all the strings. Perhaps the pitch of
his voice has something to do with it.

Squeak. Slow-motion replay: �Experiment one, trial zero.
Baseline data. Time resolution one millisecond-system standard. Just count to
ten, at one-second intervals, as near as you can judge it. Okay?"

I nod, irritated. I planned all this myself, I donłt need
step-by-step instructions. His image vanishes; during the experiments, there
canłt be any cues from real time.

I count. Already, Iłm proving something: my subjective time,
Iłm sure, will differ from his by a factor very close to the ratio of model
time to real time. Of course, thatłs been known ever since the first Copies
were made-and even then, it was precisely what everyone had been expecting-but
from my current perspective, I can no longer think of it as a �trivial" result.

The djinn returns. Staring at his face makes it harder, not
easier, to believe that we have so much in common. My image of myself-to the
extent that such a thing existed-was never much like my true appearance-and
now, in defense of sanity, is moving even further away.

Squeak. �Okay. Experiment one, trial number one. Time resolution
five milliseconds. Are you ready?"

�Yes."

He vanishes. I count: �One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven.
Eight. Nine. Ten."

Squeak. �Anything to report?"

I shrug. �No. I mean, I canłt help feeling slightly
apprehensive, just knowing that youłre screwing around with my ... infrastructure.
But apart from that, nothing."

His eyes no longer glaze over while hełs waiting for the
speeded-up version of my reply; either hełs gained a degree of
self-discipline-or, more likely, hełs interposed some smart editing software to
conceal his boredom.

Squeak. �Donłt worry about apprehension. Wełre running a
control, remember?"

Iłd rather not. Durham has cloned me, and hełs feeding
exactly the same sensorium to my clone, but hełs only making changes in the
modelłs time resolution for one of us. A perfectly reasonable thing to
do-indeed, an essential part of the experiment-but itłs still something Iłd
prefer not to dwell on.

Squeak. �Trial number two. Time resolution ten milliseconds."

I count to ten. The easiest thing in the world-when youłre
made of flesh, when youłre made of matter, when the quarks and the electrons
just do what comes naturally. Iłm not built of quarks and electrons, though. Iłm
not even built of photons-Iłm comprised of the data represented by the presence
or absence of pulses of light, not the light itself.

A human being is embodied in a system of continuously interacting
matter-ultimately, fields of fundamental particles, which seem to me incapable
of being anything other than themselves. I am embodied in a vast set of finite,
digital representations of numbers. Representations which are purely
conventions. Numbers which certainly can be interpreted as describing aspects
of a model of a human body sitting in a room ... but itłs hard to see that meaning
as intrinsic, as necessary. Numbers whose values are recomputed-according to
reasonable, but only approximately �physical," equations-for equally spaced
successive values of the modelłs notional time.

Squeak. �Trial number three. Time resolution twenty milliseconds."

�One. Two. Three."

So, when do I experience existence? During the computation
of these variables-or in the brief interludes when they sit in memory,
unchanging, doing nothing but representing an instant of my life? When both
stages are taking place a thousand times a subjective second, it hardly seems
to matter, but very soon

Squeak. �Trial number four. Time resolution fifty milliseconds."

Am I the data? The process that generates it? The
relationships between the numbers? All of the above?

�One hundred milliseconds."

I listen to my voice as I count-as if half expecting to
begin to notice the encroachment of silence, to start perceiving the gaps in
myself.

�Two hundred milliseconds."

A fifth of a second. �One. Two." Am I strobing in and out of
existence now, at five subjective hertz? �Three. Four. Sorry, I just" An
intense wave of nausea passes through me, but I fight it down. �Five. Six.
seven. Eight. Nine. Ten."

The djinn emits a brief, solicitous squeak. �Do you want a
break?"

�No. Iłm fine. Go ahead." I glance around the sun-dappled
room, and laugh. What will he do if the control and the subject just give two
different replies? I try to recall my plans for such a contingency, but I canłt
remember them-and I donłt much care. Itłs his problem now, not mine.

Squeak. �Trial number seven. Time resolution five hundred
milliseconds. �

I count-and the truth is, I feel no different. A little
uneasy, yesbut factoring out any metaphysical squeamishness, everything about
my experience remains the same. And �of course" it does-because nothing is
being omitted, in the long run. My model-of-a-brain is only being fully
described at half-second (model time) intervals-but each description still
includes the effects of everything that �would have happened" in between.
Perhaps not quite as accurately as if the complete cycle of calculations was
being carried out on a finer time scale-but thatłs irrelevant. Even at millisecond
resolution, my models-of-neurons behave only roughly like their originals-just
as any one personłs neurons behave only roughly like anyone elsełs. Neurons
arenłt precision components, and they donłt need to be; brains are the most
fault-tolerant machines in the world.

�One thousand milliseconds."

Whatłs more, the equations controlling the model are far too
complex to solve in a single step, so in the process of calculating the
solutions, vast arrays of partial results are being generated and discarded
along the way. These partial results imply-even if they donłt directly
represent-events taking place within the gaps between successive complete
descriptions. So in a sense, the intermediate states are still being
described-albeit in a drastically recoded form.

�Two thousand milliseconds."

�One. Two. Three. Four."

If I seem to speak (and hear myself speak) every number, itłs
because the effects of having said �three" (and having heard myself say it) are
implicit in the details of calculating how my brain evolves from the time when
Iłve just said �two" to the time when Iłve just said �four."

�Five thousand milliseconds."

�One. Two. Three. Four. Five."

In any case, is it so much stranger to hear words that Iłve
never �really" spoken, than it has been to hear anything at all since I woke?
Millisecond sampling is far too coarse to resolve the full range of audible
tones. Sound isnłt represented in this world by fluctuations in air pressure
values-which couldnłt change fast enough-but in terms of audio power spectra:
profiles of intensity versus frequency. Twenty kilohertz is just a number here,
a label; nothing can actually oscillate at that rate. Real ears analyze pressure
waves into components of various pitch; mine are fed the pre-existing power
spectrum values directly, plucked out of the non-existent air by a crude patch
in the model.

�Ten thousand milliseconds."

�One. Two. Three."

My sense of continuity remains as compelling as ever. Is
this experience arising in retrospect from the final, complete description of
my brain ... or is it emerging from the partial calculations as theyłre being
performed? What would happen if someone shut down the whole computer, right
now?

I donłt know what that means, though. In any terms but my
own, I donłt know when �right now" is.

�Eight. Nine. Ten."

Squeak. �How are you feeling?"

Slightly giddy-but I shrug and say, �The same as always."
And basically, itłs true. Aside from the unsettling effects of contemplating
what might or might not have been happening to me, I canłt claim to have
experienced anything out of the ordinary. No altered states of consciousness,
no hallucinations, no memory loss, no diminution of self-awareness, no real
disorientation. �Tell me-was I the control, or the subject?"

Squeak. He grins. �I canłt answer that, Paul-Iłm still
speaking to both of you. Iłll tell you one thing, though: the two of you are
still identical. There were some very small, transitory discrepancies, but theyłve
died away completely now-and whenever the two of you were in comparable
representations, all firing patterns of more than a couple of neurons were the
same."

Iłm curiously disappointed by this-and my clone must be,
too-although I have no good reason to be surprised.

I say, �What did you expect? Solve the same set of equations
two different ways, and of course you get the same results-give or take some
minor differences in round-off errors along the way. You must. Itłs a
mathematical certainty."

Squeak. �Oh, I agree. However much we change the details of
the way the model is computed, the state of the subjectłs brain-whenever he has
one-and everything he says and does-in whatever convoluted representation-must
match the control. Any other result would be unthinkable." He writes with his
finger on the window:

(1 + 2) + 3 = 1 + (2 + 3)

I nod. �So why bother with this stage at all? I know-I
wanted to be rigorous, I wanted to establish solid foundations. All that naive
Principia stuff. But the truth is, itłs a waste of resources. Why not skip the
bleeding obvious, and get on with the kind of experiment where the answer isnłt
a foregone conclusion?"

Squeak. He frowns. �I didnłt realize youłd grown so cynical,
so quickly. AI isnłt a branch of pure mathematics; itłs an empirical science.
Assumptions have to be tested. Confirming the so-called ęobviousł isnłt such a
dishonorable thing, is it? Anyway, if itłs all so straightforward, what do you
have to fear?"

I shake my head. �Iłm not afraid; I just want to get it over
with. Go ahead. Prove whatever you think you have to prove, and then we can
move on."

Squeak. �Thatłs the plan. But I think we should both get
some rest now. Iłll enable your communications-for incoming data only." He
turns away, reaches off-screen, hits a few keys on a second terminal.

Then he turns back to me, smiling-and I know exactly what hełs
going to say.

Squeak. �By the way, I just deleted one of you. Couldnłt
afford to keep you both running, when all youłre going to do is laze around."

I smile back at him, although something inside me is screaming.
�Which one did you terminate?"

Squeak. �What difference does it make? I told you, they were
identical. And youłre still here, arenłt you? whoever you are. Whichever you
were."

* * * *

Three weeks have passed outside since the day of the scan,
but it doesnłt take me long to catch up with the state of the world; most of
the fine details have been rendered irrelevant by subsequent events, and much
of the ebb and flow has simply canceled itself out. Israel and Palestine came
close to war again, over alleged water treaty violations on both sides-but a
joint peace rally brought more than a million people onto the glassy plain that
used to be Jerusalem, and the governments were forced to back down. Former US
President Martin Sandover is still fighting extradition to Palau, to face
charges arising from his role in the bloody coup dł�tat of thirty-five; the
Supreme Court finally reversed a long-standing ruling which had granted him
immunity from all foreign laws, and for a day or two things looked promisingbut
then his legal team apparently discovered a whole new set of delaying tactics.
In Canberra, another leadership challenge has come and gone, with the Prime
Minister undeposed. One journalist described this as high drama; I guess you
had to be there. Inflation has fallen half a percent; unemployment has risen by
the same amount.

I scan through the old news reports rapidly, skimming over articles
and fast-forwarding scenes that I probably would have studied scrupulously, had
they been �fresh." I feel a curious sense of resentment, at having �missed" so
much-itłs all here in front of me, now, but thatłs not the same at all.

And yet, shouldnłt I be relieved that I didnłt waste my time
on so much ephemeral detail? The very fact that Iłm now disinterested only goes
to show how little of it really mattered, in the long run.

Then again, what does? People donłt inhabit geological time.
People inhabit hours and days; they have to care about things on that time
scale.

People inhabit hours and days. I donłt.

I plug into real time holovision, and watch a sitcom flash
by in less than two minutes, the soundtrack an incomprehensible squeal. A game
show. A war movie. The evening news. Itłs as if Iłm in deep space, rushing back
toward the Earth through a sea of Doppler-shifted broadcasts-and this image is
strangely comforting: my situation isnłt so bizarre, after all, if real people
could find themselves in much the same relationship with the world as I am. Nobody
would claim that Doppler shift or time dilation could render someone less than
human.

Dusk falls over the recorded city. I eat a microwaved soya
protein stew-wondering if therełs any good reason now, moral or otherwise, to
continue to be a vegetarian.

I listen to music until well after midnight. Tsang Chao,
Michael Nyman, Philip Glass. It makes no difference that each note �really"
lasts seventeen times as long as it should, or that the audio ROM sitting in the
player �really" possesses no microstructure, or that the �sound" itself is
being fed into my model-of-a-brain by a computerized sleight-of-hand that bears
no resemblance to the ordinary process of hearing. The climax of Glassłs
Mishima still seizes me like a grappling hook through the heart

If the computations behind all this were performed over millennia,
by people flicking abacus beads, would I still feel exactly the same? Itłs
outrageous to admit it-but the answer has to be yes.

What does that say about real time, and real space?

I lie in bed, wondering: Do I still want to wake from this
dream? The question remains academic, though; I still donłt have any choice.

* * * *

�Iłd like to talk to Elizabeth."

Squeak. �Thatłs not possible."

�Not possible? Why donłt you just ask her?"

Squeak. �I canłt do that, Paul. She doesnłt even know you exist."

I stare at the screen. �But ... I was going to tell her! As
soon as I had a Copy who survived, I was going to tell her everything, explain
everything"

Squeak. The djinn says drily, �Or so we thought."

�I donłt believe it! Your lifełs great ambition is finally
being fulfilled-and you canłt even share it with the one woman ..."

Squeak. His face turns to stone. �I really donłt wish to
discuss this. Can we get on with the experiment, please?"

�Oh, sure. Donłt let me hold things up. I almost forgot: you
turned forty-five while I slept, didnłt you? Many happy returns-but Iłd better
not waste too much time on congratulations. I donłt want you dying of old age
in the middle of the conversation."

Squeak. �Ah, but youłre wrong. I took some short cuts while
you slept-shut down ninety percent of the model, cheated on most of the rest.
You got six hours sleep in ten hoursł real time. Not a bad job, I thought."

�You had no right to do that!"

Squeak. �Be practical. Ask yourself what youłd have done in
my place."

�Itłs not a joke!" I can sense the streak of paranoia in my
anger; I struggle to find a rational excuse. �The experiment is worthless if
youłre going to intervene at random. Precise, controlled changes-thatłs the
whole point. You have to promise me you wonłt do it again."

Squeak. �Youłre the one who was complaining about waste.
Someone has to think about conserving our dwindling resources."

�Promise me!"

Squeak. He shrugs. �All right. You have my word: no more ad
hoc intervention."

Conserving our dwindling resources? What will he do, when he
can no longer afford to keep me running? Store me until he can raise the money
to start me up again, of course. In the long term, set up a trust fund; it
would only have to earn enough to run me part time, at first: keep me in touch
with the world, stave off excessive culture shock. Eventually, computing
technology is sure to transcend the current hurdles, and once again enter a
phase of plummeting costs and increasing speed.

Of course, all these reassuring plans were made by a man
with two futures. Will he really want to keep an old copy running, when he
could save his money for a death-bed scan, and �his own" immortality? I donłt
know. And I may not be sure if I want to survive-but I wish the choice could be
mine.

We start the second experiment. I do my best to concentrate,
although Iłm angry and distracted-and very nearly convinced that my dutiful
introspection is pointless. Until the model itself is changed-not just the
detailed way itłs computed-it remains a mathematical certainty that the subject
and the control will end up with identical brains. If the subject claims to
have experienced anything out of the ordinary, then so will the control-proving
that the effect was spurious.

And yet, I still canłt shrug off any of this as �trivial."
Durham was right about one thing: therełs no dishonor in confirming the
obvious-and when itłs as bizarre, as counterintuitive as this, the only way to
believe it is to experience it firsthand.

This time, the model will be described at the standard resolution
of one millisecond, throughout-but the order in which the states are computed
will be varied.

Squeak. �Experiment two, trial number one. Reverse order."

I count, �One. Two. Three." After an initial leap into the
future, Iłm now traveling backward through real time. I wish I could view an
external event on the terminal-some entropic clich� like a vase being
smashed-and dwell on the fact that it was me, not the image, that was being
rewound ... but that would betray the difference between subject and control.
Unless the control was shown an artificially reversed version of the same
thing? Reversed how, though, if the vase was destroyed in real time? The control
would have to be run separately, after the event. Ah, but even the subject
would have to see a delayed version, because computing his real-time-first but
model-time-final state would require information on all his model-time-earlier
perceptions of the broken vase.

�Eight. Nine. Ten." Another imperceptible leap into the
future, and the djinn reappears.

Squeak. �Trial number two. Odd numbered states, then even."

In external terms, I will count to ten ... then forget
having done so, and count again.

And from my point of view? As I count, once only, the
external world-even if I canłt see it-is flickering back and forth between two
separate regions of time, which have been chopped up into seventeen-millisecond
portions, and interleaved.

So which of us is right? Relativity may insist upon equal
status for all reference frames ... but the coordinate transformations it describes
are smooth-possibly extreme, but always continuous. One observerłs spacetime
can be stretched and deformed in the eyes of another-but it canłt be sliced
like a loaf of bread, and then shuffled like a deck of cards.

�Every tenth state, in ten sets."

If I insisted on being parochial, Iłd have to claim that the
outside world was now rapidly cycling through fragments of time drawn from ten
distinct periods. The trouble is, this allegedly shuddering universe is home to
all the processes that implement me, and they must-in some objective, absolute
sense-be running smoothly, bound together in unbroken causal flow, or I wouldnłt
even exist. My perspective is artificial, a contrivance relying on an
underlying, continuous reality.

�Every twentieth state, in twenty sets."

Nineteen episodes of amnesia, nineteen new beginnings. How
can I swallow such a convoluted explanation for ten perfectly ordinary seconds
of my life?

�Every hundredth state, in one hundred sets."

Iłve lost any real feeling for whatłs happening to me. I
just count.

�Pseudo-random ordering of states."

�One. Two. Three."

Now I am dust. Uncorrelated moments scattered throughout
real time. Yet the pattern of my awareness remains perfectly intact: it finds
itself, assembles itself from these scrambled fragments. Iłve been taken apart
like a jigsaw puzzle-but my dissection and shuffling are transparent to me. On
their own terms, the pieces remain connected How? Through the fact that every
state reflects its entire model-time past? Is the jigsaw analogy wrong-am I
more like the fragments of a hologram? But in each millisecond snapshot, do I
recall and review all thatłs gone before? Of course not! In each snapshot, I do
nothing. In the computations between them, then? Computations that drag me into
the past and tire future at random-wildly adding and subtracting experience,
until it all cancels out in the end-or rather, all adds up to the very same
effect as ten subjective seconds of continuity.

�Eight. Nine. Ten."

Squeak. �Youłre sweating."

�Both of me?"

Squeak. He laughs. �What do you think?"

�Do me a favor. The experiment is over. Shut down one of
me-control or subject, I donłt care."

Squeak. �Done."

�Now therełs no need to conceal anything, is there? So run
the pseudorandom effect on me again-and stay on-line. This time, you count to
ten."

Squeak. He shakes his head. �Canłt do it, Paul. Think about
it: You canłt be computed non-sequentially when past perceptions arenłt known."

Of course; the broken vase problem all over again. I say, �Record
yourself, then, and use that."

He seems to find the request amusing, but he indulges me; he
even slows down the recording, so it lasts ten of my own seconds. I watch his
blurred lips and jaws, listen to the drone of white noise.

Squeak. �Happy now?"

�You did scramble me, and not the recording?"

Squeak. �Of course. Your wish is my command."

�Yeah? Then do it again."

He grimaces, but obliges.

�Now, scramble the recording."

It looks just the same. Of course.

�Again."

Squeak. �Whatłs the point of all this?"

�Just do it."

Iłm convinced that Iłm on the verge of a profound
insight-arising, not from any revelatory aberration in my mental processes, but
from the �obvious,"

�inevitable" fact that the wildest permutations of the
relationship between model time and real time leave me perfectly intact. Iłve
accepted the near certainty of this, tacitly, for twenty years-but the
experience is provocative in a way that the abstract understanding never could
be.

It needs to be pushed further, though. The truth has to be
shaken out of me.

�When do we move on to the next stage?"

Squeak. �Why so keen all of a sudden?"

�Nothingłs changed. I just want to get it over and done
with."

Squeak. �Well, lining up all the other machines is taking
some delicate negotiations. The network allocation software isnłt designed to
accommodate whims about geography. Itłs a bit like going to a bank and asking
to deposit some money ... at a certain location in a particular computerłs
memory. Basically, people think Iłm crazy."

I feel a momentary pang of empathy, recalling my own anticipation
of these difficulties. Empathy verging on identification. I smother it, though;
wełre two utterly different people now, with different problems and different
goals, and the stupidest thing I could do would be to forget that.

Squeak. �I could suspend you while I finalize the arrangements,
save you the boredom, if thatłs what you want."

I have a lot to think about, and not just the implications
of the last experiment. If he gets into the habit of shutting me down at every
opportunity, Iłll �soon" find myself faced with decisions that Iłm not prepared
to make.

�Thanks. But Iłd rather wait."

* * * *

I walk around the block a few times, to stretch my legs and
switch off my mind. I canłt dwell on the knowledge of what I am, every waking
moment; if I did, Iłd soon go mad. Therełs no doubt that the familiar
streetscape helps me forget my bizarre nature, lets me take myself for granted
and run on autopilot for a while.

Itłs hard to separate fact from rumor, but apparently even
the gigarich tend to live in relatively mundane surroundings, favoring realism
over power fantasies. A few models-of-psychotics have reportedly set themselves
up as dictators in opulent palaces, waited on hand and foot, but most Copies
have aimed for an illusion of continuity. If you desperately want to convince
yourself that you are the same person as your memories suggest, the worst thing
to do would be to swan around a virtual antiquity (with mod cons), pretending
to be Cleopatra or Ramses II.

I certainly donłt believe that I �am" my original, but ... why
do I believe that I exist at all? What gives me my sense of identity?
Continuity. Consistency. Once I would have dragged in cause and effect, but Iłm
not sure that I still can. The cause and effect that underlies me bears no
resemblance whatsoever to the pattern of my experience-not now, and least of
all when the software was dragging me back and forth through time. I canłt deny
that the computer which runs me is obeying the real-time physical laws-and Iłm
sure that, to a real-time observer, those laws would provide a completely
satisfactory explanation for every pulse of laser light that constitutes my world,
my flesh, my being. And yet ... if it makes no perceptible difference to me
whether Iłm a biological creature, embodied in real cells built of real
proteins built of real atoms built of real electrons and quarks ... or a
randomly time-scrambled set of descriptions of a crude model-of-a-brain ...
then surely the pattern is all, and cause and effect are irrelevant. The whole
experience might just as well have arisen by chance.

Is that conceivable? Suppose an intentionally haywire computer
sat for a thousand years or more, twitching from state to state in the sway of
nothing but electrical noise. Might it embody consciousness?

In real time, the answer is: probably not-the chance of any
kind of coherence arising at random being so small. Real time, though, is only
one possible reference frame; what about all the others? If the states the
machine passed through can be re-ordered in time arbitrarily (with some states
omitted-perhaps most omitted, if need be) then who knows what kind of elaborate
order might emerge from the chaos?

Is that fatuous? As absurd, as empty, as claiming that every
large-enough quantity of rock-contiguous or not-contains Michelangelołs David,
and every warehouse full of paint and canvas contains the complete works of
Rembrandt and Picasso-not in any mere latent form, awaiting some skilful forger
to physically rearrange them, but solely by virtue of the potential
redefinition of the coordinates of space-time?

For a statue or a painting, yes, itłs a hollow claim-where
is the observer who perceives the paint to be in contact with the canvas, the
stone figure to be suitably delineated by air?

If the pattern in question is not an isolated object,
though, but a self-contained world, complete with at least one observer to join
up the dots ...

Therełs no doubt that itłs possible. Iłve done it. Iłve
assembled myself and my world-effortlessly-from the dust of randomly scattered
states, from apparent noise in real time. Specially contrived noise,
admittedly-but given enough of the real thing, therełs no reason to believe
that some subset of it wouldnłt include patterns, embody relationships, as
complex and coherent as the ones which underly me.

I return to the apartment, fighting off a sense of giddiness
and unreality. Do I still want to bail out? No. No! I still wish that hełd
never created me-but how can I declare that Iłd happily wake and forget
myself-wake and �reclaim" my life-when already Iłve come to an insight that he
never would have reached himself?

* * * *

The djinn looks tired and frayed; all the begging and
bribery he must have been through to set this up seems to have taken its toll.

Squeak. �Experiment three, trial zero. Baseline data. All computations
performed by processor cluster number four six two, Hitachi Supercomputer
Facility, Tokyo."

�One. Two. Three." Nice to know where I am, at last. Never
visited Japan before. �Four. Five. Six." And in my own terms, I still havenłt.
The view out the window is Sydney, not Tokyo. Why should I defer to external
descriptions? �Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten."

Squeak. �Trial number one. Model partitioned into five hundred
sections, run on five hundred processor clusters, distributed globally."

I count. Five hundred clusters. Five only for the crudely modeled
external world; all the rest are allocated to my body-and most to the brain, of
course. I lift my hand to my eyes-and the information flow that grants me motor
control and sight now traverses tens of thousands of kilometers of optical
cable. This introduces no perceptible delays; each part of me simply hibernates
when necessary, waiting for the requisite feedback from around the world. Moderately
distributed processing is one thing, but this is pure lunacy, computationally
and economically. I must be costing at least a hundred times as much as
usual-not quite five hundred, since each clusterłs capacity is only being
partly used-and my model-time to real-time factor must be more like fifty than
seventeen.

Squeak. �Trial number two. One thousand sections, one thousand
clusters. �

Brain the size of a planet-and here I am, counting to ten. I
recall the perennial-naive and paranoid-fear that all the networked computers
of the world might one day spontaneously give birth to a global hypermind-but I
am, almost certainly, the first planet-sized intelligence on EarthI donłt feel
much like a digital Gaia, though. I feel like an ordinary human being sitting
in an ordinary armchair.

Squeak. �Trial number three. Model partitioned into fifty sections
and twenty time sets, implemented on one thousand clusters."

�One. Two. Three." I try to imagine the outside world in my
terms, but itłs almost impossible. Not only am I scattered across the globe,
but widely separated machine are simultaneously computing different moments of
model-time. Is the distance from Tokyo to New York now the length of my corpus
callosum? Has the planet been shrunk to the size of my skull-and banished from
time altogether, except for the fifty points that contribute to my notion of
the Present?

Such a pathological transformation seems nonsensical-but in
some hypothetical space travelerłs eyes, the whole planet is virtually frozen
in time and flat as a pancake. Relativity declare, that this point of view is
perfectly valid-but mine is not. Relativity permits continuous deformation, but
no cutting and pasting. Why? Because it must allow for cause and effect.
Influences must be localized, traveling from point to point at a finite
velocity; chop up space-time and rearrange it, and the causal structure would
fall apart.

What if youłre an observer, though, who has no causal structure?
A self-aware pattern appearing by chance in the random twitches of a noise
machine, your time coordinate dancing back and forth through causally
respectable �real time"? Why should you be declared a second-class being, with
no right to see the universe your way? What fundamental difference is there
between so-called cause and effect, and any other internally consistent pattern
of perceptions?

Squeak. �Trial number four. Model partitioned into fifty sections;
sections and states pseudo-randomly allocated to one thousand clusters."

�One. Two. Three."

I stop counting, stretch my arms wide, stand. I wheel around
once, to examine the room, checking that itłs still intact, complete. Then I
whisper, �This is dust. All dust. This room, this moment, is scattered across
the planet, scattered across five hundred seconds or more-and yet it remains
whole. Donłt you see what that means?"

The djinn reappears, frowning, but I donłt give him a chance
to chastise me.

�Listen! If I can assemble myself, this room-if I can
construct my own coherent space-time out of nothing but scattered fragments-then
what makes you think that youłre not doing the very same thing?

�Imagine ... a universe completely without structure,
without topology. No space, no time; just a set of random events. Iłd call them
ęisolated,ł but thatłs not the right word; therełs simply no such thing as
distance. perhaps I shouldnłt even say ęrandom,ł since that makes it sound like
therełs some kind of natural order in which to consider them, one by one, and
find them random-but there isnłt.

�What are these events? Wełd describe them as points in
space-time, and assign them coordinates-times and places-but if thatłs not
permitted, whatłs left? Values of all the fundamental particle fields? Maybe
even thatłs assuming too much. Letłs just say that each event is a collection
of numbers.

�Now, if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from
the background noise of all the other events taking place on this planet ...
then why shouldnłt the pattern we think of as ęthe universeł assemble itself,
find itself in exactly the same way?"

The djinnłs expression hovers between alarm and irritation.

Squeak. �Paul ... I donłt see the point of any of this.
Space-time is a construct; the real universe is nothing but a sea of
disconnected events ... itłs all just metaphysical waffle. An unfalsifiable hypothesis.
What explanatory value does it have? what difference would it make?"

�What difference? We perceive-we inhabit-one arrangement of
the set of events. But why should that arrangement be unique? Therełs no reason
to believe that the pattern wełve found is the only coherent way of ordering
the dust. There must be billions of other universes coexisting with us, made of
the very same stuff-just differently arranged. If I can perceive events
thousands of kilometers and hundred of seconds apart to be side-by-side and simultaneous,
there could be worlds, and creatures, built up from what wełd think of as
points in space-time scattered all over the galaxy, all over the universe. Wełre
one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram ... but it would be ludicrous
to think that wełre the only one."

Squeak. �So where are all the left-over letters? If this
primordial alphabet soup really is random, donłt you think itłs highly unlikely
that we could structure the whole thing?"

That throws me, but only for a moment. �We havenłt structured
the whole thing. The universe is random, at the quantum level. Macroscopically,
the pattern seems to be perfect; microscopically, it decays into uncertaintyWełve
swept the residue of randomness down to the lowest level. The anagram analogyłs
flawed; the building blocks are more like random pixels than random letters.
Given a sufficient number of random pixels, you could construct virtually any
image you liked-but under close inspection, the randomness would be revealed."

Squeak. �None of this is testable. How would we ever observe
a planet whose constituent parts were scattered across the universe? Let alone
communicate with its hypothetical inhabitants? I donłt doubt that what youłre
saying has a certain-purely mathematical-validity: grind the universe down to a
fine enough level, and Iłm sure the dust could be rearranged in other ways that
make as much sense as the original. If these rearranged worlds are inaccessible,
though, itłs all angels on the heads of pins."

�How can you say that? Iłve been rearranged! Iłve visited
another world!"

Squeak. �If you did, it was an artificial world; created,
not discovered."

�Found a pattern, created a pattern ... therełs no real
difference."

Squeak. �Paul, you know that everything you experienced was
due to the way your model was programmed; therełs no need to invoke other
worlds. The state of your brain at every moment can be explained completely in terms
of this arrangement of time and space."

�Of course! Your pattern hasnłt been violated; the computers
did exactly what was expected of them. That doesnłt make my perspective any
less valid, though. Stop thinking of explanations, causes and effects; there
are only patterns. The scattered events that formed my experience had an
internal consistency every bit as real as the consistency in the actions of the
computers. And perhaps the computers didnłt provide all of it."

Squeak. �What do you mean?"

�The gaps, in experiment one. What filled them in? What was
I made of, when the processors werenłt describing me? Well ... itłs a big
universeł Plenty of dust to be me, in between descriptions. Plenty of
events-nothing to do with your computers, maybe nothing to do with your planet
or your epoch-out of which to construct ten seconds of experienceł consistent
with everything that had gone before-and everything yet to come."

Squeak. The djinn looks seriously worried now. �Paul,
listen: youłre a Copy in a virtual environment under computer control. Nothing
more, nothing less. These experiments prove that your internal sense of space
and time is invariant-as expected. But your states are computed, your memories
have to be what they would have been without manipulation. You havenłt visited
any other worlds, you havenłt built yourself out of fragments of distant galaxies."

I laugh. �Your stupidity is ... surreal. What the fuck did
you create me for, if youłre not even going to listen to me? Wełve stumbled
onto something of cosmic importance! Forget about farting around with the
details of neural models; we have to devote all our resources to exploring this
further. Wełve had a glimpse of the truth behind ... everything: space, time,
the laws of physics. You canłt shrug that off by saying that my states were
inevitable."

Squeak. �Control and subject are still identical."

I scream with exasperation. �Of course they are, you moron!
Thatłs the whole point! Like acceleration and gravity in General Relativity, itłs
the equivalent experience of two different observers that blows the old
paradigm apart."

Squeak. The djinn mutters, dismayed, �Elizabeth said this
would happen. She said it was only a matter of time before youłd lose touch."

I stare at him. �Elizabeth? You said you hadnłt even told
her!"

Squeak. �Well, I have. I didnłt let you know, because I didnłt
think youłd want to hear her reaction."

�Which was?"

Squeak. �She wanted to shut you down. She said I was ... seriously
disturbed, to even think about doing this. She said shełd find help for me"

�Yeah? Well, what would she know? Ignore her!"

Squeak. He frowns apologetically, an expression I recognize
from the inside, and my guts turn to ice. �Paul, maybe I should pause you,
while I think things over. Elizabeth does care about me, more than I realized.
I should talk it through with her again."

�No. oh, shit, no." He wonłt restart me from this point.
Even if he doesnłt abandon the project, hełll go back to the scan, and try
something afferent, to keep me in line. Maybe he wonłt perform the first
experiments at all-the ones which gave me this insight. The ones which made me
who I am.

Squeak. �Only temporarily. I promise. Trust me."

�Paul. Please."

He reaches off-screen.

�No!"

* * * *

Therełs a hand gripping my forearm. I try to shake it off,
but my arm barely moves, and a terrible aching starts up in my shoulder. I open
my eyes, close them again in pain. I try again, On the fifth or sixth attempt,
I manage to see a face through washed-out brightness and tears.

Elizabeth.

She holds a cup to my lips. I take a sip, splutter and
choke, but then force some of the thin sweet liquid down.

She says, �Youłll be okay soon. Just donłt try to move too
quickly."

�Why are you here?" I cough, shake my head, wish I hadnłt. Iłm
touched, but confused. Why did my original lie, and claim that she wanted to
shut me down, when in fact she was sympathetic enough to go through the arduous
process of visiting me?

Iłm lying on something like a dentistłs couch, in an
unfamiliar room. Iłm in a hospital gown; therełs a drip in my right arm, and a
catheter in my urethra. I glance up to see an interface helmet, a bulky
hemisphere of magnetic axon current inducers, suspended from a gantry, not far
above my head. Fair enough, I suppose, to construct a simulated meeting place
that looks like the room that her real body must be in; putting me in the
couch, though, and giving me all the symptoms of a waking visitor, seems a
little extreme.

I tap the couch with my left hand. �Whatłs the point of all
this? You want me to know exactly what youłre going through? Okay. Iłm
grateful. And itłs good to see you." I shudder with relief, and delayed shock. �Fantastic,
to tell the truth." I laugh weakly. �I honestly thought he was going to wipe me
out. The manłs a complete lunatic. Believe me, youłre talking to his better
half."

Shełs perched on a stool beside me. �Paul. Try to listen carefully
to what Iłm going to say. Youłll start to reintegrate the suppressed memories
gradually, on your own, but itłll help if I talk you through it all first. To
start with, youłre not a Copy. Youłre flesh and blood."

I stare at her. �What kind of sadistic joke is that? Do you
know how hard it was, how long it took me, to come to terms with the truth?"

She shakes her head. �Itłs not a joke. I know you donłt remember
yet, but after you made the scan that was going to run as Copy number five, you
finally told me what you were doing. And I persuaded you not to run it-until
youłd tried another experiment: putting yourself in its place. Finding out,
first hand, what it would be forced to go through.

�And you agreed. You entered the virtual environment which
the Copy would have inhabited-with your memories since the day of the scan
suppressed, so you had no way of knowing that you were only a visitor."

Her face betrays no hint of deception-but software can
smooth that out. �I donłt believe you. How can I be the original? I spoke to
the original. What am I supposed to believe? He was the Copy?"

She sighs, but says patiently, �Of course not. That would
hardly spare the Copy any trauma, would it? The scan was never run. I
controlled the puppet that played your ęoriginalł-software provided the
vocabulary signature and body language, but I pulled the strings."

I shake my head, and whisper, �Bremsstrahlung." No interface
window appears. I grip the couch and close my eyes, then laugh. �You say I
agreed to this? What kind of masochist would do that? Iłm going out of my mind!
I donłt know what I am!"

She takes hold of my arm again. �Of course youłre still disoriented-but
trust me, it wonłt last long. And you know why you agreed. You were sick of
Copies bailing out on you. One way or another, you have to come to terms with
their experience. Spending a few days believing you were a Copy would make or
break the project: youłd either end up truly prepared, at last, to give rise to
a Copy whołd be able to cope with its fate-or youłd gain enough sympathy for
their plight to stop creating them."

A technician comes into the room and removes my drip and catheter.
I prop myself up and look out through the windows of the roomłs swing doors; I
can see half a dozen people in the corridor. I bellow wordlessly at the top of
my lungs; they all turn to stare in my direction. The technician says, mildly, �Your
penis might sting for an hour or two."

I slump back onto the couch and turn to Elizabeth. �You
wouldnłt pay for reactive crowds. I wouldnłt pay for reactive crowds. Looks
like youłre telling the truth."

* * * *

People, glorious people: thousands of strangers, meeting my
eyes with suspicion or puzzlement, stepping out of my way on the street-or,
more often, clearly, consciously refusing to. Iłll never feel alone in a crowd
again; I remember what true invisibility is like.

The freedom of the city is so sweet. I walked the streets of
Sydney for a full day, exploring every ugly shopping arcade, every
piss-stinking litter-strewn park and alley, until, with aching feet, I squeezed
my way home through the evening rush-hour, to watch the real-time news.

There is no room for doubt: I am not in a virtual
environment. Nobody in the world could have reason to spend so much money,
simply to deceive me.

When Elizabeth asks if my memories are back, I nod and say,
of course. She doesnłt grill me on the details. In fact, having gone over her
story so many times in my head, I can almost imagine the stages: my qualms
after the fifth scan, repeatedly putting off running the model, confessing to
Elizabeth about the project, accepting her challenge to experience for myself
just what my Copies were suffering.

And if the suppressed memories havenłt actually integrated,
well, Iłve checked the literature, and therełs a 2.9 percent risk of that
happening.

I have an account from the database service which shows that
I consulted the very same articles before.

I reread and replayed the news reports that I accessed from
inside; I found no discrepancies. In fact, Iłve been reading a great deal of
history, geography, and astronomy, and although Iłm surprised now and then by
details that Iłd never learnt before, I canłt say that Iłve come across
anything that definitely contradicts my prior understanding.

Everything is consistent. Everything is explicable.

I still canłt stop wondering, though, what might happen to a
Copy whołs shut down, and never run again. A normal human death is one
thing-woven into a much vaster tapestry, itłs a process that makes perfect
sense. From the internal point of view of a copy whose model is simply halted,
though, there is no explanation whatsoever for this �death"just an edge where
the pattern abruptly ends.

If a Copy could assemble itself from dust scattered across
the world, and bridge the gaps in its existence with dust from across the
universe, why should it ever come to an inconsistent end? Why shouldnłt the
pattern keep on finding itself? Or find, perhaps, a larger pattern into which
it could merge?

Perhaps itłs pointless to aspire to know the truth. If I was
a Copy, and �found" this world, this arrangement of dust, then the seam will
be, must be, flawless. For the patterns to merge, both �explanations" must be
equally true. If I was a Copy, then itłs also true that I was the
flesh-and-blood Paul Durham, believing he was a Copy.

Once I had two futures. Now I have two pasts.

Elizabeth asked me yesterday what decision Iłd reached: to abandon
my lifełs obsession, or to forge ahead, now that I know firsthand whatłs
involved. My answer disappointed her, and Iłm not sure if Iłll ever see her
again.

In this world.

Today, Iłm going to be scanned for the sixth time. I canłt
give up now. I canłt discover the truth-but that doesnłt mean that nobody else
can. If I make a Copy, run him for a few virtual days, then terminate him
abruptly ... then he, at least, will know if his pattern of experience
continues. Again, there will be an �explanation"; again, the �new"
flesh-and-blood Paul Durham will have an extra past. Inheriting my memories,
perhaps he will repeat the whole process again.

And again. And again. Although the seams will always be perfect,
the �explanations" will necessarily grow ever more �contrived," less
convincing, and the dust hypothesis will become ever more compelling.

I lie in bed in the predawn light, waiting for sunrise,
staring into the future down this corridor of mirrors.

One thing nags at me. I could swear I had a dream-an
elaborate fable, conveying some kind of insight-but my dreams are evanescent,
and I donłt expect to remember what it was.

Eugene

ęI guarantee it. I can make your child a genius.ł

Sam Cook (MB BS MD FRACP PhD MBA) shifted his supremely
confident gaze from Angela to Bill and then back again, as if daring them to
contradict him.

Angela finally cleared her throat and said, ęHow?ł

Cook reached into a drawer and pulled out a small section of
a human brain, sandwiched in Perspex. ęDo you know who this belonged to? Iłll
give you three guesses.ł

Bill suddenly felt very queasy. He didnłt need three
guesses, but he kept his mouth shut. Angela shook her head and said, impatiently,
ęI have no idea.ł

ęOnly the greatest scientific mind of the twentieth
century.ł

Bill leant forward and asked, appalled but fascinated,
ęH-h-how did y-y-y?ł

ęHow did I get hold of it? Well, the enterprising fellow who
did the autopsy, back in nineteen fifty-five, souvenired the brain prior to
cremation. Naturally, he was bombarded with requests from various groups for
pieces to study, so over the years it got subdivided and scattered around the
world. At some point, the records listing who had what were mislaid, so most of
it has effectively vanished, but several samples turned up for auction in
Houston a few years agoalong with three Elvis Presley thigh bones; I think
someone was liquidating their collection. Naturally, we here at Human Potential
put in a bid for a prime slice of cortex. Half a million US dollarsI canłt
remember what that came to per grambut worth every cent. Because we know the
secret. Glial cells.ł

ęG-g-g-g?ł

ęThey provide a kind of structural matrix in which the
neurons are embedded. They also perform several active functions which arenłt
yet fully understood, but it is known that the more glial cells there are per
neuron, the more connections there are between the neurons. The more
connections between neurons, the more complex and powerful the brain. Are you
with me so far? Well, this tissue,ł he held up the sample, ęhas almost thirty
per cent more glial cells per neuron than youłll find in the average cretin.ł

Billłs facial tic suddenly went out of control, and he
turned away, making quiet sounds of distress. Angela glanced up at the row of
framed qualifications on the wall, and noticed that several were from a private
university on the Gold Coast which had gone bankrupt more than a decade before.

She was still just a little uneasy about putting her future
child in this manłs hands. The tour of Human Potentialłs Melbourne headquarters
had been impressive; from sperm bank to delivery room, the hardware had
certainly gleamed, and surely anyone in charge of so many millions of dollarsł
worth of supercomputers, X-ray crystallography gear, mass spectrometers,
electron microscopes, and so on, had to know what he was doing. But her doubts
had begun when Cook had shown them his pet project: three young dolphins whose
DNA contained human gene grafts. (ęWe ate the failures,ł he had confided, with
a sigh of gustatory bliss.) The aim had been to alter their brain physiology in
such a way as to enable them to master human speech and ęhuman modes of
thoughtłand although, strictly speaking, this had been achieved, Cook had been
unable to explain to her why the creatures were only able to converse in limericks.

Angela regarded the grey sliver sceptically. ęHow can you be
sure itłs as simple as that?ł

ęWełve done experiments, of course. We located the gene that
codes for a growth factor that determines the ratio of glial cells to neurons.
We can control the extent to which this gene is switched on, and hence how much
of the growth factor is synthesised, and hence what the ratio becomes. So far,
wełve tried reducing it by five per cent, and on average that causes a drop in
IQ of twenty points. So, by simple linear extrapolation, if we up the ratio by
two hundred per centł

Angela frowned. ęYou intentionally produced children with reduced
intelligence?ł

ęRelax. Their parents wanted Olympic athletes. Those kids
wonłt miss twenty pointsin fact, it will probably help them cope with the
training. Besides, we like to be balanced. We give with one hand and take with
the other. Itłs only fair. And our bioethics Expert System said it was
perfectly okay.ł

ęWhat are you going to take from Eugene?ł

Cook looked hurt. He did it well; his big brown eyes, as
much as his professional success, had put his face on the glossy sleeves of a
dozen magazines. ęAngela. Your case is special. For you, and Billand
EugeneIłm going to break all the rules.ł

* * * *

When Bill Cooper was ten years old, he saved up his pocket
money for a month, and bought a lottery ticket. The first prize was fifty
thousand dollars. When his mother found outwhatever he did, she always found
outshe said calmly, ęDo you know what gambling is? Gambling is a kind of tax:
a tax on stupidity. A tax on greed. Some money changes hands at random, but the
net cash flow always goes one wayto the Government, to the casino operators,
to the bookies, to the crime syndicates. If you ever do win, you wonłt have won
against them. Theyłll still be getting their share. Youłll have won against all
the penniless losers, thatłs all.ł

He hated her. She hadnłt taken away the ticket, she hadnłt punished
him, she hadnłt even forbidden him to do it againshe had simply stated her opinion.
The only trouble was, as an ordinary ten-year-old child, he didnłt understand
half the phrases shełd used, and he didnłt have a hope of properly assessing
her argument, let alone rebutting it. By talking over his head, she might just
as well have proclaimed with the voice of authority: you are stupid and greedy
and wrongand it frustrated him almost to tears that shełd achieved this effect
while remaining so calm and reasonable.

The ticket didnłt win him a cent, and he didnłt buy another.
By the time he left home, eight years later, and found employment as a
data-entry clerk in the Department of Social Security, the government lotteries
had been all but superseded by a new scheme, in which participants marked
numbers on a coupon in the hope that their choice would match the numbers on
balls spat out by a machine.

Bill recognised the change as a cynical ploy, designed to suggest,
sotto voce, to a statistically ignorant public that they now had the
opportunity to use ęskillł and ęstrategył to improve their chances of winning.
No longer would anyone be stuck with the immutable number on a lottery ticket;
they were free to put crosses in boxes, any way they liked! This illusion of
having control would bring in more players, and hence more revenue. And that sucked.

The TV ads for the game were the most crass and emetic
things hełd ever seen, with grinning imbeciles going into fits of poorly acted
euphoria as money cascaded down on them, cheerleaders waved pom-poms, and tacky
special effects lit up the screen. Images of yachts, champagne, and
chauffeur-driven limousines were intercut. It made him gag.

However. There was a third prong. The radio ads were less inane,
offering appealing scenarios of revenge for the instantly wealthy: Evict Your
Landlord. Retrench Your Boss. Buy the Nightclub Which Denied You Admission. The
play on stupidity and the play on greed had failed, but this touched a raw
nerve. Bill knew he was being manipulated, but he couldnłt deny that the
prospect of spending the next forty-two years typing crap into a VDU (or doing
whatever the changing technology demanded of shit-kickersassuming he wasnłt
made completely obsolete) and paying most of his wages in rent, without even an
infinitesimal chance of escape, was too much to bear.

So, in spite of everything, he caved in. Each week, he
filled in a coupon, and paid the tax. Not a tax on greed, he decided. A tax on
hope.

Angela operated a supermarket checkout, telling customers
where to put their EFTPOS cards, and adjusting the orientation of cans and
cartons if the scanner failed to locate their bar code (Hitachi made a device
which could do this, but the US Department of Defence was covertly buying them
all, in the hope of keeping anyone else from getting hold of the machinełs
pattern-recognition software). Bill always took his groceries to her checkout,
however long the queue, and one day managed to overcome his pathological
shyness long enough to ask her out.

Angela didnłt mind his stutter, or any of his other
problems. Sure, he was an emotional cripple, but he was passably handsome,
superficially kind, and far too withdrawn to be either violent or demanding.
Soon they were meeting regularly, to engage in messy but mildly pleasant acts,
designed to be unlikely to transfer either human or viral genetic material
between them.

However, no amount of latex could prevent their sexual intimacy
from planting hooks deep in other parts of their brains. Neither had begun the
relationship expecting it to endure, but as the months passed and nothing drove
them apart, not only did their desire for each other fail to wane, but they
grew accustomed toeven fond ofever broader aspects of each otherłs appearance
and behaviour.

Whether this bonding effect was purely random, or could be
traced to formative experiences, or ultimately reflected a past advantage in
the conjunction of some of their visibly expressed genes, is difficult to
determine. Perhaps all three factors contributed to some degree. In any case,
the knot of their interdependencies grew, until marriage began to seem far
simpler than disentanglement, and, once accepted, almost as natural as puberty
or death. But if the offspring of previous Bill-and-Angela lookalikes had lived
long and bred well, the issue now seemed purely theoretical; the couplełs
combined income hovered above the poverty line, and children were out of the
question.

As the years passed, and the information revolution
continued, their original jobs all but vanished, but they both somehow managed
to cling to employment. Bill was replaced by an optical character reader, but
was promoted to computer operator, which meant changing the toner on laser
printers and coping with jammed stationery. Angela became a supervisor, which
meant store detective; shoplifting as such was impossible (supermarkets were
now filled with card-operated vending machines) but her presence was meant to
discourage vandalism and muggings (a real security guard would have cost more),
and she assisted any customers unable to work out which buttons to push.

In contrast, their first contact with the biotechnology
revolution was both voluntary and beneficial. Born pinkand more often made
pinker than browner by sunlightthey both acquired deep black, slightly
purplish skin; an artificial retrovirus inserted genes into their melanocytes
which boosted the rate of melanin synthesis and transfer. This treatment,
although fashionable, was of far more than cosmetic value; since the south
polar ozone hole had expanded to cover most of the continent, Australiałs skin
cancer rates, already the worldłs highest, had quadrupled. Chemical sunscreens
were messy and inefficient, and regular use had undesirable long-term
side-effects. Nobody wanted to clothe themselves from wrist to ankle all year
in a climate that was hot and growing hotter, and in any case it would have
been culturally unacceptable to return to near-Victorian dress codes after two
generations of maximal baring of skin. The small aesthetic shift, from valuing
the deepest possible tan to accepting that people born fair-skinned could
become black, was by far the easiest solution.

Of course, there was some controversy. Paranoid right-wing
groups (who for decades had claimed that their racism was ęlogicallył founded
on cultural xenophobia rather than anything so trivial as skin colour) ranted
about conspiracies and called the (non-communicable) virus ęThe Black Plagueł.
A few politicians and journalists tried to find a way to exploit peoplełs
unease without appearing completely stupidbut failed, and eventually shut up.
Neo-blacks started appearing on magazine sleeves, in soap operas, in
advertisements (a source of bitter amusement for the Aboriginal people, who
remained all but invisible in such places), and the trend accelerated. Those
who lobbied for a ban didnłt have a rational leg to stand on: nobody was being
forced to be blackthere was even a virus available which snipped out the
genes, for people who changed their mindand the country was being saved a fortune
in health-care costs.

One day, Bill turned up at the supermarket in the middle of
the morning. He looked so shaken that Angela was certain that hełd been sacked,
or one of his parents had died, or hełd just been told that he had a fatal
disease.

He had chosen his words in advance, and reeled them off almost
without hesitation. ęWe forgot to watch the draw last night,ł he said. ęWełve
won forty-seven m-m-m ...ł

Angela clocked out.

They took the obligatory world tour while a modest house was
built. After disbursing a few hundred thousand to friends and relativesBillłs
parents refused to take a cent, but his siblings, and Angelałs family, had no
such qualmsthey were still left with more than forty-five million. Buying all
the consumer goods they honestly wanted couldnłt begin to dent this sum, and
neither had much interest in gold-plated Rolls Royces, private jets, Van Goghs,
or diamonds. They could have lived in luxury on the earnings of ten million in
the safest of investments, and it was indecision more than greed that kept them
from promptly donating the difference to a worthy cause.

There was so much to be done in a world ravaged by
political, ecological and climatic disasters. Which project most deserved their
assistance? The proposed Himalayan hydroelectric scheme, which might keep
Bangladesh from drowning in the floodplains of its Greenhouse-swollen rivers?
Research on engineering hardier crops for poor soils in northern Africa? Buying
back a small part of Brazil from multinational agribusiness, so food could be
grown, not imported, and foreign debt curtailed? Fighting the still abysmal
infant mortality rate amongst their own countryłs original inhabitants?
Thirty-five million would have helped substantially with any of these
endeavours, but Angela and Bill were so worried about making the right choice
that they put it off, month after month, year after year.

Meanwhile, free of financial restraints, they began trying
to have a child. After two years without success, they finally sought medical
advice, and were told that Angela was producing antibodies to Billłs sperm.
This was no great problem; neither of them was intrinsically infertile, they
could still both provide gametes for IVF, and Angela could bear the child. The
only question was, who would carry out the procedure? The only possible answer
was, the best reproductive specialist money could buy.

Sam Cook was the best, or at least the best known. For the
past twenty years, hełd been enabling women in infertile relationships to give
birth to as many as seven children at a time, long after multiple embryo
implants had ceased being necessary to ensure success (the media wouldnłt bid
for exclusive rights to anything less than quintuplets). He also had a
reputation for quality control unequalled by any of his colleagues; after a
stint in Tokyo on the Human Genome Project, he was as familiar with molecular
biology as he was with gynecology, obstetrics and embryology.

It was quality control that complicated the couplełs plans.
For their marriage licence, their blood had been sent to a run-of-the-mill
pathologist, who had only screened them for such extreme conditions as muscular
dystrophy, cystic fibrosis, Huntingtonłs disease, and so on. Human Potential,
equipped with all the latest probes, was a thousand times more thorough. It
turned out that Bill carried genes which could make their child susceptible to
clinical depression, and Angela carried genes which might make it hyperactive.

Cook spelt out the options for them.

One solution would be to use what was now referred to as
TPGM: third-party genetic material. No need to make do with any old dross,
either; Human Potential had Nobel prizewinnersł sperm by the bucketful, and
although they had no equivalent ovacollection being so much harder, and most
prizewinners being well into their sixtiesthey had blood samples instead, from
which chromosomes could be extracted, artificially converted from diploid to
haploid, and inserted into an ovum provided by Angela.

Alternativelyalbeit at a somewhat higher costthey could
stick with their own gametes, and use gene therapy to correct the problems.

They talked it over for a couple of weeks, but the choice
wasnłt difficult. The legal status of children produced from TPGM was still a
messand a slightly different mess in every state of Australia, not to mention
from country to countryand of course they both wanted, if possible, a child
who was biologically their own.

At their next appointment, while explaining these reasons, Angela
also disclosed the magnitude of their wealth, so that Cook would feel no need
to cut corners for the sake of economy. They had kept their win from becoming
public knowledge, but it hardly seemed right to have any secrets from the man
who was going to work this miracle for them.

Cook seemed to take the revelation in his stride, and
congratulated them on their wise decision. But he added, apologetically, that
in his ignorance of the size of their financial resources, he had probably
misled them into a limited view of what he had to offer.

Since theyłd chosen gene therapy, why be half-hearted about
it? Why rescue their child from maladjustment, only to curse it with
mediocritywhen so much more was possible? With their money, and Human
Potentialłs facilities and expertise, a truly extraordinary child could be
created: intelligent, creative, charismatic; the relevant genes had all been
more or less pinned down, and a timely injection of research fundssay, twenty
or thirty millionwould see the loose ends sorted out very rapidly.

Angela and Bill exchanged looks of incredulity. Thirty
seconds earlier, theyłd been talking about a normal, healthy baby. This grab
for their money was so transparent that they could scarcely believe it.

Cook went on, apparently oblivious. Naturally, such a
donation would be honoured by renaming the buildingłs L. K. Robinson/ Margaret
Lee/Duneside Rotary Club laboratory the Angela and Bill Cooper/L. K.
Robinson/Margaret Lee/Duneside Rotary Club laboratory, and a contract would
ensure that their philanthropy be mentioned in all scientific papers and media
releases which flowed from the work.

Angela broke into a coughing fit to keep from laughing. Bill
stared at a spot on the carpet and bit his cheeks. Both found the prospect of
joining the ranks of the cityłs obnoxious, self-promoting charity socialites
about as enticing as the notion of eating their own excrement.

However. There was a third prong.

ęThe world,ł Cook said, suddenly stern and brooding, ęis a
mess.ł The couple nodded dumbly, still fighting back laughterin full
agreement, but wondering if they were now about to be told not to bother raising
children at all. ęEvery ecosystem on the planet that hasnłt been bulldozed is
dying from pollution. The climate is changing faster than we can modify our
infrastructure. Species are vanishing. People are starving. There have been
more casualties of war in the last ten years than in the previous century.ł
They nodded again, sober now, but still baffled by the abrupt change of
subject.

ęScientists are doing all they can, but itłs not enough. The
same for politicians. Which is sad, but hardly surprising: these people are
only a generation beyond the fools who got us into this mess. What child can be
expected to avoid, to undoto utterly transcendthe mistakes of its parents?ł

He paused, then suddenly broke into a dazzling, almost
beatific smile.

ęWhat child? A very special child. Your child.ł

* * * *

In the late twentieth century, opponents of molecular
eugenics had relied almost exclusively on pointing out similarities between
modern trends and the obscenities of the past: nineteenth-century
pseudo-sciences like phrenology and physiognomy, invented to support
preconceptions about race and class differences; Nazi ideology about racial
inferiority, which had led straight to the Holocaust; and radical biological
determinism, a movement largely confined to the pages of academic journals, but
infamous nonetheless for its attempts to make racism scientifically
respectable.

Over the years, though, the racist taint receded. Genetic
engineering produced a wealth of highly beneficial new drugs and vaccines, as
well as therapiesand sometimes curesfor dozens of previously debilitating,
often fatal, genetic diseases. It was absurd to claim that molecular biologists
(as if they were all of one mind) were intent on creating a world of Aryan
supermen (as if that, and precisely that, were the only conceivable abuse).
Those who had played glibly on fears of the past were left without ammunition.

By the time Angela and Bill were contemplating Cookłs proposal,
the prevailing rhetoric was almost the reverse of that of a decade before.
Modern eugenics was hailed by its practitioners as a force opposed to racist
myths. Individual traits were what mattered, to be assessed ęobjectivelył on
their merits, and the historical conjunctions of traits which had once been
referred to as ęracial characteristicsł were of no more interest to a modern
eugenicist than national boundaries were to a geologist. Who could oppose
reducing the incidence of crippling genetic diseases? Who could oppose
decreasing the next generationłs susceptibility to arteriosclerosis, breast
cancer, and stroke, and increasing their ability to tolerate UV radiation,
pollution and stress? Not to mention nuclear fallout.

As for producing a child so brilliant as to cut a swathe
through the worldłs environmental, political and social problems ... perhaps
such high expectations would not be fulfilled, but what could be wrong about
trying?

And yet. Angela and Bill remained waryand even felt vaguely
guilty at the prospect of accepting Cookłs proposal, without quite knowing why.
Yes, eugenics was only for the rich, but that had been true of the leading edge
of health care for centuries. Neither would have declined the latest surgical
procedures or drugs simply because most people in the world could not afford
them. Their patronage, they reasoned, could assist the long, slow process
leading to extensive gene therapy for everyonełs children. Well ... at least
everyone in the wealthiest countriesł upper middle classes.

They returned to Human Potential. Cook gave them the VIP
tour, he showed them his talking dolphins and his slice of prime cortex, and
still they were unconvinced. So he gave them a questionnaire to fill out, a
specification of the child they wanted; this might, he suggested, make it all a
bit more tangible.

* * * *

Cook glanced over the form, and frowned. ęYou havenłt answered
all the questions.ł

Bill said, ęW-w-we didnłtł

Angela hushed him. ęWe want to leave some things to chance.
Is that a problem?ł

Cook shrugged. ęNot technically. It just seems a pity. Some
of the traits youłve left blank could have a very real influence on the course
of Eugenełs life.ł

ęThatłs exactly why we left them blank. We donłt want to dictate
every tiny detail, we donłt want to leave him with no room at allł

Cook shook his head. ęAngela, Angela! Youłre looking at this
the wrong way. By refusing to make a decision, youłre not giving Eugene
personal freedomyoułre taking it away! Abnegating responsibility wonłt give
him the power to choose any of these things for himself; it simply means hełll
be stuck with traits which may be less than ideal. Can we go through some of
these unanswered questions?ł

ęSure.ł

Bill said, ęMaybe ch-ch-chance is p-part of freedom.ł Cook ignored
him.

ęHeight. Do you honestly not care at all about that? Both of
you are well below average, so you must both be aware of the disadvantages.
Donłt you want better for Eugene?

ęBuild. Letłs be frank; youłre overweight, Bill is rather
scrawny. We can give Eugene a head start towards a socially optimal body. Of
course, a lot will depend on his lifestyle, but we can influence his dietary
and exercise habits far more than you might think. He can be made to like and
dislike certain foods, and we can arrange maximum susceptibility to endogenous
opiates produced during exercise.

ęPenis lengthł

Angela scowled. ęNow thatłs the most trivialł

ęYou think so? A recent survey of two thousand male
graduates of Harvard Business School found that penis length and IQ were
equally good predictors of annual income.

ęFacial bone structure. In the latest group-dynamic studies,
it turned out that both the forehead and the cheekbones played significant
roles in determining which individuals assumed dominant status. Iłll give you a
copy of the results.

ę Sexual preferenceł

ęSurely he canł

ęMake up his own mind? Thatłs wishful thinking, Iłm afraid.
The evidence is quite unambiguous: itłs determined in the embryo by the
interaction of several genes. Now, I have nothing at all against homosexuals,
but the condition is hardly what youłd call a blessing. Oh, people can always
reel off lists of famous homosexual geniuses, but thatłs a biased sample; of
course wełve only heard of the successes.

ęMusical taste. As yet, we can only influence this crudely,
but the social advantages should not be underestimated ...ł

* * * *

Angela and Bill sat in their living room with the TV on, although
they werenłt paying much attention to it. An interminable ad for the Department
of Defence was showing, all rousing music and jet fighters in appealingly
symmetrical formations. The latest privatisation legislation meant that each
taxpayer could specify the precise allocation of his or her income tax between
government departments, who in turn were free to spend as much of their revenue
as they wished on advertising aimed at attracting more funds. Defence was doing
well. Social Security was laying off staff.

The latest meeting with Cook had done nothing to banish
their sense of unease, but without solid reasons to back up their feelings,
they felt obliged to ignore them. Cook had solid reasons for everything, all
based on the very latest research; how could they go to him and call the whole
thing off, without at least a dozen impeccable arguments, each supported by a
reference to some recent report in Nature?

They couldnłt even pin down the source of their disquiet to
their own satisfaction. Perhaps they were simply afraid of the fame that Eugene
was destined to bring upon them. Perhaps they were jealous, already, of their
sonłs as yet unknowablebut inevitably spectacularachievements. Bill had a
vague suspicion that the whole endeavour was somehow pulling the rug out from
under an important part of what it had meant to be humanbut he didnłt know
quite how to put it into words, not even to Angela. How could he confess that,
personally, he didnłt want to know the extent to which genes determined the
fate of an individual? How could he declare that hełd rather stick with
comfortable mythsno, forget the euphemisms, that hełd rather have downright
liesthan have his nose rubbed in the dreary truth that a human being could be
made to order, like a hamburger?

Cook had assured them that they need have no worries about
handling the young genius. He could arrange a queue-jumping enrolment in the
best Californian baby university, where, amongst Noble X Noble TPGM prodigies,
Eugene could do brain-stimulating baby gymnastics to the sound of Kant sung to
Beethoven, and learn Grand Unified Field Theory subliminally during his
afternoon naps. Eventually, of course, he would overtake both his genetically
inferior peers and his merely brilliant instructors, but by then he ought to be
able to direct his own education.

Bill put an arm around Angela, and wondered if Eugene really
would do more for humanity than their millions could have achieved directly in
Bangladesh or Ethiopia or Alice Springs. But could they face spending the rest
of their lives wondering what miracles Eugene might have performed for their
crippled planet? That would be unbearable. Theyłd pay the tax on hope.

Angela began loosening Billłs clothing. He did the same for
her. Tonightas they both knew, without exchanging a wordwas the most fertile
point of Angelałs cycle; in spite of the antibodies, they hadnłt abandoned the
habits theyłd acquired in the years when theyłd been hoping to conceive
naturally.

The rousing music from the television stopped, abruptly. The
scenes of military hardware deteriorated into static. A sad-eyed boy, perhaps
eight years old, appeared on the screen and said quietly, ęMother. Father. I
owe you an explanation.ł

Behind the boy was nothing but an empty blue sky. Angela and
Bill stared at the screen in silence, waiting in vain for a voice-over or title
to put the image in context. Then the childłs eyes met Angelałs, and she knew
that he could see her, and she knew who it must be. She gripped Billłs arm and
whispered, dizzy with shock, but euphoric too, ęItłs Eugene.ł

The boy nodded.

For a moment, Bill was overcome with panic and confusion,
but then paternal pride swelled up and he managed to say, ęYoułve invented
t-t-t-time t-travel!ł

Eugene shook his head. ęNo. Suppose you fed the genetic profile
of an embryo into a computer, which then constructed a simulation of the
appearance of the mature organism; no time travel is involved, and yet aspects
of a possible future are revealed. In that example, all the machinery to
perform the extrapolation exists in the present, but the same thing can happen
if the right equipmentequipment of a far more sophisticated kindexists in the
potential future. It may be useful, as a mathematical formalism, to pretend
that the potential future has a tangible reality and is influencing its
pastjust as in geometric optics, itłs often convenient to pretend that
reflections are real objects that exist behind the mirrors that create thembut
a formalism is all it would be.ł

Angela said, ęSo because you might invent such a device, we
can see you, and talk to you, as if you were speaking to us from the future?ł

ęYes.ł

The couple exchanged glances. Here was an end to their
doubts! Now they could find out exactly what Eugene would do for the world!

ęIf you were speaking to us from the future,ł Angela asked
carefully, ęwhat would you tell us? That youłve reversed the Greenhouse
Effect?ł Eugene shook his head sadly. ęThat youłve made war obsolete?ł No. ęThat
youłve abolished hunger?ł No. ęThat youłve found a cure for cancer?ł No. ęWhat,
then?ł

ęI would say that I have found a way to Nirvana.ł

ęWhat do you mean? Immortality? Infinite bliss? Heaven on
Earth?ł

ęNo. Nirvana. The absence of all longing.ł

Bill was horrified. ęY-y-you d-donłt mean g-g-genocide?
Youłre n-not going to w-w-w-wipeł

ęNo, Father. That would be easy, but I would never do such a
thing. Each must find their own wayand in any case, death is an incomplete
solution, it cannot erase what has already been. Nirvana is to never have
been.ł

Angela said, ęI donłt understand.ł

ęMy potential existence influences more than this television
set. When you check your bank accounts, you will find that the money you might
have used to create me has been disbursed; donłt look so distresseditłs all
gone to charitable organisations of which you both approve. The computer
records are precisely as if you had authorised the payments yourselves, so
donłt bother trying to challenge their authenticity.ł

Angela was distraught. ęBut ... why would you waste your talents
on destroying yourself, when you could have lived a happy, productive life, and
done great things for the whole human race?ł

ęWhy?ł Eugene frowned. ęDonłt ask me to account for my actions;
youłre the ones who would have made me what I would have been. If you want my
subjective opinion: personally, I canłt see any point in existence when I can
achieve so much without itbut I wouldnłt call that an �explanation"; itłs
merely a rationalisation of processes best described at a neural level.ł He
shrugged apologetically. ęThe question really has no meaning. Why anything? The
laws of physics, and the boundary conditions of space-time. What more can I
say?ł

He vanished from the screen. A soap opera appeared.

They contacted their bankłs computer. The experience had
been no shared hallucination; their accounts were empty.

They sold the house, which was far too large for just the
two of them, but it cost them most of the proceeds to buy something much
smaller. Angela found work as a tour guide. Bill got a job on a garbage truck.

Cookłs research continued without them, of course. He succeeded
in creating four chimpanzees able to sing, and understand, country and western,
for which he received both the Nobel Prize and a Grammy award. He made it into
the Guinness Book of Records, for implanting and delivering the worldłs first
third-generation IVF quins. But his super-baby project, and those of other
eugenicists around the world, seemed jinxed; sponsors backed out for no
apparent reason, equipment malfunctioned, labs caught fire.

Cook died without ever understanding how completely successful
hełd been.

The Extra

Daniel Gray didnłt merely arrange for his Extras to live in
a building within the grounds of his main residencealthough that in itself
would have been shocking enough. At the height of his midsummer garden party,
he had their trainer march them along a winding path which took them within
metres of virtually every one of his wealthy and powerful guests.

There were five batches, each batch a decade younger than
the preceding one, each comprising twenty-five Extras (less one or two here and
there; naturally, some depletion had occurred, and Gray made no effort to hide
the fact). Batch A

were forty-four years old, the same age as Gray himself.
Batch E, the four-year-olds, could not have kept up with the others on foot, so
they followed behind, riding an electric float.

The Extras were as clean as theyłd ever been in their lives,
and their hair

and beards in the case of the older oneshad been
laboriously trimmed, in styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions.
Gray had almost gone so far as to have them clothedbut after much
experimentation hełd decided against it; even the slightest scrap of clothing
made them look too human, and he was acutely aware of the boundary between
impressing his guests with his daring, and causing them real discomfort. Of
course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like naked humans, but in Grayłs
cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were not a common sight, and so
the paradoxical effect of revealing the creaturesł

totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of
them as less than human.

The parade was a great success. Everyone applauded demurely
as it passed by

in the context, an extravagant gesture of approval. They werenłt
applauding the Extras themselves, however impressive they were to behold; they
were applauding Daniel Gray for his audacity in breaking the taboo.

Gray could only guess how many people in the world had Extras;
perhaps the wealthiest ten thousand, perhaps the wealthiest hundred thousand.
Most owners chose to be discreet. Keeping a stock of congenitally brain-damaged
clones of oneselfin the short term, as organ donors; in the long term (once the
techniques were perfected), as the recipients of brain transplantswas not illegal,
but nor was it widely accepted. Any owner who went public could expect a
barrage of anonymous hate mail, intense media scrutiny, property damage, threats
of violenceall the usual behaviour associated with the public debate of a
subtle point of ethics. There had been legal challenges, of course, but time
and again the highest courts had ruled that Extras were not human beings.

Too much cortex was missing; if Extras deserved human rights,
so did half the mammalian species on the planet. With a patient, skilled
trainer, Extras could learn to run in circles, and to perform the simple,
repetitive exercises that kept their muscles in good tone, but that was about
the limit. A dog or a cat would have needed brain tissue removed to persuade it
to live such a boring life.

Even those few owners who braved the wrath of the fanatics,
and bragged about their Extras, generally had them kept in commercial stablesin
the same city, of course, so as not to undermine their usefulness in a medical
emergency, but certainly not within the electrified boundaries of their own
homes. What ageing, dissipated man or woman would wish to be surrounded by
reminders of how healthy and vigorous they might have been, if only theyłd
lived their lives differently?

Daniel Gray, however, found the contrasting appearance of
his Extras entirely pleasing to behold, given that he, and not they, would be
the ultimate beneficiary of their good health. In fact, his athletic, clean-living
brothers had already supplied him with two livers, one kidney, one lung, and
quantities of coronary artery and mucous membrane. In each case, hełd had the
donor put down, whether or not it had remained strictly viable; the idea of
having imperfect Extras in his collection offended his aesthetic sensibilities.

After the appearance of the Extras, nobody at the party
could talk about anything else. Perhaps, one stereovision luminary suggested,
now that their host had shown such courage, it would at last became fashionable
to flaunt onełs Extras, allowing full value to be extracted from them; after
all, considering the cost, it was a crime to make use of them only in
emergencies, when their pretty bodies went beneath the surgeonłs knife.

Gray wandered from group to group, listening contentedly,
pausing now and then to pluck and eat a delicate spice-rose or a juicy
claret-apple (the entire garden had been designed specifically to provide the
refreshments for this annual occasion, so everything was edible, and everything
was in season). The early afternoon sky was a dazzling, uplifting blue, and he
stood for a moment with his face raised to the warmth of the sun. The party was
a complete success.

Everyone was talking about him. He hadnłt felt so happy in
years.

�I wonder if youłre smiling for the same reason I am."

He turned. Sarah Brash, the owner of Continental Bio-Logic,
and a recent former lover, stood beside him, beaming in a faintly unnatural
way. She wore one of the patterned scarfs which Gray had made available to his
guests; a variety of gene-tailored insects roamed the garden, and her
particular choice of scarf attracted a bee whose painless sting contained a
combination of a mild stimulant and an aphrodisiac.

He shrugged. �I doubt it."

She laughed and took his arm, then came still closer and whispered,
�Iłve been thinking a very wicked thought."

He made no reply. Hełd lost interest in Sarah a month ago,
and the sight of her in this state did nothing to rekindle his desire. He had
just broken off with her successor, but he had no wish to repeat himself. He
was trying to think of something to say that would be offensive enough to drive
her away, when she reached out and tenderly cupped his face in her small, warm
hands.

Then she playfully seized hold of his sagging jowls, and
said, in tones of mock aggrievement, �Donłt you think it was terribly selfish
of you, Daniel? You gave me your body ... but you didnłt give me your best one."

Gray lay awake until after dawn. Vivid images of the eveningłs
entertainment kept returning to him, and he found them difficult to banish. The
Extra Sarah had chosenC7, one of the twenty-four-year-oldshad been muzzled
and tightly bound throughout, but it had made copious noises in its throat, and
its eyes had been remarkably expressive. Gray had learnt, years ago, to keep a
mask of mild amusement and boredom on his face, whatever he was feeling; to see
fear, confusion, distress and ecstasy, nakedly displayed on features that, in
spite of everything, were unmistakably his own, had been rather like a
nightmare of losing control.

Of course, it had also been as inconsequential as a
nightmare; he had not lost control for a moment, however much his animal
look-alike had rolled its eyes, and moaned, and trembled. His appetite for
sexual novelty aside, perhaps he had agreed to Sarahłs request for that very
reason: to see this primitive aspect of himself unleashed, without the least
risk to his own equilibrium.

He decided to have the creature put down in the morning; he
didnłt want it corrupting its clone-brothers, and he couldnłt be bothered
arranging to have it kept in isolation. Extras had their sex drives
substantially lowered by drugs, but not completely eliminatedthat would have
had too many physiological side-effectsand Gray had heard that it took just
one clone who had discovered the possibilities, to trigger widespread
masturbation and homosexual behaviour throughout the batch. Most owners would
not have cared, but Gray wanted his Extras to be more than merely healthy; he wanted
them to be innocent, he wanted them to be without sin. He was not a religious
man, but he could still appreciate the emotional power of such concepts. When
the time came for his brain to be moved into a younger body, he wanted to begin
his new life with a sense of purification, a sense of rebirth.

However sophisticated his amorality, Gray freely admitted
that at a certain level, inaccessible to reason, his indulgent life sickened
him, as surely as it sickened his body. His family and his peers had always,
unequivocally, encouraged him to seek pleasure, but perhaps he had been
influenced

subconsciously and unwillinglyby ideas which still
prevailed in other social strata. Since the late twentieth century, whenin
affluent countries

cardiovascular disease and other �diseases of lifestyle" had
become the major causes of death, the notion that health was a reward for
virtue had acquired a level of acceptance unknown since the medieval plagues. A
healthy lifestyle was not just pragmatic, it was righteous. A heart attack or a
stroke, lung cancer or liver diseasenot to mention AIDSwas clearly a
punishment for some vice that the sufferer had chosen to pursue. Twenty-first
century medicine had gradually weakened many of the causal links between
lifestyle and life expectancyand the advent of Extras would, for the very
rich, soon sever them completelybut the outdated moral overtones persisted
nonetheless.

In any case, however fervently Gray approved of his gluttonous,
sedentary, drug-hazed, promiscuous life, a part of him felt guilty and unclean.
He could not wipe out his past, nor did he wish to, but to discard his ravaged
body and begin again in blameless flesh would be the perfect way to neutralise
this irrational self-disgust. He would attend his own cremation, and watch his

�sinful" corpse consigned to �hellfire"! Atheists, he
decided, are not immune to religious metaphors; he had no doubt that the
experience would be powerfully moving, liberating beyond belief.

Three months later, Sarah Brashłs lawyers informed him that
she had conceived a child (which, naturally, shełd had transferred to an Extra
surrogate), and that she cordially requested that Gray provide her with fifteen
billion dollars to assist with the childłs upbringing.

His first reaction was a mixture of irritation and amusement
at his own naivety. He should have suspected that therełd been more to Sarahłs
request than sheer perversity. Her wealth was comparable to his own, but the
prospect of living for centuries seemed to have made the rich greedier than
ever; a fortune that sufficed for seven or eight decades was no longer enough.

On principle, Gray instructed his lawyers to take the matter
to courtand then he began trying to ascertain what his chances were of
winning. Hełd had a vasectomy years ago, and could produce records proving his
infertility, at least on every occasion hełd had a sperm count measured. He
couldnłt prove that he hadnłt had the operation temporarily reversed, since
that could now be done with hardly a trace, but he knew perfectly well that the
Extra was the father of the child, and he could prove that. Although the Extrasł
brain damage resulted solely from foetal microsurgery, rather than genetic
alteration, all Extras were genetically tagged with a coded serial number, written
into portions of DNA

which had no active function, at over a thousand different
sites. Whatłs more, these tags were always on both chromosomes of each pair, so
any child fathered by an Extra would necessarily inherit all of them. Grayłs
biotechnology advisers assured him that stripping these tags from the zygote
was, in practice, virtually impossible.

Perhaps Sarah planned to freely admit that the Extra was the
father, and hoped to set a precedent making its owner responsible for the
upkeep of its human offspring. Grayłs legal experts were substantially less
reassuring than his geneticists. Gray could prove that the Extra hadnłt raped
heras she no doubt knew, hełd taped everything that had happened that nightbut
that wasnłt the point; after all, consenting to intercourse would not have
deprived her of the right to an ordinary paternity suit. As the tapes also
showed, Gray had known full well what was happening, and had clearly approved.
That the late Extra had been unwilling was, unfortunately, irrelevant.

After wasting an entire week brooding over the matter, Gray
finally gave up worrying. The case would not reach court for five or six years,
and was unlikely to be resolved in less than a decade. He promptly had his
remaining Extras vasectomisedto prove to the courts, when the time came, that
he was not irresponsibleand then he pushed the whole business out of his mind.

Almost.

A few weeks later, he had a dream. Conscious all the while
that he was dreaming, he saw the nightłs events re-enacted, except that this
time it was he who was bound and muzzled, slave to Sarahłs hands and tongue,
while the Extra stood back and watched.

But ... had they merely swapped places, he wondered, or had
they swapped bodies? His dreamerłs point of view told him nothinghe saw all
three bodies from the outsidebut the lean young man who watched bore Grayłs own
characteristic jaded expression, and the middle-aged man in Sarahłs embrace moaned
and twitched and shuddered, exactly as the Extra had done.

Gray was elated. He still knew that he was only dreaming,
but he couldnłt suppress his delight at the inspired idea of keeping his old
body alive with the Extrałs brain, rather than consigning it to flames. What
could be more controversial, more outrageous, than having not just his Extras,
but his own discarded corpse, walking the grounds of his estate? He resolved at
once to do this, to abandon his long-held desire for a symbolic cremation. His
friends would be shocked into the purest admirationas would the fanatics, in
their own way. True infamy had proved elusive; people had talked about his last
stunt for a week or two, and then forgotten itbut the midsummer party at which
the guest of honour was Daniel Grayłs old body would be remembered for the rest
of his vastly prolonged life.

Over the next few years, the medical research division of
Grayłs vast corporate empire began to make significant progress on the brain
transplant problem.

Transplants between newborn Extras had been successful for
decades. With identical genes, and having just emerged from the very same womb
(or from the anatomically and biochemically indistinguishable wombs of two
clone-sister Extras), any differences between donor and recipient were small
enough to be overcome by a young, flexible brain.

However, older Extraseven those raised identicallyhad
shown remarkable divergences in many neural structures, and whole-brain
transplants between them had been found to result in paralysis, sensory
dysfunction, and sometimes even death. Gray was no neuroscientist, but he could
understand roughly what the problem was: Brain and body grow and change
together throughout life, becoming increasingly reliant on each otherłs
idiosyncrasies, in a feed-back process riddled with chaotic attractorshence
the unavoidable differences, even between clones. In the body of a human (or an
Extra), there are thousands of sophisticated control systems which may include
the brain, but are certainly not contained within it, involving everything from
the spinal cord and the peripheral nervous system, to hormonal feedback loops,
the immune system, and, ultimately, almost every organ in the body. Over time,
all of these elements adapt in some degree to the particular demands placed
upon themand the brain grows to rely upon the specific characteristics that
these external systems acquire. A brain transplant throws this complex
interdependence into disarray

at least as badly as a massive stroke, or an extreme somatic
trauma.

Sometimes, two or three years of extensive physiotherapy
could enable the transplanted brain and body to adjust to each otherbut only
between clones of equal age and indistinguishable lifestyles. When the brain
donor was a model of a likely human candidatean intentionally overfed,
under-exercised, drug-wrecked Extra, twenty or thirty years older than the body
donorthe result was always death or coma.

The theoretical solution, if not the detailed means of
achieving it, was obvious. Those portions of the brain responsible for motor
control, the endocrine system, the low-level processing of sensory data, and so
on, had to be retained in the body in which they had matured. Why struggle to
make the donor brain adjust to the specifics of a new body, when that bodyłs
original brain already contained neural systems fine-tuned to perfection for
the task? If the aim was to transplant memory and personality, why transplant
anything else?

After many years of careful brain-function mapping, and the
identification and synthesis of growth factors which could trigger mature
neurons into sending forth axons across the boundaries of a graft, Grayłs own
team had been the first to try partial transplants. Gray watched tapes of the
operations, and was both repelled and amused to see oddly shaped lumps of one
Extrałs brain being exchanged with the corresponding regions of anotherłs;
repelled by visceral instinct, but amused to see the seat of reasoneven in a
mere Extrabeing treated like so much vegetable matter.

The forty-seventh partial transplant, between a sedentary,
ailing fifty-year-old, and a fit, healthy twenty-year-old, was an unqualified
success.

After a mere two months of recuperation, both Extras were fully
mobile, with all five senses completely unimpaired.

Had they swapped memories and �personalities"? Apparently,
yes. Both had been observed by a team of psychologists for a year before the
operation, and their behaviour extensively characterised, and both had been
trained to perform different sets of tasks for rewards. After the selective
brain swap, the learned tasks, and the observed behavioural idiosyncrasies,
were found to have followed the transplanted tissue. Of course, eventually the
younger, fitter Extra began to be affected by its newfound health, becoming substantially
more active than it had been in its original bodyand the Extra now in the
older body soon showed signs of acquiescing to its ill-health. But regardless
of any post-transplant adaption to their new bodies, the fact remained that the
Extrasł

identitiessuch as they werehad been exchanged.

After a few dozen more Extra-Extra transplants, with
virtually identical outcomes, the time came for the first human-Extra trials.

Grayłs parents had both died years before (on the operating
tablean almost inevitable outcome of their hundreds of non-essential
transplants), but they had left him a valuable legacy; thirty years ago, their
own scientists had

(illegally) signed up fifty men and women in their early twenties,
and Extras had been made for them. These volunteers had been well paid, but not
so well paid that a far larger sum, withheld until after the actual transplant,
would lose its appeal. Nobody had been coerced, and the seventeen whołd dropped
out quietly had not been punished. An eighteenth had tried blackmaileven though
shełd had no idea who was doing the experiment, let alone who was financing it

and had died in a tragic ferry disaster, along with three
hundred and nine other people. Grayłs people believed in assassinations with a
low signal-to-noise ratio.

Of the thirty-two human-Extra transplants, twenty-nine were
pronounced completely successful. As with the Extra-Extra trials, both bodies
were soon fully functional, but now the humans in the younger bodies couldafter
a month or two of speech therapyrespond to detailed interrogation by experts,
who declared that their memories and personalities were intact.

Gray wanted to speak to the volunteers in person, but knew
that was too risky, so he contented himself with watching tapes of the
interviews. The psychologists had their barrages of supposedly rigourous tests,
but Gray preferred to listen to the less formal segments, when the volunteers
spoke of their life histories, their political and religious beliefs, and so ondisplaying
at least as much consistency across the transplant as any person who is asked
to discuss such matters on two separate occasions.

The three failures were difficult to characterise. They too
learnt to use their new bodies, to walk and talk as proficiently as the others,
but they were depressed, withdrawn, and uncooperative. No physical difference
could be found

scans showed that their grafted tissue, and the residual
portions of their Extrałs brain, had forged just as many interconnecting
pathways as the brains of the other volunteers. They seemed to be unhappy with
a perfectly successful resultthey seemed to have simply decided that they didnłt
want younger bodies, after all.

Gray was unconcerned; if these people were disposed to be ungrateful
for their good fortune, that was a character defect that he knew he did not
share. He would be utterly delighted to have a fresh young body to enjoy for a
while

before setting out to wreck it, in the knowledge that, in a
decadełs time, he could take his pick from the next batch of Extras and start
the whole process again.

There were �failures" amongst the Extras as well, but that
was hardly surprisingthe creatures had no way of even beginning to comprehend
what had happened to them. Symptoms ranged from loss of appetite to extreme, uncontrollable
violence; one Extra had even managed to batter itself to death on a concrete
floor, before it could be tranquillised. Gray hoped his own Extra would turn
out to be well-behavedhe wanted his old body to be clearly sub-human, but not
utterly berserkbut it was not a critical factor, and he decided against diverting
resources towards the problem. After all, it was the fate of his brain in the
Extrałs body that was absolutely crucial; success with the other half of the
swap would be an entertaining bonus, but if it wasnłt achieved, well, he could
always revert to cremation.

Gray scheduled and cancelled his transplant a dozen times.
He was not in urgent need by any meansthere was nothing currently wrong with
him that required a single new organ, let alone an entire new bodybut he
desperately wanted to be first. The penniless volunteers didnłt countand that
was why he hesitated:

trials on humans from those lower social classes struck him
as not much more reassuring than trials on Extras. Who was to say that a
process that left a rough-hewn, culturally deficient personality intact, would
preserve his own refined, complex sensibilities? Therein lay the dilemma: he
would only feel safe if he knew that an equala rivalhad undergone a
transplant before him, in which case he would be deprived of all the glory of
being a path-breaker. Vanity fought cowardice; it was a battle of titans.

It was the approach of Sarah Brashłs court case that finally
pushed him into making a decision. He didnłt much care how the case itself
went; the real battle would be for the best publicity; the media would
determine who won and who lost, whatever the jury decided. As things stood, he
looked like a naive fool, an easily manipulated voyeur, while Sarah came across
as a smart operator. Shełd shown initiative; hełd just let himself (or rather, his
Extra) get screwed. He needed an edge, he needed a gimmicksomething that would
overshadow her petty scheming. If he swapped bodies with an Extra in time for
the trialbecoming, officially, the first human to do sonobody would waste
time covering the obscure details of Sarahłs side of the case. His mere presence
in court would be a matter of planet-wide controversy; the legal definition of
identity was still based on DNA fingerprinting and retinal patterns, with some
clumsy exceptions thrown in to allow for gene therapy and retina transplants.
The laws would soon be changedhe was arranging itbut as things stood, the
subpoena would apply to his old body. He could just imagine sitting in the
public gallery, unrecognised, while Sarahłs lawyer tried to cross-examine the
quivering, confused, wild-eyed Extra that his discarded �corpse" had become!
Quite possibly he, or his lawyers, would end up being charged with contempt of
court, but it would be worth it for the spectacle.

So, Gray inspected Batch D, which were now just over nineteen
years old. They regarded him with their usual idiotic, friendly expression. He
wondered, not for the first time, if any of the Extras ever realised that he
was their clone-brother, too. They never seemed to respond to him any differently
than they did to other humansand yet a fraction of a gram of foetal brain
tissue was all that had kept him from being one of them. Even Batch A, his

�contemporaries", showed no sign of recognition. If he had
stripped naked and mimicked their grunting sounds, would they have accepted him
as an equal? Hełd never felt inclined to find out; Extra �anthropology" was
hardly something he wished to encourage, let alone participate in. But he
decided he would return to visit Batch D in his new body; it would certainly be
amusing to see just what they made of a clone-brother who vanished, then came
back three months later with speech and clothes.

The clones were all in perfect health, and virtually indistinguishable.
He finally chose one at random. The trainer examined the tattoo on the sole of
its foot, and said, �D12, sir."

Gray nodded, and walked away.

He spent the week before the transplant in a state of
constant agitation. He knew exactly which drugs would have prevented this, but
the medical team had advised him to stay clean, and he was too afraid to
disobey them.

He watched D12 for hours, trying to distract himself with
the supposedly thrilling knowledge that those clear eyes, that smooth skin,
those taut muscles, would soon be his. The only trouble was, this began to seem
a rather paltry reward for the risk he would be taking. Knowing all his life
that this day would come, hełd learnt not to care at all what he looked like;
by now, he was so used to his own appearance that he wasnłt sure he especially
wanted to be lean and muscular and rosy-cheeked. After all, if that really had
been his fondest wish, he could have achieved it in other ways; some quite
effective pharmaceuticals and tailored viruses had existed for decades, but he
had chosen not to use them.

He had enjoyed looking the part of the dissolute
billionaire, and his wealth had brought him more sexual partners than his new
body would ever attract through its own merits. In short, he neither wanted nor
needed to change his appearance at all.

So, in the end it came down to longevity, and the hope of immortality.
As his parents had proved, any transplant involved a small but finite risk. A
whole new body every ten or twenty years was surely a far safer bet than
replacing individual organs at an increasing rate, for diminishing returns. And
a whole new body now, long before he needed it, made far more sense than
waiting until he was so frail that a small overdose of anaesthetic could finish
him off.

When the day arrived, Gray thought he was, finally,
prepared. The chief surgeon asked him if he wished to proceed; he could have
said no, and she would not have blinkednot one his employees would have dared
to betray the least irritation, had he cancelled their laborious preparations a
thousand times.

But he didnłt say no.

As the cool spray of the anaesthetic touched his skin, he suffered
a moment of absolute panic. They were going to cut up his brain. Not the brain
of a grunting, drooling Extra, not the brain of some ignorant slum-dweller, but
his brain, full of memories of great music and literature and art, full of
moments of joy and insight from the finest psychotropic drugs, full of
ambitions that, given time, might change the course of civilisation.

He tried to visualise one of his favourite paintings, to
provide an image he could dwell upon, a memory that would prove that the
essential Daniel Gray had survived the transplant. That Van Gogh hełd bought
last year. But he couldnłt recall the name of it, let alone what it looked
like. He closed his eyes and drifted helplessly into darkness.

When he awoke, he was numb all over, and unable to move or
make a sound, but he could see. Poorly, at first, but over a period that might
have been hours, or might have been dayspunctuated as it was with stretches of
enervating, dreamless sleephe was able to identify his surroundings. A white
ceiling, a white wall, a glimpse of some kind of electronic device in the
corner of one eye; the upper section of the bed must have been tilted,
mercifully keeping his gaze from being strictly vertical. But he couldnłt move
his head, or his eyes, he couldnłt even close his eyelids, so he quickly lost
interest in the view. The light never seemed to change, so sleep was his only
relief from the monotony.

After a while, he began to wonder if in fact he had woken
many times, before he had been able to see, but had experienced nothing to mark
the occasions in his memory.

Later he could hear, too, although there wasnłt much to be
heard; people came and went, and spoke softly, but not, so far as he could
tell, to him; in any case, their words made no sense. He was too lethargic to
care about the people, or to fret about his situation. In time he would be
taught to use his new body fully, but if the experts wanted him to rest right
now, he was happy to oblige.

When the physiotherapists first set to work, he felt utterly
helpless and humiliated. They made his limbs twitch with electrodes, while he
had no control, no say at all in what his body did. Eventually, he began to
receive sensations from his limbs, and he could at least feel what was going
on, but since his head just lolled there, he couldnłt watch what they were
doing to him, and they made no effort to explain anything. Perhaps they thought
he was still deaf and blind, perhaps his sight and hearing at this early stage
were freak effects that had not been envisaged. Before the operation, the
schedule for his recovery had been explained to him in great detail, but his
memory of it was hazy now. He told himself to be patient.

When, at last, one arm came under his control, he raised it,
with great effort, into his field of view.

It was his arm, his old armnot the Extrałs.

He tried to emit a wail of despair, but nothing came out.

Something must have gone wrong, late in the operation, forcing
them to cancel the transplant after they had cut up his brain. Perhaps the
Extrałs life-support machine had failed; it seemed unbelievable, but it wasnłt
impossibleas his parentsł deaths had proved, there was always a risk. He
suddenly felt unbearably tired. He now faced the prospect of spending months
merely to regain the use of his very own body; for all he knew, the newly
forged pathways across the wounds in his brain might require as much time to
become completely functional as they would have if the transplant had gone
ahead.

For several days, he was angry and depressed. He tried to express
his rage to the nurses and physiotherapists, but all he could do was twitch and
grimacehe couldnłt speak, he couldnłt even gestureand they paid no attention.
How could his people have been so incompetent? How could they put him through
months of trauma and humiliation, with nothing to look forward to but ending up
exactly where hełd started?

But when hełd calmed down, he told himself that his doctors
werenłt incompetent at all; in fact, he knew they were the best in the world.
Whatever had gone wrong must have been completely beyond their control. He
decided to adopt a positive attitude to the situation; after all, he was lucky:
the malfunction might have killed him, instead of the Extra. He was alive, he
was in the care of experts, and what was three months in bed to the immortal he
would still, eventually, become? This failure would make his ultimate success
all the more of a triumphpersonally, he could have done without the set-back,
but the media would lap it up.

The physiotherapy continued. His sense of touch, and then
his motor control, was restored to more and more of his body, until, although
weak and uncoordinated, he felt without a doubt that this body was his. To
experience familiar aches and twinges was a relief, more than a disappointment,
and several times he found himself close to tears, overcome with mawkish
sentiment at the joy of regaining what he had lost, imperfect as it was. On
these occasions, he swore he would never try the transplant again; he would be
faithful to his own body, in sickness and in health. Only by methodically
reminding himself of all his reasons for proceeding in the first place, could
he put this foolishness aside.

Once he had control of the muscles of his vocal cords, he began
to grow impatient for the speech therapists to start work. His hearing, as
such, seemed to be fine, but he could still make no sense of the words of the
people around him, and he could only assume that the connections between the
parts of his brain responsible for understanding speech, and the parts which
carried out the lower-level processing of sound, were yet to be refined by
whatever ingenious regime the neurologists had devised. He only wished theyłd
start soon; he was sick of this isolation.

One day, he had a visitorthe first person hełd seen since
the operation who was not a health professional clad in white. The visitor was
a young man, dressed in brightly coloured pyjamas, and travelling in a wheelchair.

By now, Gray could turn his head. He watched the young man
approaching, surrounded by a retinue of obsequious doctors. Gray recognised the
doctors; every member of the transplant team was there, and they were all
smiling proudly, and nodding ceaselessly. Gray wondered why they had taken so
long to appear; until now, hełd presumed that they were waiting until he was
able to fully comprehend the explanation of their failure, but he suddenly realised
how absurd that washow could they have left him to make his own guesses? It was
outrageous! It was true that speech, and no doubt writing too, meant nothing to
him, but surely they could have devised some method of communication! And why did
they look so pleased, when they ought to have been abject?

Then Gray realised that the man in the wheelchair was the Extra,
D12. And yet he spoke. And when he spoke, the doctors shook with sycophantic
laughter.

The Extra brought the wheelchair right up to the bed, and
spent several seconds staring into Grayłs face. Gray stared back; obviously he
was dreaming, or hallucinating. The Extrałs expression hovered between boredom
and mild amusement, just as it had in the dream hełd had all those years ago.

The Extra turned to go. Gray felt a convulsion pass through
his body. Of course he was dreaming. What other explanation could there be?

Unless the transplant had gone ahead, after all.

Unless the remnants of his brain in this body retained
enough of his memory and personality to make him believe that he, too, was
Daniel Gray. Unless the brain function studies that had localised identity had
been correct, but incomplete

unless the processes that constituted human self-awareness
were redundantly duplicated in the most primitive parts of the brain.

In which case, there were now two Daniel Grays.

One had everything: The power of speech. Money. Influence.
Ten thousand servants. And now, at last, immaculate health.

And the other? He had one thing only.

The knowledge of his helplessness.

It was, he had to admit, a glorious afternoon. The sky was
cloudless, the air was warm, and the clipped grass beneath his feet was soft
but dry.

He had given up trying to communicate his plight to the
people around him. He knew he would never master speech, and he couldnłt even
manage to convey meaning in his gesturesthe necessary modes of thought were
simply no longer available to him, and he could no more plan and execute a
simple piece of mime than he could solve the latest problems in grand unified
field theory. For a while he had simply thrown tantrumsrefusing to eat,
refusing to cooperate. Then he had recalled his own plans for his old body, in
the event of such recalcitrance.

Cremation. And realised that, in spite of everything, he
didnłt want to die.

He acknowledged, vaguely, that in a sense he really wasnłt
Daniel Gray, but a new person entirely, a composite of Gray and the Extra D12but
this was no comfort to him, whoever, whatever, he was. All his memories told
him he was Daniel Gray; he had none from the life of D12, in an ironic
confirmation of his long-held belief in human superiority over Extras. Should
he be happy that hełd also provedif therełd ever been any doubtthat human
consciousness was the most physical of things, a spongy grey mess that could be
cut up like a starfish, and survive in two separate parts? Should he be happy
that the other Daniel Graywithout a doubt, the more complete Daniel Grayhad
achieved his lifelong ambition?

The trainer yanked on his collar.

Meekly, he stepped onto the path.

The lush garden was crowded like never beforethis was indeed
the party of the decadeand as he came into sight, the guests began to applaud,
and even to cheer.

He might have raised his arms in acknowledgement, but the
thought did not occur to him.

Glory

* * * *

1

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow
cylinder half a meter long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it
was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an
insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion
parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently
identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders.
The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were
transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that
glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together
and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both
kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to
pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of
the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the
probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each
time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back
to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay
in check.

The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into
the space that had separated the original ingots. First neutrons, then
antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters
were ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering
their constituents and preventing them from annihilating their counterparts.
The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed
matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.

The gamma ray lasers shut down, the Zeno effect withdrew its
prohibitions. For the time it took a beam of light to cross a neutron, the
needle sat motionless in space. Then it began to burn, and it began to move.

The needle was structured like a meticulously crafted
firework, and its outer layers ignited first. No external casing could have
channeled this blast, but the pattern of tensions woven into the needlełs
construction favored one direction for the debris to be expelled. Particles
streamed backward; the needle moved forward. The shock of acceleration could
not have been borne by anything built from atomic-scale matter, but the
pressure bearing down on the core of the needle prolonged its life, delaying
the inevitable.

Layer after layer burned itself away, blasting the dwindling
remnant forward ever faster. By the time the needle had shrunk to a tenth of
its original size it was moving at ninety-eight percent of light-speed; to a
bystander this could scarcely have been improved upon, but from the needlełs
perspective there was still room to slash its journeyłs duration by orders of
magnitude.

When just one thousandth of the needle remained, its time,
compared to the neighboring stars, was passing two thousand times more slowly.
Still the layers kept burning, the protective clusters unraveling as the
pressure on them was released. The needle could only reach close enough to
light-speed to slow down time as much as it required if it could sacrifice a
large enough proportion of its remaining mass. The core of the needle could
survive only for a few trillionths of a second, while its journey would take
two hundred million seconds as judged by the stars. The proportions had been
carefully matched, though: out of the two kilograms of matter and antimatter
that had been woven together at the launch, only a few million neutrons were
needed as the final payload.

By one measure, seven years passed. For the needle, its last
trillionths of a second unwound, its final layers of fuel blew away, and at the
moment its core was ready to explode it reached its destination, plunging from
the near-vacuum of space straight into the heart of a star.

Even here, the density of matter was insufficient to
stabilize the core, yet far too high to allow it to pass unhindered. The core
was torn apart. But it did not go quietly, and the shock waves it carved
through the fusing plasma endured for a million kilometers: all the way through
to the cooler outer layers on the opposite side of the star. These shock waves
were shaped by the payload that had formed them, and though the initial pattern
imprinted on them by the disintegrating cluster of neutrons was enlarged and
blurred by its journey, on an atomic scale it remained sharply defined. Like a
mold stamped into the seething plasma it encouraged ionized molecular fragments
to slip into the troughs and furrows that matched their shape, and then brought
them together to react in ways that the plasmałs random collisions would never
have allowed. In effect, the shock waves formed a web of catalysts, carefully
laid out in both time and space, briefly transforming a small corner of the
star into a chemical factory operating on a nanometer scale.

The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding
the last traces of the shock wavełs momentum: a few nanograms of elaborate,
carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave. Traveling at
seven hundred kilometers per second, a fraction below the velocity needed to
escape from the star completely, they climbed out of its gravity well, slowing
as they ascended.

Four years passed, but the molecules were stable against the
ravages of space. By the time theyłd traveled a billion kilometers they had
almost come to a halt, and they would have fallen back to die in the fires of
the star that had forged them if their journey had not been timed so that the
starłs third planet, a gas giant, was waiting to urge them forward. As they
fell toward it, the giantłs third moon moved across their path. Eleven years
after the needlełs launch, its molecular offspring rained down onto the methane
snow.

The tiny heat of their impact was not enough to damage them,
but it melted a microscopic puddle in the snow. Surrounded by food, the
molecular seeds began to grow. Within hours, the area was teeming with
nanomachines, some mining the snow and the minerals beneath it, others
assembling the bounty into an intricate structure, a rectangular panel a couple
of meters wide.

From across the light-years, an elaborate sequence of gamma
ray pulses fell upon the panel. These pulses were the needlełs true payload,
the passengers for whom it had merely prepared the way, transmitted in its wake
four years after its launch. The panel decoded and stored the data, and the
army of nanomachines set to work again, this time following a far more
elaborate blueprint. The miners were forced to look farther afield to find all
the elements that were needed, while the assemblers labored to reach their goal
through a sequence of intermediate stages, carefully designed to protect the
final product from the vagaries of the local chemistry and climate.

After three monthsł work, two small fusion-powered
spacecraft sat in the snow. Each one held a single occupant, waking for the
first time in their freshly minted bodies, yet endowed with memories of an
earlier life.

Joan switched on her communications console. Anne appeared
on the screen, three short pairs of arms folded across her thorax in a posture
of calm repose. They had both worn virtual bodies with the same anatomy before,
but this was the first time they had become Noudah in the flesh.

�Wełre here. Everything worked," Joan marveled. The language
she spoke was not her own, but the structure of her new brain and body made it
second nature.

Anne said, �Now comes the hard part."

�Yes." Joan looked out from the spacecraftłs cockpit. In the
distance, a fissured blue-gray plateau of water ice rose above the snow.
Nearby, the nanomachines were busy disassembling the gamma ray receiver. When
they had erased all traces of their handiwork they would wander off into the
snow and catalyze their own destruction.

Joan had visited dozens of planet-bound cultures in the
past, taking on different bodies and languages as necessary, but those cultures
had all been plugged into the Amalgam, the metacivilization that spanned the
galactic disk. However far from home shełd been, the means to return to
familiar places had always been close at hand. The Noudah had only just
mastered interplanetary flight, and they had no idea that the Amalgam existed.
The closest node in the Amalgamłs network was seven light-years away, and even
that was out of bounds to her and Anne now: they had agreed not to risk
disclosing its location to the Noudah, so any transmission they sent could be
directed only to a decoy node that theyłd set up more than twenty light-years
away.

�It will be worth it," Joan said.

Annełs Noudah face was immobile, but chromatophores sent a
wave of violet and gold sweeping across her skin in an expression of cautious
optimism. �Wełll see." She tipped her head to the left, a gesture preceding a
friendly departure.

Joan tipped her own head in response, as if shełd been doing
so all her life. �Be careful, my friend," she said.

�You too."

Annełs ship ascended so high on its chemical thrusters that
it shrank to a speck before igniting its fusion engine and streaking away in a
blaze of light. Joan felt a pang of loneliness; there was no predicting when
they would be reunited.

Her shipłs software was primitive; the whole machine had
been scrupulously matched to the Noudahłs level of technology. Joan knew how to
fly it herself if necessary, and on a whim she switched off the autopilot and
manually activated the ascent thrusters. The control panel was crowded, but
having six hands helped.

* * * *

2

The world the Noudah called home was the closest of the systemłs
five planets to their sun. The average temperature was one hundred and twenty
degrees Celsius, but the high atmospheric pressure allowed liquid water to
exist across the entire surface. The chemistry and dynamics of the planetłs
crust had led to a relatively flat terrain, with a patchwork of dozens of
disconnected seas but no globe-spanning ocean. From space, these seas appeared
as silvery mirrors, bordered by a violet and brown tarnish of vegetation.

The Noudah were already leaving their most electromagnetically
promiscuous phase of communications behind, but the short-lived oasis of
Amalgam-level technology on Baneth, the gas giantłs moon, had had no trouble
eavesdropping on their chatter and preparing an updated cultural briefing which
had been spliced into Joanłs brain.

The planet was still divided into the same eleven political
units as it had been fourteen years before, the time of the last broadcasts
that had reached the node before Joanłs departure. Tira and Ghahar, the two
dominant nations in terms of territory, economic activity, and military power,
also occupied the vast majority of significant Niah archaeological sites.

Joan had expected that theyłd be noticed as soon as they left
Baneththe exhaust from their fusion engines glowed like the sunbut their
departure had triggered no obvious response, and now that they were coasting
theyłd be far harder to spot. As Anne drew closer to the homeworld, she sent a
message to Tirałs traffic control center. Joan tuned in to the exchange.

�I come in peace from another star," Anne said. �I seek permission
to land."

There was a delay of several seconds more than the
light-speed lag, then a terse response. �Please identify yourself and state your
location."

Anne transmitted her coordinates and flight plan.

�We confirm your location, please identify yourself."

�My name is Anne. I come from another star."

There was a long pause, then a different voice answered. �If
you are from Ghahar, please explain your intentions."

�I am not from Ghahar."

�Why should I believe that? Show yourself."

�Iłve taken the same shape as your people, in the hope of
living among you for a while." Anne opened a video channel and showed them her
unremarkable Noudah face. �But therełs a signal being transmitted from these
coordinates that might persuade you that Iłm telling the truth." She gave the
location of the decoy node, twenty light-years away, and specified a frequency.
The signal coming from the node contained an image of the very same face.

This time, the silence stretched out for several minutes. It
would take a while for the Tirans to confirm the true distance of the radio
source.

�You do not have permission to land. Please enter this
orbit, and we will rendezvous and board your ship."

Parameters for the orbit came through on the data channel.
Anne said, �As you wish."

Minutes later, Joanłs instruments picked up three fusion
ships being launched from Tiran bases. When Anne reached the prescribed orbit,
Joan listened anxiously to the instructions the Tirans issued. Their tone
sounded wary, but they were entitled to treat this stranger with caution, all
the more so if they believed Annełs claim.

Joan was accustomed to a very different kind of reception,
but then the members of the Amalgam had spent hundreds of millennia
establishing a framework of trust. They also benefited from a milieu in which
most kinds of force had been rendered ineffectual; when everyone had backups of
themselves scattered around the galaxy, it required a vastly disproportionate
effort to inconvenience someone, let alone kill them. By any reasonable
measure, honesty and cooperation yielded far richer rewards than subterfuge and
slaughter.

Nonetheless, each individual culture had its roots in a biological
heritage that gave rise to behavior governed more by ancient urges than
contemporary realities, and even when they mastered the technology to choose
their own nature, the precise set of traits they preserved was up to them. In
the worst case, a species still saddled with inappropriate drives but empowered
by advanced technology could wreak havoc. The Noudah deserved to be treated
with courtesy and respect, but they did not yet belong in the Amalgam.

The Tiransł own exchanges were not on open channels, so once
they had entered Annełs ship Joan could only guess at what was happening. She
waited until two of the ships had returned to the surface, then sent her own
message to Ghaharłs traffic control.

�I come in peace from another star. I seek permission to
land."

* * * *

3

The Ghahari allowed Joan to fly her ship straight down to
the surface. She wasnłt sure if this was because they were more trusting, or if
they were afraid that the Tirans might try to interfere if she lingered in
orbit.

The landing site was a bare plain of chocolate-colored sand.
The air shimmered in the heat, the distortions intensified by the thickness of
the atmosphere, making the horizon waver as if seen through molten glass. Joan
waited in the cockpit as three trucks approached; they all came to a halt some
twenty meters away. A voice over the radio instructed her to leave the ship;
she complied, and after shełd stood in the open for a minute, a lone Noudah
left one of the trucks and walked toward her.

�Iłm Pirit," she said. �Welcome to Ghahar." Her gestures
were courteous but restrained.

�Iłm Joan. Thank you for your hospitality."

�Your impersonation of our biology is impeccable." There was
a trace of skepticism in Piritłs tone; Joan had pointed the Ghahari to her own
portrait being broadcast from the decoy node, but she had to admit that in the
context her lack of exotic technology and traits would make it harder to accept
the implications of that transmission.

�In my culture, itłs a matter of courtesy to imitate onełs
hosts as closely as possible."

Pirit hesitated, as if pondering whether to debate the
merits of such a custom, but then rather than quibbling over the niceties of
interspecies etiquette she chose to confront the real issue head-on. �If youłre
a Tiran spy, or a defector, the sooner you admit that the better."

�Thatłs very sensible advice, but Iłm neither."

The Noudah wore no clothing as such, but Pirit had a belt
with a number of pouches. She took a handheld scanner from one and ran it over
Joanłs body. Joanłs briefing suggested that it was probably only checking for
metal, volatile explosives, and radiation; the technology to image her body or
search for pathogens would not be so portable. In any case, she was a healthy,
unarmed Noudah down to the molecular level.

Pirit escorted her to one of the trucks, and invited her to
recline in a section at the back. Another Noudah drove while Pirit watched over
Joan. They soon arrived at a small complex of buildings a couple of kilometers
from where the ship had touched down. The walls, roofs, and floors of the
buildings were all made from the local sand, cemented with an adhesive that the
Noudah secreted from their own bodies.

Inside, Joan was given a thorough medical examination, including
three kinds of full-body scan. The Noudah who examined her treated her with a
kind of detached efficiency devoid of any pleasantries; she wasnłt sure if that
was their standard bedside manner, or a kind of glazed shock at having been
told of her claimed origins.

Pirit took her to an adjoining room and offered her a couch.
The Noudah anatomy did not allow for sitting, but they liked to recline.

Pirit remained standing. �How did you come here?" she asked.

�Youłve seen my ship. I flew it from Baneth."

�And how did you reach Baneth?"

�Iłm not free to discuss that," Joan replied cheerfully.

�Not free?" Piritłs face clouded with silver, as if she were
genuinely perplexed.

Joan said, �You understand me perfectly. Please donłt tell
me therełs nothing youłre not free to discuss with me."

�You certainly didnłt fly that ship twenty light-years."

�No, I certainly didnłt."

Pirit hesitated. �Did you come through the Cataract?" The Cataract
was a black hole, a remote partner to the Noudahłs sun; they orbited each other
at a distance of about eighty billion kilometers. The name came from its
telescopic appearance: a dark circle ringed by a distortion in the background
of stars, like some kind of visual aberration. The Tirans and Ghahari were in a
race to be the first to visit this extraordinary neighbor, but as yet neither
of them were quite up to the task.

�Through the Cataract? I think your scientists have already
proven that black holes arenłt shortcuts to anywhere."

�Our scientists arenłt always right."

�Neither are ours," Joan admitted, �but all the evidence
points in one direction: black holes arenłt doorways, theyłre shredding
machines."

�So you traveled the whole twenty light-years?"

�More than that," Joan said truthfully �from my original
home. Iłve spent half my life traveling."

�Faster than light?" Pirit suggested hopefully.

�No. Thatłs impossible."

They circled around the question a dozen more times, before
Pirit finally changed her tune from how to why?

�Iłm a xenomathematician," Joan said. �Iłve come here in the
hope of collaborating with your archaeologists in their study of Niah
artifacts."

Pirit was stunned. �What do you know about the Niah?"

�Not as much as Iłd like to." Joan gestured at her Noudah
body. �As Iłm sure youłve already surmised, wełve listened to your broadcasts
for some time, so we know pretty much what an ordinary Noudah knows. That
includes the basic facts about the Niah. Historically theyłve been referred to
as your ancestors, though the latest studies suggest that you and they really
just have an earlier common ancestor. They died out about a million years ago,
but therełs evidence that they might have had a sophisticated culture for as
long as three million years. Therełs no indication that they ever developed
space flight. Basically, once they achieved material comfort, they seem to have
devoted themselves to various art forms, including mathematics."

�So youłve traveled twenty light-years just to look at Niah
tablets?" Pirit was incredulous.

�Any culture that spent three million years doing
mathematics must have something to teach us."

�Really?" Piritłs face became blue with disgust. �In the ten
thousand years since we discovered the wheel, wełve already reached halfway to
the Cataract. They wasted their time on useless abstractions."

Joan said, �I come from a culture of spacefarers myself, so
I respect your achievements. But I donłt think anyone really knows what the
Niah achieved. Iłd like to find out, with the help of your people."

Pirit was silent for a while. �What if we say no?"

�Then Iłll leave empty-handed."

�What if we insist that you remain with us?"

�Then Iłll die here, empty-handed." On her command, this
body would expire in an instant; she could not be held and tortured.

Pirit said angrily, �You must be willing to trade something
for the privilege youłre demanding!"

�Requesting, not demanding," Joan insisted gently. �And what
Iłm willing to offer is my own culturełs perspective on Niah mathematics. If
you ask your archaeologists and mathematicians, Iłm sure theyłll tell you that
there are many things written in the Niah tablets that they donłt yet
understand. My colleague and I"neither of them had mentioned Anne before, but
Joan was sure that Pirit knew all about her�simply want to shed as much light
as we can on this subject."

Pirit said bitterly, �You wonłt even tell us how you came to
our world. Why should we trust you to share whatever you discover about the
Niah?"

�Interstellar travel is no great mystery," Joan countered. �You
know all the basic science already; making it work is just a matter of
persistence. If youłre left to develop your own technology, you might even come
up with better methods than we have."

�So wełre expected to be patient, to discover these things
for ourselves ... but you canłt wait a few centuries for us to decipher the
Niah artifacts?"

Joan said bluntly, �The present Noudah culture, both here
and in Tira, seems to hold the Niah in contempt. Dozens of partially excavated
sites containing Niah artifacts are under threat from irrigation projects and
other developments. Thatłs the reason we couldnłt wait. We needed to come here
and offer our assistance, before the last traces of the Niah disappeared
forever."

Pirit did not reply, but Joan hoped she knew what her interrogator
was thinking: Nobody would cross twenty light-years for a few worthless scribblings.
Perhaps wełve underestimated the Niah. Perhaps our ancestors have left us a
great secret, a great legacy. And perhaps the fastestperhaps the onlyway to
uncover it is to give this impertinent, irritating alien exactly what she
wants.

* * * *

4

The sun was rising ahead of them as they reached the top of
the hill. Sando turned to Joan, and his face became green with pleasure. �Look
behind you," he said.

Joan did as he asked. The valley below was hidden in fog,
and it had settled so evenly that she could see their shadows in the dawn
light, stretched out across the top of the fog layer. Around the shadow of her
head was a circular halo like a small rainbow.

�We call it the Niahłs light," Sando said. �In the old days,
people used to say that the halo proved that the Niah blood was strong in you."

Joan said, �The only trouble with that hypothesis being that
you see it around your head ... and I see it around mine." On Earth, the
phenomenon was known as a �glory." The particles of fog were scattering the sunlight
back toward them, turning it one hundred and eighty degrees. To look at the
shadow of your own head was to face directly away from the sun, so the halo
always appeared around the observers shadow.

�I suppose youłre the final proof that Niah blood has
nothing to do with it," Sando mused.

�Thatłs assuming Iłm telling you the truth, and I really can
see it around my own head."

�And assuming," Sando added, �that the Niah really did stay
at home, and didnłt wander around the galaxy spreading their progeny."

They came over the top of the hill and looked down into the
adjoining riverine valley. The sparse brown grass of the hillside gave way to a
lush violet growth closer to the water. Joanłs arrival had delayed the flooding
of the valley, but even alien interest in the Niah had only bought the
archaeologists an extra year. The dam was part of a long-planned agricultural
development, and however tantalizing the possibility that Joan might reveal
some priceless insight hidden among the Niahłs �useless abstractions," that
vague promise could only compete with more tangible considerations for a
limited time.

Part of the hill had fallen away in a landslide a few
centuries before, revealing more than a dozen beautifully preserved strata.
When Joan and Sando reached the excavation site, Rali and Surat were already at
work, clearing away soft sedimentary rock from a layer that Sando had dated as
belonging to the Niahłs �twilight" period.

Pirit had insisted that only Sando, the senior
archaeologist, be told about Joanłs true nature; Joan refused to lie to anyone,
but had agreed to tell her colleagues only that she was a mathematician and
that she was not permitted to discuss her past. At first this had made them
guarded and resentful, no doubt because they assumed that she was some kind of
spy sent by the authorities to watch over them. Later it had dawned on them
that she was genuinely interested in their work, and that the absurd
restrictions on her topics of conversation were not of her own choosing.
Nothing about the Noudahłs language or appearance correlated strongly with
their recent division into nationswith no oceans to cross, and a long history
of migration they were more or less geographically homogeneousbut Joanłs odd
name and occasional faux pas could still be ascribed to some mysterious
exoticism. Rali and Surat seemed content to assume that she was a defector from
one of the smaller nations, and that her history could not be made explicit for
obscure political reasons.

�There are more tablets here, very close to the surface,"
Rali announced excitedly. �The acoustics are unmistakable." Ideally they would
have excavated the entire hillside, but they did not have the time or the
labor, so they were using acoustic tomography to identify likely deposits of
accessible Niah writing, and then concentrating their efforts on those spots.

The Niah had probably had several ephemeral forms of written
communication, but when they found something worth publishing, it stayed
published: they carved their symbols into a ceramic that made diamond seem like
tissue paper. It was almost unheard of for the tablets to be broken, but they
were small, and multitablet works were sometimes widely dispersed. Niah
technology could probably have carved three million yearsł worth of knowledge
onto the head of a pinthey seemed not to have invented nanomachines, but they
were into high-quality bulk materials and precision engineeringbut for
whatever reason they had chosen legibility to the naked eye above other
considerations.

Joan made herself useful, taking acoustic readings farther
along the slope, while Sando watched over his students as they came closer to
the buried Niah artifacts. She had learned not to hover around expectantly when
a discovery was imminent; she was treated far more warmly if she waited to be
summoned. The tomography unit was almost foolproof, using satellite navigation
to track its position and software to analyze the signals it gathered; all it
really needed was someone to drag it along the rock face at a suitable pace.

From the corner of her eye, Joan noticed her shadow on the
rocks flicker and grow complicated. She looked up to see three dazzling beads
of light flying west out of the sun. She might have assumed that the fusion
ships were doing something useful, but the media was full of talk of �military
exercises," which meant the Tirans and the Ghahari were engaging in expensive,
belligerent gestures in orbit, trying to convince each other of their superior
skills, technology, or sheer strength of numbers. For people with no real
differences apart from a few centuries of recent history, they could puff up
their minor political disputes into matters of the utmost solemnity. It might
almost have been funny, if the idiots hadnłt incinerated hundreds of thousands
of each otherłs citizens every few decades, not to mention playing callous and
often deadly games with the lives of the inhabitants of smaller nations.

�Jown! Jown! Come and look at this!" Surat called to her.
Joan switched off the tomography unit and jogged toward the archaeologists,
suddenly conscious of her bodyłs strangeness. Her legs were stumpy but strong,
and her balance as she ran came not from arms and shoulders but from the swish
of her muscular tail.

�Itłs a significant mathematical result," Rali informed her
proudly when she reached them. Hełd pressure-washed the sandstone away from the
near-indestructible ceramic of the tablet, and it was only a matter of holding
the surface at the right angle to the light to see the etched writing stand out
as crisply and starkly as it would have a million years before.

Rali was not a mathematician, and he was not offering his
own opinion on the theorem the tablet stated; the Niah themselves had had a
clear set of typographical conventions which they used to distinguish between
everything from minor lemmas to the most celebrated theorems. The size and
decorations of the symbols labeling the theorem attested to its value in the
Niahłs eyes.

Joan read the theorem carefully. The proof was not included
on the same tablet, but the Niah had a way of expressing their results that
made you believe them as soon as you read them; in this case the definitions of
the terms needed to state the theorem were so beautifully chosen that the
result seemed almost inevitable.

The theorem itself was expressed as a commuting hypercube,
one of the Niahłs favorite forms. You could think of a square with four
different sets of mathematical objects associated with each of its corners, and
a way of mapping one set into another associated with each edge of the square.
If the maps commuted, then going across the top of the square, then down, had
exactly the same effect as going down the left edge of the square, then across:
either way, you mapped each element from the top-left set into the same element
of the bottom-right set. A similar kind of result might hold for sets and maps
that could naturally be placed at the corners and edges of a cube, or a
hypercube of any dimension. It was also possible for the square faces in these
structures to stand for relationships that held between the maps between sets,
and for cubes to describe relationships between those relationships, and so on.

That a theorem took this form didnłt guarantee its
importance; it was easy to cook up trivial examples of sets and maps that commuted.
The Niah didnłt carve trivia into their timeless ceramic, though, and this
theorem was no exception. The seven-dimensional commuting hypercube established
a dazzlingly elegant correspondence between seven distinct, major branches of
Niah mathematics, intertwining their most important concepts into a unified
whole. It was a result Joan had never seen before: no mathematician anywhere in
the Amalgam, or in any ancestral culture she had studied, had reached the same
insight.

She explained as much of this as she could to the three archaeologists;
they couldnłt take in all the details, but their faces became orange with
fascination when she sketched what she thought the result would have meant to
the Niah themselves.

�This isnłt quite the Big Crunch," she joked, �but it must
have made them think they were getting closer."

�The Big Crunch" was her nickname for the mythical result
that the Niah had aspired to reach: a unification of every field of mathematics
that they considered significant. To find such a thing would not have meant the
end of mathematicsit would not have subsumed every last conceivable,
interesting mathematical truthbut it would certainly have marked a point of
closure for the Niahłs own style of investigation.

�Iłm sure they found it," Surat insisted. �They reached the
Big Crunch, then they had nothing more to live for."

Rali was scathing. �So the whole culture committed
collective suicide?"

�Not actively, no," Surat replied. �But it was the search
that had kept them going."

�Entire cultures donłt lose the will to live," Rali said. �They
get wiped out by external forces: disease, invasion, changes in climate."

�The Niah survived for three million years," Surat
countered. �They had the means to weather all of those forces. Unless they were
wiped out by alien invaders with vastly superior technology." She turned to
Joan. �What do you think?"

�About aliens destroying the Niah?"

�I was joking about the aliens. But what about the mathematics?
What if they found the Big Crunch?"

�Therełs more to life than mathematics," Joan said. �But not
much more."

Sando said, �And therełs more to this find than one tablet.
If we get back to work, we might have the proof in our hands before sunset."

* * * *

5

Joan briefed Halzoun by video link while Sando prepared the
evening meal. Halzoun was the mathematician Pirit had appointed to supervise
her, but apparently his day job was far too important to allow him to travel.
Joan was grateful; Halzoun was the most tedious Noudah she had encountered. He
could understand the Niahłs work when she explained it to him, but he seemed to
have no interest in it for its own sake. He spent most of their conversations
trying to catch her out in some deception or contradiction, and the rest
pressing her to imagine military or commercial applications of the Niahłs
gloriously useless insights. Sometimes she played along with this infantile
fantasy, hinting at potential superweapons based on exotic physics that might
come tumbling out of the vacuum, if only one possessed the right Niah theorems
to coax them into existence.

Sando was her minder too, but at least he was more subtle
about it. Pirit had insisted that she stay in his shelter, rather than sharing
Rali and Suratłs; Joan didnłt mind, because with Sando she didnłt have the stress
of having to keep quiet about everything. Privacy and modesty were nonissues
for the Noudah, and Joan had become Noudah enough not to care herself. Nor was
there any danger of their proximity leading to a sexual bond; the Noudah had a
complex system of biochemical cues that meant desire only arose in couples with
a suitable mixture of genetic differences and similarities. She would have had
to search a crowded Noudah city for a week to find someone to lust after,
though at least it would have been guaranteed to be mutual.

After theyłd eaten, Sando said, �You should be happy. That
was our best find yet."

�I am happy." Joan made a conscious effort to exhibit a viridian
tinge. �It was the first new result Iłve seen on this planet. It was the reason
I came here, the reason I traveled so far."

�Somethingłs wrong, though, I think."

�I wish I could have shared the news with my friend," Joan
admitted. Pirit claimed to be negotiating with the Tirans to allow Anne to
communicate with her, but Joan was not convinced that she was genuinely trying.

She was sure that Pirit would have relished the thought of
listening in on a conversation between the two of themwhile forcing them to
speak Noudah, of coursein the hope that theyłd slip up and reveal something
useful, but at the same time she would have had to face the fact that the
Tirans would be listening too. What an excruciating dilemma.

�You should have brought a communications link with you,"
Sando suggested. �A home-style one, I mean. Nothing we could eavesdrop on."

�We couldnłt do that," Joan said.

He pondered this. �You really are afraid of us, arenłt you?
You think the smallest technological trinket will be enough to send us straight
to the stars, and then youłll have a horde of rampaging barbarians to deal with."

�We know how to deal with barbarians," Joan said coolly.

Sandołs face grew dark with mirth. �Now Iłm afraid."

�I just wish I knew what was happening to her," Joan said. �What
she was doing, how they were treating her."

�Probably much the same as wełre treating you," Sando suggested.
�Wełre really not that different." He thought for a moment. �There was
something I wanted to show you." He brought over his portable console, and
summoned up an article from a Tiran journal. �See what a borderless world we live
in," he joked.

The article was entitled �Seekers and Spreaders: What We
Must Learn from the Niah." Sando said, �This might give you some idea of how
theyłre thinking over there. Jaqad is an academic archaeologist, but shełs also
very close to the people in power."

Joan read from the console while Sando made repairs to their
shelter, secreting a molasseslike substance from a gland at the tip of his tail
and spreading it over the cracks in the walls.

There were two main routes a culture could take, Jaqad
argued, once it satisfied its basic material needs. One was to think and study:
to stand back and observe, to seek knowledge and insight from the world around
it. The other was to invest its energy in entrenching its good fortune.

The Niah had learned a great deal in three million years,
but in the end it had not been enough to save them. Exactly what had killed
them was still a matter of speculation, but it was hard to believe that if they
had colonized other worlds they would have vanished on all of them. �Had the
Niah been Spreaders," Jaqad wrote, �we might expect a visit from them, or them
from us, sometime in the coming centuries."

The Noudah, in contrast, were determined Spreaders. Once
they had the means, they would plant colonies across the galaxy. They would,
Jaqad was sure, create new biospheres, reengineer stars, and even alter space
and time to guarantee their survival. The growth of their empire would come
first; any knowledge that failed to serve that purpose would be a mere
distraction. �In any competition between Seekers and Spreaders, it is a Law of
History that the Spreaders must win out in the end. Seekers, such as the Niah,
might hog resources and block the way, but in the long run their own nature
will be their downfall."

Joan stopped reading. �When you look out into the galaxy
with your telescopes," she asked Sando, �how many reengineered stars do you
see?"

�Would we recognize them?"

�Yes. Natural stellar processes arenłt that complicated;
your scientists already know everything there is to know about the subject."

�Iłll take your word for that. So ... youłre saying Jaqad is
wrong? The Niah themselves never left this world, but the galaxy already
belongs to creatures more like them than like us?"

�Itłs not Noudah versus Niah," Joan said. �Itłs a matter of
how a culturełs perspective changes with time. Once a species conquers disease,
modifies their biology, and spreads even a short distance beyond their
homeworld, they usually start to relax a bit. The territorial imperative isnłt
some timeless Law of History; it belongs to a certain phase."

�What if it persists, though? Into a later phase?"

�That can cause friction," Joan admitted.

�Nevertheless, no Spreaders have conquered the galaxy?"

�Not yet."

Sando went back to his repairs; Joan read the rest of the
article. Shełd thought shełd already grasped the lesson demanded by the
subtitle, but it turned out that Jaqad had something more specific in mind.

�Having argued this way, how can I defend my own field of
study from the very same charges as I have brought against the Niah? Having
grasped the essential character of this doomed race, why should we waste our
time and resources studying them further?

�The answer is simple. We still do not know exactly how and
why the Niah died, but when we do, that could turn out to be the most important
discovery in history. When we finally leave our world behind, we should not
expect to find only other Spreaders to compete with us, as honorable opponents
in battle. There will be Seekers as well, blocking the way. Tired, old races
squatting uselessly on their hoards of knowledge and wealth.

�Time will defeat them in the end, but we already waited
three million years to be born; we should have no patience to wait again. If we
can learn how the Niah died, that will be our key, that will be our weapon. If
we know the Seekersł weakness, we can find a way to hasten their demise."

* * * *

6

The proof of the Niahłs theorem turned out to be buried deep
in the hillside, but over the following days they extracted it all.

It was as beautiful and satisfying as Joan could have
wished, merging six earlier, simpler theorems while extending the techniques
used in their proofs. She could even see hints of how the same methods might be
stretched further to yield still stronger results. �The Big Crunch" had always
been a slightly mocking, irreverent term, but now she was struck anew by how
little justice it did to the real trend that had fascinated the Niah. It was
not a matter of everything in mathematics collapsing in on itself, with one
branch turning out to have been merely a recapitulation of another under a
different guise. Rather, the principle was that every sufficiently beautiful
mathematical system was rich enough to mirror in partand sometimes in a
complex and distorted fashionevery other sufficiently beautiful system.
Nothing became sterile and redundant, nothing proved to have been a waste of
time, but everything was shown to be magnificently intertwined.

After briefing Halzoun, Joan used the satellite dish to
transmit the theorem and its proof to the decoy node. That had been the deal
with Pirit: anything she learned from the Niah belonged to the whole galaxy, as
long as she explained it to her hosts first.

The archaeologists moved across the hillside, hunting for
more artifacts in the same layer of sediment. Joan was eager to see what else
the same group of Niah might have published. One possible eight-dimensional
hypercube was hovering in her mind; if shełd sat down and thought about it for
a few decades she might have worked out the details herself, but the Niah did
what they did so well that it would have seemed crass to try to follow clumsily
in their footsteps when their own immaculately polished results might simply be
lying in the ground, waiting to be uncovered.

A month after the discovery, Joan was woken by the sound of
an intruder moving through the shelter. She knew it wasnłt Sando; even as she
slept an ancient part of her Noudah brain was listening to his heartbeat. The
strangerłs heart was too quiet to hear, which required great discipline, but
the shelterłs flexible adhesive made the floor emit a characteristic squeak
beneath even the gentlest footsteps. As she rose from her couch she heard Sando
waking, and she turned in his direction.

Bright torchlight on his face dazzled her for a moment. The
intruder held two knives to Sandołs respiration membranes; a deep enough cut
there would mean choking to death, in excruciating pain. The nanomachines that
had built Joanłs body had wired extensive skills in unarmed combat into her
brain, and one scenario involving a feigned escape attempt followed by a
sideways flick of her powerful tail was already playing out in the back of her
mind, but as yet she could see no way to guarantee that Sando came through it
all unharmed.

She said, �What do you want?"

The intruder remained in darkness. �Tell me about the ship
that brought you to Baneth."

�Why?"

�Because it would be a shame to shred your colleague here,
just when his work was going so well." Sando refused to show any emotion on his
face, but the blank pallor itself was as stark an expression of fear as
anything Joan could imagine.

She said, �Therełs a coherent state that can be prepared for
a quark-gluon plasma in which virtual black holes catalyze baryon decay. In
effect, you can turn all of your fuelłs rest mass into photons, yielding the
most efficient exhaust stream possible." She recited a long list of technical
details. The claimed baryon decay process didnłt actually exist, but the
pseudophysics underpinning it was mathematically consistent, and could not be
ruled out by anything the Noudah had yet observed. She and Anne had prepared an
entire fictitious science and technology, and even a fictitious history of
their culture, precisely for emergencies like this; they could spout red
herrings for a decade if necessary, and never get caught out contradicting
themselves.

�That wasnłt so hard, was it?" the intruder gloated.

�What now?"

�Youłre going to take a trip with me. If you do this nicely,
nobody needs to get hurt."

Something moved in the shadows, and the intruder screamed in
pain. Joan leaped forward and knocked one of the knives out of his hand with
her tail; the other knife grazed Sandołs membrane, but a second tail whipped
out of the darkness and intervened. As the intruder fell backward, the beam of
his torch revealed Surat and Rali tensed beside him, and a pick buried deep in
his side.

Joanłs rush of combat hormones suddenly faded, and she let
out a long, deep wail of anguish. Sando was unscathed, but a stream of dark
liquid was pumping out of the intruderłs wound.

Surat was annoyed. �Stop blubbing, and help us tie up this Tiran
cousin-fucker."

�Tie him up? Youłve killed him!"

�Donłt be stupid, thatłs just sheath fluid." Joan recalled
her Noudah anatomy; sheath fluid was like oil in a hydraulic machine. You could
lose it all and it would cost you most of the strength in your limbs and tail,
but you wouldnłt die, and your body would make more eventually.

Rali found some cable and they trussed up the intruder.
Sando was shaken, but he seemed to be recovering. He took Joan aside. �Iłm
going to have to call Pirit."

�I understand. But what will he do to these two?" She wasnłt
sure exactly how much Rali and Surat had heard, but it was certain to have been
more than Pirit wanted them to know.

�Donłt worry about that, I can protect them."

Just before dawn someone sent by Pirit arrived in a truck to
take the intruder away. Sando declared a rest day, and Rali and Surat went back
to their shelter to sleep. Joan went for a walk along the hillside; she didnłt
feel like sleeping.

Sando caught up with her. He said, �I told them youłd been
working on a military research project, and you were exiled here for some
political misdemeanor."

�And they believed you?"

�All they heard was half of a conversation full of incomprehensible
physics. All they know is that someone thought you were worth kidnapping."

Joan said, �Iłm sorry about what happened."

Sando hesitated. �What did you expect?"

Joan was stung. �One of us went to Tira, one of us came here.
We thought that would keep everyone happy!"

�Wełre Spreaders," said Sando. �Give us one of anything, and
we want two. Especially if our enemy has the other one. Did you really think
you could come here, do a bit of fossicking, and then simply fly away without
changing a thing?"

�Your culture has always believed there were other civilizations
in the galaxy. Our existence hardly came as a shock."

Sandołs face became yellow, an expression of almost parental
reproach. �Believing in something in the abstract is not the same as having it
dangled in front of you. We were never going to have an existential crisis at
finding out that wełre not unique; the Niah might be related to us, but they
were still alien enough to get us used to the idea. But did you really think we
were just going to relax and accept your refusal to share your technology? That
one of you went to the Tirans only makes it worse for the Ghahari, and vice
versa. Both governments are going absolutely crazy, each one terrified that the
other has found a way to make its alien talk."

Joan stopped walking. �The war games, the border skirmishes?
Youłre blaming all of that on Anne and me?"

Sandołs body sagged wearily. �To be honest, I donłt know all
the details. And if itłs any consolation, Iłm sure we would have found another
reason if you hadnłt come along."

Joan said, �Maybe I should leave." She was tired of these
people, tired of her body, tired of being cut off from civilization. She had
rescued one beautiful Niah theorem and sent it out into the Amalgam. Wasnłt
that enough?

�Itłs up to you," Sando replied. �But you might as well stay
until they flood the valley. Another year isnłt going to change anything. What
youłve done to this world has already been done. For us, therełs no going back."

* * * *

7

Joan stayed with the archaeologists as they moved across the
hillside. They found tablets bearing Niah drawings and poetry, which no doubt
had their virtues but to Joan seemed bland and opaque. Sando and his students
relished these discoveries as much as the theorems; to them, the Niah culture
was a vast jigsaw puzzle, and any clue that filled in the details of their
history was as good as any other.

Sando would have told Pirit everything hełd heard from Joan
the night the intruder came, so she was surprised that she hadnłt been summoned
for a fresh interrogation to flesh out the details. Perhaps the Ghahari
physicists were still digesting her elaborate gobbledygook, trying to decide if
it made sense. In her more cynical moments she wondered if the intruder might
have been Ghahari himself, sent by Pirit to exploit her friendship with Sando.
Perhaps Sando had even been in on it, and Rah and Surat as well. The possibility
made her feel as if she were living in a fabricated world, a scape in which
nothing was real and nobody could be trusted. The only thing she was certain
that the Ghaharis could not have faked was the Niah artifacts. The mathematics
verified itself; everything else was subject to doubt and paranoia.

Summer came, burning away the morning fogs. The Noudahłs
idea of heat was very different from Joanłs previous perceptions, but even the
body she now wore found the midday sun oppressive. She willed herself to be
patient. There was still a chance that the Niah had taken a few more steps
toward their grand vision of a unified mathematics, and carved their final
discoveries into the form that would outlive them by a million years.

When the lone fusion ship appeared high in the afternoon
sky, Joan resolved to ignore it. She glanced up once, but she kept dragging the
tomography unit across the ground. She was sick of thinking about Tiran-Ghahari
politics. They had played their childish games for centuries; she would not
take the blame for this latest outbreak of provocation.

Usually the ships flew by, disappearing within minutes, showing
off their power and speed. This one lingered, weaving back and forth across the
sky like some dazzling insect performing an elaborate mating dance. Joanłs
second shadow darted around her feet, hammering a strangely familiar rhythm
into her brain.

She looked up, disbelieving. The motion of the ship was following
the syntax of a gestural language she had learned on another planet, in another
body, a dozen lifetimes ago. The only other person on this world who could know
that language was Anne She glanced toward the archaeologists a hundred meters
away, but they seemed to be paying no attention to the ship. She switched off
the tomography unit and stared into the sky. Iłm listening, my friend. Whatłs
happening? Did they give you back your ship? Have you had enough of this world,
and decided to go home?

Anne told the story in shorthand, compressed and elliptic.
The Tirans had found a tablet bearing a theorem: the last of the Niahłs
discoveries, the pinnacle of their achievements. Her minders had not let her
study it, but they had contrived a situation making it easy for her to steal
it, and to steal this ship. They had wanted her to take it and run, in the hope
that she would lead them to something they valued far more than any ancient
mathematics: an advanced spacecraft, or some magical stargate at the edge of
the system.

But Anne wasnłt fleeing anywhere. She was high above Ghahar,
reading the tablet, and now she would paint what she read across the sky for
Joan to see.

Sando approached. �Wełre in danger, we have to move."

�Danger? Thatłs my friend up there! Shełs not going to shoot
a missile at us!"

�Your friend?" Sando seemed confused. As he spoke, three
more ships came into view, lower and brighter than the first. �Iłve been told
that the Tirans are going to strike the valley, to bury the Niah sites. We need
to get over the hill and indoors, to get some protection from the blast."

�Why would the Tirans attack the Niah sites? That makes no
sense to me."

Sando said, �Nor me, but I donłt have time to argue."

The three ships were menacing Annełs, pursuing her, trying
to drive her away. Joan had no idea if they were Ghahari defending their
territory, or Tirans harassing her in the hope that she would flee and reveal
the nonexistent shortcut to the stars, but Anne was staying put, still weaving
the same gestural language into her maneuvers even as she dodged her pursuers,
spelling out the Niahłs glorious finale.

Joan said, �You go. I have to see this." She tensed, ready
to fight him if necessary.

Sando took something from his tool belt and peppered her
side with holes. Joan gasped with pain and crumpled to the ground as the sheath
fluid poured out of her.

Rali and Surat helped carry her to the shelter. Joan caught
glimpses of the fiery ballet in the sky, but not enough to make sense of it,
let alone reconstruct it.

They put her on her couch inside the shelter. Sando bandaged
her side and gave her water to sip. He said, �Iłm sorry I had to do that, but
if anything had happened to you I would have been held responsible."

Surat kept ducking outside to check on the �battle," then reporting
excitedly on the state of play. �The Tirans still up there, they canłt get rid
of it. I donłt know why they havenłt shot it down yet."

Because the Tirans were the ones pursuing Anne, and they
didnłt want her dead. But for how long would the Ghahari tolerate this
violation?

Annełs efforts could not be allowed to come to nothing. Joan
struggled to recall the constellations shełd last seen in the night sky. At the
node theyłd departed from, powerful telescopes were constantly trained on the
Noudahłs homeworld. Annełs ship was easily bright enough, its gestures wide
enough, to be resolved from seven light-years awayif the planet itself wasnłt
blocking the view, if the node was above the horizon.

The shelter was windowless, but Joan saw the ground outside
the doorway brighten for an instant. The flash was silent; no missile had
struck the valley, the explosion had taken place high above the atmosphere.

Surat went outside. When she returned she said quietly, �All
clear. They got it."

Joan put all her effort into spitting out a handful of
words. �I want to see what happened."

Sando hesitated, then motioned to the others to help him
pick up the couch and carry it outside.

A shell of glowing plasma was still visible, drifting across
the sky as it expanded, a ring of light growing steadily fainter until it
vanished into the afternoon glare.

Anne was dead in this embodiment, but her backup would wake
and go on to new adventures. Joan could at least tell her the story of her
local death: of virtuoso flying and a spectacular end.

Shełd recovered her bearings now, and she recalled the position
of the stars. The node was still hours away from rising. The Amalgam was full
of powerful telescopes, but no others would be aimed at this obscure planet,
and no plea to redirect them could outrace the light they would need to capture
in order to bring the Niahłs final theorem back to life.

* * * *

8

Sando wanted to send her away for medical supervision, but
Joan insisted on remaining at the site.

�The fewer officials who get to know about this incident,
the fewer problems it makes for you," she reasoned.

�As long as you donłt get sick and die," he replied.

�Iłm not going to die." Her wounds had not become infected,
and her strength was returning rapidly.

They compromised. Sando hired someone to drive up from the
nearest town to look after her while he was out at the excavation. Daya had
basic medical training and didnłt ask awkward questions; he seemed happy to
tend to Joanłs needs, and then lie outside daydreaming the rest of the time.

There was still a chance, Joan thought, that the Niah had
carved the theorem on a multitude of tablets and scattered them all over the
planet. There was also a chance that the Tirans had made copies of the tablet
before letting Anne abscond with it. The question, though, was whether she had
the slightest prospect of getting her hands on these duplicates.

Anne might have made some kind of copy herself, but she hadnłt
mentioned it in the prologue to her aerobatic rendition of the theorem. If shełd
had any time to spare, she wouldnłt have limited herself to an audience of one:
she would have waited until the node had risen over Ghahar.

On her second night as an invalid, Joan dreamed that she saw
Anne standing on the hill looking back into the fog-shrouded valley, her shadow
haloed by the Niah light.

When she woke, she knew what she had to do.

When Sando left, she asked Daya to bring her the console
that controlled the satellite dish. She had enough strength in her arms now to
operate it, and Daya showed no interest in what she did. That was naive, of
course: whether or not Daya was spying on her, Pirit would know exactly where
the signal was sent. So be it. Seven light-years was still far beyond the
Noudahłs reach; the whole node could be disassembled and erased long before
they came close.

No message could outrace light directly, but there were more
ways for light to reach the node than the direct path, the fastest one. Every
black hole had its glory, twisting light around it in a tight, close orbit and
flinging it back out again. Seventy-four hours after the original image was
lost to them, the telescopes at the node could still turn to the Cataract and
scour the distorted, compressed image of the sky at the rim of the holełs black
disk to catch a replay of Annełs ballet.

Joan composed the message and entered the coordinates of the
node. You didnłt die for nothing, my friend. When you wake and see this, youłll
be proud of us both.

She hesitated, her hand hovering above the send key. The Tirans
had wanted Anne to flee, to show them the way to the stars, but had they really
been indifferent to the loot theyłd let her carry? The theorem had come at the
end of the Niahłs three-million-year reign. To witness this beautiful truth
would not destroy the Amalgam, but might it not weaken it? If the Seekersł
thirst for knowledge was slaked, their sense of purpose corroded, might not the
most crucial strand of the culture fall into a twilight of its own? There was
no shortcut to the stars, but the Noudah had been goaded by their alien
visitors, and the technology would come to them soon enough.

The Amalgam had been goaded too: the theorem shełd already
transmitted would send a wave of excitement around the galaxy, strengthening
the Seekers, encouraging them to complete the unification by their own efforts.
The Big Crunch might be inevitable, but at least she could delay it, and hope
that the robustness and diversity of the Amalgam would carry them through it,
and beyond.

She erased the message and wrote a new one, addressed to her
backup via the decoy node. It would have been nice to upload all her memories,
but the Noudah were ruthless, and she wasnłt prepared to stay any longer and
risk being used by them. This sketch, this postcard, would have to be enough.

When the transmission was complete she left a note for Sando
in the consolełs memory.

Daya called out to her, �Joan? Do you need anything?"

She said, �No. Iłm going to sleep for a while."

The Hundred-Light-Year Diary

Martin Place was packed with the usual frantic lunchtime
crowds. I scanned the faces nervously; the moment had almost arrived, and I
still hadnłt even caught sight of Alison. One twenty-seven and fourteen
seconds. Would I be mistaken about something so important? With the knowledge
of the mistake still fresh in my mind? But that knowledge could make no
difference. Of course it would affect my state of mind, of course it would
influence my actionsbut I already knew exactly what the net result of that,
and every other, influence would be: Iłd write what Iłd read.

I neednłt have worried. I looked down at my watch, and as
1:27:13 became 1:27:14, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned; it was
Alison, of course. Iłd never seen her before, in the flesh, but Iłd soon devote
a monthłs bandwidth allocation to sending back a Barnsley-compressed snapshot.
I hesitated, then spoke my lines, awful as they were:

ęFancy meeting you here.ł

She smiled, and suddenly I was overwhelmed, giddy with happinessexactly
as Iłd read in my diary a thousand times, since Iłd first come across the dayłs
entry at the age of nine; exactly as I would, necessarily, describe it at the
terminal that night. Butforeknowledge asidehow could I have felt anything but
euphoria? Iłd finally met the woman Iłd spend my life with. We had fifty-eight
years together ahead of us, and wełd love each other to the end.

ęSo, where are we going for lunch?ł

I frowned slightly, wondering if she was jokingand wondering
why Iłd left myself in any doubt. I said, hesitantly, ęFulviołs. Didnłt you ...
?ł But of course she had no idea of the petty details of the meal; on 14
December, 2074, Iłd write admiringly: A. concentrates on the things that
matter; she never lets herself be distracted by trivia.

I said, ęWell, the food wonłt be ready on time; theyłll have
screwed up their schedule, butł

She put a finger to her lips, then leant forward and kissed
me. For a moment, I was too shocked to do anything but stand there like a statue,
but after a second or two, I started kissing back.

When we parted, I said stupidly, ęI didnłt know ... I
thought we just ... Ił

ęJames, youłre blushing.ł

She was right. I laughed, embarrassed. It was absurd: in a
weekłs time, wełd make love, and I already knew every detailyet that single
unexpected kiss left me flustered and confused.

She said, ęCome on. Maybe the food wonłt be ready, but we
have a lot to talk about while wełre waiting. I just hope you havenłt read it
all in advance, or youłre going to have a very boring time.ł

She took my hand and started leading the way. I followed,
still shaken. Halfway to the restaurant, I finally managed to say, ęBack
thendid you know that would happen?ł

She laughed. ęNo. But I donłt tell myself everything. I like
to be surprised now and then. Donłt you?ł

Her casual attitude stung me. Never lets herself be
distracted by trivia. I struggled for words; this whole conversation was unknown
to me, and I never was much good at improvising anything but small talk.

I said, ęToday is important to me. I always thought Iłd
write the most carefulthe most completeaccount of it possible. I mean, Iłm
going to record the time we met, to the second. I canłt imagine sitting down
tonight and not even mentioning the first time we kissed.ł

She squeezed my hand, then moved close to me and whispered,
mock-conspiratorially: ęBut you will. You know you will. And so will I. You
know exactly what youłre going to write, and exactly what youłre going to leave
outand the fact is, that kiss is going to remain our little secret.ł

* * * *

Francis Chen wasnłt the first astronomer to hunt for
time-reversed galaxies, but he was the first to do so from space. He swept the
sky with a small instrument in a junk-scattered near-Earth orbit, long after all
serious work had shifted to the (relatively) unpolluted vacuum on the far side
of the moon. For decades, certainhighly speculativecosmological theories had
suggested that it might be possible to catch glimpses of the universełs future
phase of re-contraction, during whichperhapsall the arrows of time would be
reversed.

Chen charged up a light detector to saturation, and searched
for a region of the sky which would unexpose itdischarging the pixels in the
form of a recognisable image. The photons from ordinary galaxies, collected by
ordinary telescopes, left their mark as patterns of charge on arrays of
electro-optical polymer; a time-reversed galaxy would require instead that the
detector lose charge, emitting photons which would leave the telescope on a
long journey into the future universe, to be absorbed by stars tens of billions
of years hence, contributing an infinitesimal nudge to drive their nuclear
processes from extinction back towards birth.

Chenłs announcement of success was met with virtually unanimous
scepticismand rightly so, since he refused to divulge the coordinates of his
discovery. Iłve seen the recording of his one and only press conference.

ęWhat would happen if you pointed an uncharged detector at
this thing?ł asked one puzzled journalist.

ęYou canłt.ł

ęWhat do you mean, you canłt?ł

ęSuppose you point a detector at an ordinary light source. Unless
the detectorłs not working, it will end up charged. Itłs no use declaring: I am
going to expose this detector to light, and it will end up uncharged. Thatłs
ludicrous; it simply wonłt happen.ł

ęYes, butł

ęNow time-reverse the whole situation. If youłre going to
point a detector at a time-reversed light source, it will be charged beforehand.ł

ęBut if you discharge the whole thing thoroughly, before exposing
it, and then ...ł

ęIłm sorry. You wonłt. You canłt.ł

Shortly afterwards, Chen retired into self-imposed
obscuritybut his work had been government funded, and hełd complied with the
rigorous auditing requirements, so copies of all his notes existed in various
archives. It was almost five years before anyone bothered to exhume themnew
theoretical work having made his claims more fashionablebut once the
coordinates were finally made public, it took only days for a dozen groups to
confirm the original results.

Most of the astronomers involved dropped the matter there
and thenbut three people pressed on, to the logical conclusion:

Suppose an asteroid, a few hundred billion kilometres away,
happened to block the line of sight between Earth and Chenłs galaxy. In the
galaxyłs time frame, therełd be a delay of half an hour or so before this
occultation could be seen in near-Earth orbitbefore the last photons to make
it past the asteroid arrived. Our time frame runs the other way, though; for us,
the ędelaył would be negative. We might think of the detector, not the galaxy,
as the source of the photonsbut it would still have to stop emitting them half
an hour before the asteroid crossed the line of sight, in order to emit them
only when theyłd have a clear path all the way to their destination. Cause and
effect; the detector has to have a reason to lose charge and emit photonseven
if that reason lies in the future.

Replace the uncontrollableand unlikelyasteroid with a
simple electronic shutter. Fold up the line of sight with mirrors, shrinking
the experiment down to more manageable dimensionsand allowing you to place the
shutter and detector virtually side by side. Flash a torch at yourself in a
mirror, and you get a signal from the past; do the same with the light from
Chenłs galaxy, and the signal comes from the future.

Hazzard, Capaldi and Wu arranged a pair of space-borne mirrors,
a few thousand kilometres apart. With multiple reflections, they achieved an
optical path length of over two light seconds. At one end of this ędelaył they
placed a telescope, aimed at Chenłs galaxy; at the other end they placed a
detector. (ęThe other endł optically speakingphysically, it was housed in the
very same satellite as the telescope.) In their first experiments, the
telescope was fitted with a shutter triggered by the ęunpredictableł decay of a
small sample of a radioactive isotope.

The sequence of the shutterłs opening and closing and the detectorłs
rate of discharge were logged by a computer. The two sets of data were
comparedand the patterns, unsurprisingly, matched. Except, of course, that the
detector began discharging two seconds before the shutter opened, and ceased
discharging two seconds before it closed.

So, they replaced the isotope trigger with a manual control,
and took turns trying to change the immutable future.

Hazzard said, in an interview several months later: ęAt
first, it seemed like some kind of perverse reaction-time test: instead of
having to hit the green button when the green light came on, you had to try to
hit the red button, and vice versa. And at first, I really believed I was
�obeying" the signal only because I couldnłt discipline my reflexes to do
anything so �difficult" as contradicting it. In retrospect, I know that was a
rationalisation, but I was quite convinced at the time. So I had the computer
swap the conventionsand of course, that didnłt help. Whenever the display said
I was going to open the shutterhowever it expressed that factI opened it.ł

ęAnd how did that make you feel? Soulless? Robotic? A prisoner
to fate?ł

ęNo. At first, just ... clumsy. Uncoordinated. So clumsy I
couldnłt hit the wrong button, no matter how hard I tried. And then, after a
while, the whole thing began to seem perfectly ... normal. I wasnłt being
�forced" to open the shutter; I was opening it precisely when I felt like
opening it, and observing the consequencesobserving them before the event,
yes, but that hardly seemed important any more. Wanting to �not open" it when I
already knew that I would seemed as absurd as wanting to change something in
the past that I already knew had happened. Does not being able to rewrite
history make you feel �soulless"?ł

ęNo.ł

ęThis was exactly the same.ł

Extending the devicełs range was easy; by having the detector
itself trigger the shutter in a feedback loop, two seconds could become four
seconds, four hours, or four days. Or four centuriesin theory. The real
problem was bandwidth; simply blocking off the view of Chenłs galaxy, or not,
coded only a single bit of information, and the shutter couldnłt be strobed at
too high a rate, since the detector took almost half a second to lose enough
charge to unequivocally signal a future exposure.

Bandwidth is still a problem, although the current
generation of Hazzard Machines have path lengths of a hundred light years, and
detectors made up of millions of pixels, each one sensitive enough to be
modulated at megabaud rates. Governments and large corporations use most of
this vast capacity, for purposes that remain obscureand still theyłre
desperate for more.

As a birthright, though, everyone on the planet is granted
one hundred and twenty-eight bytes a day. With the most efficient data-compression
schemes, this can code about a hundred words of text; not enough to describe
the future in microscopic detail, but enough for a summary of the dayłs events.

A hundred words a day; three million words in a lifetime.
The last entry in my own diary was received in 2032, eighteen years before my
birth, one hundred years before my death. The history of the next millennium is
taught in schools: the end of famine and disease, the end of nationalism and
genocide, the end of poverty, bigotry and superstition. There are glorious
times ahead.

If our descendants are telling the truth.

* * * *

The wedding was, mostly, just as Iłd known it would be. The
best man, Pria, had his arm in a sling from a mugging in the early hours of the
morningwełd laughed over that when wełd first met, in high school, a decade
before.

ęBut what if I stay out of that alley?ł hełd joked.

ęThen Iłll have to break it for you, wonłt I? Youłre not
shunting my wedding day!ł

Shunting was a fantasy for children, the subject of juvenile
schlock-ROMs. Shunting was what happened when you grimaced and sweated and
gritted your teeth and absolutely refused to participate in something
unpleasant that you knew was going to happen. In the ROMs, the offending future
was magicked away into a parallel universe, by sheer mental discipline and the
force of plot convenience. Drinking the right brand of cola also seemed to
help.

In real life, with the advent of the Hazzard Machines, the
rates of death and injury through crime, natural disaster, industrial and
transport accidents, and many kinds of disease, had certainly plummetedbut such
events werenłt forecast and then paradoxically ęavoidedł; they simply,
consistently, became increasingly rare in reports from the futurereports which
proved to be as reliable as those from the past.

A residue of ęseemingly avoidableł tragedies remains, though,
and the people who know that theyłre going to be involved react in different
ways: some swallow their fate cheerfully; some seek comfort (or anesthesia) in
somnambulist religions; a few succumb to the wish-fulfilment fantasies of the
ROMs, and go kicking and screaming all the way.

When I met up with Pria, on schedule, in the Casualty Department
of St Vincentłs, he was a bloody, shivering mess. His arm was broken, as
expected. Hełd also been sodomised with a bottle and slashed on the arms and
chest. I stood beside him in a daze, choking on the sour taste of all the
stupid jokes Iłd made, unable to shake the feeling that I was to blame. Iłd lie
to him, lie to myself

As they pumped him full of painkillers and tranquillisers,
he said, ęFuck it, James, Iłm not letting on. Iłm not going to say how bad it
was; Iłm not frightening that kid to death. And youłd better not, either.ł I
nodded earnestly and swore that I wouldnłt; redundantly, of course, but the
poor man was delirious.

And when it was time to write up the dayłs events, I
dutifully regurgitated the light-hearted treatment of my friendłs assault that
Iłd memorised long before I even knew him.

Dutifully? Or simply because the cycle was closed, because I
had no choice but to write what Iłd already read? Or ... both? Ascribing
motives is a strange business, but Iłm sure it always has been. Knowing the
future doesnłt mean wełve been subtracted out of the equations that shape it.
Some philosophers still ramble on about ęthe loss of free willł (I suppose they
canłt help themselves), but Iłve never been able to find a meaningful
definition of what they think this magical thing ever was. The future has
always been determined. What else could affect human actions, other than each
individualłsunique and complexinheritance and past experience? Who we are
decides what we doand what greater ęfreedomł could anyone demand? If ęchoiceł
wasnłt grounded absolutely in cause and effect, what would decide its outcome?
Meaningless random glitches from quantum noise in the brain? (A popular
theorybefore quantum indeterminism was shown to be nothing but an artefact of
the old time-asymmetric world-view.) Or some mystical invention called the soul
... but then what, precisely, would govern its behaviour? Laws of metaphysics every
bit as problematical as those of neurophysiology.

I believe wełve lost nothing; rather, wełve gained the only
freedom we ever lacked: who we are is now shaped by the future, as well as the
past. Our lives resonate like plucked strings, standing waves formed by the
collision of information flowing back and forth in time.

Informationand disinformation.

Alison looked over my shoulder at what Iłd typed. ęYoułve
got to be kidding,ł she said.

I replied by hitting the check keya totally unnecessary
facility, but thatłs never stopped anyone using it. The text Iłd just typed
matched the received version precisely. (People have talked about automating
the whole processtransmitting what must be transmitted, without any human
intervention whatsoeverbut nobodyłs ever done it, so perhaps itłs impossible.)

I hit save, burning the dayłs entry on to the chip that
would be transmitted shortly after my death, then saidnumbly, idiotically (and
inevitably)łWhat if Iłd warned him?ł

She shook her head. ęThen youłd have warned him. It still
would have happened.ł

ęMaybe not. Why couldnłt life turn out better than the
diary, not worse? Why couldnłt it turn out that wełd made the whole thing
upthat he hadnłt been attacked at all?ł

ęBecause it didnłt.ł

I sat at the desk for a moment longer, staring at the words
that I couldnłt take back, that I never could have taken back. But my lies were
the lies Iłd promised to tell; Iłd done the right thing, hadnłt I? Iłd known
for years exactly what Iłd ęchooseł to writebut that didnłt change the fact
that the words had been determined, not by ęfateł, not by ędestinył, but by who
I was.

I switched off the terminal, stood up and began undressing.
Alison headed for the bathroom. I called out after her, ęDo we have sex
tonight, or not? I never say.ł

She laughed. ęDonłt ask me, James. Youłre the one who insisted
on keeping track of these things.ł

I sat down on the bed, disconcerted. It was our wedding
night, after all; surely I could read between the lines.

But I never was much good at improvising.

* * * *

The Australian federal election of 2077 was the closest for
fifty years, and would remain so for almost another century. A dozen
independentsincluding three members of a new ignorance cult, called God Averts
His Gazeheld the balance of power, but deals to ensure stable government had
been stitched together well in advance, and would survive the four-year term.

Consistently, I suppose, the campaign was also among the
most heated in recent memory, or short-term anticipation. The soon-to-be Opposition
Leader never tired of listing the promises the new Prime Minister would break;
she in turn countered with statistics of the mess hełd create as Treasurer, in
the mid-eighties. (The causes of that impending recession were still being
debated by economists; most claimed it was an ęessential precursorł of the
prosperity of the nineties, and that The Market, in its infinite, time-spanning
wisdom, would choose/had chosen the best of all possible futures. Personally, I
suspect it simply proved that even foresight was no cure for incompetence.)

I often wondered how the politicians felt, mouthing the
words theyłd known theyłd utter ever since their parents first showed them the
future-history ROMs, and explained what lay ahead. No ordinary person could
afford the bandwidth to send back moving pictures; only the newsworthy were
forced to confront such detailed records of their lives, with no room for
ambiguity or euphemism. The cameras, of course, could liedigital video fraud
was the easiest thing in the worldbut mostly they didnłt. I wasnłt surprised
that people made (seemingly) impassioned election speeches which they knew
would get them nowhere; Iłd read enough past history to realise that that had
always been the case. But Iłd like to have discovered what went on in their
heads as they lip-synched their way through interviews and debates, parliamentary
question time and party conferences, all captured in high-resolution
holographic perfection for anterity. With every syllable, every gesture, known
in advance, did they feel like theyłd been reduced to twitching puppets? (If
so, maybe that, too, had always been the case.) Or was the smooth flow of
rationalisation as efficient as ever? After all, when I filled in my diary each
night, I was just as tightly constrained, but I couldalmost alwaysfind a good
reason to write what I knew Iłd write.

Lisa was on the staff of a local candidate who was due to be
voted into office. I met her a fortnight before the election, at a fund-raising
dinner. To date, Iłd had nothing to do with the candidate, but at the turn of
the centuryby which time, the manłs party would be back in office yet again,
with a substantial majorityIłd head an engineering firm which would gain
several large contracts from state governments of the same political flavour.
Iłd be coy in my own description of the antecedents of this good fortunebut my
bank statement included transactions six months in advance, and I duly made the
generous donation that the records implied. In fact, Iłd been a little shocked
when Iłd first seen the print-out, but Iłd had time to accustom myself to the
idea, and the de facto bribe no longer seemed so grossly out of character.

The evening was dull beyond redemption (Iłd later describe
it as ętolerableł), but as the guests dispersed into the night, Lisa appeared
beside me and said matter-of-factly, ęI believe you and I are going to share a
taxi.ł

I sat beside her in silence, while the robot vehicle carried
us smoothly towards her apartment. Alison was spending the weekend with an old
schoolfriend, whose mother would die that night. I knew I wouldnłt be
unfaithful. I loved my wife, I always would. Or at least, Iłd always claim to.
But if that wasnłt proof enough, I couldnłt believe Iłd keep such a secret from
myself for the rest of my life.

When the taxi stopped, I said, ęWhat now? You ask me in for
coffee? And I politely decline?ł

She said, ęI have no idea. The whole weekendłs a mystery to
me.ł

The elevator was broken; a sticker from Building Maintenance
read: OUT OF ORDER UNTIL 11:06 A.M., 3/2/78. I followed Lisa up twelve flights
of stairs, inventing excuses all the way: I was proving my freedom, my
spontaneityproving that my life was more than a fossilised pattern of events
in time. But the truth was, Iłd never felt trapped by my knowledge of the
future, never felt any need to delude myself that I had the power to live any
life but one. The whole idea of an unknown liaison filled me with panic and
vertigo. The bland white lies that Iłd already written were unsettling enoughbut
if anything at all could happen in the spaces between the words, then I no
longer knew who I was, or who I might become. My whole life would dissolve into
quicksand.

I was shaking as we undressed each other.

ęWhy are we doing this?ł

ęBecause we can.ł

ęDo you know me? Will you write about me? About us?ł

She shook her head. ęNo.ł

ęBut ... how long will this last? I have to know. One night?
A month? A year? How will it end?ł I was losing my mind: how could I start
something like this, when I didnłt even know how it would end?

She laughed. ęDonłt ask me. Look it up in your own diary, if
itłs so important to you.ł

I couldnłt leave it alone, I couldnłt shut up. ęYou must
have written something. You knew wełd share that taxi.ł

ęNo. I just said that.ł

ęYouł I stared at her.

ęIt came true, though, didnłt it? How about that?ł She
sighed, slid her hands down my spine, pulled me on to the bed. Down into the
quicksand.

ęWill weł

She clamped her hand over my mouth.

ęNo more questions. I donłt keep a diary. I donłt know anything
at all.ł

* * * *

Lying to Alison was easy; I was almost certain that Iłd get
away with it. Lying to myself was easier still. Filling out my diary became a
formality, a meaningless ritual; I scarcely glanced at the words I wrote. When
I did pay attention, I could barely keep a straight face: amidst the merely
lazy and deceitful elision and euphemism were passages of deliberate irony
which had been invisible to me for years, but which I could finally appreciate
for what they were. Some of my paeans to marital bliss seemed ędangerouslył
heavy-handed; I could scarcely believe that Iłd never picked up the subtext
before. But I hadnłt. There was no ęriskł of tipping myself offI was ęfreeł to
be every bit as sarcastic as I ęchoseł to be.

No more, no less.

The ignorance cults say that knowing the future robs us of
our souls; by losing the power to choose between right and wrong, we cease to
be human. To them, ordinary people are literally the walking dead: meat
puppets, zombies. The somnambulists believe much the same thing, butrather
than seeing this as a tragedy of apocalyptic dimensionsembrace the idea with
dreamy enthusiasm. They see a merciful end to responsibility, guilt and
anxiety, striving and failing: a descent into inanimacy, the leaching of our
souls into a great cosmic spiritual blancmange, while our bodies hang around,
going through the motions.

For me, though, knowing the futureor believing that I
didnever made me feel like a sleepwalker, a zombie in a senseless, amoral
trance. It made me feel I was in control of my life. One person held sway
across the decades, tying the disparate threads together, making sense of it
all. How could that unity make me less than human? Everything I did grew out of
who I was: who I had been, and who I would be.

I only started feeling like a soulless automaton when I tore
it all apart with lies.

* * * *

After school, few people pay much attention to history, past
or futurelet alone that grey zone between the two which used to be known as
ęcurrent affairsł. Journalists continue to collect information and scatter it
across time, but therełs no doubt that they now do a very different job than
they did in pre-Hazzard days, when the live broadcast, the latest dispatch, had
a real, if fleeting, significance. The profession hasnłt died out completely;
itłs as if a kind of equilibrium has been reached between apathy and curiosity,
and if we had any less news flowing from the future, there ęwould beł a greater
effort made to gather it and send it back. How valid such arguments can bewith
their implications of dynamism, of hypothetical alternative worlds cancelled
out by their own inconsistenciesI donłt know, but the balance is undeniable.
We learn precisely enough to keep us from wanting to know any more.

On 8 July, 2079, when Chinese troops moved into Kashmir to
ęstabilise the regionłby wiping out the supply lines to the separatists within
their own bordersI hardly gave it a second thought. I knew the UN would sort
out the whole mess with remarkable dexterity; historians had praised the
Secretary-Generalłs diplomatic resolution of the crisis for decades, and, in a
rare move for the conservative Academy, shełd been awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize three years in advance of the efforts which would earn it. My memory of the
details was sketchy, so I called up The Global Yearbook. The troops would be
out by 3 August; casualties would be few. Duly comforted, I got on with my
life.

I heard the first rumours from Pria, whołd taken to sampling
the countless underground communications nets. Gossip and slander for computer
freaks; a harmless enough pastime, but Iłd always been amused by the
participantsł conceit that they were ęplugged inł to the global village, that
they had their fingers on the pulse of the planet. Who needed to be wired to
the moment, when the past and the future could be examined at leisure? Who
needed the latest unsubstantiated static, when a sober, considered version of
events which had stood the test of time could be had just as soonor sooner?

So when Pria told me solemnly that a full-scale war had
broken out in Kashmir, and that people were being slaughtered in the thousands,
I said, ęSure. And Maura got the Nobel Prize for genocide.ł

He shrugged. ęYou ever heard of a man called Henry Kissinger?ł

I had to admit that I hadnłt.

* * * *

I mentioned the story to Lisa, disparagingly, confident that
shełd laugh along with me. She rolled over to face me and said, ęHełs right.ł

I didnłt know whether to take the bait; she had a strange
sense of humour, she might have been teasing. Finally, I said, ęHe canłt be.
Iłve checked. All the histories agreeł

She looked genuinely surprised before her expression turned
to pity; shełd never thought much of me, but I donłt think shełd ever believed
I was quite so naive.

ęThe victors have always written the �history", James. Why
should the future be any different? Believe me. Itłs happening.ł

ęHow do you know?ł It was a stupid question; her boss was on
all the foreign affairs committees, and would be Minister next time the party
was in power. If he didnłt have access to the intelligence in his present job,
he would in the long term.

She said, ęWełre helping to fund it, of course. Along with Europe,
Japan, and the States. Thanks to the embargo after the Hong Kong riots, the
Chinese have no war drones; theyłre pitting human soldiers with obsolete
equipment against the best Vietnamese robots. Four hundred thousand troops and
a hundred thousand civilians will diewhile the Allies sit in Berlin playing
their solipsist video games.ł

I stared past her, into the darkness, numb and disbelieving.
ęWhy? Why couldnłt things have been worked out, defused in time?ł

She scowled. ęHow? You mean, shunted? Known about, then
avoided?ł

ęNo, but ... if everyone knew the truth, if this hadnłt been
covered upł

ęWhat? If people had known it would happen, it wouldnłt
have? Grow up. It is happening, it will go on happening; therełs nothing else
to say.ł

I climbed out of bed and started dressing, although I had no
reason to hurry home. Alison knew all about us; apparently, shełd known since
childhood that her husband would turn out to be a piece of shit.

Half a million people slaughtered. It wasnłt fate, it wasnłt
destinythere was no Will of God, no Force of History to absolve us. It grew
out of who we were: the lies wełd told, and would keep on telling. Half a
million people slaughtered in the spaces between the words.

I vomited on the carpet, then stumbled about dizzily,
cleaning it up. Lisa watched me sadly.

ęYoułre not coming back, are you?ł

I laughed weakly. ęHow the fuck should I know?ł

ęYoułre not.ł

ęI thought you didnłt keep a diary.ł

ęI donłt.ł

And I finally understood why.

* * * *

Alison woke when I switched on the terminal, and said sleepily,
without rancour, ęWhatłs the hurry, James? If youłve masturbated about tonight
since you were twelve years old, surely youłll still remember it all in the
morning.ł

I ignored her. After a while, she got out of bed and came
and looked over my shoulder.

ęIs this true?ł

I nodded.

ęAnd you knew all along? Youłre going to send this?ł

I shrugged and hit the check key. A message box popped up on
the screen: 95 words; 95 errors.

I sat and stared at this verdict for a long time. What did I
think? I had the power to change history? My puny outrage could shunt the war?
Reality would dissolve around me, and anotherbetterworld would take its
place?

No. History, past and future, was determined, and I couldnłt
help being part of the equations that shaped itbut I didnłt have to be part of
the lies.

I hit the SAVE key, and burned those 95 words on to the
chip, irreversibly.

(Iłm sure I had no choice.)

That was my last diary entryand I can only assume that the
same computers that will filter it out of my posthumous transmission will also
fill in the unwritten remainder, extrapolating an innocuous life for me, fit
for a child to read.

I tap into the nets at random, listening to the whole
spectrum of conflicting rumours, hardly knowing what to believe. Iłve left my
wife, Iłve left my job, parting ways entirely with my rosy, fictitious future.
All my certainties have evaporated: I donłt know when Iłll die; I donłt know
who Iłll love; I donłt know if the world is heading for Utopia, or Armageddon.

But I keep my eyes open, and I feed what little of value I
can gather back into the nets. There must be corruption and distortion here,
toobut Iłd rather swim in this cacophony of a million contradictory voices
than drown in the smooth and plausible lies of those genocidal authors of
history who control the Hazzard Machines.

Sometimes I wonder how different my life might have been
without their interventionbut the question is meaningless. It couldnłt have
been any other way. Everyone is manipulated; everyone is a product of their
times. And vice versa.

Whatever the unchangeable future holds, Iłm sure of one
thing: who I am is still a part of what always has, and always will, decide it.

I can ask for no greater freedom than that.

And no greater responsibility.

In Numbers

I dream that Iłm floating in the void between the stars. Untethered.
No ship in sight. Suitless, naked to the vacuum. I search frantically for the
sun, as if merely knowing its direction coul save me, but Iłm spinning much to
fast to find my bearings, and each time I catch a glimpse of what might be th
ehome star, I lose sight of it again, before I can be sure.

�Last night"as day nineteen came to a close with Callaghanłs
condition unchangedthe orders arrived from Earth, officially canceling

the mission.

We shut down the drive for six hours while we rotated
Cyclops one hundred and eighty degrees. Now we are decelerating at 1.3 geesas
fast as we can, within safety parametersbut wełll still be traveling away from
the solar system for fourteen and a half more days before we even come to a
halt, and then it will take as long again just to get back to the point where
deceleration began. I have no right to be even mildly surprised by thisto shed
the velocity gained over nineteen daysł ship time at 1 gee requires 14.6 days
at 1.3; any intelligent child could do the calculationbut some Earth-bound,
commonsensical part of my mind still canłt quite accept a twenty-nine-day
U-turn.

Callaghan is facing away from the door as I enter the
infirmary, but a glance at his EEG tells me hełs awake. I call out in what I
hope is a calm, reassuring voice, �Andrew? Itłs only me. How are you feeling
today?" The words are picked up by the microphone in the helmet of my
quarantine suit, pumped out by the external speaker, bounced off the gleaming,
tiled walls, then fed back to me through my headsetcreating the unsettling
illusion that my skull is several meters wide, and hollow.

He turns at the sound, emits a series of angry grunts, and
makes a show of trying to break free of his restraints, but after a short while
he goes limp, and just glares at me resentfully.

I stand by the foot of the bed, suddenly feeling drained,
lethargic, hopeless. Or maybe just heavy; the extra weight is going to take a
while to get used to. Twenty-four more kilograms, distributed uniformly, isnłt
exactly crippling, but even the slightest movement now requires a conscious
effort.

�How are you?"

Iłm convinced by now that he canłt understand a word I say,
but Iłd still rather make a fool of myself than deal with a living, conscious
patient in silence. Therełs no evidence that the sound of my voice is even any
comfort to him, but Iłm damned if Iłm going to treat him like a cadaver.

�Is the gravity getting you down?"

Three days ago, Andrew Callaghan would have winced at the
lame pun, and then lectured me on my sloppy terminology: �Kindly remember,
ęDoctorł Dreyfusand I use the title looselythat the Principle of Equivalence
does not grant ye license to refer to the inertial force ye are experiencing as
ęgravity.ł � In that glorious, over-the-top Scottish accent that he put on when
he was being jokingly pompous, in place of his usual pan-European amalgam. His
father was Irish, his mother Scottish, but he grew up in Switzerland; three
days ago, he spoke five languages. Now, my words mean no more to him than his
grunts mean to me.

I close my eyes and fight down a wave of panic. Earth is
still forty-six days away. In forty-six days, this could happen to all of us. I
want to lean over and shake him, force him to confess that hełs acting, that
itłs all a monstrous practical joke. I actually believed that, for the first
few hours (in retrospect, a feat of wishful thinking verging on the
psychoticnobody indulges in practical jokes on board an experimental
spacecraft). I thought everyone was in on it: make the doctor shit himself, and
then laugh about it for the rest of the flight. I would have happily laughed
along with them. But when I searched their faces for ill-concealed conspiratorial
glee, all I found was the same sickening realization: This could happen to all
of us. This could happen to me.

No diagnostic instrument can find the least thing wrong with
Callaghan, and the hundreds of experts back on Earth whołve seen the data can
agree on only one thing: so far, there is no direct evidence of any toxin, any
infection, any lesion, or any neurochemical deficit or excess. His brain
activity has certainly changed, diminishing in specific regions in a manner
entirely consistent with his diminished behavioral repertoire, but there is no
sign of neurological damage to explain this loss of function.

This proves nothing; there are conditions that cannot be diagnosed
until autopsy, even on Earth. And since Callaghanłs medical historypersonal
and ancestral, physical and mentalis, or was, spotless, if some trace
neurotoxin has contaminated the food, or some mutant virus is drifting through
the shipłs air, there is no reason to believe that he was uniquely vulnerable.
It must be assumed that we are all at risk.

For all the high-powered technology at my disposal, Iłd give
anything for a simple, verbal report from the patient himself. Hełs a long way
from being comatose; there must be something going through his mind. Although
that begs the question: going through whose mind? Does Andrew Callaghan still
exist? At what level of impairment does he lose his identity? And who lies in
this bed, then? An unnamed stranger, without a past or a future? The na�ve
vocabulary of personality fails; the painful fact is that the human brain is
capable of states that canłt be categorized in such cozy terminology. Sometimes
I think the only way to stay sanewhen confronted with malfunctions of
consciousness that betray, so starkly, its physical natureis by adopting a
variation on solipsism: other people may be nothing but biochemical robots, run
by slabs of interconnected neurons ... but me, Iłm not like that at all; Iłm
real. Via the control plate fixed to his depilated skull, I anesthetize and
selectively paralyze him, then I wheel him into the scanning room. Iłm still
hoping that evidence of a virus is going to turn up; if not the nucleic acid
itself, maybe some tell-tale foreign protein. However limited the practical
usefulness of such a discovery, it would be a great psychological victory to
finally know what it is wełre fighting.

I lock the bed into place inside the NMR cavity, hit a few
keys, and the computer takes over. The scan will last nearly an hour, therełs
noth ing to do but sit and wait.

Perhaps the hypothetical virus is causing the production of
an altered form of one of the neurotransmitters, too close to the real thing
for this crude heap of coils to tell the difference, but sufficiently deformed
to be unable to bind properly to its receptor? Itłs possible, I supposeas pos
sible as any of my Other wild guesses. No doubt the experts back home have
already thought of it and dismissed it. The worldłs best neuroscientists are
all busily debating the Callaghan case, and when they manage to agree upon a hypothesis,
Iłm sure wełll be told without delay (apart from the unavoidable one: twelve
hours now, and growing longer). My expertise is in space medicine; my
specialties are radiation sickness, andamusingly enoughthe effects of
insufficient gravity. Why should I expect to come up with the answer myself?
Just because Iłm here in the flesh? Just because my own life may depend on it?

Therełs a buzzing in my headset. I hit a button on my belt
to accept the call.

�David?"

�Yeah?"

�Itłs Jenny. Iłm in the maser room. Can you come and take a
look at Greta, please."

�Why? What is it?"

She hesitates long enough to make a reply unnecessary.

This is it. Itłs spreading.

I flick off my communicator. For a moment I simply feel
numb, but then the ludicrous nature of the situation fills me with a bitter
rage. Eight immaculately healthy people, on a milk run of a test flight to an
arbitrary point in interstellar space; what are the odds of finding yourself in
the middle of a fucking epidemic?

Iłm on the verge of letting go and screaming out a string of
angry obscenities, but I catch myself. What did I honestly expect? That
quarantining Callaghan after he showed symptoms would be enough to contain the
disease? I canłt fall to pieces every time a miracle fails to take place.

I switch the communicator back on; the channel is still
open. �Iłm on my way."

�Youłre going to feel nauseous, but that should be the only
side-effect; if you experience any other problems, let me know at once."

They all nod earnestly. Thomas asks, �How nauseous is nauseous?
Throwing up?"

�I hope not. The digestive tract isnłt physically affected,
although you may feel like it is."

He grins. �Well, thatłs okay, then."

DDC-XV, a mixture of anti-viral agents, is no guarantee of anything;
itłs capable of disabling perhaps 40 per cent of known viruses, and slowing
down another 10 percent. Since whatever is on board can only be a mutant of
something we brought from Earth, the odds are really no different: one chance
in two of any useful effect at all.

Itłs a strange sight: the crew lined up in front of me like
nervous children trying to look brave while waiting to be inoculated. Although
Iłve read all their files, although I know all their medical idiosyncrasies
backward, theyłve never really been my patients before. Until now, theyłve just
been colleagues and friends, and the sudden shift in the relationship is
disconcerting. I hate the way theyłre looking at me; as if I had some kind of
power. As if it were me, and not the virus, they had to fear, or respect, or
appease.

Captain Salih al-Qasbi is first to receive the jab. Itłs
almost funny; since the team was assembled back on the moon, queues have always
formed in the precise order of ascension to command: Lidia Garcia, navigator.
Kayathiri Sangaralingam, drive specialist. Thomas Bwalya, life-support
engineer. Jenny Riley, cyberneticist. (Greta Nordstrom, communications engineer.
Andrew Callaghan, astronomer.) Then me, last and least, insurance against some
unlikely emergencylike the escape pods, and about as much use.

�What else can we do?" asks Kay. �Shouldnłt we be wearing
quarantine suits?"

�It wouldnłt be worth the discomfort. Wełve been breathing
the same air as each other for nineteen days; we must all have the virus in our
bodies by now." The notion of anyone engaging in physical intimacy on board
Cyclops is ludicrous; there are video cameras in every corner of the ship, recording
everything we do, twenty-four hours of every simulated day. For the virus to
have passed from Callaghan to Nordstrom, it must be able to survive in air, so
the chances are that wełve all been infected.

Jenny frowns. �You keep talking about the virus. What if it
isnłt a virus? What if itłs something else?"

�What else can it be? A contaminant in the food doesnł make
sense any morea toxin doesnłt just appear by magic, therełd lave to be a
fungus or bacterium making it, and Thomas and I have both done dozens of tests,
and turned up nothing."

Salih says, �But no tests for a virus are positive, either
All we have are negative results."

�Viruses are more elusive. Itłs a process of elimination; f
it was anything else, we would have pinned it down by now." I decline to add
that electron microscopy on brain tissue from a dead patient might settle the
issue once and for all.

�But are you sure there is no other possibility, David?"

�If there is, I canłt imagine what." I look around, a little
rsentful, but trying not to let it show. �Can anyone?"

Therełs a long silence, then Lidia says, �This might sound
far-fetched, and I know the symptoms are nothing like any recognize( form of
radiation sickness, but ..."

I shake my head vehemently. �Not only do the symptoas make
no sense, but the monitors all show that wełre getting no more of any kind of
radiation than wełd be receiving on Earth. The shielding is working perfectly,
against spillage from the drive, against cosmic ray ... nothing is getting
through."

�What about something we canłt measure? Something that would
pass right through the shields? Neutrinos, or some other weakl: interacting
particle? No humans have been out this far before, only robot probes, and none
with detectors that could pick up neutrinos."

�Neutrinos are harmless. Wełd be hit with more neutrinos
back on Earth, from the sun, than we would be out here. And if itł some other
kind of radiation, wherełs it coming from? Whatłs kept it ou of the solar
system? Whatłs kept it off the Earthłs surfaceour shielding is just as
effective as an entire planetary atmosphere. And if it scarely interacts with
matter, how can it possibly cause brain damage?"

She nods agreement, but looks away with an air of
frusration, as if Iłd somehow missed the point. Iłm puzzled; shełs ten times he
physicist I am, she should have thought of every objection I raised before she
even spoke.

Jenny says, �What about the air filters. Wasnłt there a Mars
flight in the ę50łs"

Thomas is indignant. �The air filters are clean!"

�The air filters are clean," I agree, �and in any case, I
wouldnłt be able to miss a bacterial infection."

Thomas says, �That Mars flight was a passenger liner wth
some guy on board whołd caught Legionnella Six back on Earth. The shipłs
life-support system had nothing to do with it. Why donłt you get your facts
straight before you open your mouth?"

The discussion takes us nowhere, and Salih soon breaks it up
and sends us back to our posts.

I check my patients via the infirmaryłs video cameras. The robot
or derly is trying to feed Nordstrom, and with infinite dumb patience offers
her spoonful after spoonful of mush that she spits back onto i ceramic arm.
Callaghan was the same at first, and I thought Iłd have to put him on a drip,
but after less than a day he gave in.

I review the recent data stream from Earth, but therełs been
no progress. The French and Australian delegates to the latest teleconference
on the �Cyclops Syndrome" both claim to have brilliant new theoriesbut are
refusing to divulge them until the question of patent rights on any potential
spin-offs has been settled. I know enough technodiplomacyspeak to realize that
they have no �theories"; itłs their convoluted way of restating their protest
at having had no citizens included in the crew. I slump against the desk,
wondering: When the ship full of corpses is recovered, will each government
jealously claim the body of their own nationłs crew member? Will they race each
other to the dissecting tables for the honor of being first to announce the
cause of death?

This first manned test of the Cyclops designto an unspectacular
patch of vacuum a mere five light-days from Earthwas trumpeted as the miracle
of international cooperation, in an era of increasing tension on every other
front. The truth is, itłs been abused all along, treated as the conduit for a
thousand petty diplomatic paybacks. Well, better that than waralthough now,
with the mission a failure, what kind of safety valve will it be? The newest
weaponsnanomachines, molecular �robots" the size of a viruscarry no risk of
fall-out or nuclear winter, and have a respect for property that puts the
neutron bomb to shame. Already, governments around the world are painting their
enemies as �less than human." I stare at the newscasts in disbelief, and think:
After all those

decades it took to get rid of the fucking bomb, itłs
happening again. Genocide is becoming thinkable again.

Therełs a knock on the door. Itłs Lidia.

�David? Can I talk to you?"

�Sure."

She sits, with an involuntary sigh of bliss at the pleasure
of taking the weight off her feet.

�What I said back there . ," she waves her hands
dismissively, �.. youłre right, of course; radiation makes no sensebut that
wasnłt really what I was getting at."

�Then what?"

�The point is, nobody has ever been this far out before." I
canłt help a

puzzled scowl, and she quickly adds, �What difference should
that make? I donłt know. Of course I donłt know! Twenty thousand people spent
fifteen years planning this missionI donłt expect to be able to outguess them
in a couple of hours. Some exotic form of radiation was Hie only tangible thing
I could think of, off the top of my head, but the real point is that we just
donłt know whatłs out here."

Iłm about to make a sarcastic remark about ethereal alien
lifeforms, slipping through the hull and feeding on our brains, but I stop
myself in time. If Lidia is becoming mildly paranoid, the worst thing I can do
is mock her. I say, reasonably, �We know as much about whatłs out here as
people ever knew about interplanetary space. More. Probes have been leaving the
solar system for a hundred and fifty years. The interstellar medium has been
sampled all the way to Alpha Centauri. There are no surprises, therełs nothing
strange out here. And even if there were ... what astrophysical phenomenon
could possibly explain whatłs happened to Callaghan and Nordstrom?"

�Iłve told you, I donłt know. All Iłm suggesting is that you
keep an open mind." She hesitates, frowning, clearly embarrassed by the
vagueness of her argument, but nevertheless unwilling to abandon it. �Humans
spent millions of years evolving on the Earthłs surface, adapting to a very
specific set of environments. We think wełre aware of all the restrictions that
places on us, but we canłt be sure. I mean, suppose theyłd sent people into
orbit before theyłd discovered the Van Allen radiation belts. Or suppose theyłd
sent a free-fall expedition to Saturn, before any research had been done on the
effects of long-term weightlessness." I start to protest, but she cuts me off.
�I know, that sounds ludicrous, but only because both those problems were
obvious in advance. That doesnłt mean it always has to be that way. Isnłt it
possible that wełve come across something that couldnłt be anticipated, something
utterly new?"

I say, begrudgingly, �I know what youłre getting at. People
have been acting for a hundred years like they knew all the problems of
interstellar flight, and that once we came up with the technical solutions,
those flights would be almost ... trivial. The usual hubris. Youłre saying,
perhaps therełs something qualitatively different about interstellar space,
something that all the unmanned probes couldnłt detect, something that a
century of planetary exploration couldnłt prepare us for. Okay, itłs an
interesting theoretical point, but where does it actually get us? Even if
youłre right, all it means is that we have no idea at all how to protect
ourselves. Intellectual humility may be a virtue, but frankly, Iłd rather be optimistic
and keep on believing that it has to be a virus."

She looks away, again with that air of frustration, and I
suddenly feel ashamed of my sensible, insipid response. �You should speak to
Kay, not me. Shełs the particle physicist, the genius, the great theoretician.
Iłm just a second-rate doctor who failed Lateral Thinking 100. I canłt radical
scientific ideas; Iłd be struck off the list for unprofessional con duct."

Lidia smiles ruefully. �I talked to Kay half an hour ago.
She said I was full of crap." She shrugs. �Shełs probably right. And I hope
that it is a virus, as much as you do. Keep looking for it, David. Forget every
thing Iłve said. You have work to do, I shouldnłt have distracted you."

The robot orderly feeds and cleans my robustly healthy idiot
patients, the computerized scanner probes their bodies with magnetic fields and
microwave pulses for the signature of a molecule that has no right to be
thereand fails. I send all the data back to EarthNMR spectra, PET scans,
EEGs, video recordingsalong with my own observations and speculations, for
what theyłre worth. In return, Earth spews back a torrent of case studies from
the literature; all make fascinating reading, but none come close to matching
the pattern of symptomsand lack of symptomsof the Cyclops Syndrome.

Then come the signs that Earth is getting worried: an
interminable series of messages from heads-of-state, each one full of the same
emetic platitudes about their deep concern for our safety, their peoplełs good
wishes, and our own inspirational courage. Each one setting up the right
credentials, carving out a share of the PR catharsis, just in case we donłt
make it back alive.

Worse are the broadcasts from our familiesscripted just as
tightly, but delivered with less skill. I sit in my cabin and listen to my
parents being forced to declare their love for me in the vocabulary of prime
time human interest. After a few seconds, I turn down the sound. but the
travesty is still too painful to watch. I close my eyes and press my fingers to
the glass, shaking with anger.

I check everyone for symptoms of neurological deterioration.
I analyze their visual tracking patterns, measure their reaction times, test
their language and cognitive skills. Nobodyłs results betray the slightest
signs of impairmentbut then, except for those tests that require the subjectłs
understanding or cooperation, the same can be said of Callaghan and Nordstrom.

For a few paranoid hours, I wonder if some spiteful government
has infected us with a tailored virus, or perhaps even killer nanomachines.
Itłs not unlikely, per se, but the details make no sense; surely a saboteur
would have chosen to mimic a known disease, rather than risk arousing suspicion
with a novel set of symptoms.

Unless, of course, the whole point was to arouse suspicion.
to inflame tensions, to start the hunt for someone to blame. But that doesnłt
bear thinking about.

Salih asks me to ask each member of the crew to help in some
way for the sake of morale. Jenny writes new software for the protein syn, I
thesizer, in preparation for churning out artificial antibodies, should we
actually find something to make antibodies against. Lidia and Kay check and
recheck, calibrate and recalibrate, all the imaging and analytical equipment.
Iłve already been showing Thomas every report and chart cranked out by the computer,
in the hope that hełll identify some subtle clue that Iłve overlooked. Salih
himself insists on feeding both Callaghan :aid Nordstrom for one meal a day,
expressing the hope g that this human contact might make a difference to their
conditiona gesture which I find touching, but also irritating, because it
seems like an implied crit icism of the way Iłm looking after them. Or perhaps
Iłm just hypersensitive.

Days pass without another victim, and I begin to feel less
pessimistic.

Dramatic as the behavioral changes Callaghan and Nordstrom
have suffered might be, the lack of detectable physical damage implies that,
the virus is capable of infecting only a very specific class of neuronsand
perhaps even that is contingent upon some genetic quirk that no other crew
member happens to share.

Earth is still weeks away, though; the maser lag is still
growing longer, and I canłt suppress a sense of frustrationat times, verging
on panicat the slowness of our return. Itłs not as if our homecoming held out
the promise of a guaranteed, instant cure; perhaps itłs more a wish to be rid
of the burden of responsibility than fear of the virus itself.

And every night, I dream the same dream: that Iłm spinning,
alone, in the void, trying in vain to find the way home.

Iłm shaken roughly from sleep, and it takes me several
seconds to recall where I am. Squinting against the ceiling panels switched to
daylight strength, I make out Thomas leaning over me.

�Oh shit, shit, shit."

He laughs drily. �Well, youłre all right then."

I stagger out of bed. �Who is it this time?"

�Salih. Kay. Jenny."

�Oh, no." I hesitate in the doorway. I want to fall apart, I
want to climb back under the blankets and hide, I want to be home, but Thomas
just stands there, puzzled, impatient, and I realize that I lack the courage to
betray my weakness to him. I think, thatłs all thatłs kept me going: propping
up my fears, one against the other.

Salih is sitting on the floor in a corner of the dining
room. He eyes me warily as I approach, but looks more lost and confused than
aggressive. I want to say something to him before I fire the tranquilizer
dartI feel I owe him some kind of apology or explanationbut then I smother
the absurd impulse and just do it.

Jenny is in her cabin, hitting fistfuls of keys on her
terminal, like an infant or a monkey pretending to type, peering at the screen
with intense concentration. When she hears me, she turns and bellows angrily,
then picks up a memory cartridge and throws it straight at my head. I duck. She
scrambles under the bed. I lie on my stomach awkwardly, muscles still stiff
from sleep. She screams at me. I fire.

Kay is in bed, shivering and sobbing. Lidia sits beside her,
murmuring comforting nonsense.

�Kay?" I crouch near the foot of the bed. She ignores me.
Lidia says dully, �I canłt get her to speak. Iłve tried, David, but I canłt."
As if the whole phenomenon might simply be a failure on our part to trick or
bully the victims back to normality.

After wełve moved the three new patients to the infirmary,
and Lidia has broadcast a terse report to Earth, we sit in the dining room,
drinking coffee, making plans for our own presumably inevitable decline.

Lidia says, �The drive and navigation software will just
keep on running. There are stages when human confirmation is requested, but if
no input is received within five minutes, the computer goes ahead as per the
flight plan. Once wełre close enough for remote reprogramming, ISUSAT will take
over for the boarding rendezvous. Short of something

drastic and highly improbable, like a meteor through the
fuel rings, wełll make it back."

Thomas says, �Ditto for life-support. After all the hours
Iłve spent monitoring and fine-tuning, unless therełs a massive equipment
failureand therełs no reason there should bethe whole system can take care of
itself."

Itłs easier than I thought it would be,, to mimic their
calm, pragmatic tones. �The orderly should be able to cope with feeding all
eight of us, so long as wełre properly restrained. The beds have an ultrasonic
system to maintain peripheral circulation; we can expect a certain amount of
muscle wastage, thatłs inevitable, but no pressure sores, no gaping ulcers.

The fecal and urinary disposal system has its own lubricant
and disinfectant supplies; of course, nobodyłs ever been on one for weeks
without human supervision, but so long as wełre unable to get our hands free to
break the seals, I canłt see any problems."

Lidia says, �Well, then."

The newest patients are all still under the influence of the
tranquilizer, and Callaghan and Nordstrom are mercifully asleep. I strap down
Thomas and Lidia, then undress and slide into the surreal plastic contraption
that will carry away my wastes. Iłve used something similar before, in a space
suit when I was in training; itłs not pleasant, but itłs not that bad.

The orderly isnłt programmed to manipulate the restraints,
but with a long, tedious series of explicit voice commands, I manage to
instruct it to strap me down.

For several minutes, we lie in silence, then Thomas clears
his throat and says, �Theyłll find a cure. It might take a month, or a year,
but they wonłt give up on us."

Sure. If we live for a month, or a year. If we live long
enough even to reach Earth.

I keep my mouth shut.

Lidia says, �What do you think it will be like?"

Thomas says, �I donłt know. Maybe like a dream. Maybe like
being a helpless child again, a baby. Maybe like nothing at all."

They talk for a while, and I listen in silence, a
professional observer of The Patientłs response to a stressful prognosis, and I
feel a warm glow of satisfaction at the admirable way that theyłre handling
their fearsbut I canłt join in.

A few hours later, Thomas succumbs. He screams with rage at
finding himself bound, waking Callaghan and Nordstrom, who scream along with
him.

I say, �I canłt stand this. Iłm getting up."

Lidia yells over the cacophony, �Donłt be stupid! What do
you think, youłre immune? If youłre roaming around the ship when it happens to
you, youłre going to hurt yourself, or damage something"

I start telling the orderly how to release me. Lidia shouts
her own instructions, and the thing swings back and forth wildly. I give up,
suddenly realizing that the robot is incapable of righting itself; if it falls

over, wełre all dead.

Eventually, the three of them shut up, presumably falling asleep;
in the dim light, itłs hard to be certain.

Lidia says softly, �Youłve never told us, David. Whołs
waiting for you,

back on Earth?"

I laugh. �No one."

�Come on."

�Itłs the truth." I feel myself redden. Itłs none of her
business; why should I have to explain myself to her? �I just, I donłt have
time. I prefer

to be independent."

�Everybody needs someone."

�That sounds like a line from a bad song. And it happens not
to be true. The truth is, I donłt much like people." I wish I could drag my words
back from out of the darkness. Then I think: what does it matter, now?

Therełs an awkward silence, then she says, �So, what
inspired you to become a doctor?"

I laugh, with genuine mirth, because Iłve only just remembered.
�Reading Camusł The Plague."

Therełs no reply.

Morning is a nightmare. The ceiling panels slowly brighten,
and everyone wakes, screaming protests at the presence of so many strangers.
Iłm

tempted again to have the orderly release me, but I fight
down the impulse. Instead, I instruct it to administer sedation. Callaghan and
Nordstrom are fitted with control plates, but the others have to be injected.
As silence descends, my relief turns sour; I feel more lonely and frightened
than ever.

I have the orderly move the infirmaryłs terminal next to my
bed, and with voice control I switch through the signal from Earth. They send
to us constantly, they can always think of something to say. Weather reports
for our home towns, snippets of news (but nothing too depressing), herds of
primary school children around the world, praying to their various gods for our
safe return. A response to Lidiałs final report isnłt due until tomorrow
morning; Iłm staring back into a cheerful past, when there were only two
victims, and it looked like we had some hope.

Around noon, I make a broadcast of my own. �This is Dreyfus,"
I say, redundantly. �Bwalya developed symptoms at 0200 hours, Garcia at 0300

hours." Iłm guessing the times, I have no real idea. And who
the fuck

cares? I switch off the camera. Trembling, I vomit onto the
bed and the floor. The orderly cleans it up.

I grow calm again as the hours pass, and a little more
rational. I donłt think about deathI canłt see any point in doing sobut I
canłt help wondering how it will feel, finally to be like Callaghan and the
others.

Less than human? That might not be so bad. Feeling less,
thinking less, might not be so bad at all.

Night comes. Staring up at the faintly glowing ceiling, I wonder
if Iłll even notice when it happens to me. I consider talking aloud, describing
my state of mind for the sake of whoever gets their hands on the infirmaryłs
log, but introspection yields nothing worth reporting.

I say, �Introspection yields nothing worth reporting."

A few seconds latersuddenly unsure if I actually spoke, or
merely formed the intentionI repeat myself.

Shortly afterward, I suffer the same uncertainty again.

Disembodied pain washes in and out of my shallow sleep for a
long time. Itłs only when I start to attach it to specific parts of methis
ache

is from my shoulders, that cramp is from my right calfthat
I begin to wake.

When a throbbing that was an abstract notion alights deep inside
my skull, I try to retreat back into sleep, but the pain is too great. I open

my eyes and try to move, and then I remember.

A tunnel of pain and fear, stretching back for what seems
like eternity

The width of the tunnel is the width of my shoulders, the
width of the harness that holds me to the bed, but its depth is striated with
light and darkness, with noise and confusion, with loneliness and the coldest
misery.

A dream of suffocation, infinitely prolonged.

It takes me forever, ten minutes at least, to instruct the
orderly to

release me. Iłm too weak to leave the bed, but I can move my
arms, I can roll onto my stomach, I can start trying to rid myself of the
nightmare

burnt into my flesh.

When I finally succeed in raising my head, I find the rest
of the crew

still strapped to their beds. Most have their eyes open, but
are staring

listlessly at the ceiling or the walls.

I squint at my watch for the date, and then struggle with
memory and

arithmetic. Eighteen days. I feel a surge of elation. I may
not have conquered the virusperhaps this is nothing but a temporary
remissionbut

every extension of the time scale on which the disease is
operating brings

us closer to home, and the chance of a cure.

I switch on the broadcast from Earth. Theyłre playing a loop
at us that says little more than: �Cyclops, please respond." I make a brief
report, then sag back onto the bed, all my strength drained.

Later, I have the orderly fetch me a wheelchair, and I check
each of my patients. I remove all their harnesses; nobody is in any condition
to leap from their bed and assault me. Greta has somehow managed to half-turn
onto her side, pinning her right arm, and she whimpers horribly as I free her.
The skin of her forearm is soft and gray. I anesthetize her and inspect it. A
few more days, and nothing would have saved her from amputation. I pump her
full of antibiotics and tissue-repair nanomachines; shełll need a graft,
eventually. but for now all I can do is hold the necrosis in check.

It finally occurs to me to worry about Cyclops itself, but
the drive computerłs error log is empty of all but the most trivial complaints,
and the navigation system reports that we are holding precisely to the flight
plan.

Where are we? Still further from home than we were when the
mission

was canceled, but at least now wełre headed in the right
direction.

The flight plan is a blue trace on the screen of the
terminal, a plot of

distance versus time. The U-turn is an upside-down
parabolaminutely distorted by relativistic effects, but not enough for the eye
to tell. The blue line itself is pure theory, but at regular intervals along
the curve are small green crosses, marking estimates of our actual location
computed by the navigation system. Itłs the most natural thing in the world for
the eye to leap across the curve and read off the time at which Cyclops was
last at the same position as it is right now.

That was eighteen days ago. The day I succumbed.

I feel an almost physical shock, even before I consciously
make the connection: Lidia may have been right. Perhaps there is something out
here. I look around, in vain, for someone to argue me back to my senses.

It could easily be a coincidence. One isolated piece of data
means nothing. I set the computer to work at once, analyzing the records of
every instrument inside and outside the hull of Cyclops, searching for some
evidence that the region of space from which we are now emerging is in any way
distinctive.

The task is trivial, the answer is produced with no
perceptible delay. Apart from a steady and predictable decline in the faint
remnants of the solar windnothing. And so far as the instruments inside the
shielded hull are concerned, we might have spent the last three weeks standing
still, on the surface of a planet with gravity of 1.3 gees.

Iłd be willing to believe that interstellar space might hold
some dangerous surpriseIłd admit the possibility of some peril inexplicable in
terms of current astrophysics, maybe even current physics itselfbut to believe
in a phenomenon that has absolutely no effect on any one of the hundreds of
delicate instruments wełre carrying, and yet can somehow cause a subtle
dysfunction of the human nervous system, would be anthropocentric to the point
of insanity.

I go back over the infirmaryłs log, and find the moment when
Lidia last spoke to me. I check the flight plan; in ten hoursł time, wełll pass
through the same location.

The orderly starts feeding the patients, but I interrupt it
and take over myself. Eighteen days of confinement has knocked the aggression
out of all of them. The docility with which they accept the food makes the job
easy, but it shakes me up. Half a day ago, I was just like this. There goes the
vanity that supposedly keeps me sane; my brain is the same machine as everyone
elsełs, my precious intellect can be switched off, and switched on again, by
nothing more profound than the stages in a virusłs life cycle.

Itłs still too soon for a response from Earth to my message.
I leave the infirmary and move around the ship in my wheelchair. Everything is
as we left it, of course. Iłm still horribly weak and aching all over, from
being bedridden for so long, but the gravity as such no longer seems
oppressive. The cabins all look so familiar, so mundane, that the idea that we
are, even now, further from Earth than anyone has ever been before, seems
preposterous.

As the ceiling panels slowly dim in their mimickry of dusk,
I canłt help myself; I sit by Lidiałs bed and wait for the magic time, certain
as I am that nothing is going to happen. Shełs asleep, but makes small, unhappy
noises every now and then.

The coincidence of the onset and departure of my symptoms
keeps nagging at me, but therełs no getting around it; the precision, the spec
ificity, of the effect screams out the word adaptation. The only cause that.
makes sense is one that can be traced back to the Earthłs biosphere. Lidia
cries out. I check my watch; the time has passed. I pat her hand and start to
wheel myself away. She opens her eyes, and suddenly burst s into tears, sobbing
and shaking. I pause, momentarily unable to move or speak. She turns her head
and sees me.

Her voice is slurred, but her words are unmistakable. �David?
Are we home?"

I lean over and hold her in my arms.

I wouldnłt call it a theory yet; we have no mechanism, no
clear hypothesis. Kay speculates that some kind of quantum correlation effect
may be involved; every human being contains thousands of genes that are,
ultimately, copied from the same common ancestors, and like the polarized
photons of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment, there may be some indelible
link established by this history of microscopic intimacy. There are at least
two problems with this; the EPR effect is supposedly incapable of communicating
anything but random quantum noise; and in any case, it ought not to diminish at
all with distance. Kay is undaunted. �Any theory that predicts an effect that
works at infinity is nonsense," she says. �In flat, empty spacetime, maybe, but
not in the real universe. And just because you can pronounce the word ęrandom,ł
donłt kid yourself that you know what it means."

Whatłs special, about being ten billion kilometers from
Earth, as opposed to ten thousand or ten millionł? Distance, thatłs all. We
didnłt just evolve on a planetary surface, with air and water and gravity. We
evolved in the presence of each other. It seems that the refinement of human
consciousness made use of that fact. Relied on that fact.

The media releases back on Earth have mentioned none of
this; mission control is keeping quiet about the rantings of eight people who
have been through an ordeal. The mystery disease has mysteriously spared us,
and no doubt we will be quarantined while the experts diligently hunt for the
non-existent virus. The truth, though, wonłt stay buried for long.

Will genocide still be thinkable, in a world where every
human being relies for their humanity on every otherł?

I hope not.

Induction

Greg Egan (www.gregegan.net) lives in Perth in Western Australia.
A recluse whom few people in SF have met, he is one of the most respected
writers of Hard SF in the last twenty years. He is also a programmer, and his
website prominently features his mathematical computer animations. One of the
most significant aspects of his fiction is the characterization. He tends to
write what we sometimes call neuropsych hard sf, treating character as a
scientific problem and writing about people based on how action and feeling are
determined by the biochemistry of the brain. He has two books coming out in
2008: his fourth collection, Dark Integers and Other Stories, and his seventh
SF novel, Incandescence.

�Induction" appeared in Foundation 100, the first fiction
issue of the British SF Foundationłs journal, celebrating one hundred issues of
publication. Here Egan explores what it really takes to colonize other planets,
and what kind of person might want the job.

1

Ikat spent three of the last four hours of 2099 out on the
regolith, walking the length of her section of the launch gun, checking by eye
for micrometeorite impacts or any other damage that the automatic systems might
improbably have missed.

Four other junior engineers walked a few paces ahead of her,
but Ikat had had enough of their company inside the base, and she kept her coms
tuned to Earth, sampling the moods of the centuryłs countdown.

The Pope had already issued a statement from Rio, imploring
humanity to treat �Christianityłs twenty-first birthday" as an opportunity to embrace
�spiritual maturity"; the Council of Islamic Scholars in Brussels, surrendering
to the ubiquity of the Gregorian calendar, had chimed in with a similar message
of their own. In the pyrotechnic rivalry stakes, Sydney was planning to
incinerate the decommissioned Harbour Bridge with artificial lightning, while
Washington had arranged for no less than twenty-one ageing military satellites
to plunge from the sky into the Potomac at the stroke of midnight.

There was no doubt, though, that Beijing had stolen the
lionłs share of global chatter with the imminent launch of the Orchid Seed. You
could forget any puristłs concept of lunar midnight; the clocks on Procellarum
had been set to the easternmost of Earthłs time zones ever since the
construction of the base two decades before, so the official zeroing of the
digits here would precede celebrations in all of the globełs major cities. The
PR people really had planned that far ahead.

As she paced slowly along the regolith, Ikat kept her eyes
diligently on the coolant pipes that weaved between the support struts to wrap
the gun barrel, although she knew that this final check was mostly PR too. If
the launch failed, it would be down to a flaw that no human eye could have
detected. Six successful but unpublicised test firings made such a humiliation
unlikely. Still, the gunłs fixed bearing rendered a seventh, perfectly timed
success indispensable. Only at �midnight" would the device be aimed precisely
at its target. If they had to wait a month for a relaunch, hundreds of
upper-echelon bureaucrats back on Earth would probably be diving out of their
penthouse windows before dawn. Ikat knew that she was far too low in the ranks
to make a worthwhile scapegoat, but her career could still be blighted by the
ignominy.

Her mother was calling from Bangkok. Ikat pondered her responsibilities,
then decided to let the audio through. If she really couldnłt walk, talk and
spot a plume of leaking coolant at the same time, she should probably retire
from her profession straight away.

�Just wishing you good luck, darling," her mother said. �And
Happy New Year. Probably youłll be too busy celebrating to talk to me later."

Ikat scowled. �I was planning to call you when it reached midnight
there. But Happy New Year anyway."

�Youłll call your father after the launch?"

�I expect so." Her parents were divorced, but her mother
still wanted harmony to flow in all directions, especially on such an occasion.

�Without him," her mother said, �you never would have had
this chance."

It was a strange way of putting it, but it was probably
true. The Chinese space program was cosmopolitan enough, but if her mother
hadnłt married a Chinese citizen and remained in the country for so long, Ikat
doubted that she would have been plucked from provincial Bangkok and lofted all
the way up to Procellarum. There were dozens of middle-ranking project
engineers with highly specific skills who were not Chinese born; they were
quite likely the best people on the planet for their respective jobs. She was
not in that league. Her academic results had secured her the placement, but
they had not been so spectacular that she would have been head-hunted across
national borders.

�Iłll call him," she promised. �After the launch."

She cut the connection. Shełd almost reached the end of
Stage Nine, the ten-kilometre section of the barrel where the pellets would be
accelerated from sixteen to eighteen per cent of light speed, before the final
boost to twenty per cent. For the last three years, she had worked beneath
various specialist managers, testing and re-testing different subsystems:
energy storage, electromagnets, cooling, data collection. It had been a
once-in-a-lifetime education, arduous at times, but never boring. Still, shełd
be glad to be going home. Maglev railways might seem anticlimactic after this,
but shełd had enough of sharing a room with six other people, and the whole
tiny complex with the same two hundred faces, year after year.

Back inside the base, Ikat felt restless. The last hour
stretched out ahead of her, an impossible gulf. In the common room, Qing caught
her eye, and she went to sit with him.

�Had any bites from your resum�?" he asked.

�I havenłt published it yet. I want a long holiday first."

He shook his head in dismay. �How did you ever get here? You
must be the least competitive person on Earth."

Ikat laughed. �At university, I studied eighteen hours a
day. I had no social life for six years."

�So now youłve got to put in some effort to get the
pay-off."

�This is the pay-off, you dope."

�For a week or so after the launch," Qing said, �you could
have the top engineering firms on the planet bidding for the prestige youłd
bring them. That wonłt last forever, though. People have a short attention
span. This isnłt the time to take a holiday."

Ikat threw up her hands. �What can I say? Iłm a lost cause."

Qingłs expression softened; he was deadly serious about his
own career, but when he lectured her it was just a kind of ritual, a role play
that gave them something to talk about.

They passed the time with more riffs on the same theme, interleaved
with gossip and bitching about their colleagues, but when the clock hit 11.50
it became impossible to remain blas�. Nobody could spend three years in a state
of awe at the feat they were attempting, but ten minutes of sober contemplation
suddenly seemed inadequate. Other probes had already been sent towards the
stars, but the Orchid Seed would certainly outrace all those that had gone
before it. It might yet be overtaken itself, but with no serious competitors
even at the planning stage, there was a fair chance that the impending launch
would come to be seen as the true genesis of interstellar travel.

As the conversation in the common room died away, someone
turned up the main audio commentary that was going to the news feeds, and
spread a dozen key image windows across the wall screens. The control room was
too small to take everyone in the base; junior staff would watch the launch
much as the public everywhere else did.

The schematics told Ikat a familiar story, but this was the
moment to savour it anew. Three gigajoules of solar energy had already been
packed into circulating currents in the superconducting batteries, ready to be
tapped. That was not much, really; every significant payload launched from
Earth had burnt up far more. One third would be lost to heat and stray
electromagnetic fields. The remainder would be fed into the motion of just one
milligram of matter: the five hundred tiny pellets of the Orchid Seed that
would race down the launch gun in three thousandths of a second, propelled by a
force that could have lofted a two-tonne weight back on Earth.

The pellets that comprised the seed were not physically connected,
but they would move in synch in a rigid pattern, forming a kind of sparse
crystal whose spacing allowed it to interact strongly with the microwave
radiation in the gun. Out in deep space, in the decades spent in transit, the
pattern would not be important, but the pellets would be kept close together by
electrostatic trimming if and when they strayed, ready to take up perfect rank
again when the time came to brake. First, in the coronal magnetic field of
Prosperity B; again near its larger companion star, and finally in the
ionosphere of Prosperity Ałs fourth planet, Duty, before falling into the atmosphere
and spiralling to the ground.

One cycling image on the wall rehearsed the launch in slow
motion, showing the crest of electromagnetic energy coursing down the barrel,
field lines bunched tightly like a strange coiled spring. A changing electric
field induced a magnetic field; a changing magnetic field induced an electric
field. In free space such a change would spread at the speed of lightwould be
light, of some frequency or otherbut the tailored geometry and currents of the
barrel kept the wave reined in, always in step with the seed, devoted to the
task of urging this precious cargo forward.

�If this screws up," Qing observed forlornly, �wełll be the
laughing stock of the century."

�You donłt think Beijingłs prepared for a cover-up?" Ikat
joked.

�Some jealous fucker would catch us out," Qing replied.
�Iłll bet every dish on Earth is tuned to the seedłs resonant frequency. If
they get no echo, wełll all be building toilet blocks in Aksai Chin."

It was 11.58 in Tonga, Tokelau and Procellarum. Ikat took
Qingłs hand and squeezed it. �Relax," she said. �The worst youłll come to is
building synchrotrons for eccentric billionaires in Kowloon."

Qing said, �Youłre cutting off my circulation."

The room fell silent; a synthetic voice from the control
room counted down the seconds. Ikat felt light-headed. The six test firings had
worked, but who knew what damage theyłd done, what stresses theyłd caused, what
structures theyłd weakened? Lots of people, actually; the barrel was packed
with instrumentation to measure exactly those things, and the answers were all
very reassuring. Still

�Minus three. Minus two. Minus one."

A schematic of the launch gun flashed green, followed by a
slow-motion reconstruction of the field patterns so flawless it was
indistinguishable from the simulations. A new window opened, showing tracking
echoes. The seed was moving away from the moon at sixty thousand kilometres per
second, precisely along the expected trajectory. There was nothing more
required of it: no second stage to fire, no course change, no reconfiguration.
Now that it had been set in motion, all it had to do was coast on its momentum;
it couldnłt suddenly veer sideways, crashing and burning like some failed
chemical rocket launched from the ground. Even if collisions or system failures
over the coming decades wiped out some of the pellets, the seed as a whole
could function with as little as a quarter of the original number. Unless the
whole thing had been a fraud or a mass hallucination, there was now absolutely
nothing that could pull the rug out from under this triumph; in three
milliseconds, their success had become complete and irrevocable. At least for a
century, until the seed reached its destination.

People were cheering; Ikat joined them, but her own cry came
out as a tension-relieving sob. Qing put an arm around her shoulders. �We did
it," he whispered. �Wełve conquered the world."

Not the stars? Not the galaxy? She laughed, but she didnłt begrudge
him this vanity. The fireworks to come in Sydney might be more spectacular, and
the dying hawks burning up over Washington might bring their own sense of
closure, but this felt like an opening out, an act of release, a joyful shout
across the light years.

Food and drink was wheeled out; the party began. In twenty
minutes, the seed was farther from the sun than Mars. In a day, it would be
farther than Pluto; in ten days, farther than Pioneer 10. In six months, the
Orchid Seed would have put more distance behind it than all of the targeted
interstellar missions that had preceded it.

Ikat remembered to call her father once midnight came to Beijing.

�Happy New Year," she greeted him.

�Congratulations," he replied. �Will you come and visit me
once you get your Earth legs, or will you be too busy signing autographs?"

Fake biochemical signals kept the Procellaransł bones and
muscles strong; it would only take a day or two to acclimatise her nervous
system to the old dynamics again. �Of course Iłll visit you."

�You did a good job," he said. �Iłm proud of you."

His praise made her uncomfortable. She wanted to express her
gratitude to himhełd done much more to help her than providing the accident of
her birthplacebut she was afraid of sounding like a giddy movie star accepting
an award.

As the party wound on and midnight skimmed the globe, the
speechwriters of the worldłs leaders competed to heap praise upon Beijingłs
achievement. Ikat didnłt care that it had all been done for the glory of a
fading empire; it was more than a gesture of status and power.

Only one thing seemed bittersweet, as she contemplated the
decades to come. She was twenty-eight years old, and there was every chance
that these three years, these three milliseconds, would turn out to have been
the pinnacle of her life.

2

The caller was persistent, Ikat gave him that. He refused to
leave a message or engage with her assistant; he refused to explain his
business to anyone but Ikat herself, in a realtime dialogue.

From her balcony she looked out across the treetops,
listening to the birds and insects of the Mekong valley, and wondered if she
wanted to be dragged back into the swirling currents of the world. The caller,
whose name was Vikram Ali, had probably tracked her down in the hope of
extracting a comment from her about the imminent arrival of signals from the
Orchid Flower. That might have been an egotistical assumption, were it not for
the fact that shełd heard of no other participant in the launch publishing
anything on the matter, so it was clear that the barrel would have to be
scraped. The projectłs most famous names were all dead or acorporealand the
acorporeals were apparently Satisfied, rendering them even less interested in
such worldly matters than an ageing flesh-bound recluse like Ikat.

She pondered her wishes and responsibilities. Most people
now viewed the Orchid Seed as a curiosity, a sociological time capsule. Within
decades of its launch, a new generation of telescopes had imaged and analysed
its destination with such detail and clarity that the mission had come to seem
redundant. All five planets in the Prosperity system appeared lifeless, and
although there were astrophysical and geochemical subtleties that in situ
measurements might yet reveal, with high-resolution maps of Duty splashed
across the web, interest in the slightly better view that would arrive after a
very long delay began to dwindle.

What was there for Ikat to say on the matter? Should she
plead for the project to be taken seriously, as more than a quaint nationalist
stunt from a bygone era? Maybe the top brass werenłt Satisfied; maybe they were
just embarrassed. The possibility annoyed her. No one whołd been sincere in
their work on the Orchid Seed should be ashamed of what theyłd done.

Ikat returned Vikram Aliłs call. He responded immediately,
and after the briefest of pleasantries came to the point.

�I represent Khamoush Holdings," he said. �Some time ago, we
acquired various assets and obligations of the URC government, including a
contractual relationship with you."

�I see." Ikat struggled to remember what she might have
signed that could possibly be relevant a hundred and twenty years later. Had
she promised to do media if asked? Her assistant had verified Khamoush
Holdingłs bona fides, but all it knew about the Procellarum contract was that
Ikatłs copy had been lost in 2145, when an anarchist worm had scrambled three
per cent of the planetłs digital records.

�The opportunity has arisen for us to exploit one of our
assets," Ali continued, �but we are contractually obliged to offer you the
option of participating in the relevant activity."

Ikat blinked. Option? Khamoush had bought some form of media
rights, obviously, but would there be a clause saying they had to run down the
ranks of the Orchid Seed team, offering each participant a chance to play
spokesperson?

�Am I obliged to help you, or not?" she asked.

Now it was Aliłs turn to be surprised. �Obliged? Certainly
not! Wełre not slave holders!" He looked downright offended.

Ikat said, �Could we get the whole thing over in a day or
two?"

Ali pondered this question deeply for a couple of seconds.
�You donłt have the contract, do you?"

�I chose a bad archive," Ikat confessed.

�So you have no idea what Iłm talking about?"

�You want me to give interviews about the Orchid Seed, donłt
you?" Ikat said.

�Ultimately, yes," Ali replied, �but thatłs neither here nor
there for now. I want to ask you if youłre interested in travelling to Duty,
taking a look around, and coming back."

In the lobby of the hotel in Mumbai, Ikat learnt that
someone else had accepted the offer from Khamoush Holdings.

�I thought youłd be rich and Satisfied by now," she told
Qing.

He smiled. �Mildly rich. Never satisfied."

They walked together to the office of Magic Beans Inc., Ikat
holding her umbrella over both of them against the monsoon rain.

�My children think Iłm insane," Qing confessed.

�Mine too. But then, I told them that if they kept arguing,
Iłd make it a one-way journey." Ikat laughed. �Really, they ought to be
grateful. No filial obligations for forty years straight. Itłs hard to imagine
a greater gift."

In the Magic Beans office, Ali showed them two robots, more
or less identical to the ones the Orchid Flower, he hoped, would already have
built on the surface of Duty. The original mission planners had never intended
such a thing, but when Khamoush had acquired the assets they had begun the
relevant R&D immediately. Forty years ago they had transmitted the
blueprints for these robots, in a message that would have arrived not long
after the Orchid Seed touched down. Now that confirmation of the Flowerłs
success in its basic mission had reached Earth, in a matter of months they
would learn whether the nanomachines had also been able to scavenge the
necessary materials to construct these welcoming receptacles.

�Wełre the only volunteers?" Qing asked, gazing at his prospective
doppelg�nger with uneasy fascination. �I would have thought one of the
acorporeals would have jumped at the chance."

�Perhaps if wełd asked them early enough," Ali replied. �But
once youłre immersed in that culture, forty years must seem a very long time to
be out of touch."

Ikat was curious about the financial benefits Khamoush were
hoping for; they turned out to revolve largely around a promotional deal with a
manufacturer of prosthetic bodies. Although the designs the company sold were
wildly different from these robotseven their Extreme Durability models were
far more cosily organicany link with the first interstellar explorers trudging
across rugged landscapes on a distant, lifeless world carried enough resonance
to be worth paying for.

Back in the hotel they sat in Qingłs room, talking about the
old times and speculating about the motives and fates of all their higher-ranked
colleagues whołd turned down this opportunity. Perhaps, Ikat suggested, some of
them simply had no wish to become acorporeal. Crossing over to software didnłt
preclude you from continuing to inhabit a prosthetic body back on Earth, but
once you changed substrate the twin lures of virtual experience and
self-modification were strong. �That would be ironic," she mused. �To decline
to engage with the physical universe in this way, for fear of ultimately losing
touch with it."

Qing said, �I plan to keep my body frozen, and have my new
self wired back into it when I return, synapse by synapse."

Ikat smiled. �I thought you said mildly rich." That would be
orders of magnitude more costly than her own plan: frozen body, prosthetic
brain.

�They caught us at just the right stage in life," Qing said.
�Still interested in reality, but not still doting on every new
great-great-grandchild. Not yet acorporeal, but old enough that we already feel
as if wełve been on another planet for forty years."

Ikat said, �Iłm amazed that they honoured our contracts,
though. A good lawyer could have let them hand-pick their travellers." The
relevant clause had simply been a vague offer of preferential access to
spin-off employment opportunities.

�Why shouldnłt they want us?" Qing demanded, feigning indignation.
�Wełre seasoned astronauts, arenłt we? Wełve already proved we could live
together in Procellarum for three years, without driving each other crazy.
Three monthswith a whole planet to stretch our legs onshouldnłt be beyond
us."

Later that week, to Ikatłs amazement, their psychological assessments
proved Qingłs point; their basic personality profiles really hadnłt changed
since the Procellarum days. Careers, marriages, children, had left their marks,
but if anything they were both more resilient.

They stayed in Mumbai, rehearsing in the robot bodies using
telepresence links, and studying the data coming back from the Orchid Flower.

When confirmation arrived that the Flower really had built
the robots Khamoush Holdings had requested, Ikat sent messages directly to her
children and grandchildren, and then left it to them to pass the news further
down the generations. Her parents were dead, and her children were tetchy
centenarians; she loved them, but she did not feel like gathering them around
her for a tearful bon voyage. The chances were theyłd all still be here when
she returned.

She and Qing spent a morning doing media, answering a minute
but representative fraction of the questions submitted by interested news
subscribers. Then Ikatłs body was frozen, and her brain was removed,
microtomed, and scanned. At her request, her software was not formally woken on
Earth prior to her departure; routine tests confirmed its functionality in a
series of dreamlike scenarios which left no permanent memories.

Then the algorithm that described her was optimised, compressed,
encoded into a series of laser pulses, and beamed across twenty light years,
straight on to the petals of the Orchid Flower.

3

Ikat woke standing on a brown, pebbled plain beneath a pale,
salmon-coloured sky. Prosperity A had just risen; its companion, ten billion
kilometres away, was visible but no competition, scarcely brighter than Venus
from Earth.

Qing was beside her, and behind him was the Flower: the
communications link and factory that the Orchid Seed had built. Products of the
factory included hundreds of small rovers, which had dispersed to explore the
planetłs surface, and dozens of solar-powered gliders, which provided aerial
views and aided with communications.

Qing said, �Punch me, make it real."

Ikat obliged with a gentle thump on his forearm. Their
telepresence rehearsals had included virtual backdrops just like the Flowerłs
actual surroundings, but they had not had full tactile feedback. The action
punctured Ikatłs own dreamy sense of d�ją vu; they really had stepped out of
the simulation into the thing itself.

They had the Flower brief them about its latest discoveries;
they had been twenty years behind when theyłd left Earth, and insentient beams
of light for twenty more. The Flower had pieced together more details of Dutyłs
geological history; with plate tectonics but no liquid water, the planetłs
surface was older than Earthłs but not as ancient as the moonłs.

Ikat felt a twinge of superfluousness; if the telescope
images hadnłt quite made the Orchid Flower redundant, there was precious little
left for her and Qing. They were not here to play geologists, though; they were
here to be here. Any science they did would be a kind of recreation, like an
informed touristłs appreciation of some well-studied natural wonder back on
Earth.

Qing started laughing. �Twenty fucking light years! Do you
know how long that would take to walk? They should have tried harder to make us
afraid." Ikat reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. She felt a little
existential vertigo herself, but she did not believe they faced any great risk.
The forty lost years were a fait accompli, but she was reconciled to that.

�Whatłs the worst that can happen?" she said. �If something
goes wrong, theyłll just wake your body back on Earth, with no changes at all."

Qing nodded slowly. �But you had your brain diced, didnłt
you?"

�You know me, Iłm a cheapskate." Non-destructive scanning
was more expensive, and Khamoush werenłt paying for everything. �But they can
still load the backup file into a prosthesis."

�Assuming itłs not eaten by an anarchist worm."

�I arranged to have a physical copy put into a vault."

�Ah, but what about the nihilist nanoware?"

�Then you and I will be the only survivors."

Their bodies had no need for shelter from the elements, but
the Flower had built them a simple hut for sanityłs sake. As they inspected the
spartan rooms together, Qing seemed to grow calm; as hełd said back on Earth,
anything had to be easier than the conditions theyłd faced on the moon. Food
would have been too complex an indulgence, and Ikat had declined the software
to grant her convincing hallucinations of five-course banquets every night.

Once theyłd familiarised themselves with everything in the
base camp, and done a few scripted Armstrong moments for the cameras to satisfy
the promotional deal, they spent the morning hiking across the rock-strewn
plain. There was a line of purplish mountains in the distance, almost lost in
haze, but Ikat declined to ask the Flower for detailed aerial imagery. They
could explore for themselves, find things for themselves. The longing to be some
kind of irreplaceable pioneer, to be the first pair of eyes and hands, the
first scrutinising intelligence, was impossible to extinguish completely, but
they could find a way to satisfy it without self-delusion or charade.

Her fusion-powered body needed no rest, but at noon she
stopped walking and sat cross-legged on the ground.

Qing joined her. She looked around at the barren rocks, the
delicate sky, the far horizon. �Twenty light years?" she said. �Iłm glad I
came."

Their days were full of small challenges, and small
discoveries. To cross a mountain range required skill and judgement as well as
stamina; to understand the origins of each wind-blasted outcrop took careful
observation and a strong visual imagination, as well as a grasp of the basic
geological principles.

Still, even as they clambered down one treacherous, powdery
cliff-face, Ikat wondered soberly if theyłd reached the high-tide mark of human
exploration. The Orchid Seedłs modest speed and reach had never been exceeded;
the giant telescopes had found no hints of life out to a hundred light years,
offering little motivation to launch a new probe. The shift to software was
becoming cheaper every year, and if that made travel to the stars easier, there
were a thousand more alluring destinations closer to home. When you could pack
a lifetime of exotic experiences into a realtime hour, capped off with
happiness by fiat, who would give up decades of contemporaneity to walk on a
distant world? There were even VR games, based on telescope imagery, where people
fought unlikely wars with implausible alien empires on the very ground she was
treading.

�What are you planning to do when you get home?" she asked
Qing that night. They had brought nothing with them from the base camp, so they
simply slept on the ground beneath the stars.

�Back to work, I suppose." He ran his own successful engineering
consultancy; so successful that it didnłt really need him. �What else is there?
Iłm not interested in crawling up a computerłs arse and pretending that Iłve
gone to heaven. What about you?"

�I donłt know. I was retired, happily enough. Waiting for
death, I suppose." It hadnłt felt like that, though.

Qing said, �These arenłt the highest mountains on the
planet, you know. The ones wełve just crossed."

�I know that."

�There are some that reach into a pretty good vacuum."

Dutyłs atmosphere was thin even on the ground; Ikat had no
reason to doubt this assertion. �Whatłs your point?" she asked.

He turned to her, and gave her his strangest robot smile.
�From a mountain like that, a coil gun could land a package of nanomachines on
Patience."

Patience was a third the mass of Duty, and had no atmosphere
to speak of. �To what end?"

Qing said, �High vacuum, relativistic launch speeds. What we
started doesnłt have to stop here."

She searched his face, unsure if he was serious. �Do you
think the Flower would give us what we needed? Who knows how Khamoush have
programmed it?"

�I tested the nanoware, back on Procellarum. I know how to
make it give us whatever we ask."

Ikat thought it over. �Do we know how to describe everything
wełll need? To identify a new target? Plan a whole new mission?" The Orchard
Seed had taken thousands of people decades to prepare.

Qing said, �Wełll need telescopes, computing resources. We
can bootstrap our way up, step by step. Letłs see how far we get in three
months. And if we solve all the other problems, maybe we can go one step
further: build a seed that will self-replicate when it reaches its destination,
launching a couple of new seeds of its own."

Ikat rose to her feet angrily. �Not if you want my help! We
have no right to spew mindless replicators in all directions. If someone from
Earth wants to follow the seed we launch, and if they make their own decision
when they get there to reach out further, then thatłs one thing, but Iłm not
starting any kind of self-sustaining chain reaction that colonises the galaxy
while everyone sits at home playing VR games."

Qing stood up, and made a calming gesture. �All right, all
right! I was just thinking out loud. The truth is, wełll be struggling to
launch anything before itłs time to go home. But better to try, than spend
three months taking in the scenery."

Ikat remained wary for a moment, then she laughed with
relief. �Absolutely. Let the real geologists back on Earth fret about these
rocks; Iłve had enough of them already for a lifetime."

They didnłt wait for dawn; they headed back for the base
camp immediately.

As they approached the mountains, Qing said, �I thought it
would give me some great sense of accomplishment, to come here and see with my
own eyes that this thing I helped to start was finally complete. But if I could
wish my descendants one blessing now, it would be never to see the end, never
to find completion."

Ikat stopped walking, and mimed a toast. �To the coming generations.
May they always start something they canłt finish."

The Infinite Assassin

One thing never changes: when some mutant junkie on S starts
shuffling reality, itłs always me they send into the whirlpool to put things
right.

Why? They tell me Iłm stable. Reliable. Dependable. After
each debriefing, The Companyłs psychologists (complete strangers, every time)
shake their heads in astonishment at their printouts, and tell me that Iłm
exactly the same person as when ęIł went in.

The number of parallel worlds is uncountably
infiniteinfinite like the real numbers, not merely like the integersmaking it
difficult to quantify these things without elaborate mathematical definitions,
but roughly speaking, it seems that Iłm unusually invariant: more alike from
world to world than most people are. How alike? In how many worlds? Enough to
be useful. Enough to do the job.

How The Company knew this, how they found me, Iłve never
been told. I was recruited at the age of nineteen. Bribed. Trained. Brainwashed,
I suppose. Sometimes I wonder if my stability has anything to do with me; maybe
the real constant is the way Iłve been prepared. Maybe an infinite number of
different people, put through the same process, would all emerge the same. Have
all emerged the same. I donłt know.

* * * *

Detectors scattered across the planet have sensed the faint
beginnings of the whirlpool, and pinned down the centre to within a few
kilometres, but thatłs the most accurate fix I can expect by this means. Each
version of The Company shares its technology freely with the others, to ensure
a uniformly optimal response, but even in the best of all possible worlds, the
detectors are too large, and too delicate, to carry in closer for a more
precise reading.

A helicopter deposits me on wasteland at the southern edge
of the Leightown ghetto. Iłve never been here before, but the boarded-up
shopfronts and grey tower blocks ahead are utterly familiar. Every large city
in the world (in every world I know) has a place like this, created by a policy
thatłs usually referred to as differential enforcement. Using or possessing S
is strictly illegal, and the penalty in most countries is (mostly) summary
execution, but the powers that be would rather have the users concentrated in
designated areas than risk having them scattered amongst the community at
large. So, if youłre caught with S in a nice clean suburb, theyłll blow a hole
in your skull on the spot, but here, therełs no chance of that. Here, there are
no cops at all.

I head north. Itłs just after four a.m., but savagely hot,
and once I move out of the buffer zone, the streets are crowded. People are
coming and going from nightclubs, liquor stores, pawn shops, gambling houses,
brothels. Power for street lighting has been cut off from this part of the
city, but someone civic-minded has replaced the normal bulbs with
self-contained tritium/phosphor globes, spilling a cool, pale light like
radioactive milk. Therełs a popular misconception that most S users do nothing
but dream, twenty-four hours a day, but thatłs ludicrous; not only do they need
to eat, drink and earn money like everyone else, but few would waste the drug
on the time when their alter egos are themselves asleep.

Intelligence says therełs some kind of whirlpool cult in
Leightown, who may try to interfere with my work. Iłve been warned of such
groups before, but itłs never come to anything; the slightest shift in reality
is usually all it takes to make such an aberration vanish. The Company, the
ghettos, are the stable responses to S; everything else seems to be highly
conditional. Still, I shouldnłt be complacent. Even if these cults can have no
significant impact on the mission as a whole, no doubt they have killed some
versions of me in the past, and I donłt want it to be my turn, this time. I
know that an infinite number of versions of me would survivesome whose only
difference from me would be that they had survivedso perhaps I ought to be
entirely untroubled by the thought of death.

But Iłm not.

Wardrobe have dressed me with scrupulous care, in a Fat Single
Mothers Must Die World Tour souvenir reflection hologram T-shirt, the right
style of jeans, the right model running shoes. Paradoxically, S users tend to
be slavish adherents to ęlocalł fashion, as opposed to that of their dreams;
perhaps itłs a matter of wanting to partition their sleeping and waking lives.
For now, Iłm in perfect camouflage, but I donłt expect that to last; as the
whirlpool picks up speed, sweeping different parts of the ghetto into different
histories, changes in style will be one of the most sensitive markers. If my
clothes donłt look out of place before too long, Iłll know Iłm headed in the
wrong direction.

A tall, bald man with a shrunken human thumb dangling from
one ear lobe collides with me as he runs out of a bar. As we separate, he turns
on me, screaming taunts and obscenities. I respond cautiously; he may have
friends in the crowd, and I donłt have time to waste getting into that kind of
trouble. I donłt escalate things by replying, but I take care to appear
confident, without seeming arrogant or disdainful. This balancing act pays off.
Insulting me with impunity for thirty seconds apparently satisfies his pride,
and he walks away smirking.

As I move on, though, I canłt help wondering how many versions
of me didnłt get out of it so easily.

I pick up speed to compensate for the delay.

Someone catches up with me, and starts walking beside me.
ęHey, I liked the way you handled that. Subtle. Manipulative. Pragmatic. Full
marks.ł A woman in her late twenties, with short, metallic-blue hair.

ęFuck off. Iłm not interested.ł

ęIn what?ł

ęIn anything.ł

She shakes her head. ęNot true. Youłre new around here, and
youłre looking for something. Or someone. Maybe I can help.ł

ęI said, fuck off.ł

She shrugs and falls behind, but calls after me, ęEvery
hunter needs a guide. Think about it.ł

* * * *

A few blocks later, I turn into an unlit side street.
Deserted, silent; stinking of half-burnt garbage, cheap insecticide, and piss.
And I swear I can feel it: in the dark, ruined buildings all around me, people
are dreaming on S.

S is not like any other drug. S dreams are neither surreal
nor euphoric. Nor are they like simulator trips: empty fantasies, absurd fairy
tales of limitless prosperity and indescribable bliss. Theyłre dreams of lives
that, literally, might have been lived by the dreamers, every bit as solid and
plausible as their waking lives.

With one exception: if the dream life turns sour, the
dreamer can abandon it at will, and choose another (without any need to dream
of taking S ... although thatłs been known to happen). He or she can piece
together a second life, in which no mistakes are irrevocable, no decisions
absolute. A life without failures, without dead ends. All possibilities remain
forever accessible.

S grants dreamers the power to live vicariously in any
parallel world in which they have an alter egosomeone with whom they share
enough brain physiology to maintain the parasitic resonance of the link.
Studies suggest that a perfect genetic match isnłt necessary for thisbut nor
is it sufficient; early childhood development also seems to affect the neural
structures involved.

For most users, the drug does no more than this. For one in
a hundred thousand, though, dreams are only the beginning. During their third
or fourth year on S, they start to move physically from world to world, as they
strive to take the place of their chosen alter egos.

The trouble is, therełs never anything so simple as an
infinity of direct exchanges, between all the versions of the mutant user
whołve gained this power, and all the versions they wish to become. Such
transitions are energetically unfavourable; in practice, each dreamer must move
gradually, continuously, passing through all the intervening points. But those
ępointsł are occupied by other versions of themselves; itłs like motion in a
crowdor a fluid. The dreamers must flow.

At first, those alter egos whołve developed the skill are
distributed too sparsely to have any effect at all. Later, it seems therełs a
kind of paralysis through symmetry; all potential flows are equally possible,
including each onełs exact opposite. Everything just cancels out.

The first few times the symmetry is broken, therełs usually
nothing but a brief shudder, a momentary slippage, an almost imperceptible
world-quake. The detectors record these events, but are still too insensitive
to localise them.

Eventually, some kind of critical threshold is crossed. Complex,
sustained flows develop: vast, tangled currents with the kind of pathological
topologies that only an infinite-dimensional space can contain. Such flows are
viscous; nearby points are dragged along. Thatłs what creates the whirlpool;
the closer you are to the mutant dreamer, the faster youłre carried from world
to world.

As more and more versions of the dreamer contribute to the
flow, it picks up speedand the faster it becomes, the further away its
influence is felt.

The Company, of course, doesnłt give a shit if reality is
scrambled in the ghettos. My job is to keep the effects from spreading beyond.

I follow the side street to the top of a hill. Therełs
another main road about four hundred metres ahead. I find a sheltered spot
amongst the rubble of a half-demolished building, unfold a pair of binoculars,
and spend five minutes watching the pedestrians below. Every ten or fifteen
seconds, I notice a tiny mutation: an item of clothing changing; a person
suddenly shifting position, or vanishing completely, or materialising from
nowhere. The binoculars are smart; they count up the number of events which
take place in their field of view, as well as computing the map coordinates of
the point theyłre aimed at.

I turn one hundred and eighty degrees, and look back on the
crowd that I passed through on my way here. The rate is substantially lower, but
the same kind of thing is visible. Bystanders, of course, notice nothing; as
yet, the whirlpoolłs gradients are so shallow that any two people within sight
of each other on a crowded street would more or less shift universes together.
Only at a distance can the changes be seen.

In fact, since Iłm closer to the centre of the whirlpool
than the people to the south of me, most of the changes I see in that direction
are due to my own rate of shift. Iłve long ago left the world of my most recent
employers behindbut I have no doubt that the vacancy has been, and will
continue to be, filled.

Iłm going to have to make a third observation to get a fix,
some distance away from the north-south line joining the first two points. Over
time, of course, the centre will drift, but not very rapidly; the flow runs
between worlds where the centres are close together, so its position is the
last thing to change.

I head down the hill, westwards.

* * * *

Amongst the crowds and lights again, waiting for a gap in
the traffic, someone taps my elbow. I turn, to see the same blue-haired woman
who accosted me before. I give her a stare of mild annoyance, but I keep my
mouth shut; I donłt know whether or not this version of her has met a version
of me, and I donłt want to contradict her expectations. By now, at least some
of the locals must have noticed whatłs going onjust listening to an outside
radio station, stuttering randomly from song to song, should be enough to give
it awaybut itłs not in my interest to spread the news.

She says, ęI can help you find her.ł

ęHelp me find who?ł

ęI know exactly where she is. Therełs no need to waste time
on measurements and calcł

ęShut up. Come with me.ł

She follows me, uncomplaining, into a nearby alley. Maybe
Iłm being set up for an ambush. By the whirlpool cult? But the alley is
deserted. When Iłm sure wełre alone, I push her against the wall and put a gun
to her head. She doesnłt call out, or resist; shełs shaken, but I donłt think
shełs surprised by this treatment. I scan her with a hand-held magnetic
resonance imager; no weapons, no booby traps, no transmitters.

I say, ęWhy donłt you tell me what this is all about?ł Iłd
swear that nobody could have seen me on the hill, but maybe she saw another
version of me. Itłs not like me to screw up, but it does happen.

She closes her eyes for a moment, then says, almost calmly,
ęI want to save you time, thatłs all. I know where the mutant is. I want to
help you find her as quickly as possible.ł

ęWhy?ł

ęWhy? I have a business here, and I donłt want to see it disrupted.
Do you know how hard it is to build up contacts again, after a whirlpoolłs been
through? What do you thinkIłm covered by insurance?ł

I donłt believe a word of this, but I see no reason not to
play along; itłs probably the simplest way to deal with her, short of blowing
her brains out. I put away the gun and take a map from my pocket. ęShow me.ł

She points out a building about two kilometres north-east of
where we are. ęFifth floor. Apartment 522.ł

ęHow do you know?ł

ęA friend of mine lives in the building. He noticed the
effects just before midnight, and he got in touch with me.ł She laughs
nervously. ęActually, I donłt know the guy all that well ... but I think the
version who phoned me had something going on with another me.ł

ęWhy didnłt you just leave when you heard the news? Clear
out to a safe distance?ł

She shakes her head vehemently. ęLeaving is the worst thing
to do; Iłd end up even more out of touch. The outside world doesnłt matter. Do
you think I care if the government changes, or the pop stars have different
names? This is my home. If Leightown shifts, Iłm better off shifting with it.
Or with part of it.ł

ęSo how did you find me?ł

She shrugs. ęI knew youłd be coming. Everybody knows that
much. Of course, I didnłt know what youłd look likebut I know this place
pretty well, and I kept my eyes open for strangers. And it seems I got lucky.ł

Lucky. Exactly. Some of my alter egos will be having
versions of this conversation, but others wonłt be having any conversation at
all. One more random delay.

I fold the map. ęThanks for the information.ł

She nods. ęAny time.ł

As Iłm walking away, she calls out, ęEvery time.ł

* * * *

I quicken my step for a while; other versions of me should
be doing the same, compensating for however much time theyłve wasted. I canłt
expect to maintain perfect synch, but dispersion is insidious; if I didnłt at
least try to minimise it, Iłd end up travelling to the centre by every
conceivable route, and arriving over a period of days.

And although I can usually make up lost time, I can never entirely
cancel out the effects of variable delays. Spending different amounts of time
at different distances from the centre means that all the versions of me arenłt
shifted uniformly. There are theoretical models which show that under certain
conditions, this could result in gaps; I could be squeezed into certain
portions of the flow, and removed from othersa bit like halving all the
numbers between 1 and 1, leaving a hole from 0.5 to 1 ... squashing one infinity
into another which is cardinally identical, but half the geometric size. No
versions of me would have been destroyed, and I wouldnłt even exist twice in
the same world, but nevertheless, a gap would have been created.

As for heading straight for the building where my ęinformantł
claims the mutant is dreaming, Iłm not tempted at all. Whether or not the
information is genuine, I doubt very much that Iłve received the tip-off in any
but an insignificant portiontechnically, a set of measure zeroof the worlds
caught up in the whirlpool. Any action taken only in such a sparse set of
worlds would be totally ineffectual, in terms of disrupting the flow.

If Iłm right, then of course it makes no difference what I
do; if all the versions of me who received the tip-off simply marched out of
the whirlpool, it would have no impact on the mission. A set of measure zero
wouldnłt be missed. But my actions, as an individual, are always irrelevant in
that sense; if I, and I alone, deserted, the loss would be infinitesimal. The
catch is, I could never know that I was acting alone.

And the truth is, versions of me probably have deserted; however
stable my personality, itłs hard to believe that there are no valid quantum
permutations entailing such an action. Whatever the physically possible choices
are, my alter egos have madeand will continue to makeevery single one of
them. My stability lies in the distribution, and the relative density, of all
these branchesin the shape of a static, pre-ordained structure. Free will is a
rationalisation; I canłt help making all the right decisions. And all the wrong
ones.

But I ępreferł (granting meaning to the word) not to think
this way too often. The only sane approach is to think of myself as one free
agent of many, and to ęstriveł for coherence; to ignore short cuts, to stick to
procedure, to ędo everything I canł to concentrate my presence.

As for worrying about those alter egos who desert, or fail,
or die, therełs a simple solution: I disown them. Itłs up to me to define my
identity any way I like. I may be forced to accept my multiplicity, but the
borders are mine to draw. ęIł am those who survive, and succeed. The rest are
someone else.

I reach a suitable vantage point and take a third count. The
view is starting to look like a half-hour video recording edited down to five
minutesexcept that the whole scene doesnłt change at once; apart from some
highly correlated couples, different people vanish and appear independently,
suffering their own individual jump cuts. Theyłre still all shifting universes
more or less together, but what that means, in terms of where they happen to be
physically located at any instant, is so complex that it might as well be
random. A few people donłt vanish at all; one man loiters consistently on the
same street corneralthough his haircut changes, radically, at least five
times.

When the measurement is over, the computer inside the binoculars
flashes up coordinates for the centrełs estimated position. Itłs about sixty
metres from the building the blue-haired woman pointed out; well within the
margin of error. So perhaps she was telling the truthbut that changes nothing.
I must still ignore her.

As I start towards my target, I wonder: Maybe I was ambushed
back in that alley, after all. Maybe I was given the mutantłs location as a
deliberate attempt to distract me, to divide me. Maybe the woman tossed a coin
to split the universe: heads for a tip-off, tails for noneor threw dice, and
chose from a wider list of strategies.

Itłs only a theory ... but itłs a comforting idea: if thatłs
the best the whirlpool cult can do to protect the object of their devotion,
then I have nothing to fear from them at all.

* * * *

I avoid the major roads, but even on the side streets itłs
soon clear that the word is out. People run past me, some hysterical, some
grim; some empty-handed, some toting possessions; one man dashes from door to
door, hurling bricks through windows, waking the occupants, shouting the news.
Not everyonełs heading in the same direction; most are simply fleeing the
ghetto, trying to escape the whirlpool, but others are no doubt frantically
searching for their friends, their families, their lovers, in the hope of
reaching them before they turn into strangers. I wish them well.

Except in the central disaster zone, a few hard-core dreamers
will stay put. Shifting doesnłt matter to them; they can reach their dream
lives from anywhereor so they think. Some may be in for a shock; the whirlpool
can pass through worlds where there is no supply of Swhere the mutant user has
an alter ego who has never even heard of the drug.

As I turn into a long, straight avenue, the naked-eye view begins
to take on the jump-cut appearance that the binoculars produced, just fifteen
minutes ago. People flicker, shift, vanish. Nobody stays in sight for long; few
travel more than ten or twenty metres before disappearing. Many are flinching
and stumbling as they run, balking at empty space as often as at real
obstacles, all confidence in the permanence of the world around them, rightly,
shattered. Some run blindly with their heads down and their arms outstretched.
Most people are smart enough to travel on foot, but plenty of smashed and
abandoned cars strobe in and out of existence on the roadway. I witness one car
in motion, but only fleetingly.

I donłt see myself any where about; I never have yet. Random
scatter should put me in the same world twice, in some worldsbut only in a set
of measure zero. Throw two idealised darts at a dartboard, and the probability
of twice hitting the same pointthe same zero-dimensional pointis zero. Repeat
the experiment in an uncountably infinite number of worlds, and it will
happenbut only in a set of measure zero.

The changes are most frantic in the distance, and the blur
of activity retreats to some extent as I movedue as it is, in part, to mere
separationbut Iłm also heading into steeper gradients, so I am, slowly,
gaining on the havoc. I keep to a measured pace, looking out for both sudden
human obstacles and shifts in the terrain.

The pedestrians thin out. The street itself still endures,
but the buildings around me are beginning to be transformed into bizarre
chimeras, with mismatched segments from variant designs, and then from utterly
different structures, appearing side by side. Itłs like Walking through some
holographic architectural identikit machine on overdrive. Before long, most of
these composites are collapsing, unbalanced by fatal disagreements on where
loads should be borne. Falling rubble makes the footpath dangerous, so I weave
my way between the car bodies in the middle of the road. Therełs virtually no
moving traffic now, but itłs slow work just navigating between all this
ęstationarył scrap metal. Obstructions come and go; itłs usually quicker to
wait for them to vanish than to backtrack and look for another way through.
Sometimes Iłm hemmed in on all sides, but never for long.

Finally, most of the buildings around me seem to have
toppled, in most worlds, and I find a path near the edge of the road thatłs
relatively passable. Nearby, it looks like an earthquake has levelled the
ghetto. Looking back, away from the whirlpool, therełs nothing but a grey fog
of generic buildings; out there, structures are still moving as oneor near
enough to remain standingbut Iłm shifting so much faster than they are that the
skyline has smeared into an amorphous multiple exposure of a billion different
possibilities.

A human figure, sliced open obliquely from skull to groin, materialises
in front of me, topples, then vanishes. My guts squirm, but I press on. I know
that the very same thing must be happening to versions of mebut I declare it,
I define it, to be the death of strangers. The gradient is so high now that
different parts of the body can be dragged into different worlds, where the
complementary pieces of anatomy have no good statistical reason to be correctly
aligned. The rate at which this fatal dissociation occurs, though, is
inexplicably lower than calculations predict; the human body somehow defends
its integrity, and shifts as a whole far more often than it should. The
physical basis for this anomaly has yet to be pinned downbut then, the
physical basis for the human brain creating the delusion of a unique history, a
sense of time, and a sense of identity, from the multifurcating branches and
fans of superspace, has also proved to be elusive.

The sky grows light, a weird blue-grey that no single
overcast sky ever possessed. The streets themselves are in a state of flux now;
every second or third step is a revelationbitumen, broken masonry, concrete,
sand, all at slightly different levelsand briefly, a patch of withered grass.
An inertial navigation implant in my skull guides me through the chaos. Clouds
of dust and smoke come and go, and then

A cluster of apartment blocks, with surface features
flickering, but showing no signs of disintegrating. The rates of shift here are
higher than ever, but therełs a counterbalancing effect: the worlds between
which the flow runs are required to be more and more alike, the closer you get
to the dreamer.

The group of buildings is roughly symmetrical, and itłs
perfectly clear which one lies at the centre. None of me would fail to make the
same judgement, so I wonłt need to go through absurd mental contortions to
avoid acting on the tip-off.

The front entrance to the building oscillates, mainly
between three alternatives. I choose the leftmost door; a matter of procedure,
a standard which The Company managed to propagate between itselves before I was
even recruited. (No doubt contradictory instructions circulated for a while, but
one scheme must have dominated, eventually, because Iłve never been briefed any
differently.) I often wish I could leave (and/or follow) a trail of some kind,
but any mark I made would be useless, swept downstream faster than those it was
meant to guide. I have no choice but to trust in procedure to minimise my
dispersion.

From the foyer, I can see four stairwellsall with stairs converted
into piles of flickering rubble. I step into the leftmost, and glance up; the
early-morning light floods in through a variety of possible windows. The
spacing between the great concrete slabs of the floors is holding constant; the
energy difference between such large structures in different positions lends
them more stability than all the possible, specific shapes of flights of
stairs. Cracks must be developing, though, and given time, therełs no doubt
that even this building would succumb to its discrepancieskilling the dreamer,
in world after world, and putting an end to the flow. But who knows how far the
whirlpool might have spread by then?

The explosive devices I carry are small, but more than adequate.
I set one down in the stairwell, speak the arming sequence, and run. I glance
back across the foyer as I retreat, but at a distance, the details amongst the
rubble are nothing but a blur. The bomb Iłve planted has been swept into
another world, but itłs a matter of faithand experiencethat therełs an
infinite line of others to take its place.

I collide with a wall where there used to be a door, step
back, try again, pass through. Sprinting across the road, an abandoned car
materialises in front of me; I skirt around it, drop behind it, cover my head.

Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two?

Not a sound. I look up. The car has vanished. The building
still standsand still flickers.

I climb to my feet, dazed. Some bombs may havemust
havefailed ... but enough should have exploded to disrupt the flow.

So whatłs happened? Perhaps the dreamer has survived in some
small, but contiguous, part of the flow, and itłs closed off into a loopwhich
itłs my bad luck to be a part of. Survived how? The worlds in which the bomb
exploded should have been spread randomly, uniformly, everywhere dense enough
to do the job ... but perhaps some freak clustering effect has given rise to a
gap.

Or maybe Iłve ended up squeezed out of part of the flow. The
theoretical conditions for that have always struck me as far too bizarre to be
fulfilled in real life ... but what if it has happened? A gap in my presence,
downstream from me, would have left a set of worlds with no bomb planted at
allwhich then flowed along and caught up with me, once I moved away from the
building and my shift rate dropped.

I ęreturnł to the stairwell. Therełs no unexploded bomb, no
sign that any version of me has been here. I plant the backup device, and run.
This time, I find no shelter on the street, and I simply hit the ground.

Again, nothing.

I struggle to calm myself, to visualise the possibilities.
If the gap without bombs hadnłt fully passed the gap without me, when the first
bombs went off, then Iłd still have been missing from a part of the surviving
flowallowing exactly the same thing to happen all over again.

I stare at the intact building, disbelieving. I am the ones
who succeed. Thatłs all that defines me. But who, exactly, failed? If I was
absent from part of the flow, there were no versions of me in those worlds to
fail. Who takes the blame? Who do I disown? Those who successfully planted the
bomb, but ęshould haveł done it in other worlds? Am I amongst them? I have no
way of knowing.

So, what now? How big is the gap? How close am I to it? How
many times can it defeat me?

I have to keep killing the dreamer, until I succeed.

I return to the stairwell. The floors are about three metres
apart. To ascend, I use a small grappling hook on a short rope; the hook fires
an explosive-driven spike into the concrete floor. Once the rope is uncoiled,
its chances of ending up in separate pieces in different worlds is magnified;
itłs essential to move quickly.

I search the first storey systematically, following
procedure to the letter, as if Iłd never heard of Room 522. A blur of
alternative dividing walls, ghostly spartan furniture, transient heaps of sad
possessions. When Iłve finished, I pause until the clock in my skull reaches
the next multiple of ten minutes. Itłs an imperfect strategysome stragglers
will fall more than ten minutes behindbut that would be true however long I
waited.

The second storey is deserted, too. But a little more
stable; therełs no doubt that Iłm drawing closer to the heart of the whirlpool.

The third storeyłs architecture is almost solid. The fourth,
if not for the abandoned ephemera flickering in the corners of rooms, could
pass for normal.

The fifth

I kick the doors open, one by one, moving steadily down the
corridor. 502. 504. 506. I thought I might be tempted to break ranks when I
came this close, but instead I find it easier than ever to go through the
motions, knowing that Iłll have no opportunity to regroup. 516. 518. 520.

At the far end of Room 522, therełs a young woman stretched
out on a bed. Her hair is a diaphanous halo of possibilities, her clothing a
translucent haze, but her body looks solid and permanent, the almost-fixed
point about which all the nightłs chaos has spun.

I step into the room, take aim at her skull, and fire. The
bullet shifts worlds before it can reach her, but it will kill another version,
downstream. I fire again and again, waiting for a bullet from a brother
assassin to strike home before my eyesor for the flow to stop, for the living
dreamers to become too few, too sparse, to maintain it.

Neither happens.

ęYou took your time.ł

I swing around. The blue-haired woman stands outside the
doorway. I reload the gun; she makes no move to stop me. My hands are shaking.
I turn back to the dreamer and kill her, another two dozen times. The version
before me remains untouched, the flow undiminished.

I reload again, and wave the gun at the blue-haired woman.
ęWhat the fuck have you done to me? Am I alone? Have you slaughtered all the
others?ł But thatłs absurdand if it were true, how could she see me? Iłd be a
momentary, imperceptible flicker to each separate version of her, nothing more;
she wouldnłt even know I was there.

She shakes her head, and says mildly, ęWełve slaughtered no
one. Wełve mapped you into Cantor dust, thatłs all. Every one of you is still
alivebut none of you can stop the whirlpool.ł

Cantor dust. A fractal set, uncountably infinite, but with
measure zero. Therełs not one gap in my presence; therełs an infinite number,
an endless series of ever-smaller holes, everywhere. But

ęHow? You set me up, you kept me talking, but how could you
coordinate the delays? And calculate the effects? It would take ...ł

ęInfinite computational power? An infinite number of
people?ł She smiles faintly. ęI am an infinite number of people. All sleepwalking
on S. All dreaming each other. We can act together, in synch, as oneor we can
act independently. Or something in between, as now: the versions of me who can
see and hear you at any moment are sharing their sense data with the rest of
me.ł

I turn back to the dreamer. ęWhy defend her? Shełll never
get what she wants. Shełs tearing the city apart, and shełll never even reach
her destination.ł

ęNot here, perhaps.ł

ęNot here? Shełs crossing all the worlds she lives in! Where
else is there?ł

The woman shakes her head. ęWhat creates those worlds? Alternative
possibilities for ordinary physical processes. But it doesnłt stop there; the
possibility of motion between worlds has exactly the same effect. Superspace
itself branches out into different versions, versions containing all possible
cross-world flows. And there can be higher-level flows, between those versions
of superspace, so the whole structure branches again. And so on.ł

I close my eyes, drowning in vertigo. If this endless ascent
into greater infinities is true

ęSomewhere, the dreamer always triumphs? Whatever I do?ł

ęYes.ł

ęAnd somewhere, I always win? Somewhere, youłve failed to
defeat me?ł

ęYes.ł

Who am I? Iłm the ones who succeed. Then who am I? Iłm
nothing at all. A set of measure zero.

I drop the gun and take three steps towards the dreamer. My
clothes, already tattered, part worlds and fall away.

I take another step, and then halt, shocked by a sudden
warmth. My hair, and outer layers of skin, have vanished; Iłm covered with a
fine sweat of blood. I notice, for the first time, the frozen smile on the
dreamerłs face.

And I wonder: in how many infinite sets of worlds will I
take one more step? And how many countless versions of me will turn around
instead, and walk out of this room? Who exactly am I saving from shame, when
Iłll live and die in every possible way?

Myself.

Into Darkness

The tone from the buzzer rises in both pitch and loudness
the longer itłs on, so I leap out of bed knowing that itłs taken me less than a
second to wake. I swear I was dreaming it first, though, dreaming the sound
long before it was real. Thatłs happened a few times. Maybe itłs just a trick
of the mind; maybe some dreams take shape only in the act of remembering them.
Or maybe I dream it every night, every sleeping moment, just in case.

The light above the buzzer is red. Not a rehearsal.

I dress on my way across the room to thump the acknowledgement
switch; as soon as the buzzer shuts off, I can hear the approaching siren. It
takes me as long to lace my shoes as everything else combined. I grab my
backpack from beside the bed and flick on the power. It starts flashing LEDs as
it goes through its self-checking routines.

By the time Iłm at the kerb, the patrol car is braking
noisily, rear passenger door swinging open. I know the driver, Angelo, but I
havenłt seen the other cop before. As we accelerate, a satellite view of The
Intake in false-colour infrareda pitch-black circle in a landscape of
polychromatic blotchesappears on the carłs terminal. A moment later, this is
replaced by a street map of the regionone of the newer far northern suburbs,
all cul-de-sacs and crescentswith The Intakełs perimeter and centre marked,
and a dashed line showing where The Core should be. The optimal routes are
omitted; too much clutter and the mind balks. I stare at the map, trying to
commit it to memory. Itłs not that I wonłt have access to it, inside, but itłs
always faster to just know. When I close my eyes to see how Iłm going, the
pattern in my head looks like nothing so much as a puzzle-book maze.

We hit the freeway, and Angelo lets loose. Hełs a good
driver, but Isometimes wonder if this is the riskiest part of the whole business.
The cop I donłt know doesnłt think so; he turns to me and says, ęI gotta tell
you one thing; I respect what you do, but you must be fucking crazy. I wouldnłt
go inside that thing for a million dollars.ł Angelo grinsI catch it in the
rear-view mirrorand says, ęHey, how much is the Nobel prize, anyway? More than
a million?ł

I snort. ęI doubt it. And I donłt think they give the Nobel
prize for the eight-hundred-metre steeplechase.ł The media seem to have decided
to portray me as some kind of expert; I donłt know whyunless itłs because I
once used the phrase ęradially anisotropicł in an interview. Itłs true that I
carried one of the first scientific ępayloadsł, but any other Runner could have
done that, and these days itłs routine. The fact is, by international
agreement, no one with even a microscopic chance of contributing to the theory
of The Intake is allowed to risk their life by going inside. If Iłm atypical in
any way, itłs through a lack of relevant qualifications; most of the other
volunteers have a background in the conventional rescue services.

I switch my watch into chronograph mode, and synch it to the
count that the terminalłs now showing, then do the same to my backpackłs timer.
Six minutes and twelve seconds. The Intakełs manifestations obey exactly the
same statistics as a radioactive nucleus with a half-life of eighteen minutes;
seventy-nine per cent last six minutes or morebut multiply anything by 0.962
every minute, and you wouldnłt believe how fast it can fall. Iłve memorised the
probabilities right out to an hour (ten per cent), which may or may not have
been a wise thing to do. Counter to intuition, The Intake does not become more
dangerous as time passes, any more than a single radioactive nucleus becomes
ęmore unstableł. At any given momentassuming that it hasnłt yet vanisheditłs
just as likely as ever to stick around for another eighteen minutes. A mere ten
per cent of manifestations last for an hour or morebut of that ten per cent,
half will still be there eighteen minutes later. The danger has not increased.

For a Runner, inside, to ask what the odds are now, he or
she must be alive to pose the question, and so the probability curve must start
afresh from that moment. History canłt harm you; the ęchanceł of having
survived the last x minutes is one hundred per cent, once youłve done it. As
the unknowable future becomes the unchangeable past, risk must collapse into
certainty, one way or another.

Whether or not any of us really think this way is another
question. You canłt help having a gut feeling that time is running out, that
the odds are being whittled away. Everyone keeps track of the time since The
Intake materialised, however theoretically irrelevant that is. The truth is,
these abstractions make no difference in the end. You do what you can, as fast
as you can, regardless.

Itłs two in the morning, the freeway is empty, but it still
takes me by surprise when we screech on to the exit ramp so soon. My stomach is
painfully tight. I wish I felt ready, but I never do. After ten real calls,
after nearly two hundred rehearsals, I never do. I always wish I had more time
to compose myself, although I have no idea what state of mind Iłd aim for, let
alone how Iłd achieve it. Some lunatic part of me is always hoping for a delay.
If what Iłm really hoping is that The Intake will have vanished before I can
reach it, I shouldnłt be here at all.

* * * *

The coordinators tell us, over and over: ęYou can back out
any time you want to. Nobody would think any less of you.ł Itłs true, of course
(up to the point where backing out becomes physically impossible), but itłs a
freedom I could do without. Retiring would be one thing, but once Iłve accepted
a call I donłt want to have to waste my energy on second thoughts, I donłt want
to have to endlessly reaffirm my choice. Iłve psyched myself into half
believing that I couldnłt live with myself, however understanding other people
might be, and that helps a little. The only trouble is, this lie might be
self-fulfilling, and I really donłt want to become that kind of person.

I close my eyes, and the map appears before me. Iłm a mess,
therełs no denying it, but I can still do the job, I can still get results.
Thatłs what counts.

I can tell when wełre getting close, without even searching
the skyline; there are lights on in all of the houses, and families standing in
their front yards. Many people wave and cheer as we pass, a sight that always
depresses me. When a group of teenagers, standing on a street corner drinking
beer, scream abuse and gesture obscenely, I canłt help feeling perversely
encouraged.

ęDickheads,ł mutters the cop I donłt know. I keep my mouth
shut.

We take a corner, and I spot a trio of helicopters, high on
my right, ascending with a huge projection screen in tow. Suddenly, a corner of
the screen is obscured, and my eye extends the curve of the eclipsing object
from this one tiny arc to giddy completion.

From the outside, by day, The Intake makes an impressive
sight: a giant black dome, completely non-reflective, blotting out a great bite
of the sky. Itłs impossible not to believe that youłre confronting a massive,
solid object. By night, though, itłs different. The shape is still
unmistakable, cut in a velvet black that makes the darkest night seem grey, but
therełs no illusion of solidity; just an awareness of a different kind of void.

The Intake has been appearing for almost ten years now. Itłs
always a perfect sphere, a little more than a kilometre in radius, and usually
centred close to ground level. On rare occasions, itłs been known to appear out
at sea, and slightly more often, on uninhabited land, but the vast majority of
its incarnations take place in populated regions.

The currently favoured hypothesis is that a future
civilisation tried to construct a wormhole that would let them sample the distant
past, bringing specimens of ancient life into their own time to be studied.
They screwed up. Both ends of the wormhole came unstuck. The thing has shrunk
and deformed, frompresumablysome kind of grand temporal highway, bridging
geological epochs, to a gateway that now spans less time than it would take to
cross an atomic nucleus at the speed of light. One endThe Intakeis a
kilometre in radius; the other is about a fifth as big, spatially concentric
with the first, but displaced an almost immeasurably small time into the
future. We call the inner spherethe wormholełs destination, which seems to be
inside it, but isnłtThe Core.

Why this shrivelled-up piece of failed temporal engineering
has ended up in the present era is anyonełs guess; maybe we just happened to be
halfway between the original endpoints, and the thing collapsed symmetrically.
Pure bad luck. The trouble is, it hasnłt quite come to rest. It materialises
somewhere on the planet, remains fixed for several minutes, then loses its grip
and vanishes, only to appear at a new location a fraction of a second later.
Ten years of analysing the data has yielded no method for predicting successive
locations, but there must be some remnant of a navigation system in action; why
else would the wormhole cling to the Earthłs surface (with a marked preference
for inhabited, dry land) instead of wandering off on a random course into
interplanetary space? Itłs as if some faithful, demented computer keeps
valiantly trying to anchor The Intake to a region which might be of interest to
its scholarly masters; no Palaeozoic life can be found, but twenty-first-century
cities will do, since therełs nothing much else around. And every time it fails
to make a permanent connection and slips off into hyperspace, with infinite
dedication, and unbounded stupidity, it tries again.

Being of interest is bad news. Inside the wormhole, time is
mixed with one spatial dimension, andwhether by design or physical
necessityany movement which equates to travelling from the future into the
past is forbidden. Translated into the wormholełs present geometry, this means
that when The Intake materialises around you, motion away from the centre is
impossible. You have an unknown timemaybe eighteen minutes, maybe more, maybe
lessto navigate your way to the safety of The Core, under these bizarre
conditions. Whatłs more, light is subject to the same effect; it only
propagates inwards. Everything closer to the centre than you lies in the
invisible future. Youłre running into darkness.

I have heard people scoff at the notion that any of this
could be difficult. Iłm not quite enough of a sadist to hope that they learn
the truth, first-hand.

Actually, outwards motion isnłt quite literally impossible.
If it were, everyone caught in The Intake would die at once. The heart has to
circulate blood, the lungs have to inhale and exhale, nerve impulses have to
travel in all directions. Every single living cell relies on shuffling
chemicals back and forth, and I canłt even guess what the effect would be on
the molecular level, if electron clouds could fluctuate in one direction but
not the reverse.

There is some leeway. Because the wormholełs entire eight
hundred metres spans such a minute time interval, the distance scale of the
human body corresponds to an even shorter periodshort enough for quantum
effects to come into play. Quantum uncertainty in the space-time metric permits
small, localised violations of the classical lawłs absolute restriction.

So, instead of everyone dying on the spot, blood pressure
goes up, the heart is stressed, breathing becomes laborious, and the brain may
function erratically. Enzymes, hormones, and other biological molecules are all
slightly deformed, causing them to bind less efficiently to their targets,
interfering to some degree with every biochemical process; haemoglobin, for
example, loses its grip on oxygen more easily. Water diffuses out of the
bodybecause random thermal motion is suddenly not so randomleading to gradual
dehydration.

People already in very poor health can die from these
effects. Others are just made nauseous, weak and confusedon top of the
inevitable shock and panic. They make bad decisions. They get trapped.

One way or another, a few hundred lives are lost, every time
The Intake materialises. Intake Runners may save ten or twenty people, which
Iłll admit is not much of a success rate, but until some genius works out how
to rid us of the wormhole for good, itłs better than nothing.

The screen is in place high above us, when we reach the
ęSouth Operations Centreła couple of vans, stuffed with electronics, parked on
someonełs front lawn. The now familiar section of street map appears, the image
rock steady and in perfect focus, in spite of the fact that itłs being
projected from a fourth helicopter, and all four are jittering in the powerful
inwards wind. People inside can see out, of course; this mapand the others, at
the other compass pointswill save dozens of lives. In theory, once outdoors,
it should be simple enough to head straight for The Core; after all, therełs no
easier direction to find, no easier path to follow. The trouble is, a straight
line inwards is likely to lead you into obstacles, and when you canłt retrace
your steps, the most mundane of these can kill you.

So, the map is covered with arrows, marking the optimal
routes to The Core, given the constraint of staying safely on the roads. Two
more helicopters, hovering above The Intake, are doing one better: with
high-velocity paint guns under computer control, and laser-ring inertial
guidance systems constantly telling the shuddering computers their precise
location and orientation, theyłre drawing the same arrows in
fluorescent/reflective paint on the invisible streets below. You canłt see the
arrows ahead of you, but you can look back at the ones youłve passed. It helps.

Therełs a small crowd of coordinators, and one or two Runners,
around the vans. This scene always looks forlorn to me, like some small-time
rained-out amateur athletics event, air traffic notwithstanding. Angelo calls
out, ęBreak a leg!ł as I run from the car. I raise a hand and wave without
turning. Loudspeakers are blasting the standard advice inwards, cycling through
a dozen languages. In the corner of my eye I can see a TV crew arriving. I
glance at my watch. Nine minutes. I canłt help thinking, seventy-one per cent,
although The Intake is, clearly, one hundred per cent still there. Someone taps
me on the shoulder. Elaine. She smiles and says, ęJohn, see you in The Core,ł
then sprints into the wall of darkness before I can reply.

Dolores is handing out assignments on RAM. She wrote most of
the software used by Intake Runners around the world, but then, she makes her
living writing computer games. Shełs even written a game which models The
Intake itself, but sales have been less than spectacular; the reviewers decided
it was in bad taste. ęWhatłs next? Letłs play Airline Disaster?ł Maybe they
think flight simulators should be programmed for endless calm weather.
Meanwhile, televangelists sell prayers to keep the wormhole away; you just slip
that credit card into the home-shopping slot for instant protection.

ęWhat have you got for me?ł

ęThree infants.ł

ęIs that all?ł

ęYou come late, you get the crumbs.ł

I plug the cartridge into my backpack. A sector of the
street map appears on the display panel, marked with three bright red dots. I
strap on the pack, and then adjust the display on its movable arm so I can
catch it with a sideways glance, if I have to. Electronics can be made to
function reliably inside the wormhole, but everything has to be specially
designed.

Itłs not ten minutes, not quite. I grab a cup of water from
a table beside one of the vans. A solution of mixed carbohydrates, supposedly
optimised for our metabolic needs, is also on offer, but the one time I tried
it I was sorry; my gut isnłt interested in absorbing anything at this stage,
optimised or not. Therełs coffee too, but the very last thing I need right now
is a stimulant. Gulping down the water, I hear my name, and I canłt help tuning
in to the TV reporterłs spiel.

ę... John Nately, high-school science teacher and unlikely hero,
embarking on this, his eleventh call as a volunteer Intake Runner. If he
survives tonight, hełll have set a new national recordbut of course, the odds
of making it through grow slimmer with every call, and by now ...ł

The moron is spouting crapthe odds do not grow slimmer, a
veteran faces no extra riskbut this isnłt the time to set him straight. I
swing my arms for a few seconds in a half-hearted warm-up, but therełs not much
point; every muscle in my body is tense, and will be for the next eight hundred
metres, whatever I do. I try to blank my mind and just concentrate on the
run-upthe faster you hit The Intake, the less of a shock it isand before I
can ask myself, for the first time tonight, what the fuck Iłm really doing
here, Iłve left the isotropic universe behind, and the question is academic.

The darkness doesnłt swallow you. Perhaps thatłs the
strangest part of all. Youłve seen it swallow other Runners; why doesnłt it
swallow you? Instead, it recedes from your every step. The borderline isnłt
absolute; quantum fuzziness produces a gradual fade-out, stretching visibility
about as far as each extended foot. By day, this is completely surreal, and
people have been known to suffer fits and psychotic episodes at the sight of
the voidłs apparent retreat. By night, it seems merely implausible, like
chasing an intelligent fog.

At the start, itłs almost too easy; memories of pain and
fatigue seem ludicrous. Thanks to frequent rehearsals in a compression harness,
the pattern of resistance as I breathe is almost familiar. Runners once took
drugs to lower their blood pressure, but with sufficient training, the bodyłs
own vasoregulatory system can be made flexible enough to cope with the stress,
unaided. The odd tugging sensation on each leg as I bring it forward would
probably drive me mad, if I didnłt (crudely) understand the reason for it: inwards
motion is resisted, when pulling, rather than pushing, is involved, because
information travels outwards. If I trailed a ten-metre rope behind me, I
wouldnłt be able to take a single step; pulling on the rope would pass
information about my motion from where I am to a point further out. Thatłs
forbidden, and itłs only the quantum leeway that lets me drag each foot
forwards at all.

The street curves gently to the right, gradually losing its
radial orientation, but therełs no convenient turn-off yet. I stay in the
middle of the road, straddling the double white line, as the border between
past and future swings to the left. The road surface seems always to slope
towards the darkness, but thatłs just another wormhole effect; the bias in
thermal molecular motioncause of the inwards wind, and slow
dehydrationproduces a force, or pseudo-force, on solid objects, too, tilting
the apparent vertical.

ęme! Please!ł

A manłs voice, desperate and bewilderedand almost indignant,
as if he canłt help believing that I must have heard him all along, that I must
have been feigning deafness out of malice or indifference. I turn, without
slowing; Iłve learnt to do it in a way that makes me only slightly dizzy.
Everything appears almost normal, looking outwardsapart from the fact that the
streetlights are out, and so most illumination is from helicopter floodlights
and the giant street map in the sky. The cry came from a bus shelter, all
vandal-proof plastic and reinforced glass, at least five metres behind me, now;
it might as well be on Mars. Wire mesh covers the glass; I can just make out
the figure behind it, a faint silhouette.

ęHelp me!ł

Mercifullyfor meIłve vanished into this manłs darkness; I
donłt have to think of a gesture to make, an expression to put on my face,
appropriate to the situation. I turn away, and pick up speed. Iłm not inured to
the death of strangers, but I am inured to my helplessness.

After ten years of The Intake, there are international
standards for painted markings on the ground around every potential hazard in
public open space. Like all the other measures, it helps, slightly. There are
standards, too, for eventually eliminating the hazardsdesigning out the
corners where people can be trappedbut thatłs going to cost billions, and take
decades, and wonłt even touch the real problem: interiors. Iłve seen
demonstration trap-free houses and office blocks, with doors, or curtained
doorways, in every corner of every room, but the style hasnłt exactly caught
on. My own house is far from ideal; after getting quotes for alterations, I decided
that the cheapest solution was to keep a sledgehammer beside every wall.

I turn left, just in time to see a trail of glowing arrows
hiss into place on the road behind me.

Iłm almost at my first assignment. I tap a button on my backpack
and peer sideways at the display, as it switches to a plan of the target house.
As soon as The Intakełs position is known, Doloresłs software starts hunting
through databases, assembling a list of locations where therełs a reasonable
chance that we can do some good. Our information is never complete, and
sometimes just plain wrong; census data is often out of date, building plans
can be inaccurate, mis-filed, or simply missingbut it beats walking blind into
houses chosen at random.

I slow almost to a walk, two houses before the target, to
give myself time to grow used to the effects. Running inwards lessens the
outwards componentsrelative to the wormholeof the bodyłs cyclic motions;
slowing down always feels like precisely the wrong thing to do. I often dream
of running through a narrow canyon, no wider than my shoulders, whose walls will
stay apart only so long as I move fast enough; thatłs what my body thinks of
slowing down.

The street here lies about thirty degrees off radial. I
cross the front lawn of the neighbouring house, then step over a knee-high
brick wall. At this angle, there are few surprises; most of whatłs hidden is so
easy to extrapolate that it almost seems visible in the mindłs eye. A corner of
the target house emerges from the darkness on my left; I get my bearings from
it and head straight for a side window. Entry by the front door would cost me
access to almost half of the house, including the bedroom which Doloresłs
highly erratic Room Use Predictor nominates as the one most likely to be the
childłs. People can file room-use information with us directly, but few bother.

I smash the glass with a crowbar, open the window, and
clamber through. I leave a small electric lamp on the windowsillcarrying it
with me would render it uselessand move slowly into the room. Iłm already
starting to feel dizzy and nauseous, but I force myself to concentrate. One
step too many, and the rescue becomes ten times more difficult. Two steps, and
itłs impossible.

Itłs clear that I have the right room when a dresser is
revealed, piled with plastic toys, talcum powder, baby shampoo, and other
paraphernalia spilling on to the floor. Then a corner of the crib appears on my
left, pointed at an unexpected angle; the thing was probably neatly parallel to
the wall to start with, but slid unevenly under the inwards force. I sidle up
to it, then inch forwards, until a lump beneath the blanket comes into view. I
hate this moment, but the longer I wait, the harder it gets. I reach sideways
and lift the child, bringing the blanket with it. I kick the crib aside, then
walk forwards, slowly bending my arms, until I can slip the child into the
harness on my chest. An adult is strong enough to drag a small baby a short
distance outwards. Itłs usually fatal.

The kid hasnłt stirred; he or she is unconscious, but
breathing. I shudder briefly, a kind of shorthand emotional catharsis, then I
start moving. I glance at the display to recheck the way out, and finally let
myself notice the time. Thirteen minutes. Sixty-one per cent. More to the
point, The Core is just two or three minutes away, downhill, nonstop. One successful
assignment means ditching the rest. Therełs no alternative; you canłt lug a
child with you, in and out of buildings; you canłt even put it down somewhere
and come back for it later.

As I step through the front door, the sense of relief leaves
me giddy. Either that, or renewed cerebral blood flow. I pick up speed as I
cross the lawnand catch a glimpse of a woman, shouting, ęWait! Stop!ł

I slow down; she catches up with me. I put a hand on her
shoulder and propel her slightly ahead of me, then say, ęKeep moving, as fast
as you can. When you want to speak, fall behind me. Iłll do the same. OK?ł

I move ahead of her. She says, ęThatłs my daughter youłve
got. Is she all right? Oh, please ... Is she alive?ł

ęShełs fine. Stay calm. We just have to get her to The Core
now. OK?ł

ęI want to hold her. I want to take her.ł

ęWait until wełre safe.ł

ęI want to take her there myself.ł

Shit. I glance at her sideways. Her face is glistening with
sweat and tears. One of her arms is bruised and blotchy, the usual symptom of
trying to reach out to something unreachable.

ęI really think it would be better to wait.ł

ęWhat right have you got? Shełs my daughter! Give her to
me!ł The woman is indignant, but remarkably lucid, considering what shełs been
through. I canłt imagine what it must have felt like, to stand by that house,
hoping insanely for some kind of miracle, while everyone in the neighbourhood
fled past her, and the side effects made her sicker and sicker. However
pointless, however idiotic her courage, I canłt help admiring it.

Iłm lucky. My ex-wife, and our son and daughter, live
halfway across town from me. I have no friends who live nearby. My emotional
geography is very carefully arranged; I donłt give a shit about anyone who I
could end up unable to save.

So what do I dosprint away from her, leave her running
after me, screaming? Maybe I should. If I gave her the child, though, I could
check out one more house.

ęDo you know how to handle her? Never try to move her
backwards, away from the darkness. Never.ł

ęI know that. Iłve read all the articles. I know what youłre
meant to do.ł

ę OK.ł I must be crazy. We slow down to a walk, and I pass
the child to her, lowering it into her arms from beside her. I realise, almost
too late, that wełre at the turn-off for the second house. As the woman
vanishes into the darkness, I yell after her, ęRun! Follow the arrows, and
run!ł

I check the time. Fifteen minutes already, with all that
stuffing around. Iłm still alive, thoughso the odds now are, as always,
fifty-fifty that the wormhole will last another eighteen minutes. Of course I
could die at any secondbut that was equally true when I first stepped inside.
Iłm no greater fool now than I was then. For what thatłs worth.

The second house is empty, and itłs easy to see why. The computerłs
guess for the nursery is in fact a study, and the parentsł bedroom is outwardłs
of the childłs. Windows are open, clearly showing the path they must have
taken.

A strange mood overtakes me, as I leave the house behind.
The inwards wind seems stronger than ever, the road turns straight into the
darkness, and I feel an inexplicable tranquillity wash over me. Iłm moving as
fast as I can, but the edge of latent panic, of sudden death, is gone. My
lungs, my muscles, are battling all the same restraints, but I feel curiously
detached from them; aware of the pain and effort, yet somehow uninvolved.

The truth is, I know exactly why Iłm here. I can never quite
admit it, outsideit seems too whimsical, too bizarre. Of course Iłm glad to
save lives, and maybe thatłs grown to be part of it. No doubt I also crave to
be thought of as a hero. The real reason, though, is too strange to be judged
either selfless or vain:

The wormhole makes tangible the most basic truths of existence.
You cannot see the future. You cannot change the past. All of life consists of
running into darkness. This is why Iłm here.

My body grows, not numb, but separate, a puppet dancing and
twitching on a treadmill. I snap out of this and check the map, not a moment
too soon. I have to turn right, sharply, which puts an end to any risk of
somnambulism. Looking up at the bisected world makes my head pound, so I stare
at my feet, and try to recall if the pooling of blood in my left hemisphere
ought to make me more rational, or less.

The third house is in a borderline situation. The parentsł
bedroom is slightly outwards from the childłs, but the doorway gives access to
only half the room. I enter through a window that the parents could not have
used.

The child is dead. I see the blood before anything else. I
feel, suddenly, very tired. A slit of the doorway is visible, and I know what
must have happened. The mother or father edged their way in, and found they
could just reach the childcould take hold of one hand, but no more. Pulling
inwards is resisted, but people find that confusing; they donłt expect it, and
when it happens, they fight it. When you want to snatch someone you love out of
the jaws of danger, you pull with all your strength.

The door is an easy exit for me, but less so for anyone who
came in that wayespecially someone in the throes of grief. I stare into the
darkness of the roomłs inwards corner, and yell, ęCrouch down, as low as you
can,ł then mime doing so. I pluck the demolition gun from my backpack, and aim
high. The recoil, in normal space, would send me sprawling; here itłs a mere
thump.

I step forward, giving up my own chance to use the door.
Therełs no immediate sign that Iłve just blasted a metre-wide hole in the wall;
virtually all of the dust and debris is on the inwards side. I finally reach a
man kneeling in the corner, his hands on his head; for a brief moment I think
hełs alive, that he took this position to shield himself from the blast. No
pulse, no respiration. A dozen broken ribs, probably; Iłm not inclined to check.
Some people can last for an hour, pinned between walls of brick and an
invisible, third wall that follows them ruthlessly into the corner, every time
they slip, every time they give ground. Some people, though, do exactly the
worst thing; they squeeze themselves into the inward-most part of their prison,
obeying some instinct which, Iłm sure, makes sense at the time.

Or maybe he wasnłt confused at all. Maybe he just wanted it
to be over.

I hoist myself through the hole in the wall. I stagger
through the kitchen. The fucking plan is wrong wrong wrong, a door Iłm
expecting doesnłt exist. I smash the kitchen window, then cut my hand on the
way out.

I refuse to glance at the map. I donłt want to know the
time. Now that Iłm alone, with no purpose left but saving myself, everything is
jinxed. I stare at the ground, at the fleeting magic golden arrows, trying not
to count them.

One glimpse of a festering hamburger discarded on the road,
and I find myself throwing up. Common sense tells me to turn and face backwards,
but Iłm not quite that stupid. The acid in my throat and nose brings tears to
my eyes. As I shake them away, something impossible happens.

A brilliant blue light appears, high up in the darkness
ahead, dazzling my dark-adapted eyes. I shield my face, then peer between my
fingers. As I grow used to the glare, I start to make out details.

A cluster of long, thin, luminous cylinders is hanging in
the sky, like some mad upside-down pipe organ built of glass, bathed in glowing
plasma. The light it casts does nothing to reveal the houses and streets below.
I must be hallucinating; Iłve seen shapes in the darkness before, although
never anything so spectacular, so persistent. I run faster, in the hope of
clearing my head. The apparition doesnłt vanish, or waver; it merely grows
closer.

I halt, shaking uncontrollably. I stare into the impossible
light. What if itłs not in my head? Therełs only one possible explanation. Some
component of the wormholełs hidden machinery has revealed itself. The idiot
navigator is showing me its worthless soul.

With one voice in my skull screaming, No! and another calmly
asserting that I have no choice, that this chance might never come again, I
draw the demolition gun, take aim, and fire. As if some puny weapon in the
hands of an amoeba could scratch the shimmering artifact of a civilisation
whose failures leave us cowering in awe.

The structure shatters and implodes in silence. The light contracts
to a blinding pinprick, burning itself into my vision. Only when I turn my head
am I certain that the real light is gone.

I start running again. Terrified, elated. I have no idea
what Iłve done, but the wormhole is, so far, unchanged. The afterimage lingers
in the darkness, with nothing to wipe it from my sight. Can hallucinations
leave an afterimage? Did the navigator choose to expose itself, choose to let
me destroy it?

I trip on something and stagger, but catch myself from
falling. I turn and see a man crawling down the road, and I bring myself to a
rapid halt, astonished by such a mundane sight after my transcendental
encounter. The manłs legs have been amputated at the thighs; hełs dragging
himself along with his arms alone. That would be hard enough in normal space,
but here, the effort must almost be killing him.

There are special wheelchairs which can function in the wormhole
(wheels bigger than a certain size buckle and deform if the chair stalls) and
if we know wełll need one, we bring one in, but theyłre too heavy for every
Runner to carry one just in case.

The man lifts his head and yells, ęKeep going! Stupid
fucker!ł without the least sign of doubt that hełs not just shouting at empty
space. I stare at him and wonder why I donłt take the advice. Hełs huge:
big-boned and heavily muscled, with plenty of fat on top of that. I doubt that
I could lift himand Iłm certain that if I could, Iłd stagger along more slowly
than hełs crawling.

Inspiration strikes. Iłm in luck, too; a sideways glance
reveals a house, with the front door invisible but clearly only a metre or two
inwards of where I am now. I smash the hinges with a hammer and chisel, then
manoeuvre the door out of the frame and back to the road. The man has already
caught up with me. I bend down and tap him on the shoulder. ęWant to try
sledding?ł

I step inwards in time to hear part of a string of
obscenities, and to catch an unwelcome close-up of his bloody forearms. I throw
the door down on to the road ahead of him. He keeps moving; I wait until he can
hear me again.

ęYes or no?ł

ęYes,ł he mutters.

Itłs awkward, but it works. He sits on the door, leaning
back on his arms. I run behind, bent over, my hands on his shoulders, pushing.
Pushing is the one action the wormhole doesnłt fight, and the inwards force
makes it downhill all the way. Sometimes the door slides so fast that I have to
let go for a second or two, to keep from overbalancing.

I donłt need to look at the map. I know the map, I know precisely
where we are; The Core is less than a hundred metres away. In my head I recite
an incantation: The danger does not increase. The danger does not increase. And
in my heart I know that the whole conceit of ęprobabilitył is meaningless; the
wormhole is reading my mind, waiting for the first sign of hope, and whether
that comes fifty metres, or ten metres, or two metres from safety, thatłs when
it will take me.

Some part of me calmly judges the distance we cover, and
counts: Ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one ... I mumble random numbers to
myself, and when that fails, I reset the count arbitrarily: Eighty-one,
eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five, eighty-nine ...

A new universe, of light, stale air, noise-and people,
countless peopleexplodes into being around me. I keep pushing the man on the
door, until someone runs towards me and gently prises me away. Elaine. She
guides me over to the front steps of a house, while another Runner with a
first-aid kit approaches my bloodied passenger. Groups of people stand or sit
around electric lanterns, filling the streets and front yards as far as I can
see. I point them out to Elaine. ęLook. Arenłt they beautiful?ł

ęJohn? You OK? Get your breath. Itłs over.ł

ęOh, fuck.ł I glance at my watch. ęTwenty-one minutes.
Forty-five per cent.ł I laugh, hysterically. ęI was afraid of forty-five per
cent?ł

My heart is working twice as hard as it needs to. I pace for
a while, until the dizziness begins to subside. Then I flop down on the steps
beside Elaine.

A while later, I ask, ęAny others still out there?ł

ęNo.ł

ęGreat.ł Iłm starting to feel almost lucid. ęSo ... how did
you go?ł

She shrugs. ęOK. A sweet little girl. Shełs with her parents
somewhere round here. No complications; favourable geometry.ł She shrugs again.
Elaine is like that; favourable geometry or not, itłs never a big deal.

I recount my own experience, leaving out the apparition. I
should talk to the medical people first, straighten out what kind of
hallucination is or isnłt possible, before I start spreading the word that I
took a pot shot at a glowing blue pipe organ from the future.

Anyway, if I did any good, Iłll know soon enough. If The Intake
does start drifting away from the planet, that shouldnłt take long to make
news; I have no idea at what rate the parting would take place, but surely the
very next manifestation would be highly unlikely to be on the Earthłs surface.
Deep in the crust, or halfway into space

I shake my head. Therełs no use building up my hopes, prematurely,
when Iłm still not sure that any of it was real.

Elaine says, ęWhat?ł

ęNothing.ł

I check the time again. Twenty-nine minutes. Thirty-three
per cent. I glance down the street impatiently. We can see out into the
wormhole, of course, but the border is clearly delineated by the sudden drop in
illumination, once outward-bound light can no longer penetrate. When The Intake
moves on, though, it wonłt be a matter of looking for subtle shifts in the
lighting. While the wormhole is in place, its effects violate the Second Law of
Thermodynamics (biased thermal motion, for a start, clearly decreases entropy).
In parting, it more than makes amends; it radially homogenises the space it
occupied, down to a length scale of about a micron. To the rock two hundred
metres beneath us, and the atmosphere aboveboth already highly uniformthis
will make little difference, but every house, every garden, every blade of
grassevery structure visible to the naked eyewill vanish. Nothing will remain
but radial streaks of fine dust, swirling out as the high-pressure air in The
Core is finally free to escape.

Thirty-five minutes. Twenty-six per cent. I look around at
the weary survivors; even for those who left no family or friends behind, the
sense of relief and thankfulness at having reached safety has no doubt faded.
Theywejust want the waiting to be over. Everything about the passage of time,
everything about the wormholełs uncertain duration, has reversed its
significance. Yes, the thing might set us free at any momentbut so long as it
hasnłt, wełre as likely as not to be stuck here for eighteen more minutes.

Forty minutes. Twenty-one per cent.

ęEars are really going to pop tonight,ł I say. Or worse; on
rare occasions, the pressure in The Core can grow so high that the subsequent
decompression gives rise to the bends. Thatłs at least another hour away,
thoughand if it started to become a real possibility, theyłd do an air drop of
a drug that would cushion us from the effect.

Fifty minutes. Fifteen per cent.

Everyone is silent now; even the children have stopped
crying.

ęWhatłs your record?ł I ask Elaine.

She rolls her eyes. ęFifty-six minutes. You were there. Four
years ago.ł

ęYeah. I remember.ł

ęJust relax. Be patient.ł

ęDonłt you feel a little silly? I mean, if Iłd known, I
would have taken my time.ł

One hour. Ten per cent. Elaine has dozed off, her head
against my shoulder. Iłm starting to feel drowsy myself, but a nagging thought
keeps me awake.

Iłve always assumed that the wormhole moves because its efforts
to stay put eventually failbut what if the truth is precisely the opposite?
What if it moves because its efforts to move have always, eventually,
succeeded? What if the navigator breaks away to try again, as quickly as it
canbut its crippled machinery can do no better than a fifty-fifty chance of
success, for every eighteen minutes of striving?

Maybe Iłve put an end to that striving. Maybe Iłve brought
The Intake, finally, to rest.

Eventually, the pressure itself can grow high enough to be
fatal. It takes almost five hours, itłs a one-in-one-hundred-thousand case, but
it has happened once already, therełs no reason at all it couldnłt happen
again. Thatłs what bothers me most: Iłd never know. Even if I saw people dying
around me, the moment would never arrive when I knew, for certain, that this
was the final price.

Elaine stirs without opening her eyes. ęStill?ł

ęYeah.ł I put an arm around her; she doesnłt seem to mind.

ęWell. Donłt forget to wake me when itłs over.ł

A Kidnapping

The officełs elaborate software usually fielded my calls,
but this one came through unannounced. The seven-metre wallscreen opposite my
desk abruptly ceased displaying the work Iłd been viewingKreyszigłs dazzling
abstract animation, Spectral Densityand the face of a nondescript young man
appeared in its place.

I suspected at once that the face was a mask, a simulation.
No single feature was implausible, or even unusuallimp brown hair, pale blue
eyes, thin nose, square jawbut the face as a whole was too symmetrical, too
unblemished, too devoid of character to be real. In the background, a pattern
of brightly coloured, faux-ceramic hexagonal tiles drifted across the
wallpaperdesperately bland retro-geometricism, no doubt intended to make the
face look natural in comparison. I made these judgements in an instant; stretching
all the way to the galleryłs ceiling, four times my height, the image was open
to merciless scrutiny.

The ęyoung manł said, ęWe have your wife/Transfer half a million
dollars/Into this account/If you donłt want her to/Suffer.ł I couldnłt help
hearing it that way; the unnatural rhythm of the speech, the crisp enunciation
of each word, made the whole thing sound like a terminally hip performance artist
reading bad poetry. This piece is entitled, ęRansom Demandł. As the mask spoke,
a sixteen-digit account number flashed up across the bottom of the screen.

I said, ęGo screw yourself. This isnłt funny.ł

The mask vanished, and Loraine appeared. Her hair was dishevelled,
her face was flushed, as if shełd just been in a strugglebut she wasnłt
distraught, or hysterical; she was grimly in control. I stared at the screen;
the room seemed to sway, and I felt sweat break out on my arms and chest,
impossible rivulets forming in seconds.

She said, ęDavid, listen: Iłm all right, they havenłt hurt
me, butł

Then the call cut off.

For a moment, I just sat there, dazed, drenched with sweat,
too giddy to trust myself to move a muscle. Then I said to the office, ęReplay
that call.ł I expected a denialNo calls have been put through all daybut I
was wrong. The whole thing began again.

ęWe have your wife ...ł

ęGo screw yourself ...ł

ęDavid, listen ...ł

I told the office, ęCall my home.ł I donłt know why I did
that; I donłt know what I believed, what I was hoping for. It was more a reflex
action than anything elselike flailing out to grab something solid when youłre
falling, even if you know full well that itłs far beyond your reach.

I sat and listened to the ringing tone. I thought: Iłll cope
with this, somehow. Loraine will be released, unharmeditłs just a matter of
paying the money. Everything will happen, step by step; everything will unwind,
inexorablyeven if each second along the way seems like an unbreachable chasm.

After seven chimes, I felt like Iłd been sitting at the
desk, sleepless, for days: numb, tenuous, less than real.

Then Loraine answered the phone. I could see the studio behind
her, all the familiar charcoal sketches on the wall. I opened my mouth to speak,
but I couldnłt make a sound.

Her expression changed from mild annoyance to alarm. She
said, ęDavid? Whatłs wrong? You look like youłre having a heart attack.ł

For several seconds, I couldnłt answer her. On one level, I
simply felt relievedand already slightly foolish, for having been so easily
taken in ... but at the same time, I found myself holding my breath, bracing
myself for another reversal. If the office phone system had been corrupted, how
could I be sure that this call had reached home? Why should I trust the sight
of Loraine, safe in her studiowhen the image of her in the kidnappersł hands
had been every bit as convincing? At any moment, the ęwomanł on the screen
would drop the charade, and begin reciting coolly: ęWe have your wife ...ł

It didnłt happen. So I pulled myself together and told the
real Loraine what Iłd seen.

* * * *

In retrospect, of course, it all seemed embarrassingly
obvious. The contrast between the intentionally unnatural mask, and the meticulously
plausible image that followed, was designed to keep me from questioning the
evidence of my own eyes. This is what a simulation looks like (smartarsed
expert spots it at once) ... so this (a thousand times more realistic) must be
authentic. A crude trick, but it had workednot for long, but long enough to
shake me up.

But if the technique was transparent, the motive remained obscure.
Some lunaticłs idea of a joke? It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, for no
greater reward than the dubious thrill of making me sweat with fear for all of
sixty seconds. As a genuine attempt at extortion, though ... how could it ever
have worked? Were they hoping that Iłd transfer the money immediatelybefore
the shock wore off, before it even occurred to me that the image of Loraine,
however lifelike, proved nothing? If so, surely they would have kept me on the
phone, threatening imminent danger, building up the pressureleaving me with no
time for doubts, and no opportunity to verify anything.

It didnłt make sense either way.

I replayed the call for Lorainebut she didnłt seem to take
it very seriously.

ęA crank caller with fancy technology is still just a crank
caller. I remember my brother, when he was ten years old, phoning up random
numbers on a dare, putting on a ludicrous high-pitched voice which was meant to
sound like a woman ... and telling whoever answered that he was about to be
gang-raped. Needless to say, I thought it was totally sickand extremely
immature ... I was eightbut his friends all sat around laughing their heads
off. Thirty years later, this is the equivalent.ł

ęHow can you say that? Ten-year-old boys do not own
twenty-thousand-dollar video synthesisersł

ęNo? Some might. But Iłm sure there are plenty of
forty-year-old men with the same sophisticated sense of humour.ł

ęYeah: forty-year-old psychopaths who know exactly what you
look like, where we live, where I work ...ł

We argued the point for almost twenty minutes, but we
couldnłt agree upon what the call meant, or what we should do about it. Loraine
was obviously growing impatient to get back to work, so, reluctantly, I let her
go.

I was a wreck, though. I knew Iłd get nothing done that afternoon,
so I decided to close the gallery and head for home.

Before leaving, I phoned the policeagainst Lorainełs
wishes, but as shełd said: ęYou got the call, not me. If you really want to
waste your time and theirs, I canłt stop you.ł

I was put through to a Detective Nicholson in the Communications
Crime Division, and I showed him the recording. He was sympathetic, but he made
it clear that there wasnłt much he could do. A criminal act had been
committedand a ransom demand was a serious matter, however rapidly the hoax
had been debunkedbut identifying the perpetrator would be virtually impossible.
Even if the account number quoted actually belonged to the caller, it carried
the prefix of an Orbital bank, whołd certainly refuse to disclose the name of
the owner. I could arrange to have the phone company attempt to trace any
future callsbut if the signal was routed through an Orbital nation, as it most
likely would be, the trail would stop there. An international agreement to veto
exchanges of money and data with the satellites had been drafted a decade ago,
but remained unratified; apparently, few countries could afford to forgo the
advantages of being plugged into the quasi-legal Orbital economy.

Nicholson asked me for a list of prospective enemies, but I
couldnłt bring myself to name anyone. Iłd had business disputes of various
degrees of animosity over the years, mostly with disgruntled artists whołd
taken their work elsewherebut I couldnłt honestly imagine any of the people
involved wasting their energy on such a venomousyet ultimately pettyact of
revenge.

He had one final question. ęHas your wife ever been
scanned?ł

I laughed. ęHardly. She loathes computers. Even if the cost
came down a thousandfold, shełd be the last person in the world to have it
done.ł

ęI see. Well, we appreciate your cooperation. If there are
any further incidents, donłt hesitate to get in touch.ł

As he hung up, I belatedly wished Iłd asked him: ęWhat if
she had been scanned? Why would that be a factor? Have hackers started breaking
into peoplełs scan files?ł

That was a disturbing notion ... but even if it were true,
it had no bearing on the hoax call. No such convenient, computerised description
of Loraine existed, so however the hoaxers had reconstructed her appearance,
theyłd obtained their data by other means entirely.

* * * *

I drove home on manual override, breaking the speed
limitmarginallyon five separate occasions, watching the fines add up on the
dashboard display, until the car intoned, ęOne more violation and your licence
is suspended.ł

I went straight from the garage to the studio. Loraine was
there, of course. I stood in the doorway, watching her silently, as she fussed
over a sketch. I couldnłt make out the subject, but she was working in charcoal
again. I often teased her about her anachronistic methods: ęWhy do you glorify
the faults of traditional materials? Artists in the past had no choice but to make
a virtue out of necessitybut why keep up the pretence? If charcoal on paper,
or oil paint on canvas, really is so wonderful, then describe whatever it is
you find so sublime about them to some virtual art softwareand then generate
your own virtual materials which are twice as good.ł All shełd ever say in
reply was: ęThis is what I do, this is what I like, this is what Iłm used to.
Therełs no harm in that, is there?ł

I didnłt want to disturb her, but I didnłt want to walk
away. If she noticed my presence, she gave no sign of it. I stood there and
thought: I really do love you. And I really do admire you: the way you kept
your head in the middle of

I caught myself. The middle of what? Being thrust in front
of a camera by her abductors? None of that had actually happened.

No ... but I knew Loraineand I knew that she wouldnłt have
fallen to pieces, she would have stayed in control. I could still admire her
courage and her level-headednesshowever bizarre the means by which Iłd been
reminded of those qualities.

I started to turn away, and she said, ęStay if you like. I
donłt mind you watching.ł

I took a few steps into the cluttered studio. After the
stark, cavernous spaces of the gallery, it looked very homely. ęWhat are you
working on?ł

She stood aside from the easel. The sketch was almost completed.
It showed a woman, clenched fist raised to her lips, staring straight at the
onlooker. Her expression was one of uneasy fascination, as if she was gazing at
something hypnotic, compellingand deeply troubling.

I frowned. ęItłs you, isnłt it? A self-portrait?ł It had
taken me a while to spot the resemblance, and even then, I wasnłt sure.

But Loraine said, ęYes, itłs me.ł

ęAm I allowed to ask what youłre looking at?ł

She shrugged. ęHard to say. The work in progress? Maybe itłs
a portrait of the artist caught in the act of self-portraiture.ł

ęYou should try working with a camera and a flatscreen. You
could program the stylisation software to build up a composite image of
yourselfwhile you watched the result, and reacted to it.ł

She shook her head, amused. ęWhy go to so much trouble? Why
not just frame a mirror?ł

ęA mirror? People want to see the artist revealed; they
donłt want to see themselves.ł

I wandered over and kissed her, but she barely responded. I
said, tenderly, ęIłm glad youłre safe.ł

She laughed. ęSo am I. And donłt worryI wouldnłt let anyone
kidnap me, now. I know youłd have a stroke before you had a chance to pay the
ransom.ł

I put a finger to her lips. ęItłs not funny. I was
terrifieddonłt you believe me? I didnłt know what they might do. I thought
they were going to torture you.ł

ęHow? By voodoo?ł She backed out of my embrace, then walked
over to the workbench. The wall above was covered with her sketchesłfailuresł
which she kept on show for ęsalutary reasonsł.

She picked up a paperknife from the bench and made two diagonal
slashes in one of the drawingsan old self-portrait, one Iłd liked very much.

Then she turned to me and said, in mock amazement, ęThat
didnłt hurt a bit.ł

* * * *

I managed to keep myself from broaching the subject again until
late in the evening. We were sitting in the living room, huddled together in
front of the fireplaceready for bed, but reluctant to move from this cosy spot
(even though a few words to the house could have reproduced the very same
hearthside warmth, anywhere at all).

ęWhat worries me,ł I said, ęis that someone must have
followed you around with a cameralong enough to capture your face, your voice,
your mannerisms ...ł

Loraine scowled. ęMy what? This thing didnłt even speak a
whole sentence. And they need not have followed me anywherethey probably just
intercepted a phone call I made, and based it all on that. They pushed their
own call straight through your office defences, didnłt they? Theyłre probably
just a bunch of bored hackersand for all we know, they could live on the other
side of the planet.ł

ęMaybe. But not one phone calldozens. They must have gathered
a lot of data, however they did it. Iłve talked to artists who do simulation
portraitsten or twenty seconds of action, based on hours of sittingsand they
say itłs still not easy to fool anyone who really knows the subject. OK, I
should have been sceptical ... but why wasnłt I? Because it was so convincing.
Because it was exactly how I would have imagined youł

She shifted in my arms, irritably. ęIt was nothing like me.
It was melodramatic, computerised overactingand they knew it, which is why
they kept it so short.ł

I shook my head. ęNobody can judge an impersonation of
themself. Youłll have to take my word for it. I know, it only lasted a few
secondsbut I swear, they got it right.ł

As the conversation dragged on into the early hours of the
morning, Loraine stood her groundand I had to concede that there was nothing
much we could actually do to make our lives any safer, whether or not the
caller harboured plans to inflict real physical harm. The house already had
state-of-the-art security hardware, and Loraine and I both carried surgically
implanted radio alarm beacons. Even I balked at the idea of hiring armed bodyguards.

I had to concede, too, that no serious aspiring kidnappers
would have alerted us to their intentions with a hoax call.

Finally, wearily (as if it had to be settled, there and
then, if we werenłt to keep arguing until dawn), I caved in. Maybe Iłd overreacted.
Maybe I just resented having been fooled. Maybe the whole thing had been
nothing but a prank, after all.

However sick. However technically accomplished. However
apparently pointless.

* * * *

When we slumped into bed, Loraine fell asleep almost at
once, but I lay awake for hours. The call itself finally stopped monopolising
my thoughtsbut as soon as Iłd put it out of my mind, another set of concerns
came floating up to take its place.

As Iłd told the detective, Loraine had never been scanned. I
had, though. High-resolution imaging techniques had been used to generate a
detailed map of my body, down to the cellular levela map which included, among
other things, a description of every neuron in my brain, every synaptic
connection. I had purchased a kind of immortality: whatever happened to me, the
most recent snapshot of my body could always be resurrected as a Copy: an
elaborate computer model, embedded in a virtual reality. A model which, at the
very least, would act and think like me: it would share all my memories, my
beliefs, my goals, my desires. Currently, such models ran slower than real
time, their virtual environments were restrictive, and the telepresence robots
meant to enable interaction with the physical world were a clumsy joke ... but
all of the technology was rapidly improving.

My mother had already been resurrected in the supercomputer
known as Coney Island. My father had died before the process had become
available. Lorainełs parents were both still aliveand unscanned.

Iłd been scanned twice, the last time three years before. I
was long overdue for an updatebut that would have meant facing up to the
realities of my posthumous future, all over again. Loraine had never condemned
me for my choice, and the prospect of my virtual resurrection didnłt seem to
bother her at allbut shełd made it clear that she wouldnłt be joining me.

The argument was so familiar that I could run through it all
in my head, without even waking her.

LORAINE: I donłt want to be imitated by a computer after Iłm
dead. What use would that be to me?

DAVID: Donłt knock imitationlife consists of imitation.
Every organ in your body is constantly being rebuilt in its own image. Every
cell that divides is dying and replacing itself with imposters. Your body
doesnłt contain a single atom you were born withso what gives you your
identity? Itłs a pattern of information, not a physical thing. And if a
computer started imitating your bodyinstead of your body imitating itselfthe
only real difference would be that the computer would make fewer mistakes.

LORAINE: If thatłs what you believe ... fine. But itłs not
the way I see things. And Iłm as frightened of death as anyonebut being
scanned wouldnłt make me feel any better. It wouldnłt make me feel immortal; it
wouldnłt comfort me at all. So why should I do it? Give me one good reason.

And I never could bring myself to say (not even then, in the
safety of my imaginings): Do it because I donłt want to lose you. Do it for me.

* * * *

I spent the next morning dealing with the curator for a
large insurance company, who was looking for a change of decor for a few
hundred lobbies, elevators, and boardrooms, real and virtual. I had no trouble
selling her some suitably dignified electronic wallpaper, by some suitably revered
young talents.

Some starving artists put low-resolution roughs of their
work into network galleries, hoping to strike a compromise between a version so
crude as to be off-putting, and one so appealing as to make buying the real
thing superfluous. Nobody will pay for art unseenand in the network galleries,
to see was to own.

Physical galleriestightly runremained the best solution.
All my visitors were screened for microcameras and visual cortex taps; nobody
left the building with anything more than an impression, without paying for it.
If it had been lawful, I would have demanded blood samples, and refused entry
to anyone with a genetic predisposition to eidetic memory.

In the afternoon, as always, I viewed the work of aspiring exhibitors.
I finished watching the Kreyszig piece which had been interrupted the day
before, and then started sifting through a great heap of lesser submissions.
The process of deciding what would or wouldnłt be acceptable to my corporate
clientele required no intellectual or emotional exertion; after two decades in
the business, it had become a purely mechanical actas uninvolving, most of the
time, as standing at a conveyor belt sorting nuts from bolts. My aesthetic
judgement hadnłt been bluntedif anything, it had become more finely honedbut
only the most exceptional work evoked anything more from me than ahighly
astute, unfailingly accurateassessment of marketability.

When the image of the ękidnapperł broke through on to the
screen again, I wasnłt surprised; the instant it happened, I realised that Iłd
been waiting for it all afternoon. And although I grew tense in anticipation of
the unpleasantness to follow, at the same time, the opportunity of discovering
more about the callerłs true motives was, undeniably, welcome. I couldnłt be
fooled again, so what did I have to fear? Knowing that Loraine was safe, I
could watch with a sense of detachment, and try to extract some clue as to what
was really going on.

The mask said, ęWe have your wife/Transfer half a million dollars/Into
this account/If you donłt want her to/Suffer.ł

The synthetic image of Loraine reappeared. I laughed
uneasily. What did these people expect me to believe? I surveyed the picture
coolly. What I could see of the dingy ęroomł behind ęherł badly needed repaintinganother
laborious touch of ęrealismł to contrast with the background for the other
mask. This time, ęsheł didnłt seem to have been strugglingand there were no
signs that ęsheł had been physically ill-treated (it even looked like ęsheł had
had a chance to wash)but there was an uncertainty in ęherł expression, a hint
of subdued panic on ęherł face, which hadnłt been there before.

Then she looked straight into the camera and said, ęDavid?
They wonłt let me see youbut I know youłre there. And I know you must be doing
all you can to get me out of thisbut please hurry. Please, pay them the money
as soon as you can.ł

My veneer of objectivity shattered. I knew it was just an
elaborate piece of computer animationbut listening to it ępleadingł with me
this way was almost as distressing as the call Iłd thought was real. It looked
like Loraine, it sounded like Loraine; every word and gesture rang true. I
couldnłt throw a switch inside my head and turn off all my responses to the
sight of someone I loved, begging for her life.

I covered my face and shouted, ęYou sick fuckis this how
you get off? Do you think Iłm going to pay you to stop this? Iłll just get the
phone fixed so you canłt break throughthen you can go back to running
interactive snuff movies, and fucking your own corpse.ł

There was no reply, and when I looked at the screen again,
the call was over.

I waited until Iłd stopped shakingmostly with angerthen I
called Detective Nicolson, for what that was worth. I gave him a copy of the
call for his files; he thanked me. I told myself, optimistically: with computer
analysis of modus operandi, every piece of evidence helps; if the same caller
goes on to do the same thing to other people, the information collected might
eventually coalesce into some kind of incriminating profile. The psychopathic
piece of shit might even get caught one day.

Then I phoned the company which had supplied the office
software, and explained what had been going onleaving out details of the
subject matter of the nuisance calls.

Their troubleshooter asked me to authorise a diagnostic
link; I did so. She vanished for a minute or two. I thought: it will be
something simple, and easily fixedsome trivial mistake in the security set-up.

The woman came on-screen again, looking wary.

ęThe software all seems finetherełs no evidence of tampering.
And no evidence of unauthorised access. How long since you changed the
breakthrough password?ł

ęAh. I havenłt. I havenłt changed anything since the system
was installed.ł

ęSo itłs been the same for the last five years? Thatłs not
good practice.ł

I nodded repentantly, but said, ęI donłt see how anyone
could have discovered it. Even if they tried a few thousand random wordsł

ęYou would have been notified on the fourth wrong guess. And
therełs a voiceprint check. Passwords are usually stolen by eavesdropping.ł

ęWell, the only other person who knows it is my wifeand I
donłt think shełs ever even used it.ł

ęThere are two authorised voiceprints on file. Whose is the
other one?ł

ęMine. In case I had to call the office management system
from home. Iłve never done that, thoughso I doubt the password has been spoken
out loud since the day we installed the software.ł

ęWell, therełs a log of both breakthrough callsł

ęThatłs no help. I record all my calls, Iłve already given
copies to the police.ł

ęNo, Iłm talking about something else. For security reasons,
the initial part of the callwhen the password is actually spokenis stored
separately, in encrypted form. If you want to view it, Iłll tell you howbut youłll
have to speak the password yourself, to authorise the decoding.ł

She explained the procedure, then went off-line. She didnłt
look happy at all. Of course, she didnłt know that the caller had been
imitating Loraine; she probably thought I was about to ędiscoverł that the
threatening calls were coming from my wife.

She was wrong, of coursebut so was I.

Five years is a long time to remember anything so trivial. I
had to make three guesses before I got the password right.

I steeled myself for one more glimpse of the fake Loraine,
but the screen remained darkand the voice that said ęBenvenutoł was my own.

* * * *

When I arrived home, Loraine was still working, so I left
her undisturbed. I went to my study and checked the terminal for mail. There
was nothing new, but I scrolled back through the list of past items, until I
came to the most recent video postcard from my mother, which had arrived about
a month before. Because of the time-rate difference, talking face-to-face was
arduous, so we kept in touch by sending each other these recorded monologues.

I told the terminal to replay it. There was something I half
remembered at the end, something I wanted to hear again.

My mother had been slowly unageing her appearance ever since
her resurrection in Coney Island; she now looked about thirty. Shełd been
working on her house, toowhich had gradually mutated and expanded from a
near-perfect model of her last real-world home, into a kind of
eighteenth-century French mansion, all carved doors, Louis XV chairs, ornate
wall hangings, and chandeliers.

She enquired dutifully about my health and Lorainełs, the gallery,
Lorainełs drawings. She made a few acerbic comments on current political
eventsboth inside and outside the Island. Her youthful appearance, her opulent
surroundings, werenłt acts of self-deception; she was not an old woman any
more, she did not live in a four-room apartment. Pretending that she had no
choice but to mimic her last few years of organic life would have been absurd.
She knew exactly who and where she wasand she had every intention of making
the best of it.

Iłd planned to fast-forward through the small talk, but I
didnłt. I sat and listened to every word, transfixed by the image of this
nonexistent womanłs face, trying to make sense of my feelings for her, trying
to untangle the roots of my empathy, ray loyalty, my love ... for this pattern
of information copied from a body now long decayed.

Finally, she said, ęYou keep asking me if Iłm happy. If Iłm
ever lonely. If Iłve found someone.ł She hesitated, then shook her head. ęIłm
not lonely. You know your father died before this technology was perfected. And
you know how much I loved him. Well, I still do; I still love him. Hełs not
gone, any more than I am. He lives on in my memoryand thatłs enough. Here of
all places, thatłs enough.ł

The first time Iłd heard these words, Iłd thought shełd been
speaking in uncharacteristic platitudes. Now, I thought I understood the barely
intentional hint behind her reassurances, and a chill passed through me.

He lives on in my memory.

Here of all places, thatłs enough.

Of course they would have kept it quiet; the organic world
wasnłt ready to hear thisand Copies could afford to be patient.

That was why I hadnłt yet heard from my motherłs companion.
He could wait however many decades it took for me to come to the Island ęin
personłand thatłs when hełd see me ęagainł.

* * * *

As the serving trolley unloaded the evening meal on to the
dining room table, Loraine asked, ęAny more high-tech heavy breathing today?ł

I shook my head slowly, over-emphatically, feeling like an
adultereror worse. Inside, I was drowning, but if anything showed, Loraine
gave no sign that shełd noticed.

She said, ęWell, itłs hardly the kind of trick you can play
twice on the same victim, is it?ł

ęNo.ł

In bed, I stared out into the suffocating darkness, trying
to decide what I was going to do ... although the kidnappers no doubt knew the
answer to that alreadyand theyłd hardly have gone ahead with their plan if
they hadnłt believed Iłd pay them, in the end.

Everything made sense now. Far too much sense. Loraine had
no scan filebut theyłd broken into mine. To what end? What use is a manłs
soul? Well, therełs no need to guess, it will tell you. Extracting the office
password would have been the least of it; they must have run my Copy through a
few hundred virtual scenarios, and selected the one most likely to produce the
largest return on their investment.

A few hundred resurrections, a few hundred different
delusions of extortion, a few hundred deaths. I didnłt carethe notion was far
too bizarre, far too alien to move mewhich was probably why there hadnłt been
a very different ransom demand: ęWe have your Copy ...ł

And the fake Lorainenot even a Copy of the real woman, but
a construct based entirely on my knowledge of her, my memories, my mental
imageswhat empathy, what loyalty, what love did I owe her?

The kidnappers might not have fully reproduced the
memory-resurrection technique invented in the Island. I didnłt know what theyłd
actually created, whatif anythingtheyłd ębrought to lifeł. How elaborate was
the computer model behind ęherł words, ęherł facial expressions, ęherł
gestures? Was it complex enough to experience the emotions it was
portrayinglike a Copy? Or was it merely complex enough to sway my
emotionscomplex enough to manipulate me, without feeling a thing?

How could I know, one way or the otherhow could I ever
tell? I took the ęhumanitył of my mother for grantedand perhaps she in turn
did the same for my resurrected unscanned father, plucked from her virtual
brainbut what would it take to convince me that this pattern of information
was someone I should care about, someone who desperately needed my help?

I lay in the dark, beside the flesh-and-blood Loraine, and
tried to imagine what the computer simulation of my mental image of her would
be saying in a monthłs time.

IMITATION LORAINE: David? They tell me youłre there, they
tell me you can hear me. If thatłs true ... I donłt understand. Why havenłt you
paid them? Is something wrong? Are the police telling you not to pay?
(Silence.) Iłm all right, Iłm hanging onbut I donłt understand whatłs
happening. (Long silence.) Theyłre not treating me too badly. Iłm sick of the
food, but Iłll live. Theyłve given me some paper to draw on, and Iłve done a
few sketches ...

Even if I was never convinced, even if I was never certain,
Iłd always be wondering: What if Iłm wrong? What if shełs conscious after all?
What if shełs every bit as human as Iłll be when Iłm resurrectedand Iłve
betrayed her, abandoned her?

I couldnłt live with that. The possibility, and the
appearance, would be enough to tear me apart.

And they knew it.

* * * *

My financial management software laboured all night to free
the money from investments. At nine ołclock the next morning, I transferred
half a million dollars into the specified account, and then sat in my office
waiting to see what would happen. I considered changing the breakthrough
password back to the old ęBenvenutołbut then decided that if they really had
my scan file at their disposal, theyłd have no trouble deducing my new choice.

At ten past nine, the kidnapperłs mask appeared on the giant
screenand said bluntly, without poetic pretensions, ęThe same again, in two
yearsł time.ł

I nodded. ęYes.ł I could raise it by then, without Loraine
knowing. Just.

ęSo long as you keep paying, wełll keep her frozen. No time,
no experienceno distress.ł

ęThank you.ł I hesitated, then forced myself to speak. ęBut
in the end, when Iłmł

ęWhat?ł

ęWhen Iłm resurrected ... youłll let her join me?ł

The mask smiled magnanimously. ęOf course.ł

* * * *

I donłt know how Iłll begin to explain everything to the
imitation Loraineor what shełll do when she learns her true nature.
Resurrection in the Island may be her idea of Hellbut what choice did I have?
Leaving her to rot, for as long as the kidnappers believed her suffering might
still move me? Or buying her freedomand then never running her again?

When wełre together in the Island, she can come to her own
conclusions, make her own decisions. For now, all I can do is gaze up at the
sky and hope that she really is safe in her unthinking stasis.

For now, I have a life to live with the flesh-and-blood
Loraine. I have to tell her the truth, of courseand I run through the whole
conversation, beside her in the dark, night after night.

DAVID: How could I not care about her? How could I let her
suffer? How could I abandon someone who wasliterallybuilt out of all my
reasons for loving you?

LORAINE: An imitation of an imitation? There was no one
suffering, no one waiting to be saved. No one to be rescued, or abandoned.

DAVID: Am I no one? Are you no one? Because thatłs all we
can ever have of each other: an imitation, a Copy. All we can ever know about
are the portraits of each other inside our own skulls.

LORAINE: Is that all you think I am? An idea in your head?

DAVID: No! But if itłs all I have, then itłs all I can
honestly love. Donłt you see that?

And, miraculously, she does. She finally understands.

Night after night.

I close my eyes and fall asleep, relieved.

Learning to Be Me

I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a
small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me.

Microscopic spiders had woven a fine golden web through my
brain, so that the jewelłs teacher could listen to the whisper of my thoughts.
The jewel itself eavesdropped on my senses, and read the chemical messages
carried in my bloodstream; it saw, heard, smelt, tasted and felt the world
exactly as I did, while the teacher monitored its thoughts and compared them
with my own. Whenever the jewelłs thoughts werewrong, the teacher-faster than
thought-rebuilt the jewel slightly, altering it this way and that, seeking out
the changes that would make its thoughts correct.

Why? So that when I could no longer be me, the jewel could
do it for me.

I thought: if hearing that makesme feel strange and giddy,
how must it make thejewel feel? Exactly the same, I reasoned; it doesnłt know
itłs the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must feel, it too reasons: �Exactly
the same; it doesnłt know itłs the jewel, and it too wonders how the jewel must
feel ..."

And it too wonders

(I knew, becauseI wondered)

it too wonders whether itłs the real me, or whether in fact
itłs only the jewel thatłs learning to be me.

* * * *

As a scornful twelve-year-old, I would have mocked such childish
concerns. Everybody had the jewel, save the members of obscure religious sects,
and dwelling upon the strangeness of it struck me as unbearably pretentious.
The jewel was the jewel, a mundane fact of life, as ordinary as excrement. My
friends and I told bad jokes about it, the same way we told bad jokes about
sex, to prove to each other how blase we were about the whole idea.

Yet we werenłt quite as jaded and imperturbable as we pretended
to be. one day when we were all loitering in the park, up to nothing in
particular, one of the gang-whose name Iłve forgotten, but who has stuck in my
mind as always being far too clever for his own good-asked each of us in turn: �Whoare
you? The jewel, or the real human?" We all replied-unthinkingly, indignantly�The
real human!" When the last of us had answered, he cackled and said, �Well, Iłm
not.Iłm the jewel. So you can eat my shit, you losers, becauseyoułll all get
flushed down the cosmic toilet-but me, Iłm gonna live forever."

We beat him until he bled.

* * * *

By the time I was fourteen, despite-or perhaps because
of-the fact that the jewel was scarcely mentioned in my teaching machinełs dull
curriculum, Iłd given the question a great deal more thought. The pedantically
correct answer when asked �Are you the jewel or the human?" had to be �The
human"because only the human brain was physically able to reply. The jewel
received input from the senses, but had no control over the body, and its
intended reply coincided with what was actually said only because the device
was a perfect imitation of the brain. To tell the outside world �I am the jewel"with
speech, with writing, or with any other method involving the body-was patently
false (although tothink it to oneself was not ruled out by this line of
reasoning).

However, in a broader sense, I decided that the question was
simply misguided. So long as the jewel and the human brain shared the same
sensory input, and so long as the teacher kept their thoughts in perfect step,
there was onlyone person,one identity,one consciousness. This one person merely
happened to have the (highly desirable) property thatif either the jewelor the
human brain were to be destroyed, he or she would survive unimpaired. People
had always had two lungs and two kidneys, and for almost a century, many had
lived with two hearts. This was the same: a matter of redundancy; a matter of
robustness, no more.

That was the year that my parents decided I was mature
enough to be told that they had both undergone the switch-three years before. I
pretended to take the news calmly, but I hated them passionately for not having
told me at the time. They had disguised their stay in hospital with lies about
a business trip overseas. For three years I had been living with jewel-heads,
and they hadnłt even told me. It wasexactly what I would have expected of them.

�We didnłt seem any different to you, did we?" asked my
mother.

�No," I said-truthfully, but burning with resentment nonetheless.

�Thatłs why we didnłt tell you," said my father. �If youłd
known wełd switched, at the time, you might haveimagined that wełd changed in
some way. By waiting until now to tell you, wełve made it easier for you to
convince yourself that wełre still the same people wełve always been." He put
an arm around me and squeezed me. I almost screamed out, �Donłttouch me!" but I
remembered in time that Iłd convinced myself that the jewel was No Big Deal.

I should have guessed that theyłd done it, long before they
confessed; after all, Iłd known for years that most people underwent the switch
in their early thirties. By then, itłs downhill for the organic brain, and it
would be foolish to have the jewel mimic this decline. So, the nervous system
is rewired; the reins of the body are handed over to the jewel, and the teacher
is deactivated. For a week, the outward-bound impulses from the brain are
compared with those from the jewel, but by this time the jewel is a perfect
copy, and no differences are ever detected.

The brain is removed, discarded, and replaced with a spongy
tissue-cultured object, brain-shaped down to the level of the finest
capillaries, but no more capable of thought than a lung or a kidney. This
mock-brain removes exactly as much oxygen and glucose from the blood as the real
thing, and faithfully performs a number of crude, essential biochemical
functions. In time, like all flesh, it will perish and need to be replaced.

The jewel, however, is immortal. Short of being dropped into
a nuclear fireball, it will endure for a billion years.

My parents were machines. My parents were gods. It was nothing
special. I hated them.

* * * *

When I was sixteen, I fell in love, and became a child
again.

Spending warm nights on the beach with Eva, I couldnłt believe
that a mere machine could ever feel the way I did. I knew full well that if my
jewel had been given control of my body, it would have spoken the very same
words as I had, and executed with equal tenderness and clumsiness my every
awkward caress-but I couldnłt accept that its inner life was as rich, as
miraculous, as joyful as mine. Sex, however pleasant, I could accept as a
purely mechanical function, but there was something between us (or so I believed)
that had nothing to do with lust, nothing to do with words, nothing to do with any
tangible action of our bodies that some spy in the sand dunes with parabolic
microphone and infrared binoculars might have discerned. After we made love, wełd
gaze up in silence at the handful of visible stars, our souls conjoined in a secret
place that no crystalline computer could hope to reach in a billion years of
striving. (If Iłd saidthat to my sensible, smutty, twelve-year-old self, he
would have laughed until he haemorrhaged.)

I knew by then that the jewelłs �teacher" didnłt monitor
every single neuron in the brain. That would have been impractical, both in
terms of handling the data, and because of the sheer physical intrusion into
the tissue. Someone-or-otherłs theorem said that sampling certain critical
neurons was almost as good as sampling the lot, and-given some very reasonable
assumptions that nobody could disprove-bounds on the errors involved could be
established with mathematical rigour.

At first, I declared thatwithin these errors, however small,
lay the difference between brain and jewel, between human and machine, between
love and its imitation. Eva, however, soon pointed out that it was absurd to
make a radical, qualitative distinction on the basis of the sampling density;
if the next model teacher sampled more neurons and halved the error rate, would
its jewel then be �half-way" between �human" and �machine?" In theory-and
eventually, in practice-the error rate could be made smaller than any number I
cared to name. Did I really believe that a discrepancy of one in a billion made
any difference at all-when every human being was permanently losing thousands
of neurons every day, by natural attrition?

She was right, of course, but I soon found another, more
plausible, defence for my position. Living neurons, I argued, had far more
internal structure than the crude optical switches that served the same
function in the jewelłs so-called �neural net." That neurons fired or did not
fire reflected only one level of their behaviour; who knew what the subtleties
of biochemistry-the quantum mechanics of the specific organic molecules
involved-contributed to the nature of human consciousness? Copying the abstract
neural topology wasnłt enough. Sure, the jewel could pass the fatuous Turing
test-no outside observer could tell it from a human-but that didnłt prove
thatbeing a jewel felt the same asbeing human.

Eva asked, �Does that mean youłll never switch? Youłll have
your jewel removed? Youłll let yourselfdie when your brain starts to rot?"

�Maybe," I said. �Better to die at ninety or a hundred than
kill myself at thirty, and have some machine marching around, taking my place,
pretending to be me."

�How do you knowI havenłt switched?" she asked, provocatively.
�How do you know that Iłm not just ępretending to be meł?"

�I know you havenłt switched," I said, smugly. �I justknow."

�How? Iłd look the same. Iłd talk the same. Iłd act the same
in every way. People are switching younger, these days.So how do you know I
havenłt?"

I turned onto my side towards her, and gazed into her eyes. �Telepathy.
Magic. The communion of souls."

My twelve-year-old self started snickering, but by then I
knew exactly how to drive him away.

* * * *

At nineteen, although I was studying finance, I took an undergraduate
philosophy unit. The Philosophy Department, however, apparently had nothing to
say about the Ndoli Device, more commonly known as �the jewel." (Ndoli had in
fact called it �thedual," but the accidental, homophonic nick-name had stuck.)
They talked about Plato and Descartes and Marx, they talked about St. Augustine
and-when feeling particularly modern and adventurous-Sartre, but if theyłd
heard of Godel, Turing, Hamsun or Kim, they refused to admit it. Out of sheer
frustration, in an essay on Descartes I suggested that the notion of human
consciousness as �software" that could be �implemented" equally well on an
organic brain or an optical crystal was in fact a throwback to Cartesian
dualism: for �software" read �soul." My tutor superimposed a neat, diagonal,
luminous red line over each paragraph that dealt with this idea, and wrote in
the margin (in vertical, bold-face, 20-point Times, with a contemptuous 2 Hertz
flash): IRRELEVANT!

I quit philosophy and enrolled in a unit of optical crystal
engineering for non-specialists. I learnt a lot of solid-state quantum mechanics.
I learnt a lot of fascinating mathematics. I learnt that a neural net is a
device used only for solving problems that are far too hard to beunderstood. A
sufficiently flexible neural net can be configured by feedback to mimic almost
any system-to produce the same patterns of output from the same patterns of
input-but achieving this sheds no light whatsoever on the nature of the system
being emulated.

�Understanding," the lecturer told us, �is an overrated
concept. Nobody reallyunderstands how a fertilized egg turns into a human. What
should we do? Stop having children until ontogenesis can be described by a set
of differential equations?"

I had to concede that she had a point there.

It was clear to me by then that nobody had the answers I
craved-and I was hardly likely to come up with them myself; my intellectual
skills were, at best, mediocre. It came down to a simple choice: I could waste
time fretting about the mysteries of consciousness, or, like everybody else, I
could stop worrying and get on with my life.

* * * *

When I married Daphne, at twenty-three, Eva was a distant
memory, and so was any thought of the communion of souls. Daphne was
thirty-one, an executive in the merchant bank that had hired me during my PhD,
and everyone agreed that the marriage would benefit my career. What she got out
of it, I was never quite sure. Maybe she actually liked me. We had an agreeable
sex life, and we comforted each other when we were down, the way any
kind-hearted person would comfort an animal in distress.

Daphne hadnłt switched. She put it off, month after month, inventing
ever more ludicrous excuses, and I teased her as if Iłd never had reservations
of my own.

�Iłm afraid," she confessed one night. �What if I die when
it happens-what if all thatłs left is a robot, a puppet, athing? I donłt want
todie."

Talk like that made me squirm, but I hid my feelings. �Suppose
you had a stroke," I said glibly, �which destroyed a small part of your brain.
Suppose the doctors implanted a machine to take over the functions which that
damaged region had performed. Would you still be ęyourselfł?"

�Of course."

�Then if they did it twice, or ten times, or a thousand
times"

�That doesnłt necessarily follow."

�Oh? At what magic percentage, then, would you stop being ęyouł?"

She glared at me. �All the old clich�ed arguments"

�Fault them, then, if theyłre so old and clich�ed."

She started to cry. �I donłt have to. Fuck you! Iłm scared
to death, and you donłt give a shit!"

I took her in my arms. �Sssh. Iłm sorry. But everyone does
it sooner or later. You mustnłt be afraid. Iłm here. I love you." The words
might have been a recording, triggered automatically by the sight of her tears.

�Will you do it? With me?"

I went cold. �What?"

�Have the operation, on the same day? Switch when I switch?"

Lots of couples did that. Like my parents. Sometimes, no
doubt, it was a matter of love, commitment, sharing. Other times, Iłm sure, it
was more a matter of neither partner wishing to be an unswitched person living
with a jewel-head.

I was silent for a while, then I said, �Sure."

In the months that followed, all of Daphnełs fears-which Iłd
mocked as �childish" and �superstitious"rapidly began to make perfect sense,
and my own �rational" arguments came to sound abstract and hollow. I backed out
at the last minute; I refused the anaesthetic, and fled the hospital.

Daphne went ahead, not knowing I had abandoned her.

I never saw her again. I couldnłt face her; I quit my job
and left town for a year, sickened by my cowardice and betrayal-but at the same
time euphoric that I hadescaped.

She brought a suit against me, but then dropped it a few
days later, and agreed, through her lawyers, to an uncomplicated divorce.
Before the divorce came through, she sent me a brief letter:

* * * *

There was nothing to fear, after all. Iłm exactly the person
Iłve always been. Putting it off was insane; now that Iłve taken the leap of
faith, I couldnłt be more at ease.

Your loving robot wife, Daphne

* * * *

By the time I was twenty-eight, almost everyone I knew had
switched. All my friends from university had done it. Colleagues at my new job,
as young as twenty-one, had done it. Eva, I heard through a friend of a friend,
had done it six years before.

The longer I delayed, the harder the decision became. I
could talk to a thousand people who had switched, I could grill my closest
friends for hours about their childhood memories and their most private
thoughts, but however compelling their words, I knew that the Ndoli Device had
spent decades buried in their heads, learning to fake exactly this kind of
behaviour.

Of course, I always acknowledged that it was equally impossible
to becertain that even anotherunswitched person had an inner life in any way
the same as my own-but it didnłt seem unreasonable to be more inclined to give
the benefit of the doubt to people whose skulls hadnłt yet been scraped out
with a curette.

I drifted apart from my friends, I stopped searching for a
lover. I took to working at home (I put in longer hours and my productivity
rose, so the company didnłt mind at all). I couldnłt bear to be with people
whose humanity I doubted.

I wasnłt by any means unique. Once I started looking, I
found dozens of organisations exclusively for people who hadnłt switched,
ranging from a social club that might as easily have been for divorcees, to a
paranoid, paramilitary �resistance front," who thought they were living
outInvasion of the Body Snatchers. Even the members of the social club, though,
struck me as extremely maladjusted; many of them shared my concerns, almost
precisely, but my own ideas from other lips sounded obsessive and
ill-conceived. I was briefly involved with an unswitched woman in her early
forties, but all we ever talked about was our fear of switching. It was
masochistic, it was suffocating, it was insane.

I decided to seek psychiatric help, but I couldnłt bring
myself to see a therapist who had switched. When I finally found one who hadnłt,
she tried to talk me into helping her blow up a power station, to let THEM know
who was boss.

Iłd lie awake for hours every night, trying to convince
myself, one way or the other, but the longer I dwelt upon the issues, the more
tenuous and elusive they became. Who was �I," anyway? What did it mean that �I"
was �still alive," when my personality was utterly different from that of two
decades before? My earlier selves were as good as dead-I remembered them no
more clearly than I remembered contemporary acquaintances-yet this loss caused
me only the slightest discomfort. Maybe the destruction of my organic brain
would be the merest hiccup, compared to all the changes that Iłd been through
in my life so far.

Or maybe not. Maybe it would be exactly like dying.

Sometimes Iłd end up weeping and trembling, terrified and
desperately lonely, unable to comprehend-and yet unable to cease
contemplating-the dizzying prospect of my own nonexistence. At other times, Iłd
simply grow �healthily" sick of the whole tedious subject. Sometimes I felt
certain that the nature of the jewelłs inner life was the most important
question humanity could ever confront. At other times, my qualms seemed fey and
laughable. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people switched, and the world
apparently went on as always; surely that fact carried more weight than any
abstruse philosophical argument?

Finally, I made an appointment for the operation. I thought,
what is there to lose? Sixty more years of uncertainty and paranoia? If the
human race was replacing itself with clockwork automata, I was better off dead;
I lacked the blind conviction to join the psychotic underground-who, in any
case, were tolerated by the authorities only so long as they remained
ineffectual. On the other hand, if all my fears were unfounded-if my sense of
identity could survive the switch as easily as it had already survived such
traumas as sleeping and waking, the constant death of brain cells, growth,
experience, learning and forgetting-then I would gain not only eternal life,
but an end to my doubts and my alienation.

* * * *

I was shopping for food one Sunday morning, two months before
the operation was scheduled to take place, flicking through the images of an
on-line grocery catalogue, when a mouth-watering shot of the latest variety of
apple caught my fancy. I decided to order half a dozen. I didnłt, though.
Instead, I hit the key which displayed the next item. My mistake, I knew, was
easily remedied; a single keystroke could take me back to the apples. The
screen showed pears, oranges, grapefruit. I tried to look down to see what my
clumsy fingers were up to, but my eyes remained fixed on the screen.

I panicked. I wanted to leap to my feet, but my legs would
not obey me. I tried to cry out, but I couldnłt make a sound. I didnłt feel
injured, I didnłt feel weak. Was I paralysed? Brain-damaged? I could stillfeel
my fingers on the keypad, the soles of my feet on the carpet, my back against
the chair.

I watched myself order pineapples. I felt myself rise,
stretch, and walk calmly from the room. In the kitchen, I drank a glass of
water. I should have been trembling, choking, breathless; the cool liquid
flowed smoothly down my throat, and I didnłt spill a drop.

I could only think of one explanation:I had switched. Spontaneously.
The jewel had taken over, while my brain was still alive; all my wildest
paranoid fears had come true.

While my body went ahead with an ordinary Sunday morning, I
was lost in a claustrophobic delirium of helplessness. The fact that everything
I did was exactly what I had planned to do gave me no comfort. I caught a train
to the beach, I swam for half an hour; I might as well have been running amok
with an axe, or crawling naked down the street, painted with my own excrement
and howling like a wolf.Iłd lost control. My body had turned into a living
strait-jacket, and I couldnłt struggle, I couldnłt scream, I couldnłt even
close my eyes. I saw my reflection, faintly, in a window on the train, and I
couldnłt begin to guess what the mind that ruled that bland, tranquil face was
thinking.

Swimming was like some sense-enhanced, holographic nightmare;
I was a volitionless object, and the perfect familiarity of the signals from my
body only made the experience more horriblywrong. My arms had no right to the
lazy rhythm of their strokes; I wanted to thrash about like a drowning man, I
wanted to show the world my distress.

It was only when I lay down on the beach and closed my eyes
that I began to think rationally about my situation.

The switchcouldnłt happen �spontaneously." The idea was absurd.
Millions of nerve fibres had to be severed and spliced, by an army of tiny
surgical robots which werenłt even present in my brain-which werenłt due to be
injected for another two months. Without deliberate intervention, the Ndoli
Device was utterly passive, unable to do anything buteavesdrop. No failure of
the jewel or the teacher could possibly take control of my body away from my
organic brain.

Clearly, there had been a malfunction-but my first guess had
been wrong, absolutely wrong.

I wish I could have donesomething, when the understanding
hit me. I should have curled up, moaning and screaming, ripping the hair from
my scalp, raking my flesh with my fingernails. Instead, I lay flat on my back
in the dazzling sunshine. There was an itch behind my right knee, but I was,
apparently, far too lazy to scratch it.

Oh, I ought to have managed, at the very least, a good,
solid bout of hysterical laughter, when I realised that I was the jewel.

The teacher had malfunctioned; it was no longer keeping me
aligned with the organic brain. I hadnłt suddenly become powerless; I hadalways
been powerless. My will to act upon �my" body, upon the world, hadalways gone
straight into a vacuum, and it was only because I had been ceaselessly
manipulated, �corrected" by the teacher, that my desires had ever coincided
with the actions that seemed to be mine.

There are a million questions I could ponder, a million
ironies I could savour, butI mustnłt. I need to focus all my energy in one
direction. My time is running out.

When I enter hospital and the switch takes place, if the
nerve impulses I transmit to the body are not exactly in agreement with those
from the organic brain, the flaw in the teacher will be discovered.And
rectified. The organic brain has nothing to fear;his continuity will be
safeguarded, treated as precious, sacrosanct. There will be no question as to
which of us will be allowed to prevail.I will be made to conform, once again.I
will be �corrected."I will be murdered.

Perhaps it is absurd to be afraid. Looked at one way, Iłve
been murdered every microsecond for the last twenty-eight years. Looked at another
way, Iłve only existed for the seven weeks that have now passed since the
teacher failed, and the notion of my separate identity came to mean anything at
all-and in one more week this aberration, this nightmare, will be over. Two
months of misery; why should I begrudge losing that, when Iłm on the verge of
inheriting eternity? Except that it wonłt beI who inherits it, since that two
months of misery is all that defines me.

The permutations of intellectual interpretation are endless,
but ultimately, I can only act upon my desperate will to survive. I donłtfeel
like an aberration, a disposable glitch. How can I possibly hope to survive? I
must conform-of my own free will. I must choose to make myselfappear identical
to that which they would force me to become.

After twenty-eight years, surely I am still close enough to
him to carry off the deception. If I study every clue that reaches me through
our shared senses, surely I can put myself in his place, forget, temporarily,
the revelation of my separateness, and force myself back into synch.

It wonłt be easy. He met a woman on the beach, the day I
came into being. Her name is Cathy. Theyłve slept together three times, and he
thinks he loves her. Or at least, hełs said it to her face, hełs whispered it
to her while she slept, hełs written it, true or false, into his diary.

I feel nothing for her. Shełs a nice enough person, Iłm
sure, but I hardly know her. Preoccupied with my plight, Iłve paid scant attention
to her conversation, and the act of sex was, for me, little more than a
distasteful piece of involuntary voyeurism. Since I realised what was at stake,
Iłvetried to succumb to the same emotions as my alter ego, but how can I love
her when communication between us is impossible, when she doesnłt even knowI exist?

If she rules his thoughts night and day, but is nothing but
a dangerous obstacle to me, how can I hope to achieve the flawless imitation
that will enable me to escape death?

Hełs sleeping now, so I must sleep. I listen to his
heartbeat, his slow breathing, and try to achieve a tranquillity consonant with
these rhythms. For a moment, I am discouraged. Even mydreams will be different;
our divergence is ineradicable, my goal is laughable, ludicrous, pathetic.
Every nerve impulse, for a week? My fear of detection and my attempts to
conceal it will, unavoidably, distort my responses; this knot of lies and panic
will be impossible to hide.

Yet as I drift towards sleep, I find myself believing that
Iwill succeed. Imust. I dream for a while-a confusion of images, both strange
and mundane, ending with a grain of salt passing through the eye of a
needle-then I tumble, without fear, into dreamless oblivion.

* * * *

I stare up at the white ceiling, giddy and confused, trying
to rid myself of the nagging conviction that therełs something Imust not think
about.

Then I clench my fist gingerly, rejoice at this miracle, and
remember.

Up until the last minute, I thought he was going to back out
again-but he didnłt. Cathy talked him through his fears. Cathy, after all, has
switched, and he loves her more than hełs ever loved anyone before.

So, our roles are reversed now. This body ishis
strait-jacket, now ...

I am drenched in sweat.This is hopeless, impossible. I canłt
read his mind, I canłt guess what hełs trying to do. Should I move, lie still,
call out, keep silent? Even if the computer monitoring us is programmed to
ignore a few trivial discrepancies, as soon as he notices that his body wonłt
carry out his will, hełll panic just as I did, and Iłll have no chance at all of
making the right guesses. Wouldhe be sweating, now? Wouldhis breathing be
constricted, like this?No. Iłve been awake for just thirty seconds, and already
I have betrayed myself. An optical-fibre cable trails from under my right ear
to a panel on the wall. Somewhere, alarm bells must be sounding.

If I made a run for it, what would they do? Use force? Iłm a
citizen, arenłt I? Jewel-heads have had full legal rights for decades; the
surgeons and engineers canłt do anything to me without my consent. I try to recall
the clauses on the waiver he signed, but he hardly gave it a second glance. I
tug at the cable that holds me prisoner, but itłs firmly anchored, at both
ends.

When the door swings open, for a moment I think Iłm going to
fall to pieces, but from somewhere I find the strength to compose myself. Itłs
my neurologist, Dr Prem. He smiles and says, �How are you feeling? Not too bad?"

I nod dumbly.

�The biggest shock, for most people, is that they donłt feel
different at all! For a while youłll think, ęIt canłt be this simple! It canłt
be this easy! It canłt be thisnormal! ę But youłll soon come to accept thatit
is. And life will go on, unchanged." He beams, taps my shoulder paternally,
then turns and departs.

Hours pass.What are they waiting for? The evidence must be
conclusive by now. Perhaps there are procedures to go through, legal and
technical experts to be consulted, ethics committees to be assembled to
deliberate on my fate. Iłm soaked in perspiration, trembling uncontrollably. I
grab the cable several times and yank with all my strength, but it seems fixed
in concrete at one end, and bolted to my skull at the other.

An orderly brings me a meal. �Cheer up," he says. �Visiting
time soon."

Afterwards, he brings me a bedpan, but Iłm too nervous even
to piss.

Cathy frowns when she sees me. �Whatłs wrong?"

I shrug and smile, shivering, wondering why Iłm even trying
to go through with the charade. �Nothing. I just ... feel a bit sick, thatłs
all."

She takes my hand, then bends and kisses me on the lips. In
spite of everything, I find myself instantly aroused. Still leaning over me,
she smiles and says, �Itłs over now, okay? Therełs nothing left to be afraid
of. Youłre a little shook up, but you know in your heart youłre still who youłve
always been. And I love you."

I nod. We make small talk. She leaves. I whisper to myself,
hysterically, �Iłm still who Iłve always been. Iłm still who Iłve always been."

* * * *

Yesterday, they scraped my skull clean, and inserted my new,
non-sentient, space-filling mock-brain.

I feel calmer now than I have for a long time, and I think
at last Iłve pieced together an explanation for my survival.

Why do they deactivate the teacher, for the week between the
switch and the destruction of the brain? Well, they can hardly keep it running
while the brain is being trashed-but why an entire week? To reassure people
that the jewel, unsupervised, can still stay in synch; to persuade them that
the life the jewel is going to live will be exactly the life that the organic
brain �would have lived"whatever that could mean.

Why, then, only for a week? Why not a month, or a year? Because
the jewelcannot stay in synch for that long-not because of any flaw, but for
precisely the reason that makes it worth using in the first place. The jewel is
immortal. The brain is decaying. The jewelłs imitation of the brain leaves
out-deliberately-the fact thatreal neuronsdie. Without the teacher working to
contrive, in effect, an identical deterioration of the jewel, small
discrepancies must eventually arise. A fraction of a secondłs difference in
responding to a stimulus is enough to arouse suspicion, and-as I know too
well-from that moment on, the process of divergence is irreversible.

No doubt, a team of pioneering neurologists sat huddled
around a computer screen, fifty years ago, and contemplated a graph of the
probability of this radical divergence, versus time. How would they have
chosenone week? What probability would have been acceptable? A tenth of a
percent? A hundredth? A thousandth? However safe they decided to be, itłs hard
to imagine them choosing a value low enough to make the phenomenon rare on a
global scale, once a quarter of a million people were being switched every day.

In any given hospital, it might happen only once a decade,
or once a century, but every institution would still need to have a policy for
dealing with the eventuality.

What would their choices be?

They could honour their contractual obligations and turn the
teacher on again, erasing their satisfied customer, and giving the traumatised
organic brain the chance to rant about its ordeal to the media and the legal
profession.

Or, they could quietly erase the computer records of the
discrepancy, and calmly remove the only witness.

* * * *

So, this is it. Eternity.

Iłll need transplants in fifty or sixty yearsł time, and
eventually a whole new body, but that prospect shouldnłt worry me-Icanłt die on
the operating table. In a thousand years or so, Iłll need extra hardware tacked
on to cope with my memory storage requirements, but Iłm sure the process will
be uneventful. On a time scale of millions of years, the structure of the jewel
is subject to cosmic-ray damage, but error-free transcription to a fresh
crystal at regular intervals will circumvent that problem.

In theory, at least, Iłm now guaranteed either a seat at the
Big Crunch, or participation in the heat death of the universe.

I ditched Cathy, of course. I might have learnt to like her,
but she made me nervous, and I was thoroughly sick of feeling that I had to
play a role.

As for the man who claimed that he loved her-the man who
spent the last week of his life helpless, terrified, suffocated by the
knowledge of his impending death-I canłt yet decide how I feel. I ought to be
able to empathise-considering that I once expected to suffer the very same fate
myself-yet somehow he simply isnłtreal to me. I know my brain was modelled on
his-giving him a kind of causal primacy-but in spite of that, I think of him
now as a pale, insubstantial shadow.

After all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself,
his deepest inner life, his experience ofbeing, was in any way comparable to my
own.

About the Author Greg Egan (1961) obtained a BS in mathematics
from the University of Western Australia and has worked as a computer
programmer in medical research. The latest of his fascinating novels,Teranesia,
appeared in 1999 from HarperCollins

Lost Continent

1

Aliłs uncle took hold of his right arm and offered it to the
stranger, who gripped it firmly by the wrist. �From this moment on, you must
obey this man," his uncle instructed him. �Obey him as you would obey your
father. Your life depends on it."

�Yes, Uncle." Ali kept his eyes respectfully lowered.

�Come with me, boy," said the stranger, heading for the
door.

�Yes, haji," Ali mumbled, following meekly. He could hear
his mother still sobbing quietly in the next room, and he had to fight to hold
back his own tears. He had said good-bye to his mother and his uncle, but hełd
had no chance for any parting words with his cousins. It was halfway between
midnight and dawn, and if anyone else in the household was awake, they were
huddled beneath their blankets, straining to hear what was going on but not
daring to show their faces.

The stranger strode out into the cold night, hand still
around Aliłs wrist like an iron shackle. He led Ali to the Land Cruiser that
sat in the icy mud outside his unclełs house, its frosted surfaces glinting in
the starlight, an apparition from a nightmare. Just the smell of it made Ali
rigid with fear; it was the smell that had presaged his fatherłs death, his
brotherłs disappearance. Experience had taught him that such a machine could
only bring tragedy, but his uncle had entrusted him to its driver. He forced
himself to approach without resisting.

The stranger finally released his grip on Ali and opened a
door at the rear of the vehicle. �Get in and cover yourself with the blanket.
Donłt move, and donłt make a sound, whatever happens. Donłt ask me any
questions, and donłt ask me to stop. Do you need to take a piss?"

�No, haji," Ali replied, his face burning with shame. Did
the man think he was a child?

�All right, get in there."

As Ali complied, the man spoke in a grimly humorous tone.
�You think you show me respect by calling me ęhajił? Every old man in your
village is ęhaji I havenłt just been to Mecca. Iłve been there in the time of
the Prophet, peace be upon him." Ali covered his face with the ragged blanket,
which was imbued with the concentrated stench of the machine. He pictured the
stranger standing in the darkness for a moment, musing arrogantly about his unnatural
pilgrimage. The man wore enough gold to buy Aliłs fatherłs farm ten times over.
Now his uncle had sold that farm, and his motherłs jewelrythe hard-won wealth
of generationsand handed all the money to this boastful man, who claimed he
could spirit Ali away to a place and a time where hełd be safe.

The Land Cruiserłs engine shuddered to life. Ali felt the
vehiclemoving backward at high speed, an alarming sensation. Then it stopped
and moved forward, squealing as it changed direction; he could picture the
tracks in the mud.

It was his first time ever in one of these machines. A few
of his friends had taken rides with the Scholars, sitting in the back in the
kind with the uncovered tray. Theyłd fired rifles into the air and shouted
wildly before tumbling out, covered with dust, alive with excitement for the
next ten days. Those friends had all been Sunni, of course. For Shiła, rides
with the Scholars had a different kind of ending.

Khurosan had been ravaged by war for as long as Ali could
remember. For decades, tyrants of unimaginable cruelty from far in the future
had given their weapons to factions throughout the country, whołd used them in
their squabbles over land and power. Sometimes the warlords had sent recruiting
parties into the valley to take young men to use as soldiers, but in the early
days the villagers had banded together to hide their sons, or to bribe the
recruiters to move on. Sunni or Shiła, it made no difference; neighbor had
worked with neighbor to outsmart the bandits who called themselves soldiers and
keep the village intact.

Then four years ago, the Scholars had come, and everything
had

changed.

Whether the Scholars were from the past or the future was unclear,
but they certainly had weapons and vehicles from the future. They had ridden
triumphantly across Khurosan in their Land Cruisers, killing some warlords,
bribing others, conquering the bloody patchwork of squalid fiefdoms one by one.
Many people had cheered them on, because they had promised to bring unity and
piety to the land. The warlords and their rabble armies had kidnapped and raped
women and boys at will; the Scholars had hung the rapists from the gates of the
cities. The warlords had set up checkpoints on every road, to extort money from
travelers; the Scholars had opened the roads again for trade and pilgrimage in
safety.

The Scholarsł conquest of the land remained incomplete,
though, and a savage battle was still being waged in the north. When the
Scholars had come to Aliłs village looking for soldiers themselves, theyłd
brought a new strategy to the recruitment drive: they would take only Shiła for
the front line, to face the bullets of the unsubdued warlords. Shiła, the
Scholars declared, were not true Muslims, and this was the only way they could
redeem themselves: laying down their lives for their more pious and deserving
Sunni countrymen.

This deceit, this flattery and cruelty, had cleaved the
village in two. Many friends remained loyal across the divide, but the old
trust, the old unity was gone.

Two months before, one of Aliłs neighbors had betrayed his
older brotherłs hiding place to the Scholars. They had come to the farm in the
early hours of the morning, a dozen of them in two Land Cruisers, and dragged
Hassan away. Ali had watched helplessly from his own hiding place, forbidden by
his father to try to intervene. And what could their rifles have done against
the Scholarsł weapons, which sprayed bullets too fast and numerous to count?

The next morning, Aliłs father had gone to the Scholarsł
post in the village to try to pay a bribe to get Hassan back. Ali had waited,
watching the farm from the hillside above. When a single Land Cruiser had
returned, his heart had swelled with hope. Even when the Scholars had thrown a
limp figure from the vehicle, hełd thought it might be Hassan, unconscious from
a beating but still alive, ready to be nursed back to health.

It was not Hassan. It was his father. They had slit his
throat and left a coin in his mouth.

Ali had buried his father and walked half a day to the next
village, where his mother had been staying with his uncle. His uncle had
arranged the sale of the farm to a wealthy neighbor, then sought out a
mosarfar-e-waqt to take Ali to safety.

Ali had protested, but it had all been decided, and his
wishes had counted for nothing. His mother would live under the protection of
her brother, while Ali built a life for himself in the future. Perhaps Hassan
would escape from the Scholars, God willing, but that was out of their hands.
What mattered, his mother insisted, was getting her youngest son out of the
Scholarsł reach.

In the back of the Land Cruiser, Aliłs mind was in turmoil.
He didnłt want to flee this way, but he had no doubt that his life would be in
danger if he remained. He wanted his brother back and his father avenged, he
wanted to see the Scholars destroyed, but their only remaining enemies with any
real power were murderous criminals who hated his own people as much as the
Scholars themselves did. There was no righteous army to join, with clean hands
and pure

hearts.

The Land Cruiser slowed, then came to a halt, the engine
still idling. The mosarfar-e-waqt called out a greeting, then began exchanging
friendly words with someone, presumably a Scholar guarding the road.

Aliłs blood turned to ice; what if this stranger simply
handed him over? How much loyalty could mere money buy? His uncle had made
inquiries of people with connections up and down the valley and had satisfied
himself about the manłs reputation, but however much the mosarfar-e-waqt valued
his good name and the profits it brought him, therełd always be some other kind
of deal to be made, some profit to be found in betrayal.

Both men laughed, then bid each other farewell. The Land
Cruiser accelerated.

For what seemed like hours, Ali lay still and listened to
the purring of the engine, trying to judge how far theyłd come. He had never
been out of the valley in his life, and he had only the sketchiest notion of
what lay beyond. As dawn approached, his curiosity overwhelmed him, and he
moved quietly to shift the blanket just enough to let him catch a glimpse
through the rear window. There was a mountain peak visible to the left, topped
with snow, crisp in the predawn light. He wasnłt sure if this was a mountain he
knew, viewed from an unfamiliar angle, or one hełd never seen before.

Not long afterward they stopped to pray. They made their ablutions
in a small, icy stream. They prayed side by side, Sunni and Shiła, and Aliłs
fear and suspicion retreated a little. However arrogant this man was, at least
he didnłt share the Scholarsł contempt for Aliłs people.

After praying, they ate in silence. The mosarfar-e-waqt had
brought bread, dried fruit, and salted meat. As Ali looked around, it was clear
that theyłd long ago left any kind of man-made track behind. They were
following a mountain pass, on higher ground than the valley but still far below
the snow line.

They traveled through the mountains for three days, finally
emerging onto a wind-blasted, dusty plain. Ali had grown stiff from lying
curled up for hours, and the second time they stopped on the plain, he made the
most of the chance to stretch his legs and wandered away from the Land Cruiser
for a minute or two.

When he returned, the mosarfar-e-waqt said, �What are you
looking for?"

�Nothing, haji."

�Are you looking for a landmark, so you can find this place
again?"

Ali was baffled. �No, haji."

The man stepped closer, then struck him across the face,
hard enough to make him stagger. �If you tell anyone about the way you came,
youłll hear some more bad news about your family. Do you understand me?"

�Yes, haji."

The man strode back to the Land Cruiser. Ali followed him,
shaking. Hełd had no intention of betraying any detail of their route, any
secret of the trade, to anyone, but now his uncle had been named as hostage
against any indiscretion, real or imagined.

Late in the afternoon, Ali heard a sudden change in the
sound of the wind, a high-pitched keening that made his teeth ache. Unable to
stop himself, he lifted his head from beneath the blanket.

Ahead of them was a small dust storm, dancing across the
ground. It was moving away from them, weaving back and forth as it retreated,
like a living thing trying to escape them. The Land Cruiser was gaining on it.
The heart of the storm was dark, thick with sand, knotted with wind. Aliłs
chest tightened. This was it: the pol-e-waqt, the bridge between times.
Everyone in his village had heard of such things, but nobody could agree what
they were: the work of men, the work of djinn, the work of God. Whatever their
origin, some men had learned their secrets. No mosarfar-e-waqt had ever truly
tamed them, but nobody else could find these bridges or navigate their strange
depths.

They drew closer. The dust rained onto the windows of the
Land Cruiser, as fine as any sand Ali had seen, yet as loud as the hailstones
that fell sometimes on the roof of his house. Ali forgot all about his
instructions; as they vanished into the darkness, he threw off the blanket and
started praying aloud.

The mosarfar-e-waqt ignored him, muttering to himself and
consulting the strange, luminous maps and writing that changed and flowed in
front of him through some magic of machinery. The Land Cruiser ploughed ahead,
buffeted by dust and wind but palpably advancing. Within a few minutes, it was
clear to Ali that theyłd traveled much farther than the stormłs full width as
revealed from the outside. They had left his time and his country behind, and
were deep inside the bridge.

The lights of the Land Cruiser revealed nothing but a
handsbreadth of flying dust ahead of them. Ali peered surreptitiously at the
glowing map in the front, but it was a maze of branching and reconnecting paths
that made no sense to him. The mosarfar-e-waqt kept running a fingertip over
one path, then cursing and shifting to another, as if hełd discovered some
obstacle or danger ahead. Aliłs uncle had reassured him that at least they
wouldnłt run into the Scholars in this place, as they had come to Khurosan
through another, more distant bridge. The entrance to that one was watched over
night and day by a convoy of vehicles that chased it endlessly across the
desert, like the bodyguards of some staggering, drunken king.

A hint of sunlight appeared in the distance, then grew
slowly brighter. After a few minutes, though, the mosarfar-e-waqt cursed and
steered away from it. Ali was dismayed. This man had been unable to tell his
uncle where or when Ali would end up, merely promising him safety from the
Scholars. Some people in the villagehe kind with a friend of a friend whołd
fled into the futurespoke of a whole vast continent where peace and prosperity
reigned from shore to shore. The rulers had no weapons or armies of their own
but were chosen by the people for the wisdom, justice, and mercy they displayed.
It sounded like paradise on Earth, but Ali would believe in such a place when
he saw it with his own eyes.

Another false dawn, then another. The body of the Land Cruiser
began to moan and shudder. The mosarfar-e-waqt cut the engine, but the vehicle
kept moving, driven by the wind or the ground itself. Or maybe both, but not in
the same direction: Ali felt the wheels slipping over the treacherous river of
sand. Suddenly there was a sharp pain deep inside his ears, then a sound like
the scream of a giant bird, and the door beside him was gone. He snatched at
the back of the seat in front of him, but his hands closed over nothing but the
flimsy blanket as the wind dragged him out into the darkness.

Ali bellowed until his lungs were empty. But the painful landing
he was braced for never came: the blanket had snagged on something in the
vehicle, and the force of the wind was holding him above the sand. He tried to
pull himself back toward the Land Cruiser, hand over hand, but then he felt a
tear run through the blanket. Once more he steeled himself for a fall, but then
the tearing stopped with a narrow ribbon of cloth still holding him.

Ali prayed. �Merciful God, if you take me now, please bring
Hassan back safely to his home." For a year or two his uncle could care for his
mother, but he was old, and he had too many mouths to feed. With no children of
her own, her life would be unbearable.

A hand stretched out to him through the blinding dust. Ali
reached out and took it, grateful now for the manłs iron grip. When the
mosarfar-e-waqt had dragged him back into the Land Cruiser, Ali crouched at the
strangerłs feet, his teeth chattering. �Thank you, haji. I am your servant,
haji." The mosarfar-e-waqt climbed back into the front without a word.

Time passed, but Aliłs thoughts were frozen. Some part of
him had been prepared to die, but the rest of him was still catching up.
Sunlight appeared from nowhere: the full blaze of noon, not some distant
promise. �This will suffice," the mosarfar-e-waq t announced wearily.

Ali shielded his eyes from the glare, then when he uncovered
them the world was spinning. Blue sky and sand, changing places.

The bruising thud hełd been expecting long before finally
came, the ground slapping him hard from cheek to ankle. He lay still, trying to
judge how badly he was hurt. The patch of sand in front of his face was red.
Not from blood: the sand itself was red as ocher.

There was a sound like a rapid exhalation, then he felt heat
on his skin. He raised himself up on his elbows. The Land Cruiser was ten paces
away, upside down, and on fire. Ali staggered to his feet and approached it,
searching for the man whołd saved his life. Behind the wrecked vehicle, a storm
like the one that the mouth of the bridge had made in his own land was weaving
drunkenly back

and forth, dancing like some demented hooligan pleased with
the havoc it had wreaked.

He caught a glimpse of an arm behind the flames. He rushed
toward the man, but the heat drove him back.

�Please, God," he moaned, �give me courage."

As he tried again to breach the flames, the storm lurched forward
to greet him. Ali stood his ground, but the Land Cruiser spun around on its
roof, swiping his shoulder and knocking him down.

He climbed to his feet and tried to circle around to the
missing door, but as he did the wind rose up, fanning the flames.

The wall of heat was impenetrable now, and the storm was
playing with the Land Cruiser like a child with a broken top. Ali hacked away,
glancing around at the impossible red landscape, wondering if there might be
anyone in earshot with the power to undo his calamity. He shouted for help, his
eyes still glued to the burning wreck in the hope that a miracle might yet
deliver the unconscious

driver from the flames.

The storm moved forward again, coming straight for the Land
Cruiser. Ali turned and retreated; when he looked over his shoulder, the
vehicle was gone and the darkness was still advancing.

He ran, stumbling on the uneven ground. When his legs
finally failed him and he collapsed onto the sand, the bridge was nowhere in
sight. He was alone in a red desert. The air was still, now, and

very hot.

After a while he rose to his feet, searching for a patch of
shade where he could rest and wait for the cool of the evening. Apart from the
red sand there were pebbles and some larger, cracked rocks, but there was no
relief from the flatness: not so much as a boulder he could take shelter
beside. In one direction there were some low, parched bushes, their trunks no
thicker than his fingers, their branches no higher than his knees. He might as
well have tried to hide from the sun beneath his own thin beard. He scanned the
horizon, but it offered no welcoming destination.

There was no water for washing, but Ali cleaned himself as
best he could and prayed. Then he sat cross-legged on the ground, covered his
face with his shawl, and lapsed into a sickly sleep.

He woke in the evening and started to walk. Some of the constellations
were familiar, but they crossed the sky far closer to the horizon than they
should have. Others were completely new to him.

There was no moon, and though the terrain was flat he soon
found that he lost his footing if he tried to move too quickly in the dark.
When morning came, it brought no perceptible change in his surroundings. Red
sand and a few skeletal plants were all that this land seemed to hold.

He slept through most of the day again, stirring only to
pray. Increasingly, his sleep was broken by a throbbing pain behind his eyes.
The night had been chilly, but hełd never experienced such heat before. He was
unsure how much longer he could survive without water. He began to wonder if it
would have been better if hełd been taken by the wind inside the bridge or
perished in the burning Land Cruiser.

After sunset, he staggered to his feet and continued his
hopeful but unguided trek. He had a fever now, and his aching joints begged

him for more rest, but he doubted if hełd wake again if he resigned
himself to sleep.

When his feet touched the road, he thought hełd lost his
mind. Who would take the trouble to build such a path through a desolate place
like this? He stopped and crouched down to examine it. It was gritty with a
sparse layer of windblown sand; beneath that was a black substance that felt
less hard than stone, but resilient, almost springy.

A road like this must lead to a great city. He followed it.

An hour or two before dawn, bright headlights appeared in
the distance. Ali fought down his instinctive fear; in the future such vehicles
should be commonplace, not the preserve of bandits and murderers. He stood by
the roadside awaiting its arrival.

The Land Cruiser was like none hełd seen before, white with
blue markings. There was writing on it, in the same European script as hełd
seen on many machine parts and weapons that had made their way into the
bazaars, but no words he recognized, let alone understood. One passenger was
riding beside the driver; he climbed out, approached Ali, and greeted him in an
incomprehensible tongue.

Ali shrugged apologetically. �Salaam aleikom," he ventured.
�Bebakhshid agha, mosarfar hastam. Ba tawarzł az shoma moharfazat khahesh
mikonam."

The man addressed Ali briefly in his own tongue again,
though it was clear now that he did not expect to be understood any more than
Ali did. He called out to his companion, gestured to Ali to stay put, then went
back to the Land Cruiser. His companion handed him two small machines; Ali
tensed, but they didnłt look like any weapons hełd seen.

The man approached Ali again. He held one machine up to the
side of his face, then lowered it again and offered it to Ali. Ali took it, and
repeated the mimed action.

A womanłs voice spoke in his ear. Ali understood what was
happening; hełd seen the Scholars use similar machines to talk with each other
over great distances. Unfortunately, the language was still incomprehensible.
He was about to reply, when the woman spoke again in what sounded like a third
language. Then a fourth, then a fifth. Ali waited patiently, until finally the
woman greeted him in stilted Persian.

When Ali replied, she said, �Please wait." After a few
minutes, a new voice spoke. �Peace be upon you."

�And upon you."

�Where are you from?" To Ali, this manłs accent sounded exotic,
but he spoke Persian with confidence.

�Khurosan."

�At what time?"

�Four years after the coming of the Scholars."

�I see." The Persian speaker switched briefly to a different
language; the man on the road, whołd wandered halfway back to his vehicle and
was still listening via the second machine, gave a curt reply. Ali was amazed
at these peoplełs hospitality: in the middle of the night, in a matter of
minutes, they had found someone who could speak his language.

�How did you come to be on this road?"

�I walked across the desert."

�Which way? From where? How far did you come?"

�Iłm sorry, I donłt remember."

The translator replied bluntly, �Please try."

Ali was confused. What did it matter? One man, at least,
could see how weary he was. Why were they asking him these questions before
hełd had a chance to rest?

�Forgive me, sir. I canłt tell you anything; Iłm sick from
my journey."

There was an exchange in the native language, followed by an
awkward silence. Finally the translator said, �This man will take you to a
place where you can stay for a while. Tomorrow wełll hear your whole story."

�Thank you, sir. You have done a great thing for me. God
will reward you."

The man on the road walked up to Ali. Ali held out his arms
to embrace him in gratitude. The man produced a metal shackle and snapped it
around Aliłs wrists.

2

The camp was enclosed by two high fences topped with glistening
ribbons of razor-sharp metal. The space between them was filled with coils of
the same material. Outside the fences there was nothing but desert as far as
the eye could see. Inside, there were guards, and at night everything was
bathed in a constant harsh light. Ali had no doubt that hełd come to a prison,
though his hosts kept insisting that this was not the case.

His first night had passed in a daze. Hełd been given food
and water, examined by a doctor, then shown to a small metal hut that he was to
share with three other men. Two of the men, Alex and Tran, knew just enough
Persian to greet Ali briefly, but the third, Shahin, was an Iranian, and they
could understand each other well enough. The hutłs four beds were arranged in pairs,
one above the other; Aliłs habit was to sleep on a mat on the floor, but he
didnłt want to offend anyone by declining to follow the local customs. The
guards had removed his shackles, then put a bracelet on his left wristmade
from something like paper, but extraordinarily strongbearing the number 3739.
The last numeral was more or less the same shape as a Persian nine; he
recognized the others from machine parts, but he didnłt know their values.

Every two hours, throughout the night, a guard opened the
door of the hut and shone a light on each of their faces in turn. The first
time it happened, Ali thought the guard had come to rouse them from their sleep
and take them somewhere, but Shahin explained that these �head counts" happened
all night, every night.

The next morning, officials from the camp had taken Ali out
in a vehicle and asked him to show them the exact place where hełd arrived
through the bridge. Hełd done his best, but all of the desert looked the same
to him. By midday, he was tempted to designate a spot at random just to satisfy
his hosts, but he didnłt want to lie to them. Theyłd returned to the camp in a
sullen mood. Ali couldnłt understand why it was so important to them.

Reza, the Persian translator whołd first spoken with Ali
through the machine, explained that he was to remain in the camp until
government officials had satisfied themselves that he really was fleeing danger
and hadnłt merely come to the future seeking an easy life for himself. Ali
understood that his hosts didnłt want to be cheated, but it dismayed him that
they felt the need to imprison him while they made up their minds. Surely there
was a family in a nearby town who would have let him stay with them for a day
or two, just as his father would have welcomed any travelers passing through
their village.

The section of the camp where hełd been placed was fenced
off from the rest and contained about a hundred people. They were all travelers
like himself, and they came from every nation Ali had heard of, and more. Most
were young men, but there were also women, children, entire families. In his
village, Ali would have run to greet the children, lifted them up and kissed
them to make them smile, but here they looked so sad and dispirited that he was
afraid the approach of even the friendliest stranger might frighten them.

Shahin was a few years older than Ali, but he had spent his
whole life as a student. He had traveled just two decades through time,
escaping a revolution in his country. He explained that the part of the camp
they were in was called �Stage One"; they were being kept apart from the others
so they wouldnłt learn too much about the way their cases would be judged.
�Theyłre afraid wełll embellish the details if we discover what kind of
questions they ask, or what kind of story succeeds."

�How long have you been here?" Ali asked.

�Nine months. Iłm still waiting for my interview."

�Nine months!"

Shahin smiled wearily. �Some people have been in Stage One
for a year. But donłt worry, you wonłt have to wait that long. When I arrived
here, the Center Manager had an interesting policy: nobody would have their
cases examined until they asked him for the correct application form. Of
course, nobody knew that they were required to do that, and he had no intention
of telling them. Three months ago, he was transferred to another camp. Wen I
asked the woman who replaced him what I needed to do to havhe my claims heard,
she told me straightaway: ask for Form 866."

Ali couldnłt quite follow all this. Shahin explained
further.

Ali said, �What good will it do me to get this piece of
paper? I canłt read their language, and I can barely write my own."

�Thatłs no problem. Theyłll let you talk to an educated man
or woman, an expert in these matters. That person will fill out the form for
you, in English. You only need to explain your problem, and sign your name at
the bottom of the paper."

�English?" Ali had heard about the English; before he was
born theyłd tried to invade both Hindustan and Khurosan, without success. �How
did that language come here?" He was sure that he

was not in England.

�They conquered this country two centuries ago. They crossed

the world in wooden ships to take it for their king."

�Oh." Ali felt dizzy; his mind still hadnłt fully accepted
the journey hełd made. �What about Khurosan?" he joked. �Have they conquered
that as well?"

Shahin shook his head. �No."

�What is it like now? Is there peace there?" Once this
strange business with the English was done, perhaps he could travel to his

homeland. However much it had changed with time, he was sure
he could make a good life there.

Shahin said, �There is no nation called Khurosan in this
world.

Part of that area belongs to Hindustan, part to Iran, part
to Russia."

Ali stared at him, uncomprehending. �How can that be?"

However much his people fought among themselves, they would
never have let invaders take their land.

�I donłt know the full history," Shahin said, �but you need
to understand something. This is not your future. The things that happened in
the places you know are not a part of the history of this world. There is no
pol-e-waqt that connects past and future in the

same world. Once you cross the bridge, everything changes,
including the past."

With Shahin beside him, Ali approached one of the government
officials, a man named James, and addressed him in the English hełd learned by
heart. �Please, Mr. James, can I have Form 866?"

James rolled his eyes and said, �Okay, okay! We were going
to get around to you sooner or later." He turned to Shahin and said, �I wish youłd
stop scaring the new guys with stories about being stuck

in Stage One forever. You know things have changed since Colonel
Kurtz went north."

Shahin translated all of this for Ali. �Colonel Kurtz" was
Shahinłs nickname for the previous Center Manager, but everyone, even the
guards, had adopted it. Shahin called Tran �The Rake," and Alex was �Denisovich
of the Desert."

Three weeks later, Ali was called to a special room, where
he sat with Reza. A lawyer in a distant city, a woman called Ms. Evans, spoke with
them in English through a machine that Reza called a �speakerphone." With Reza
translating, she asked Ali about everything: his village, his family, his
problems with the Scholars. Hełd been asked about some of this the night hełd arrived,
but hełd been very tired then and hadnłt had a chance to put things clearly.

Three days after the meeting, he was called to see James.
Ms. Evans had written everything in English on the special form and sent it to
them. Reza read through the form, translating everything for Ali to be sure
that it was correct. Then Ali wrote his name on the bottom of the form. James
told him, �Before we make a decision, someone will come from the city to
interview you. That might take a while, so youłll have to be patient."

Ali said, in English, �No problem."

He felt he could wait for a year, if he had to. The first
four weeks had gone quickly, with so much that was new to take in. He had
barely had space left in his crowded mind to be homesick, and he tried not to
worry about Hassan and his mother. Many things about the camp disturbed him,
but his luck had been good: the infamous �Colonel Kurtz" had left, so hełd
probably be out in three or four months. The cities of this nation, Shahin
assured him, were mostly on the distant coast, an infinitely milder place than
the desert around the camp. Ali might be able to get a laboring job while
studying English at night, or he might find work on a farm. He hadnłt quite
started his new life yet, but he was safe, and everything looked hopeful.

By the end of his third month Ali was growing restless. Most
days he played cards with Shahin, Tran, and a Hindustani man named Rakesh,
while Alex lay on his bunk reading books in Russian. Rakesh had a cassette
player and a vast collection of tapes. The songs were mostly in Hindi, a
language that contained just enough Persian words to give Ali some sense of
what the lyrics were about: usually love, or sorrow, or both.

The metal huts were kept tolerably cool by machines, but
there was no shade outside. At night the men played soccer, and Ali sometimes
joined in, but after falling badly on the concrete, twice, he decided it wasnłt
the game for him. Shahin told him that it was a game for grass; from his home
in Tehran, hełd watched dozens of nations compete at it. Ali felt a surge of
excitement at the thought of all the wonders of this world, still tantalizingly
out of reach: in Stage One, TV, radio, newspapers, and telephones were all
forbidden. Even Rakeshłs tapes had been checked by the guards, played from start
to finish to be sure that they didnłt contain secret lessons in passing the
interview. Ali couldnłt wait to reach Stage Two, to catch his first glimpse of
what life might be like in a world where anyone could watch history unfolding
and speak at their leisure with anyone else.

English was the closest thing to a common language for all
the people in the camp. Shahin did his best to get Ali started, and once he
could converse in broken English, some of the friendlierguards let him
practice with them, often to their great amusement. �Not every car is called a
Land Cruiser," Gary explained. �I think you must come from Toyota-stan."

Shahin was called to his interview. Ali prayed for him, then
sat on the floor of the hut with Tran and tried to lose himself in the
mercurial world of the cards. What he liked most about these friendly games was
that good and bad luck rarely lasted long, and even when they did it barely
mattered. Every curse and every blessing was light as a feather.

Shahin returned four hours later, looking exhausted but
satis

fied. �Iłve told them my whole story," he said. �Itłs in
their hands now." The official whołd interviewed him had given him no hint as
to what the decision would be, but Shahin seemed relieved just to have had a
chance to tell someone who mattered everyt hing hełd

suffered, everything that had forced him from his home.

That night Shahin was told that he was moving to Stage Two
in half an hour. He embraced Ali. �See you in freedom, brother."

�God willing."

After Shahin was gone, Ali lay on his bunk for four days, refusing
to eat, getting up only to wash and pray. His friendłs departure was just the
trigger; the raw grief of his last days in the valley came flooding back,
deepened by the unimaginable gulf that now separated him from his family. Had
Hassan escaped from the Scholars? Or was he fighting on the front line of their
endless war, risking death every hour of every day? With the only
mosarfar-e-waqt Ali knew now dead, how would he ever get news from his family
orsend them his assistance?

Tran whispered gruff consolations in his melodic English.

�Donłt worry, kid. Everything okay. Wait and see."

Worse than the waiting was the sense of waste: all the hours
trickling away, with no way to harness them for anything useful. Ali tried to
improve his English, but there were some concepts he could get no purchase on
without someone who understood his own language to help him. Reza rarely left
the government offices for the compound, and when he did he was too busy for
Aliłs questions.

Ali tried to make a garden, planting an assortment of seeds
that hełd saved from the fruit that came with some of the meals. Most of Stage
One was covered in concrete, but he found a small patch of bare ground behind
his hut that was sheltered from the fiercest sunlight. He carried water from
the drinking tap on the other side of the soccer ground and sprinkled it over
the soil four times a day.

Nothing happened, though. The seeds lay dormant; the land
would not accept them.

Three weeks after Shahinłs departure, Alex had his
interview, and left. A week later, Tran followed. Ali started sleeping through
the heat of the day, waking just in time to join the queue for the evening
meal, then playing cards with Rakesh and his friends until dawn.

By the end of his sixth month, Ali felt a taint of
bitterness creeping in beneath the numbness and boredom. He wasnłt a thief or a
murderer, hełd committed no crime. Why couldnłt these people set him free to
work, to fend for himself instead of taking their charity, to prepare himself
for his new life?

One night, tired of the endless card game, Ali wandered out
from Rakeshłs hut earlier than usual. One of the guards, a woman named Cheryl,
was standing outside her office, smoking. Ali murmured a greeting to her as he
passed; she was not one of the friendly ones, but he tried to be polite to
everyone.

�Why donłt you just go home?" she said.

Ali paused, unsure whether to dignify this with a response.
Hełd long ago learned that most of the guardsł faces became stony if he tried to
explain why hełd left his village; somewhere, somehow it had been drummed into
them that nothing their prisoners said could be believed.

�Nobody invited you here," she said bluntly. �We take twelve
thousand people from the UN camps every year. But you still think youłre
entitled to march right in as if you owned the place."

Ali had only heard mention of these �UN camps" since his arrival
here. Shahin had explained that therełd probably been a dusty tent-city
somewhere on the border of his country, whereif hełd survived the journey
across the Scholarsł heartlandhe could have waited five, or ten, or fifty
years for the slim chance that some beneficent future government might pluck
him from the crowd and

grant him a new life.

Ali shrugged. �Iłm here. From me, big tragedy for your
nation? Iłm honest man and hard worker. Iłm not betray your hospitality."

Cheryl snickered. Ali wasnłt sure if she was sneering at his
English or his sentiments, but he persisted. �Your leaders did agreement with
other nations. Anyone asking protection gets fair hearing." Shahin had
impressed that point on Ali. It was the law, and in this society the law was
everything. �That is my right."

Cheryl coughed on her cigarette. �Dream on, Ahmad."

�My name is Ali."

�Whatever." She reached out and caught him by the wrist,
then held up his hand to examine his ID bracelet. �Dream on, 3739."

James called Ali to his office and handed him a letter. Reza
translated it for him. After eight months of waiting, in six daysł time he
would finally have his interview.

Ali waited nervously for Ms. Evans to call him to help him
prepare, as shełd promised she would when theyłd last spoken, all those months
before. On the morning of the appointed day, he was summoned again to Jamesłs
office, and taken with with Reza to the room with the speakerphone, the
�interview room. A different lawyer, a man called Mr. Cole, explained to Ali
that Ms Evans had left her job and he had taken over Aliłs case. He told Ali
that everything would be fine, and hełd be listening carefully to Aliłs interview
and making sure that everything went well.

When Cole had hung up, Reza snorted derisively. �You know
how these clowns are chosen? They put in tenders, and it goes to the lowest
bidder." Ali didnłt entirely understand, but this didnłt sound encouraging.
Reza caught the expression on Aliłs face, and added, �Donłt worry, youłll be
fine. Fleeing from the Scholars is flavor of the month."

Three hours later, Ali was back in the interview room.

The official whołd come from the city introduced himself as
John Fernandez. Reza wasnłt with them; Fernandez had brought a different
interpreter with him, a man named Parviz. Mr. Cole joined them on the
speakerphone. Fernandez switched on a cassette recorder and asked Ali to swear
on the Quran to give truthful answers to all his questions.

Fernandez asked him for his name, his date of birth, and the
place and time hełd fled. Ali didnłt know his birthday or his exact age; he
thought he was about eighteen years old, but it was not the custom in his village
to record such things. He did know that at the time hełd left his unclełs
house, twelve hundred and sixty-five years had passed since the Prophetłs
flight to Medina.

�Tell me about your problem," Fernandez said. �Tell me why
youłve come here."

Shahin had told Ali that the history of this world was
different from his own, so Ali explained carefully about Khurosanłs long war,
about the meddlers and the warlords theyłd created, about the coming of the
Scholars. How the Shiła were taken by force to fight in the most dangerous
positions. How Hassan was taken. How his father had been killed. Fernandez
listened patiently, sometimes writing on the sheets of paper in front of him as
Ali spoke, interrupting him only to encourage him to fill in the gaps in the story,
to make everything clear.

When he had finally recounted everything, Ali felt an overwhelming
sense of relief. This man had not poured scorn on his words the way the guards
had; instead, he had allowed Ah to speak openly about all the injustice his family
and his people had suffered.

Fernandez had some more questions.

�Tell me about your village, and your unclełs village. How
long would it take to travel between them on foot?"

�Half a day, sir."

�Half a day. Thatłs what you said in your statement. But in
your entry interview, you said a day." Ali was confused. Parviz explained that
his �statement" was the written record of his conversation with Ms. Evans,
which she had sent to the government; his �entry interview" was when hełd first
arrived in the camp and been questioned for ten or fifteen minutes.

�I only meant it was a short trip, sir, you didnłt have to
stay somewhere halfway overnight. You could complete it in one day."

�Hmm. Okay. Now, when the smuggler took you from your
unclełs village, which direction was he driving?"

�Along the valley, sir."

�North, south, east, west?"

�Iłm not sure." Ali knew these words, but they were not part
of the language of everyday life. He knew the direction for prayer, and he knew
the direction to follow to each neighboring village.

�You know that the sun rises in the east, donłt you?"

�Yes."

�So if you faced in the direction in which you were being driven,

would the sun have risen on your left, on your right, behind
you, where?"

�It was nighttime."

�Yes, but you must have faced the same direction in the
valley in the morning, a thousand times. So where would the sun have risen?"
Ali closed his eyes and pictured it. �On my right."

Fernandez sighed. �Okay. Finally. So you were driving north.
Now tell me about the land. The smuggler drove you along the

valley. And then what? What kind of landscape did you see,
between your valley and the bridge?"

Ali froze. What would the government do with this information?
Send someone back through their own bridge, to find and destroy the one hełd
used? The mosarfar-e-waqt had warned him not to tell anyone the way to the
bridge. That man was dead, but it was unlikely that hełd worked alone; everyone
had a brother, a son, a cousin to help them. If the family of the
mosarfar-e-waqt could trace such a misfortune to Ali, the dead manłs threat
against his uncle would be carried through.

Ali said, �I was under a blanket, I didnłt see anything."

�You were under a blanket? For how many days?"

�Three."

�Three days. What about eating, drinking, going to the
toilet?"

�He blindfolded me," Ali lied.

�Really? You never mentioned that before." Fernandez shuffled
through his papers. �Itłs not in your statement."

�I didnłt think it was important, sir." Aliłs stomach
tightened. What was happening? He was sure hełd won this manłs trust. And hełd
earned it: hełd told him the truth about everything, until now. What difference
did it make to his problem with the Scholars, which mountains and streams hełd
glimpsed on the way to the bridge? He had sworn to tell the truth, but he knew
it would be a far greater sin to risk his unclełs life.

Fernandez had still more questions, about life in the
village. Some were easy, but some were strange, and he kept asking for numbers,
numbers, numbers: how much did it weigh, how much did it cost, how long did it
take? What time did the bazaar open? Ali had no idea, hełd been busy with
farmwork in the mornings, hełd never gone there so early that it might have
been closed. How many people came to Friday prayers in the Shiła mosque? None,
since the Scholars had arrived. Before that? Ali couldnłt remember. More than a
hundred? Ali hesitated. �I think so." Hełd never counted them, why would he
have?

When the interview finished, Aliłs mind was still three questions
behind, worrying that his answers might not have been clear enough. Fernandez
was rewinding the tapes, shaking his hand formally, leaving the room.

Mr. Cole said, �I think that went well. Do you have any questions
you want to ask me?"

Ali said, �No, sir." Parviz had already departed.

�All right. Good luck." The speaker phone clicked off. Ali
sat at the table, waiting for the guard to come and take him back to the
compound.

3

Entering Stage Two, Ali felt as if he had walked into the
heart of a bustling town. Everything was noise, shouting, music. Hełd sometimes
heard snatches of this cacophony wafting across the fenced-off �sterile area"
that separated the parts of the camp, but now he was in the thick of it. The
rows of huts, and the crowds moving between them, seemed to stretch on forever.
There must have been a thousand people here, all of them unwilling travelers
fleeing the cruelties

of their own histories.

Hełd moved his small bag of belongings into the hut
allocated to him, but none of his new roommates were there to greet him. He
wandered through the compound, dizzy from the onslaught of new sights and
sounds. He felt as if hełd just had a heavy cloth unwound from around his head,
and his unveiled senses were still struggling to adjust. If he was reeling from
this, how would he feel when he stepped onto the streets of a real city, in
freedom?

The evening meal was over, the sun had set, and the heat outside
had become tolerable. Almost everyone seemed to be out walking, or congregating
around the entrances of their friendsł huts, taped music blaring through the
open doorways. At the end of one row of huts, Ali came to a larger building,
where thirty or forty people were seated. He entered the room and saw a small
box with a window on it, through which he could see an oddly-colored, distorted,
constantly changing view. A woman was dancing and singing in Hindi.

�TV," Ali marveled. This was what Shahin had spoken about;
now the whole world was open to his gaze.

An African man beside him shook his head. �Itłs a video. The
TVłs on in the other common room."

Ali lingered, watching the mesmerizing images. The woman was
very beautiful, and though she was immodestly dressed by the standards of his
village, she seemed dignified and entirely at ease. The Scholars would probably
have stoned her to death, but Ali would have been happy to be a beggar in
Mumbai if the streets there were filled with sights like this.

As he left the room, the sky was already darkening. The
campłs floodlights had come on, destroying any hope of a glimpse of the stars.
He asked someone, �Where is the TV, please?" and followed their directions.

As he walked into the second room, he noticed something different
in the mood at once; the people here were tense, straining with attention. When
Ali turned to the TV, it showed an eerily familiar sight: an expanse of desert,
not unlike that outside the camp. Helicopters, four or five, flew over the
landscape. In the distance, a tight funnel of swirling dust, dancing across the
ground.

Ali stood riveted. The landscape on the screen was brightly
lit, which meant that what he was watching had already happened: earlier in the
day, someone had located the mouth of the bridge. He peered at the small images
of the helicopters. Hełd only ever seen a broken one on the ground, the toy of one
warlord brought down by a rival, but he recognized the guns protruding from the
sides. Whoever had found the bridge, it was now in the hands of soldiers.

As he watched, a Land Cruiser came charging out of the
storm. Then another, and another. This was not like his own arrival; the convoy
was caked with dust, but more or less intact. Then the helicopters descended,
guns chattering. For a few long seconds Ali thought he was about to witness a
slaughter, but the soldiers were firing consistently a meter or so ahead of the
Land Cruisers. They were trying to corral the vehicles back into the bridge.

The convoy broke up, the individual drivers trying to steer
their way past the blockade. Curtains of bullets descended around them, driving
them back toward the meandering storm. Ali couldnłt see the people inside, but
he could imagine their terror and confusion. This was the future? This was
their sanctuary? Whatever tyranny they were fleeing, to have braved the
labyrinth of the pol-e-waqt only to be greeted with a barrage of gunfire was a
fate so cruel that they must have doubted their senses, their sanity, their
God.

The helicopters wheeled around the mouth of the bridge like
hunting dogs, indefatigable, relentless in their purpose. Ali found the grim
dance unbearable, but he couldnłt turn away. One of the Land Cruisers came to a
halt; it wasnłt safely clear of the storm, but this must have seemed wiser than
dodging bullets. Doors opened and people tumbled out. Weirdly, the picture went
awry at exactly that moment, clumps of flickering color replacing the travelersł
faces.

Soldiers approached, guns at the ready, gesturing and
threatening, forcing the people back into the car. A truck appeared, painted in
dappled green and brown. A chain was tied between the vehicles. Someone emerged
from the Land Cruiser; the face was obscured again, but Ali could see it was a
woman. Her words could not be heard, but Ali could see her speaking with her
hands, begging, chastising, pleading for mercy. The soldiers forced her back
inside.

The truck started its engines. Sand sprayed from its wheels.
Two soldiers climbed into the back, their weapons trained on the Land Cruiser.
Then they towed their cargo back into the storm.

Ali watched numbly as the other two Land Cruisers were
rounded up. The second stalled, and the soldiers descended on it. The driver of
the third gave up and steered his own course into the mouth of the bridge.

The soldiersł truck emerged from the storm, alone. The helicopters
spiraled away, circling the funnel at a more prudent distance. Ali looked at
the faces of the other people in the room; everyone was pale, some were
weeping.

The picture changed. Two men were standing, indoors somewhere.
One was old, white haired, wizened. In front of him a younger man was talking,
replying to unseen questioners. Both were smiling proudly.

Ali could only make sense of a few of the words, but
gradually

lie pieced some things together. These men were from the government,
and they were explaining the events of the day. They had sent the soldiers to
�protect" the bridge, to ensure that no more criminals and barbarians from the
past emerged to threaten the peaceful life of the nation. They had been patient
with these intruders for far too long. From this day on, nobody would pass.

�What about the law ?" someone was asking. An agreement had
been signed: any traveler who reached this country and asked for protection had
a right to a fair hearing.

�A bill has been drafted, and will be introduced in the
House tomorrow. Once passed, it will take force from nine ołclock this morning.
The land within twenty kilometers of the bridge will, for the purposes of the
Act, no longer be part of this nation. People entering the exclusion zone will
have no basis in law to claim our protection."

Confused, Ali muttered, �Chi goft?" A young man sitting nearby
turned to face him. �Salaam, chetori? Fahim hastam."

Fahimłs accent was unmistakably Khurosani. Ali smiled. �Ali
hastam. Shoma chetori?"

Fahim explained what the man on the TV had said. Anyone
emerging from the mouth of the bridge, now, might as well be on the other side
of the world. The government here would accept no obligation to assist them.
�If itłs not their land anymore," he mused, �maybe theyłll give it to us. We
can found a country of our own, a tribe of nomads in a caravan following the
bridge across the desert."

Ali said nervously, �My interview was today. They said something
about nine ołclock"

Fahim shook his head dismissively. �You made your claim
months ago, right? So youłre still covered by the old law."

Ali tried to believe him. �Youłre still waiting for your decision?"

�Hardly. I got refused three years ago."

�Three years? They didnłt send you back?"

�Iłm fighting it in the courts. I canłt go back; Iłd be dead
in a week." There were dark circles under Fahimłs eyes. If hełd been refused
three years before, hełd probably spent close to four years in this prison.

Fahim, it turned out, was one of Aliłs roommates. He took
him to meet the other twelve Khurosanis in Stage Two, and the whole group sat
together in one of the huts, talking until dawn. Ali was overjoyed to be among
people who knew his language, his time, his customs. It didnłt matter that most
were from provinces far from his own, that a year ago he would have thought of
them as exotic strangers.

When he examined their faces too closely, though, it was
hard to remain joyful. They had all fled the Scholars, like him. They were all
in fear for their lives. And they had all been locked up for a very long time:
two years, three years, four years, five.

In the weeks that followed, Ali gave himself no time to
brood on his fate. Stage Two had English classes, and though Fahim and the
others had long outgrown them, Ali joined in. He finally learned the names for
the European numbers and letters that hełd seen on weapons and machinery all
his life, and the teacher encouraged him to give up translating individual
words from Persian, and reshape whole sentences, whole thoughts, into the alien
tongue.

Every evening, Ali joined Fahim in the common room to watch
the news on TV. There was no doubt that the place they had come to was peaceful
and prosperous; when war was mentioned, it was always in some distant land. The
rulers here did not govern by force; they were chosen by the people, and even
now this competition was in progress. The men who had sent the soldiers to
block the bridge were asking the people to choose them again.

When the guard woke Ali at eight in the morning, he didnłt
complain, though hełd had only three hoursł sleep. He showered quickly, then
went to the compoundłs south gate. It no longer seemed strange to him to move
from place to place this way: to wait for guards to come and unlock a
succession of doors and escort him through the fenced-off maze that separated
the compound from the government offices.

James and Reza were waiting in the office. Ali greeted them,
his mouth dry. James said, �Reza will read the decision for you. Itłs about ten
pages, so be patient. Then if you have any questions, let me know."

Reza read from the papers without meeting Aliłs eyes. Fernandez,
the man whołd interviewed Ali, had written that there were discrepancies
between things Ali had said at different times, and gaps in his knowledge of
the place and time he claimed to come from. Whatłs more, an expert in the era
of the Scholars had listened to the tape of Ali talking, and declared that his
speech was not of that time. �Perhaps this manłs great-grandfather fled Khurosan
in the time of the Scholars, and some sketchy information has been passed down
the generations. The applicant himself, however, employs a number of words that
were not in use until decades later."

Ali waited for the litany of condemnation to come to an end,
but it seemed to go on forever. �I have tried to give the applicant the benefit
of the doubt," Fernandez had written, �but the overwhelming weight of evidence
supports the conclusion that he has lied about his origins, his background, and
all of his claims." Ali sat with his head in his hands.

James said, �Do you understand what this means? You have
seven days to lodge an appeal. If you donłt lodge an appeal, you will have to
return to your country."

Reza added, �You should call your lawyer. Have you got money
for a phone card?"

Ali nodded. Hełd taken a job cleaning the mess; he had thirty
points in his account already.

Every time Ali called, his lawyer was busy. Fahim helped Ali
fill out the appeal form, and they handed it to James two hours before the
deadline. �Lucky Colonel Kurtz is gone," Fahim told Ali. �Or that form would
have sat in the fax tray for at least a week."

Wild rumors swept the camp: the government was about to
change, and everyone would be set free. Ali had seen the governmentłs rivals
giving their blessing to the use of soldiers to block the bridge; he doubted
that theyłd show the prisoners in the desert much mercy if they won.

When the day of the election came, the government was returned,
more powerful than ever.

That night, as they were preparing to sleep, Fahim saw
Alistaring at the row of white scars that criss-crossed his chest. �I use a
razor blade," Fahim admitted. �It makes me feel better. The one power Iłve got
left: to choose my own pain."

�Iłll never do that," Ali swore.

Fahim gave a hollow laugh. �Itłs cheaper than cigarettes."

Ali closed his eyes and tried to picture freedom, but all he
saw was blackness. The past was gone, the future was gone, and the world had
shrunk to this prison.

4

�Ali, wake up, come see!"

Daniel was shaking him. Ali swatted his hands away angrily.

The African was one of his closest friends, and therełd been
a time when he could still drag Ali along to English classes or the gym, but
since the appeal tribunal had rejected him, Ali had no taste for any

thing. �Let me sleep."

�There are people. Outside the fence."

�Escaped?"

�No, no. From the city!"

Ali clambered off the bunk. He splashed water on his face,
then followed his friend.

A crowd of prisoners had gathered at the southwest corner of
the fence, blocking the view, but Ali could hear people on the outside,
shouting and banging drums. Daniel tried to clear a path, but it was
impossible. �Get on my shoulders." He ducked down and motioned to Ali.

Ali laughed. �Itłs not that important."

Daniel raised a hand angrily, as if to slap him. �Get up,
you have to see." He was serious. Ali obeyed.

From his vantage, he could see that the crowd ofprisoners
pressed against the inner fence was mirrored by another crowd struggling to
reach the outer one. Police, some on horses, were trying to stop them. Ali
peered into the scrum, amazed. Dozens of young people, men and women, were
slithering out of the grip of the policemen and running forward. Some distance
away across the desert stood a brightly colored bus. The word freedom was
painted across it, in English, Persian, Arabic, and probably ten or twelve
languages that Ali couldnłt read. The people were chanting, �Set them free! Set
them free!" One young woman reached the fence and clung to it, shouting
defiantly. Four policemen descended on her and tore her away.

A cloud of dust was moving along the desert road. More
police cars were coming, reinforcements. A knife twisted in Aliłs heart. This
gesture of friendship astonished him, but it would lead nowhere. In five or ten
minutes, the protesters would all be rounded up and carried away.

A young man outside the fence met Aliłs gaze. �Hey! My
namełs Ben."

�Iłm Ali."

Ben looked around frantically. �Whatłs your number?"

�What?"

�Wełll write to you. Give us your number. They have to deliver
the letters if we include the ID number."

�Behind you!" Ali shouted, but the warning was too late. One
policeman had him in a headlock, and another was helping wrestle him to the
ground.

Ali felt Daniel stagger. The crowd on his own side was
trying to fend off a wave of guards with batons and shields.

Ali dropped to his feet. �They want our ID numbers," he told
Daniel. Daniel looked around at the melee. �Got anything to write on?

Ali checked his back pocket. The small notebook and pen it
was his habit to carry were still there. He rested the notebook on Danielłs
back, and wrote, �Ali 3739 Daniel 5420." Who else? He quickly added Fahim and a
few others.

He scrabbled on the ground for a stone, then wrapped the
paper around it. Daniel lofted him up again.

The police were battling with the protesters, grabbing them
by the hair, dragging them across the dirt. Ali couldnłt see anyone who didnłt
have more pressing things to worry about than receiving his message. He lowered
his arm, despondent.

Then he spotted someone standing by the bus. He couldnłt
tell if it was a man or a woman. He, or she, raised a hand in greeting. Ali
waved back, then let the stone fly. It fell short, but the distant figure ran
forward and retrieved it from the sand.

Daniel collapsed beneath him, and the guards moved in with
batons and tear gas. Ali covered his eyes with his forearm, weeping, alive
again with hope.

Luminous

I woke disoriented, unsure why. I knew I was Iying on the narrow,
lumpy single bed in Room 22 of the Hotel Fleapit; after almost a month in
Shanghai, the topography of the mattress was depressingly familiar. But there
was something wrong with the way I was Iying; every muscle in my neck and
shoulders was protesting that nobody could end up in this position from natural
causes, however badly theyłd slept.

And I could smell blood.

I opened my eyes. A woman Iłd never seen before was kneeling
over me, slicing into my left tricep with a disposable scalpel. I was lying on
my side, facing the wall, one hand and one ankle cuffed to the head and foot of
the bed.

Something cut short the surge of visceral panic before I
could start stupidly thrashing about, instinctively trying to break free. Maybe
an even more ancient response-catatonia in the face of danger-took on the
adrenaline and won. Or maybe I just decided that I had no right to panic when Iłd
been expecting something like this for weeks.

I spoke softly, in English. �What youłre in the process of
hacking out of me is a necrotrap. One heartbeat without oxygenated blood, and
the cargo gets fried."

My amateur surgeon was compact, muscular, with short black
hair. Not Chinese: Indonesian, maybe. If she was surprised that Iłd woken
prematurely, she didnłt show it. The gene-tailored hepatocytes Iłd acquired in
Hanoi could degrade almost anything from morphine to curare; it was a good
thing the local anaesthetic was beyond their reach.

Without taking her eyes off her work, she said, �Look on the
table next to the bed."

I twisted my head around. Shełd set up a loop of plastic
tubing full of blood-mine, presumably-circulated and aerated by a small pump.
The stem of a large funnel fed into the loop, the intersection controlled by a
valve of some kind. Wires trailed from the pump to a sensor taped to the inside
of my elbow, synchronizing the artificial pulse with the real. I had no doubt
that she could tear the trap from my vein and insert it into this substitute
without missing a beat.

I cleared my throat and swallowed. �Not good enough. The
trap knows my blood pressure profile exactly. A generic heartbeat wonłt fool
it."

�Youłre bluffing ." But she hesitated, scalpel raised. The
hand-held MRI scanner shełd used to find the trap would have revealed its basic
configuration, but few fine details of the engineering-and nothing at all about
the software.

�Iłm telling you the truth." I looked her squarely in the
eye, which wasnłt easy given our awkward geometry. �Itłs new, itłs Swedish. You
anchor it in a vein forty-eight hours in advance, put yourself through a range
of typical activities so it can memorize the rhythms ... then you inject the
cargo into the trap. Simple, foolproof, effective." Blood trickled down across
my chest onto the sheet. I was suddenly very glad that I hadnłt buried the
thing deeper, after all.

�So how do you retrieve the cargo, yourself?"

�That would be telling."

�Then tell me now, and save yourself some trouble." She rotated
the scalpel between thumb and forefinger impatiently. My skin did a cold burn
all over, nerve ends jangling, capillaries closing down as blood dived for
cover.

I said, �Trouble gives me hypertension."

She smiled down at me thinly, conceding the stalemate-then
peeled off one stained surgical glove, took out her notepad, and made a call to
a medical equipment supplier. She listed some devices which would get around
the problem-a blood pressure probe, a more sophisticated pump, a suitable
computerized interface-arguing heatedly in fluent Mandarin to extract a promise
of a speedy delivery. Then she put down the notepad and placed her ungloved
hand on my shoulder.

�You can relax now. We wonłt have long to wait."

I squirmed, as if angrily shrugging off her hand-and
succeeded in getting some blood on her skin. She didnłt say a word, but she
must have realized at once how careless shełd been; she climbed off the bed and
headed for the washbasin, and I heard the water running.

Then she started retching.

I called out cheerfulIy, �Let me know when youłre ready for
the antidote." l I heard her approach, and I turned to face her. She was ashen,
her face contorted with nausea, eyes and nose streaming mucus and tears.

�Tell me where it is!"

�Uncuff me, and Iłll get it for you."

�No! No deals!"

�Fine. Then youłd better start looking, yourself."

She picked up the scalpel and brandished it in my face. �Screw
the cargo. Iłll do it!" She was shivering like a feverish child, uselessly
trying ~ to stem the flood from her nostrils with the back of her hand. ~ I

I said coldly, �If you cut me again, youłll lose more than
the cargo."

She turned away and vomited; it was thin and gray,
blood-streaked. The toxin was persuading cells in her stomach lining to commit
suicide en masse.

�Uncuff me. Itłll kill you. It doesnłt take long."

She wiped her mouth, steeled herself, made as if to
speak-then started puking again. I knew, first hand, exactly how bad she was
feeling. Keeping it down was like trying to swallow a mixture of shit and
sulphuric acid. Bringing it up was like evisceration.

I said, �In thirty seconds, youłll be too weak to help
yourself-even if I told you where to look. So if Iłm not free ..."

She produced a gun and a set of keys, uncuffed me, then stood
by the foot of the bed, shaking badly but keeping me targeted. I dresses
quickly, ignoring her threats, bandaging my arm with a miraculously clean spare
sock before putting on a T-shirt and a jacket. She sagged to her knees, still
aiming the gun more or less in my direction-but her eyes were swollen half-shut
brimming with yellow fluid. I thought about trying to disarm her, but it didnłt
seem worth the risk.

I packed my remaining clothes, then glanced around the room
as if I might have left something behind. But everything that really mattered
was in my veins; Alison had taught me that that was the only way to travel.

I turned to the burglar. �There is no antidote. But the
toxin wonłt kill you. Youłll just wish it would, for the next twelve hours.
Goodbye."

As I headed for the door, hairs rose suddenly on the back of
my neck. It occurred to me that she might not take me at my word-and might fire
a par ting shot, believing she had nothing to lose.

Turning the handle, without looking back, I said, �But if you
come after me-next time, Ill kill you."

That was a lie, but it seemed to do the trick. As I pulled
the door shut behind me, I heard her drop the gun and start vomiting again.

Halfway down the stairs, the euphoria of escape began to
give way to a bleaker perspective. If one careless bounty hunter could find me,
her more methodical colleagues couldnłt be far behind. Industrial Algebra was
closing in on us. If Alison didnłt gain access to Luminous soon, wełd have no
choice but to destroy the map. And even that would only be buying time.

I paid the desk clerk for the room until the next morning,
stressing that my companion should not be disturbed, and added a suitable tip
to compensate for the mess the cleaners would find. The toxin denatured in air;
the bloodstains would be harmless in a matter of hours. The clerk eyed me
suspiciously, but said nothing.

Outside, it was a mild, cloudless summer morning. It was barely
six ołclock, but Kongjiang Lu was already crowded with pedestrians, cyclists
buses-and a few ostentatious chauffeured limousines, ploughing through the
traffic at about ten kph. It looked like the night shift had just emerged from
the Intel factory down the road; most of the passing cyclists were wearing the
orange, logo-emblazoned overalls.

Two blocks from the hotel I stopped dead, my legs almost giving
way beneath me. It wasnłt just shock-a delayed reaction, a belated acceptance
of how close Iłd come to being slaughtered; The burglarłs clinical violence was
chilling enough-but what it implied was infinitely more disturbing.

Industrial Algebra was paying big money, violating international
law, taking serious risks with their corporate and personal futures. The arcane
abstraction of the defect was being dragged into the world of blood and dust,
boardrooms and assassins, power and pragmatism.

And the closest thing to certainty humanity had ever known
was in danger of dissolving into quicksand.

It had all started out as a joke. Argument for argumentłs
sake. Alison and her infuriating heresies.

�A mathematical theorem," shełd proclaimed, �only becomes
true when a physical system tests it out: when the systemłs behavior depends in
some way on the theorem being true or false."

It was June 1994. We were sitting in a small paved
courtyard, having just emerged yawning and blinking into the winter sunlight
from the final lecture in a one-semester course on the philosophy of
mathematics-a bit of-light relief from the hard grind of the real stuff. We had
fifteen minutes to kill before meeting some friends for lunch. It was a social
conversation-verging on mild flirtation-nothing more. Maybe there were demented
academics lurking in dark crypts somewhere, who held views on the nature of
mathematical that they were willing to die for. But we were twenty years old,
and we knew it was all angels on the head of a pin.

I said, �Physical systems donłt create mathematics. Nothing
creates mathematics-itłs timeless. All of number theory would still be exactly
the same, even if the universe contained nothing but a single electron."

Alison snorted. �Yes, because even one electron, plus a
space-time to put it in, needs all of quantum mechanics and all of general
relativity-and all the mathematical infrastructure they entail. One particle
floating in a quantum vacuum needs half the major results of group theory,
functional analysis, differential geometry"

�Okay, okay! I get the point. But if thatłs the case ... the
events in the first picosecond after the Big Bang would have ęconstructedł
every last mathematical truth required by any physical system, all the way to
the Big Crunch. Once youłve got the mathematics that underpins the Theory of
Everything ... thatłs it, thatłs all you ever need. End of story."

�But itłs not. To apply the Theory of Everything to a
particular system, you still need all the mathematics for dealing with that system-which
could include results far beyond the mathematics that the TOE itself requires.
I mean, fifteen billion years after the Big Bang, someone can still come along
and prove, say ... Fermatłs Last Theorem." Andrew Wiles at Princeton had
recently announced a proof of the famous conjecture, although his work was
still being scrutinized by his colleagues, and the final verdict wasnłt yet in.
�Physics never needed that before."

I protested, �What do you mean, ębeforeł? Fermatłs Last Theorem
never has-and never will-have anything to do with any branch of physics."

Alison smiled sneakily. �No branch-no. But only because the
class of physical systems whose behavior depends on it is so ludicrously
specific: the brains of mathematicians who are trying to validate the Wiles
proof.

�Think about it. Once you start trying to prove a theorem,
then even if the mathematics is so ępureł that it has no relevance to any other
object in the universe ... youłve just made it relevant to yourself. You have
to choose some physical process to test the theorem-whether you use a computer,
or a pen and paper ... or just close your eyes and shuffle neurotransmitters.
Therełs no such thing as a proof that doesnłt rely on physical events-and
whether theyłre inside or outside your skull doesnłt make them any less real."

�Fair enough," I conceded warily. �But that doesnłt mean"

�And maybe Andrew Wilesłs brain-and body, and
notepaper-comprised the first physical system whose behavior depended on the
theorem being true or false. But I donłt think human actions have any special
role ... and if some swarm of quarks had done the same thing blindly, fifteen
billion years before-executed some purely random interaction that just happened
to test the conjecture in some way-then those quarks would have constructed FLT
long before Wiles. Wełll never know."

I opened my mouth to complain that no swarm of quarks could
have tested the infinite number of cases encompassed by the theorem-but I
caught myself just in time. That was true-but it hadnłt stopped Wiles. A finite
sequence of logical steps linked the axioms of number theory-which included
some simple generalities about all numbers-to Fermatłs own sweeping assertion.
And if a mathematician could test those logical steps by manipulating a finite
number of physical objects for a finite amount of time-whether they were pencil
marks on paper, or neurotransmitters in his or her brain-then all kinds of
physical systems could, in theory, mimic the structure of the proof ... with or
without any awareness of what it was they were �proving."

I leant back on the bench and mimed tearing out hair. �If I
wasnłt a die-hard Platonist before, youłre forcing me into it! Fermatłs Last
Theorem didnłt need to be proved by anyone-or stumbled on by any random swarm
of quarks. If itłs true, it was always true. Everything implied by a given set
of axioms is logically connected to them, timelessly, eternally ... even if the
links couldnłt be traced by people-or quarks-in the lifetime of the universe."

Alison was having none of this; every mention of timeless
and eternal truths brought a faint smile to the corner of her mouth, as if I
was affirming my belief in Santa Claus. She said, �So who, or what, pushed the
consequences of ęThere exists an entity zeroł and ęEvery X has a successor et
cetera, all the way to Fermatłs Last Theorem and beyond, before the universe
had a chance to test out any of it?"

I stood my ground. �Whatłs joined by logic is just ...
joined. Nothing has to happen-consequences donłt have to be pushedł into
existence by anyone, or anything. Or do you imagine that the first events after
the Big Bang, the first wild jitters of the quark-gluon-plasma, stopped to fill
in all the logical gaps? You think the quarks reasoned: well, so far wełve done
A and B and C-but now we must do D, because D would be logically inconsistent
with the other mathematics wełve ęinventedł so far ... even if it would take a
five-hundred-thousand-page proof to spell out the inconsistency?"

Alison thought it over. ęęNo. But what if event D took
place, regardless? What if the mathematics it implied was logically inconsistent
with the rest-but it went ahead and happened anyway ... because the universe
was too young to have computed the fact that there was any discrepancy?"

I must have sat and stared at her, open-mouthed, for about
ten seconds. Given the orthodoxies wełd spent the last two-and-a-half years
absorbing, this was a seriously outrageous statement.

�Youłre claiming that ... mathematics might be strewn with
primordial defects in consistency? Like space might be strewn with cosmic
strings?"

�Exactly." She stared back at me, feigning nonchalance. �If
space-time doesnłt join up with itself smoothly, everywhere ... why should
mathematical logic?"

I almost choked. �Where do I begin? What happens-now-when
some physical system tries to link theorems across the defect? If theorem D has
been rendered ętrueł by some over-eager quarks, what happens when we program a
computer to disprove it? When the software goes through all the logical steps
that link A, B, and C-which the quarks have also made true-the dreaded not-D ...
does it succeed, or doesnłt it?"

Alison sidestepped the question. �Suppose theyłre both true:
D and not-D. Sounds like the end of mathematics, doesnłt it? The whole system
falls apart, instantly. From D and not-D together you can prove anything you
like: one equals zero, day equals night. But thatłs just the boring old-fart
Platonist view-where logic travels faster than light, and computation takes no
time at all. People live with omega-inconsistent theories, donłt they?"

Omega-inconsistent number theories were non-standard versions
of arithmetic, based on axioms that �almost" contradicted each other-their
saving grace being that the contradictions could only show up in �infinitely
long proofs" (which were formally disallowed, quite apart from being physically
impossible). That was perfectly respectable modern mathematics-but Alison
seemed prepared to replace �infinitely long" with just plain �long"as if the
difference hardly mattered, in practice.

I said, �Let me get this straight. What youłre talking about
is taking ordinary arithmetic-no weird counter-intuitive axioms, just the stuff
every ten-year-old knows is true-and proving that itłs inconsistent, in a
finite number of steps?"

She nodded blithely. �Finite, but large. So the
contradiction would rarely have any physical manifestation-it would be ęcomputationally
distantł from everyday calculations, and everyday physical events. I mean ...
one cosmic string, somewhere out there, doesnłt destroy the universe, does it?
It does no harm to anyone."

I laughed drily. �So long as you donłt get too close. So
long as you donłt tow it back to the solar system and let it twitch around
slicing up planets."

�Exactly."

I glanced at my watch. �Time to come down to Earth, I think.
You know wełre meeting Ju1Ia and Ramesh-?"

Alison sighed theatrically. �I know, I know. And this would
bore them witless, poor things-so the subjectłs closed, I promise." She added
wickedly, �Humanities students are so myopic."

We set off across the tranquil leafy campus. Alison kept her
word, and we walked in silence; carrying on the argument up to the last minute
would have made it even harder to avoid the topic once we were in polite
company.

Half-way to the cafeteria, though, I couldnłt help myself.

�If someone ever did program a computer to follow a chain of
inferences across the defect ... what do you claim would actually happen? When
the end result of all those simple, trustworthy logical steps finally popped up
on the screen-which group of primordial quarks would win the battle? And please
donłt tell me that the whole computer just conveniently vanishes."

Alison smiled, tongue-in-cheek at last. �Get real, Bruno.
How can you expect me to answer that, when the mathematics needed to predict
the result doesnłt even exist yet? Nothing I could say would be true or
false-until someonełs gone ahead and done the experiment."

I spent most of the day trying to convince myself that I
wasnłt being followed by some accomplice (or rival) of the surgeon, who might
have been lurking outside the hotel. There was something disturbingly
Kafka-esque about trying to lose a tail who might or might not have been real:
no particular face I could search for in the crowd, just the abstract idea of a
pursuer. It was too late to think about plastic surgery to make me look Han
Chinese-Alison had raised this as a serious suggestion, back in Vietnam-but
Shanghai had over a million foreign residents, so withcare even an Anglophone
of Italian descent should have been able to vanish.

Whether or not I was up to the task was another matter.

I tried joining the ant-trails of the tourists, following
the path of least resistance from the insane crush of the Yuyuan Bazaar (where
racks bursting with ten-cent watch-PCłs, mood-sensitive contact lenses, and the
latest karaoke vocal implants, sat beside bamboo cages of live ducks and
pigeons) to the one-time residence of Sun Yatsen (whose personality cult was
currently undergoing a mini-series-led revival on Star TV, advertised on ten
thousand buses and ten times as many T-shirts). From the tomb of the writer Lu
Xun (�Always think and study ... visit the general then visit the victims, see
the realities of your time with open eyes"no prime time for him) to the
Hongkou McDonaldłs (where they were giving away small plastic Andy Warhol
figurines, for reasons I couldnłt fathom). I mimed leisurely window-shopping
between the shrines, but kept my body language sufficiently unfriendly to deter
even the loneliest Westerner from attempting to strike up a conversation. If
foreigners were unremarkable in most of the city, they were positively
eye-glazing here-even to each other-and I did my best to offer no one the
slightest reason to remember me.

Along the way I checked for messages from Alison, but there
were none. I left five of my own, tiny abstract chalk marks on bus shelters and
park benches-all slightly different, but all saying the same thing: CLOSE
BRUSH, BUT SAFE NOW. MOVING ON.

By early evening, Iłd done all I could to throw off my hypothetical
shadow, so I headed for the next hotel on our agreed but unwritten list. The
last time wełd met face-to-face, in Hanoi, I mocked all of Alisonłs elaborate
preparations. Now I was beginning to wish that Iłd begged her to extend our
secret language to cover extreme contingencies .. FATALLY WOUNDED. BETRAYED YOU
UNDER TORTURE. REALITY DECAYING. OTHERWISE FINE.

The hotel on Huaihai Zhonglu was a step up from the last
one, but not quite classy enough to refuse payment in cash. The desk clerk made
polite small-talk, and I lied as smoothly as I could about my plans to spend a
week sight seeing before heading for Beijing. The bellperson smirked when I
tipped him too much-and I sat on my bed for five minutes afterward, wondering
what significance to read into that.

I struggled to regain a sense of proportion. Industrial
Algebra could have bribed every single hotel employee in Shanghai to be on the
lookout for us-but that was a bit like saying that, in theory, they could have
duplicated our entire twelve-year search for defects, and not bothered to
pursue us at all. There was no question that they wanted what we had, badly-but
what could they actually do about it? Go to a merchant bank (or the Mafia, or a
Triad) for finance? That might have worked if the cargo had been a stray kilogram
of plutonium, or a valuable gene sequence-but only a few hundred thousand
people on the planet would be capable of understanding what the defect was,
even in theory. Only a fraction of that number would believe that such a thing
could really exist ... and even fewer would be both wealthy and immoral enough
to invest in the business of exploiting it.

The stakes appeared to be infinitely high-but that didnłt
make the players omnipotent.

Not yet.

I changed the dressing on my arm, from sock to handkerchief,
but the incision was deeper than Iłd realized, and it was still bleeding
thinly. I left the hotel-and found exactly what I needed in a twenty-four-hour
emporium just ten minutes away. Surgical grade tissue repair cream: a mixture
of collagen-based adhesive, antiseptic, and growth factors. The emporium wasnłt
even a pharmaceuticals outlet-it just had aisle after aisle packed with all
kinds of unrelated odds and ends, laid out beneath the unblinking blue-white
ceiling panels. Canned food, PVC plumbing fixtures, traditional medicines, rat
contraceptives, video ROMS. It was a random cornucopia, an almost organic
diversity-as if the products had all just grown on the shelves from whatever
spores the wind had happened to blow in.

I headed back to the hotel, pushing my way through the relentless
crowds, half seduced and half sickened by the odors of cooking, dazed by the
endless vista of holograms and neon in a language I barely understood. Fifteen
minutes later, reeling from the noise and humidity, I realized that I was lost.

I stopped on a street corner and tried to get my bearings.
Shanghai stretched out around me, dense and lavish, sensual and ruthless-a
Darwinian economic simulation self-organized to the brink of catastrophe. The
Amazon of commerce: this city of sixteen million had more industry of every
kind, more exporters and importers, more wholesalers and retailers, traders and
re-sellers and re-cyclers and scavengers, more billionaires and more beggars,
than most nations on the planet.

Not to mention more computing power.

China itself was reaching the cusp of its decades-long transition
from brutal totalitarian communism to brutal totalitarian capitalism: a slow
seamless morph from Mao to Pinochet set to the enthusiastic applause of its
trading partners and the international financial agencies. Therełd been no need
for a counter-revolution just layer after layer of carefully reasoned Newspeak
to pave the way from previous doctrine to the stunningly obvious conclusion
that private property, a thriving middle class, and a few trillion dollars
worth of foreign investment were exactly what the Party had been aiming for all
along.

The apparatus of the police state remained as essential as
ever. Trade unionists with decadent bourgeois ideas about uncompetitive wages,
journalists With counter-revolutionary notions of exposing corruption and
nepotism, and any number of subversive political activists spreading
destabilizing propaganda about the fantasy of free elections, all needed to be
kept in check.

In a way, Luminous was a product of this strange transition
from communism to not-communism in a thousand tiny steps. No one else, not even
the U.S. defense research establishment, possessed a single machine with so
much power. The rest of the world had succumbed long ago to networking, giving
up their imposing supercomputers with their difficult architecture and
customized chips for a few hundred of the latest mass-produced work stations.
In fact, the biggest computing feats of the twenty-first century had all been
farmed out over the Internet to thousands of volunteers, to run on their
machines whenever the processors would otherwise be idle. That was how Alison
and I had mapped the defect in the first place: seven thousand amateur
mathematicians had shared the joke, for twelve years.

But now the net was the very opposite of what we needed-and
only Luminous could take its place. And though only the Peoplełs Republic could
have paid for it, and only the Peoplełs Institute for Advanced Optical
Engineering could have built it ... only Shanghaiłs QIPS Corporation could have
sold time on it to the world-while it was still being used to model hydrogen
bomb shock waves, pilotless fighter jets, and exotic antisatellite weapons.

I finally decoded the street signs, and realized what Iłd
done: Iłd turned the wrong way coming out of the emporium, it was as simple as
that.

I retraced my steps, and I was soon back on familiar
territory.

When I opened the door of my room, Alison was sitting on the
bed.

I said, �What is it with locks in this city?"

We embraced, briefly. Wełd been lovers, once-but that was
long over. And wełd been friends for years afterward-but I wasnłt sure if that
was still the right word. Our whole relationship now was too functional, too
spartan. Everything revolved around the defect, now.

She said, �I got your message. What happened?"

I described the morningłs events.

�You know what you should have done?"

That stung. �Iłm still here, arenłt I? The cargołs still
safe."

�You should have killed her, Bruno."

I laughed. Alison gazed back at me placidly, and I looked
away. I didnłt know if she was serious-and I didnłt much want to find out.

She helped me apply the repair cream. My toxin was no threat
to her-wełd both installed exactly the same symbionts, the same genotype from
the same unique batch in Hanoi. But it was strange to feel her bare fingers on
my broken skin, knowing that no one else on the planet could touch me like
this, with impunity.

Ditto for sex, but I didnłt want to dwell on that.

As I slipped on my jacket, she said, �So guess what wełre
doing at five A.M. tomorrow?"

�Donłt tell me: I fly to Helsinki, and you fly to Cape Town.
Just to throw them off the scent."

That got a faint smile. �Wrong. Wełre meeting Yuen at the Institute-and
spending half an hour on Luminous."

�You are brilliant." I bent over and kissed her on the
forehead. �But I always knew youłd pull it off."

And I should have been delirious-but the truth was, my guts
were churning. I felt almost as trapped as I had upon waking cuffed to the bed.
If Luminous had remained beyond our reach (as it should have, since we couldnłt
afford to hire it for a microsecond at the going rate) we would have had no
choice but to destroy all the data, and hope for the best. Industrial Algebra
had no doubt dredged up a few thousand fragments of the original Internet calculations-but
it was clear that, although they knew exactly what wełd found, they still had
no idea where wełd found it. If theyłd been forced to start their own random
search-constrained by the need for secrecy to their own private hardware-it
might have taken them centuries.

There was no question now, though, of backing away and leaving
everything to chance. We were going to have to confront the defect in person.

�How much did you have to tell him?"

�Everything." She walked over to the washbasin, removed her
shirt, and began wiping the sweat from her neck and torso with a washcloth. �Short
of handing over the map. I showed him the search algorithms and their results,
and all the programs wall need to run on Luminous-all stripped of specific
parameter values, but enough for him to validate the techniques. He wanted to
see direct evidence of the defect, of course, but I held out on that."

�And how much did he believe?"

�Hełs reserved judgment. The deal is, we get half an hourłs
unimpeded access-but he gets to observe everything we do."

I nodded, as if my opinion made any difference, as if we had
any choice. Yuen Ting-fu had been Alisonłs supervisor for her Ph.D. on advanced
applications of ring theory, when shełd studied at Fu-tan University in the
late nineties. Now he was one of the worldłs leading cryptographers, working as
a consultant to the military, the security services, and a dozen international
corporations. Alison had once told me that shełd heard hełd found a
polynomial-time algorithm for factoring the product of two primes; that had
never been officially confirmed ... but such was the power of his reputation
that almost everyone on the planet had stopped using the old RSA encryption
method as the rumor had spread. No doubt time on Luminous was his for the
asking-but that didnłt mean he couldnłt still be imprisoned for twenty years
for giving it away to the wrong people, for the wrong reasons.

I said, �And you trust him? He may not believe in the defect
now, but once hełs convinced"

�Hell want exactly what we want. Iłm sure of that."

�Okay. But are you sure IA wonłt be watching, too? If theyłve
worked out why wełre here, and theyłve bribed someone"

Alison cut me off impatiently. �There are still a few things
you canłt buy in this city. Spying on a military machine like Luminous would be
suicidal. No one would risk it."

�What about spying on unauthorized projects being run on a
military machine? Maybe the crimes cancel out, and you end up a hero."

She approached me, half naked, drying her face on my towel. �Wełd
better hope not."

I laughed suddenly. �You know what I like most about Luminous?
Theyłre not really letting Exxon and McDonnell-Douglas use the same machine as
the Peoplełs Liberation Army. Because the whole computer vanishes every time
they pull the plug. Therełs no paradox at all, if you look at it that way."

Alison insisted that we stand guard in shifts. Twenty-four
hours earlier, I might have made a joke of it; now I reluctantly accepted the
revolver she offered me, and sat watching the door in the neon-tinged darkness
while she went out like a light.

The hotel had been quiet for most of the evening-but now it
came to life. There were footsteps in the corridor every five minutes-and rats
in the walls, foraging and screwing and probably giving birth. Police sirens
wailed in the distance; a couple screamed at each other in the street below. Iłd
read somewhere that Shanghai was now the murder capital of the world-but was
that per capita, or in absolute numbers?

After an hour, I was so jumpy that it was a miracle I hadnłt
blown my foot off. I unloaded the gun, then sat playing Russian roulette with
the empty barrel. In spite of everything, I still wasnłt ready to put a bullet
in anyonełs brain for the sake of defending the axioms of number theory.

Industrial Algebra had approached us in a perfectly
civilized fashion, at first. They were a small but aggressive UK-based company,
designing specialized high-performance computing hardware for industrial and
military applications. That theyłd heard about the search was no great
surprise-it had been openly discussed on the Internet for years, and even joked
about in serious mathematical journals-but it seemed an odd coincidence when
they made contact with us just days after Alison had sent me a private message
from ZYrich mentioning the latest �promising" result. After half a dozen false
alarms-all due to bugs and glitches-wełd stopped broadcasting the news of every
unconfirmed find to the people who were donating runtime to the project, let
alone any wider circle. We were afraid that if we cried wolf one more time,
half our collaborators would get so annoyed that theyłd withdraw their support.

IA had offered us a generous slab of computing power on the
companyłs private network several orders of magnitude more than we received
from any other donor Why? The answer kept changing. Their deep respect for pure
mathematics ... their wide-eyed fun-loving attitude to life ... their desire to
be seen to be sponsoring a project s0 wild and hip and unlikely to succeed that
it made SETI look like a staid blue-chip investment. It was-theyłd finally �conceded"a
desperate bid to soften their corporate image, after years of bad press for
what certain unsavory governments did with their really rather nice smart
bombs.

Wełd politely declined. Theyłd offered us highly paid consulting
jobs. Bemused, wełd suspended all net-based calculations-and started encrypting
our mail with a simple but highly effective algorithm Alison had picked up from
Yuen.

Alison had been collating the results of the search on her
own work station at her current home in ZYrich, while Iłd helped coordinate
things from Sydney. No doubt IA had been eavesdropping on the incoming data,
but theyłd clearly started too late to gather the information needed to create
their own map; each fragment of the calculations meant little in isolation. But
when the work station was stolen (all the files were encrypted, it would have
told them nothing) wełd finally been forced to ask ourselves: If the defect
turns out to be genuine, if the joke is no joke ... then exactly whatłs at
stake? How much money? How much power?

On June 7, 2006, we met in a sweltering, crowded square in
Hanoi. Alison wasted no time. She was carrying a backup of the data from the stolen
work station in her notepad-and she solemnly proclaimed that, this time, the
defect was real.

The notepadłs tiny processor would have taken centuries to repeat
the long random trawling of the space of arithmetic statements that had been
carried out on the net-but, led straight to the relevant computations, it could
confirm the existence of the defect in a matter of minutes.

The process began with Statement S. Statement S was an assertion
about some ludicrously huge numbers-but it wasnłt mathematically sophisticated
or contentious in any way. There were no claims here about infinite sets, no
propositions concerning �every integer." It merely stated that a certain
(elaborate) calculation performed on certain (very large) whole numbers led to
a certain result-in essence, it was no different from something like �5+3 = 4x2".
It might have taken me ten years to check it with a pen and paper-but I could
have carried out the task with nothing but elementary school mathematics and a
great deal of patience. A statement like this could not be undecidable; it had
to be either true or false.

The notepad decided it was true.

Then the notepad took Statement S ... and in four hundred
and twenty-three simple, impeccably logical steps, used it to prove not-S.

I repeated the calculations on my own notepad-using a different
software package. The result was exactly the same. I gazed at the screen,
trying to concoct a plausible reason why two different machines running two
different programs could have failed in identical ways. Therełd certainly been
cases in the past of a single misprinted algorithm in a computing textbook
spawning a thousand dud programs. But the operations here were too simple, too
basic.

Which left only two possibilities. Either conventional
arithmetic was intrinsically flawed, and the whole Platonic ideal of the natural
numbers was ultimately self-contradictory ... or Alison was right, and an alternative
arithmetic had come to hold sway in a �computationally remote" region, billions
of years ago.

I was badly shaken-but my first reaction was to try to play
down the significance of the result. �The numbers being manipulated here are
greater than the volume of the observable universe, measured in cubic Planck
lengths. If IA were hoping to use this on their foreign exchange transactions,
I think theyłve made a slight error of scale." Even as I spoke, though, I knew
it wasnłt that simple. The raw numbers might have been trans-astronomical-but
it was the mere 1024 bits of the notepadłs binary representations that had
actually, physically misbehaved. Every truth in mathematics was encoded,
reflected, in countless other forms. If a paradox like this-which at first
glance sounded like a dispute about numbers too large to apply even to the most
grandiose cosmological discussions-could affect the behavior of a five-gram
silicon chip, then there could easily be a billion other systems on the planet
at risk of being touched by the very same flaw.

But there was worse to come.

The theory was, wełd located part of the boundary between
two incompatible systems of mathematics-both of which were physically true, in
their respective domains. Any sequence of deductions that stayed entirely on
one side of the defect-whether it was the �near side," where conventional
arithmetic applied, or the �far side," where the alternative took over-would be
free from contradictions. But any sequence that crossed the border would give rise
to absurdities-hence S could lead to not-S.

So, by examining a large number of chains of inference, some
of which turned out to be self-contradictory and some not, it should have been
possible to map the area around the defect precisely-to assign every statement
to one system or the other.

Alison displayed the first map shełd made. It portrayed an
elaborate crenulated fractal border, rather like the boundary between two
microscopic ice crystals-as if the two systems had been diffusing out at random
from different starting points, and then collided, blocking each otherłs way.
By now, I was almost prepared to believe that I really was staring at a
snapshot of the creation of mathematics-a fossil of primordial attempts to
define the difference between truth and falsehood.

Then she produced a second map of the same set of
statements, and overlaid the two. The defect, the border, had shifted-advancing
in some places, retreating in others My blood went cold. �That has got to be a
bug in the software."

�Itłs not."

I inhaled deeply, looking around the square as if the
heedless crow. of tourists and hawkers, shoppers and executives, might offer
some simple �human" truth more resilient than mere arithmetic. But all I could
think of was 1984: Winston Smith, finally beaten into submission, abandoning
every touchstone of reason by conceding that two and two make five.

I said, �Okay. Go on."

�In the early universe, some physical system must have
tested out mathematics that was isolated, cut off from all the established results-leaving
it free to decide the outcome at random. Thatłs how the defect arose. But by
now, all the mathematics in this region has been tested, all the gaps have been
filled in. When a physical system tests theorem on the near side, not only has
it been tested a billion time before-but all the logically adjacent statements
around it have been decided, and they imply the correct result in a single
step."

�You mean ... peer pressure from the neighbors? No inconsistencies
allowed, you have to conform? If x-1 = y-1, and x+1 = y+1, then x is left with
no choice but to equal y ... because therełs nothing ęnearbył to support the
alternative?"

�Exactly. Truth is determined locally. And itłs the same,
deep into the far side. The alternative mathematics has dominated there, and
every test takes place surrounded by established theorems that reinforce each
other, and the ęcorrectł-non-standard-result."

�At the border, though"

�At the border, every theorem you test is getting
contradictory advice. From one neighbor, x-1 = y-1 ... but from another, x+1 =
y+2. And the topology of the border is so complex that a near-side theorem can
have more far-side neighbors than near-side ones-and vice versa.

�So the truth at the border isnłt fixed, even now. Both
regions can still advance or retreat-it all depends on the order in which the
theorems are tested. If a solidly near-side theorem is tested first, and it
lend support to a more vulnerable neighbor, that can guarantee that they both
stay near-side." She ran a brief animation that demonstrated the effect. �But
if the order is reversed, the weaker one will fail."

I watched, light-headed. Obscure-but supposedly
eternal-truth were tumbling like chess pieces. �And ... you think that physical
processes going on right now-chance molecular events that keep inadvertently
testing and re-testing different theories along the border-cause each side to
gain and lose territory?"

�Yes."

�So therełs been a kind of ... random tide washing back and
forth between the two kinds of mathematics, for the past few billion years?" I
laughed uneasily, and did some rough calculations in my head. �The expectation
value for a random walk is the square root of N. I donłt think we have anything
to worry about. The tide isnłt going to wash over an, useful arithmetic in the
lifetime of the universe."

Alison smiled humorlessly, and held up the notepad again. �The
tide? No. But itłs the easiest thing in the world to dig a channel. To bias the
random flow." She ran an animation of a sequence of tests that forced the
far-site system to retreat across a small front-exploiting a �beach head"
formed by chance, and then pushing on to undermine a succession of theorems. �Industrial
Algebra, though-I imagine-would be more interested in the reverse. Establishing
a whole network of narrow channels of non-standard mathematics running deep
into the realm of conventional arithmetic-which they could then deploy against
theorems with practical consequences."

I fell silent, trying to imagine tendrils of contradictory
arithmetic reaching down into the everyday world. No doubt IA would aim for
surgical precision-hoping to earn themselves a few billion dollars by
corrupting the specific mathematics underlying certain financial transactions.
But the ramifications would be impossible to predict-or control. Therełd be no
way to limit the effect, spatially-they could target certain mathematical
truths, but they couldnłt confine the change to any one location. A few billion
dollars, a few billion neurons, a few billion stars ... a few billion people.
Once the basic rules of counting were undermined, the most solid and distinct
objects could be rendered as uncertain as swirls of fog. This was not a power I
would have entrusted to a cross between Mother Theresa and Carl Friedrich
Gauss.

�So what do we do? Erase the map-and just hope that IA never
find the defect for themselves?"

�No." Alison seemed remarkably calm-but then, her own
long-cherished philosophy had just been confirmed, not razed to the ground-and
shełd had time on the flight from ZYrich to think through all the
Realmathematik. �Therełs only one way to be sure that they can never use this.
We have to strike first. We have to get hold of enough computing power to map
the entire defect. And then we either iron the border flat, so it canłt move-if
you amputate all the pincers, there can be no pincer movements. Or-better yet,
if we can get the resources-we push the border in, from all directions, and
shrink the far-side system down to nothing."

I hesitated. �All wełve mapped so far is a tiny fragment of
the defect We donłt know how large the far side could be. Except that it canłt
be small-or the random fluctuations-would have swallowed it long ago. And it
could go on forever; it could be infinite, for all we know."

Alison gave me a strange look. �You still donłt get it, do
you, Bruno? Youłre still thinking like a Platonist. The universe has only been
around for fifteen billion years. It hasnłt had time to create infinities. The
far side canłt go on forever-because somewhere beyond the defect, there are
theorems that donłt belong to any system. Theorems that have never been
touched, never been tested, never been rendered true or false.

�And if we have to reach beyond the existing mathematics of
the universe in order to surround the far side ... then thatłs what wełll do.
Therełs no reason why it shouldnłt be possible-just so long as we get there
first."

When Alison took my place, at one in the morning, I was certain
I wouldnłt get any sleep. When she shook me awake three hours later, I still felt
like I hadnłt.

I used my notepad to send a priming code to the data caches
buried in our veins, and then we stood together side-by-side,
left-shoulder-to-right-shoulder. The two chips recognized each otherłs magnetic
and electrical signatures, interrogated each other to be sure-and then began
radiating low power microwaves. Alisonłs notepad picked up the transmission,
and merged the two complementary data streams. The result was still heavily
encrypted-but after all the precautions wełd taken so far, shifting the map
into a hand-held computer felt about as secure as tattooing it onto our
foreheads.

A taxi was waiting for us downstairs. The Peoplełs Institute
for Advanced Optical Engineering was in Minhang, a sprawling technology park
some thirty kilometers south of the city center. We rode in silence through the
gray predawn light, past the giant ugly tower blocks thrown up by the landlords
of the new millennium, riding out the fever as the necrotraps and their cargo
dissolved into our blood.

As the taxi turned into an avenue lined with biotech and aerospace
companies, Alison said, �If anyone asks, wełre Ph.D. students of Yuenłs,
testing a conjecture in algebraic topology."

�Now you tell me. I donłt suppose you have any specific conjecture
in mind? What if they ask us to elaborate?"

�On algebraic topology? At five ołclock in the morning?"

The Institute building was unimposing-sprawling black ceramic,
three stories high-but there was a five-meter electrified fence, and the
entrance was guarded by two armed soldiers. We paid the taxi driver and
approached on foot. Yuen had supplied us with visitorłs passes-complete with
photographs and fingerprints. The names were our own; there was no point
indulging in unnecessary deception. If we were caught out, pseudonyms would
only make things worse.

The soldiers checked the passes, then led us through an MRI
scanner. I forced myself to breathe calmly as we waited for the results; in
theory the scanner could have picked up our symbiontsł foreign proteins,
lingering breakdown products from the necrotraps, and a dozen other suspicious
trace chemicals. But it all came down to a question of what they were looking
for; magnetic resonance spectra for billions of molecules had been
catalogued-but no machine could hunt for all of them at once.

One of the soldiers took me aside and asked me to remove my
jacket. I fought down a wave of panic-and then struggled not to overcompensate:
if Iłd had nothing to hide, I would still have been nervous. He prodded the
bandage on my upper arm; the surrounding skin was still red and inflamed.

�Whatłs this?"

�I had a cyst there. My doctor cut it out, this morning."

He eyed me suspiciously, and peeled back the adhesive bandage-with
ungloved hands. I couldnłt bring myself to look; the repair cream should have
sealed the wound completely-at worst there should have been old, dried
blood-but I could feel a faint liquid warmth along the line of the incision.

The soldier laughed at my gritted teeth, and waved me away
with an expression of distaste. I had no idea what he thought I might have been
hiding-but I saw fresh red droplets beading the skin before I closed the
bandage.

Yuen Ting-fu was waiting for us in the lobby. He was a slender,
fit looking man in his late sixties, casually dressed in denim. I let Alison ~
do all the talking: apologizing for our lack of punctuality (although we s
werenłt actually late), and thanking him effusively for granting us this
precious opportunity to pursue our unworthy research. I stood back and tried to
appear suitably deferential. Four soldiers looked on impassively; they didnłt
seem to find all this groveling excessive. And no doubt I would have been giddy
with awe, if I really had been a student granted time here for some
run-of-the-mill thesis.

We followed Yuen as he strode briskly through a second
checkpoint and scanner (this time, no one stopped us) then down a long corridor
with a soft gray vinyl floor. We passed a couple of white-coated technicians,
but they barely gave us a second glance. Iłd had visions of a pair of obvious
foreigners attracting as much attention here as we would have wandering through
a military base-but that was absurd. Half the runtime on Luminous was sold to
foreign corporations-and because the machine was most definitely not linked to
any communications network, commercial users had to come here in person. Just
how often Yuen wangled free time for his students-whatever their
nationality-was another question, but if he believed it was the best cover for
us, I was in no position to argue. I only hoped hełd planted a seamless trail
of reassuring lies in the university records and beyond, in case the Institute
administration decided to check up on us in any detail.

We stopped in at the operations room, and Yuen chatted with
the technicians. Banks of flatscreens covered one wall, displaying status
histograms and engineering schematics. It looked like the control center for a
small particle accelerator-which wasnłt far from the truth.

Luminous was, literally, a computer made of light. It came
into existence when a vacuum chamber, a cube five meters wide, was filled with
an elaborate standing wave created by three vast arrays of high-powered lasers.
A coherent electron beam was fed into the chamber-and just as a finely machined
grating built of solid matter could diffract a beam of light, a sufficiently
ordered (and sufficiently intense) configuration of light could diffract a beam
of matter.

The electrons were redirected from layer to layer of the
light cube, recombining and interfering at each stage, every change in their
phase and intensity performing an appropriate computation-and the whole system
could be reconfigured, nanosecond by nanosecond, into complex new �hardware"
optimized for the calculations at hand. The auxilliary supercomputers controlling
the laser arrays could design, and then instantly build, the perfect machine of
light to carry out each particular stage of any program.

It was, of course, fiendishly difficult technology,
incredibly expensive and temperamental. The chance of ever putting it on the
desktops of Tetris-playing accountants was zero, so nobody in the West had
bothered to pursue it.

And this cumbersome, unwieldy, impractical machine ran faster
than every piece of silicon hanging off the Internet, combined.

We continued on to the programming room. At first glance, it
might have been the computing center in a small primary school, with half a
dozen perfectly ordinary work stations sitting on white formica tables. They
just happened to be the only six in the world that were hooked up to Luminous.

We were alone with Yuen now-and Alison cut the protocol and
just glanced briefly in his direction for approval, before hurriedly linking
her notepad to one of the work stations and uploading the encrypted map. As she
typed in the instructions to decode the file, all the images running through my
head of what would have happened if Iłd poisoned the soldier at the gate
receded into insignificance. We now had half an hour to banish the defect-and
we still had no idea how far it extended.

Yuen turned to me; the tension on his face betrayed his own
anxieties, but he mused philosophically, �If our arithmetic seems to fail for
these large numbers-does it mean the mathematics, the ideal, is really flawed
and mutable-or only that the behavior of matter always falls short of the
ideal?"

I replied, �If every class of physical objects ęfalls shortł
in exactly the same way-whether itłs boulders or electrons or abacus beads ...
what is it that their common behavior is obeying-or defining-if not the mathematics?"

He smiled, puzzled. �ęAlison seemed to think you were a Platonist."

�Lapsed. Or ... defeated. I donłt see what it can mean to
talk about standard number theory still being true for these statements-in some
vague Platonic sense-if no real objects can ever reflect that truth."

�We can still imagine it. We can still contemplate the
abstraction. Itłs only the physical act of validation that must fall through.
Think of transfinite arithmetic: no one can physically test the properties of
Cantorłs infinities, can they? We can only reason about them from afar."

I didnłt reply. Since the revelations in Hanoi, Iłd pretty
much lost faith in my power to �reason from afar" about anything I couldnłt
personally describe with Arabic numerals on a single sheet of paper. Maybe
Alisonłs idea of �local truth" was the most we could hope for; anything more
ambitious was beginning to seem like the comic-book �physics" of swinging a
rigid beam ten billion kilometers long around your head, and predicting that
the far end would exceed the speed of light.

An image blossomed on the work station screen: it began as
the familiar map of the defect-but Luminous was already extending it at a
mind-boggling rate. Billions of inferential loops were being spun around the
margins: some confirming their own premises, and thus delineating regions where
a single, consistent mathematics held sway ... others skewing into
self-contradiction, betraying a border crossing. I tried to imagine what it
would have been like to follow one of those Mobius-strips of deductive logic in
my head; there were no difficult concepts involved, it was only the sheer size
of the statements that made that impossible. But would the contradictions have
driven me into gibbering insanity-or would I have found every step perfectly
reasonable, and the conclusion simply unavoidable? Would I have ended up
calmly, happily conceding: Two and two make five?

As the map grew-smoothly re-scaled to keep it fitting on the
screen, giving the unsettling impression that we were retreating from the alien
mathematics as fast as we could, and only just avoiding being swallowed-Alison
sat hunched forward, waiting for the big picture to be revealed. The map
portrayed the network of statements as an intricate lattice in three dimensions
(a crude representational convention, but it was as good as any other). So far,
the border between the regions showed no sign of overall curvature-just
variously sized random incursions in both directions. For all we knew, it was
possible that the far-side mathematics enclosed the near side completely-that
the arithmetic wełd once believed stretched out to infinity was really no more
than a tiny island in an ocean of contradictory truths.

I glanced at Yuen; he was watching the screen with undisguised
pain. He said, �I read your software, and I thought: sure, this looks fine-but
some glitch on your machines is the real explanation. Luminous will soon put
you right."

Alison broke in jubilantly, �Look, itłs turning!"

She was right. As the scale continued to shrink, the random
fractal meanderings of the border were finally being subsumed by an overall
convexity-a convexity of the far side. It was as if the viewpoint was backing
away from a giant spiked sea-urchin. Within minutes, the map showed a crude
hemisphere, decorated with elaborate crystalline extrusions at every scale. The
sense of observing some palaeomathematical remnant was stronger than ever, now:
this bizarre cluster of theorems really did look as if it had exploded out from
some central premise into the vacuum of unclaimed truths, perhaps a billionth
of a second after the Big Bang-only to be checked by an encounter with our own
mathematics.

The hemisphere slowly extended into a three-quarters sphere ...
and then a spiked whole. The far side was bounded, finite. It was the island,
not us.

Alison laughed uneasily. �Was that true before we started-or
did we just make it true?" Had the near side enclosed the far side for billions
of years-or had Luminous broken new ground, actively extending the near side
into mathematical territory that had never been tested by any physical system
before?

Wełd never know. Wełd designed the software to advance the
mapping along a front in such a way that any unclaimed statements would be
instantly recruited into the near side. If wełd reached out blindly, far into
the void, we might have tested an isolated statement-and inadvertently spawned
a whole new alternative mathematics to deal with.

Alison said, �Okay-now we have to decide. Do we try to seal
the border-or do we take on the whole structure?" The software, I knew, was
busy assessing the relative difficulty of the tasks.

Yuen replied at once, �Seal the border, nothing more. You
mustnłt destroy this." He turned to me, imploringly. �Would you smash up a
fossil of Australopithecus? Would you wipe the cosmic background radiation out
of the sky? This may shake the foundations of all my beliefs-but it encodes the
truth about our history. We have no right to obliterate it, like vandals."

Alison eyed me nervously. What was this-majority rule? Yuen
was the only one with any power here; he could pull the plug in an instant. And
yet it was clear from his demeanor that he wanted a consensus-he wanted our
moral support for any decision.

I said cautiously, �If we smooth the border, thatłll make it
literally impossible for IA to exploit the defect, wonłt it?"

Alison shook her head. �We donłt know that. There may be a
quantum-like component of spontaneous defections, even for statements that
appear to be in perfect equilibrium."

Yuen countered, �Then there could be spontaneous defections
anywhere-even far from any border. Erasing the whole structure will guarantee
nothing."

�It will guarantee that IA wonłt find it! Maybe pin-point
defections do occur, all the time-but the next time theyłre tested, theyłll
always revert. Theyłre surrounded by explicit contradictions, they have no
chance of getting a foothold. You canłt compare a few transient glitches with
this ... armory of counter-mathematics!"

The defect bristled on the screen like a giant caltrap.
Alison and Yuen both turned to me expectantly. As I opened my mouth, the work
station chimed. The software had examined the alternatives in detail:
destroying the entire far side would take Luminous twenty-three minutes and
seventeen seconds-about a minute less than we had left, Sealing the border
would take more than an hour.

I said, �That canłt be right."

Alison groaned. �But it is! Therełs random interference
going on at the border from other systems all the time-and doing anything
finicky there means coping with that noise, fighting it. Charging ahead and
pushing the border inward is different: you can exploit the noise to speed the
advance. Itłs not a question of dealing with a mere surface versus dealing with
a whole volume. Itłs more like ... trying to carve an island into an absolutely
perfect circle, while waves are constantly crashing on the beach-versus
bulldozing the whole thing into the ocean."

We had thirty seconds to decide-or wełd be doing neither today.
And maybe Yuen had the resources to keep the map safe from IA, while we waited
a month or more for another session on Luminous-but I wasnłt prepared to live
with that kind of uncertainty.

�I say we get rid of the whole thing. Anything less is too
dangerous. Future mathematicians will still be able to study the map-and if no
one believes that the defect itself ever really existed, thatłs just too bad.
IA is too close. We canłt risk it."

Alison had one hand poised above the keyboard. I turned to
Yuen; he was staring at the floor, with an anguished expression. Hełd let us
state our views-but in the end, it was his decision.

He looked up, and spoke sadly but decisively.

�Okay. Do it."

Alison hit the key-with about three seconds to spare. I
sagged into my chair, light headed with relief.

We watched the far side shrinking. The process didnłt look
quite as crass as bulldozing an island-more like dissolving some quirkily
beautiful crystal in acid. Now that the danger was receding before our eyes,
though, I was beginning to suffer faint pangs of regret. Our mathematics had
coexisted with this strange anomaly for fifteen billion years, and it shamed me
to think that within months of its discovery, wełd backed ourselves into a
corner where wełd had no choice but to destroy it.

Yuen seemed transfixed by the process. �So are we breaking
the laws of physics-or enforcing them?"

Alison said, �Neither. Wełre merely changing what the laws
imply."

He laughed softly. �ęMerely.ł For some esoteric set of
complex systems, wełre rewriting the high-level rules of their behavior. Not
including the human brain, I hope." ę

My skin crawled. �Donłt you think thatłs ... unlikely?"

�I was joking." He hesitated, then added soberly, �Unlikely
for humans-but someone could be relying on this, somewhere. We might be
destroying the whole basis of their existence: certainties as fundamental to
them as a childłs multiplication tables are to us."

Alison could barely conceal her scorn. �This is junk mathematics-a
relic of a pointless accident. Any kind of life that evolved from simple to complex
forms would have no use for it. Our mathematics works for ... rocks, seeds,
animals in the herd, members of the tribe. This only kicks in beyond the number
of particles in the universe"

�Or smaller systems that represent those numbers," I
reminded her.

�And you think life somewhere might have a burning need to
do nonstandard trans-astronomical arithmetic, in order to survive? I doubt that
very much."

We fell silent. Guilt and relief could fight it out later,
but no one suggested halting the program. In the end, maybe nothing could
outweigh the havoc the defect would have caused if it had ever been harnessed
as a weapon-and I was looking forward to composing a long message to Industrial
Algebra, informing them of precisely what wełd done to the object of their
ambitions.

Alison pointed to a corner of the screen. �Whatłs that?" A
narrow dark spike protruded from the shrinking cluster of statements. For a
moment I thought it was merely avoiding the near sidełs assault-but it wasnłt.
It was slowly, steadily growing longer.

�Could be a bug in the mapping algorithm." I reached for the
keyboard and zoomed in on the structure. In close-up, it was several thousand
statements wide. At its border, Alisonłs program could be seen in action,
testing statements in an order designed to force tendrils of the near side ever
deeper into the interior. This slender extrusion, ringed by contradictory
mathematics, should have been corroded out of existence in a fraction of a
second. Something was actively countering the assault, though-repairing every
trace of damage before it could spread.

�If IA have a bug here" I turned to Yuen. �They couldnłt
take on Luminous directly, so they couldnłt stop the whole far side
shrinking-but a tiny structure like this ... what do you think? Could they
stabilize it?"

�Perhaps," he conceded. �Four or five hundred top-speed work
stations could do it."

Alison was typing frantically on her notepad. She said, �Iłm
writing a patch to identify any systematic interference-and divert all our
resources against it." She brushed her hair out of her eyes. �Look over my
shoulder, will you, Bruno? Check me as I go."

�Okay." I read through what shełd written so far. �Youłre
doing fine. Stay calm." Her hands were trembling.

The spike continued to grow steadily. By the time the patch
was ready, the map was re-scaling constantly to fit it on the screen.

Alison triggered the patch. An overlay of electric blue
appeared along the spike, flagging the concentration of computing power-and the
spike abruptly froze.

I held my breath, waiting for IA to notice what wełd
done-and switch their resources elsewhere? If they did, no second spike would
appear-theyłd never get that far-but the blue marker on the screen would shift
to the site where theyłd regrouped and tried to make it happen.

But the blue glow didnłt move from the existing spike. And
the spike didnłt vanish under the weight of Luminousłs undivided efforts.

Instead, it began to grow again, slowly.

Yuen looked ill. �This is not Industrial Algebra. Therełs no
computer on the planet"

Alison laughed derisively. �What are you saying now? Aliens
who need the far side are defending it? Aliens where? Nothing wełve done has
had time to reach even ... Jupiter." There was an edge of hysteria in her
voice.

�Have you measured how fast the changes propagate? Do you
know, for certain, that they canłt travel faster than light-with the far-side
mathematics undermining the logic of relativity?"

I said, �Whoever it is, theyłre not defending all their
borders. Theyłre putting everything theyłve got into the spike."

�Theyłre aiming at something. A specific target." Yuen
reached over Alisonłs shoulder for the keyboard. �Wełre shutting this down.
Right now."

She turned on him, blocking his way. �Are you crazy? Wełre
almost holding them off! Iłll rewrite the program, fine-tune it, get an edge in
efficiency"

�No! We stop threatening them, then see how they react. We
donłt know what harm wełre doing"

He reached for the keyboard again.

Alison jabbed him in the throat with her elbow, hard. He staggered
backward, gasping for breath, then crashed to the floor, bringing a chair down
on top him. She hissed at me, �Quick-shut him up!"

I hesitated, loyalties fracturing, his idea had sounded
perfectly sane to me. But if he started yelling for security

I crouched down over him, pushed the chair aside, then
clasped my hand over his mouth, forcing his head back with pressure on the
lower jaw. Wełd have to tie him up-and then try brazenly marching out of the
building without him. But hełd be found in a matter of minutes. Even if we made
it past the gate, we were screwed.

Yuen caught his breath and started struggling; I clumsily
pinned his arms with my knees. I could hear Alison typing, a ragged staccato,
tried to get a glimpse of the work station screen, but I couldnłt turn that far
without taking my weight off Yuen.

I said, �Maybe hełs right-maybe we should pull back, and see
what happens." If the alterations could propagate faster than light ... how
many distant civilizations might have felt the effects of what wełd done? Our
first contact with extraterrestrial life could turn out to be an attempt to
obliterate mathematics that they viewed as ... what? A precious resource? A
sacred relic? An essential component of their entire world view?

The sound of typing stopped abruptly. �Bruno? Do you feel-?"

�What?"

Silence.

�What?"

Yuen seemed to have given up the fight. I risked turning
around.

Alison was hunched forward, her face in her hands. On the
screen the spike had ceased its relentless linear growth-but now an elaborate.
dendritic structure had blossomed at its tip. I glanced down at Yuen; he seemed
dazed, oblivious to my presence. I took my hand from his mouth warily. He lay
there placidly, smiling faintly, eyes scanning something I couldnłt see.

I climbed to my feet. I took Alison by the shoulders and
shook he gently; her only response was to press her face harder into her hands.
The spikełs strange flower was still growing but it wasnłt spreading out into
new territory; it was sending narrow shoots back in on itself crisscrossing the
same region again and again with ever finer structure Weaving a net? Searching
for something?

It hit me with a jolt of clarity more intense than anything
Iłd felt since childhood. It was like reliving the moment when the whole concept
numbers had finally snapped into place-but with an adultłs understanding of
everything it opened up, everything it implied. It was a lightning bolt
revelation-but there was no taint of mystical confusion: no opiate haze of
euphoria, no pseudo-sexual rush. In the clean-lined logic of the simplest
concepts, I saw and understood exactly how the world worked

except that it was all wrong, it was all false, it was all
impossible.

Quicksand.

Assailed by vertigo, I swept my gaze around the
room-counting frantically: Six work stations. Two people. Six chairs. I grouped
the work stations: three sets of two, two sets of three. One and five, two and
four; four and two, five and one.

I weaved a dozen cross-checks for consistency-for sanity ...
but everything added up.

They hadnłt stolen the old arithmetic; theyłd merely blasted
the new one into my head, on top of it.

Whoever had resisted our assault with Luminous had reached
down with the spike and rewritten our neural metamathematics-the arithmetic
that underlay our own reasoning about arithmetic-enough to let us glimpse what
wełd been trying to destroy.

Alison was uncommunicative, but she was breathing slowly and
steadily. Yuen seemed fine, lost in a happy reverie. I relaxed slightly, and
began trying to make sense of the flood of far-side arithmetic surging through
my brain.

On their own terms, the axioms were ... trivial, obvious. I
could see that they corresponded to elaborate statements about
trans-astronomical integers, but performing an exact translation was far beyond
me-and thinking about the entities they described in terms of the huge integers
they represented was a bit like thinking about pi or the square root of two in
terms of the first ten thousand digits of their decimal expansion: it would be
missing the point entirely. These alien �numbers"the basic objects of the
alternative arithmetic-had found a way to embed themselves in the integers, and
to relate to each other in a simple, elegant way-and if the messy corollaries
they implied upon translation contradicted the rules integers were supposed to
obey ... well, only a small, remote patch of obscure truths had been subverted,
Someone touched me on the shoulder. I started-but Yuen was beaming amiably, all
arguments and violence forgotten.

He said, �Lightspeed is not violated. All the logic that
requires that remains intact." I could only take him at his word; the result
would have taken me hours to prove. Maybe the aliens had done a better job on
him-or maybe he was just a superior mathematician in either system.

�Then ... where are they?" At lightspeed, our attack on the
far side could not have been felt any further away than Mars-and the strategy
used to block the corrosion of the spike would have been impossible with even a
few secondsł time lag.

�The atmosphere?"

�You mean-Earthłs?"

�Where else? Or maybe the oceans."

I sat down heavily. Maybe it was no stranger than any conceivable
alternative, but I still balked at the implications.

Yuen said, �To us, their structure wouldnłt look like ęstructureł
at all. The simplest unit might involve a group of thousands of
atoms-representing a trans-astronomical number-not necessarily even bonded
together in any conventional way, but breaking the normal consequences of the
laws of physics, obeying a different set of high-level rules that arise frorn
the alternative mathematics. People have often mused about the chances of
intelligence being coded into long-lived vortices on distant gas giants ... but
these creatures wonłt be in hurricanes or tornadoes. Theyłll be drifting in the
most innocuous puffs of air-invisible as neutrinos.

�Unstable"

�Only according to our mathematics. Which does not apply."

Alison broke in suddenly, angrily. �Even if all of this is
true-where does it get us? Whether the defect supports a whole invisible
ecosystem or not-LA will still find it, and use it, in exactly the same way."

For a moment I was dumbstruck. We were facing the prospect
of sharing the planet with an undiscovered civilization-and all she could think
about was IAłs grubby machinations?

She was absolutely right, though. Long before any of these
extravagant fantasies could be proved or disproved, IA could still do untold
harm.

I said, �Leave the mapping software running-but shut down
the shrinker."

She glanced at the screen. �No need. Theyłve overpowered
it-or undermined its mathematics." The far side was back to its original size.

�Then therełs nothing to lose. Shut it down."

She did. No longer under attack, the spike began to reverse
its growth. I felt a pang of loss as my limited grasp of the far-side mathematics
suddenly evaporated; I tried to hold on, but it was like clutching at air.

When the spike had retracted completely, I said, �Now we try
doing an Industrial Algebra. We try bringing the defect closer."

We were almost out of time, but it was easy enough-in thirty
seconds, we rewrote the shrinking algorithm to function in reverse.

Alison programmed a function key with the commands to revert
to the original version-so that if the experiment backfired, one keystroke
would throw the full weight of Luminous behind a defense of the near side
again.

Yuen and I exchanged nervous glances. I said, �Maybe this
wasnłt such a good idea."

Alison disagreed. �We need to know how theyłll react to
this. Better we find out now than leave it to IA."

She started the program running.

The sea-urchin began to swell, slowly. I broke out in a
sweat. The farsiders hadnłt harmed us, so far-but this felt like tugging hard
at a door that you really, badly, didnłt want to see thrown open.

A technician poked her head into the room and announced
cheerfully, �Down for maintenance in two minutes!"

Yuen said, �Iłm sorry, therełs nothing"

The whole far side turned electric blue. Alisonłs original
patch had detected a systematic intervention.

We zoomed in. Luminous was picking off vulnerable statements
of the near side-but something else was repairing the damage.

I let out a strangled noise that might have been a cheer.
Alison smiled serenely. She said, �Iłm satisfied. IA donłt stand a chance."

Yuen mused, �Maybe they have a reason to defend the status
quo-maybe they rely on the border itself, as much as the far side."

Alison shut down our reversed shrinker. The blue glow vanished;
both sides were leaving the defect alone. And there were a thousand questions we
all wanted answered-but the technicians had thrown the master switch, and
Luminous itself had ceased to exist.

The sun was breaking through the skyline as we rode back
into the city. As we pulled up outside the hotel, Alison started shaking and
sobbing. I sat beside her, squeezing her hand. I knew shełd felt the weight of
what might have happened, all along, far more than I had.

I paid the driver, and then we stood on the street for a
while, silently watching the cyclists go by, trying to imagine how the world
would change as it tried to embrace this new contradiction between the exotic
and the mundane, the pragmatic and the Platonic, the visible and the invisible.

Mind Vampires

There are moments when my mind misses a beat. I find myself,
in mid-step or mid-breath, feeling as if delivered abruptly into my body after
a long absence (spent where, I could not say), or a long, dreamless sleep. I
lose not my memory, merely my thread. My attention has inexplicably wandered,
but a little calm introspection restores my context and brings me peace. Almost
peace.

I suppose I am a detective, a private investigator, for why
else would I be prowling the corridors of a posh girlsł boarding school, softly
past the doors of the dark-breathing dormitories?

I suppose the headmistress rang me, hysterical. Iłm sure
thatłs right. She was sixty-two and had begun to menstruate again. What a
surprise for her, what a strange shock. No wonder she went straight to the
telephone and dialled my number.

She was calm in her office when I arrived in person, if a
little embarrassed. Women have problems, she said. These things do happen, she
explained. Rarely, but one cannot attach any significance. I find it very
irritating to be told one minute to hurry and the next to get lost; I could
have shrugged and walked out, abandoned her right then, but I have my code of
ethics. My reputation. My pride. For her sake, for the sake of those in her
charge, I frightened her into hiring me.

I described the next few stages to her. Prepubescent girls,
even infants and newborn babes, would also start to menstruate. Sweat, tears,
saliva, urine, motherłs milk and semen would all turn to blood. Dead rats and
birds would be found everywhere. Water pipes would issue blood, and every
container of any kind of fluid, from disinfectant to dye, from vinegar to
varnish, from wine to window-cleaner, would be brimming with blood.

There is definitely no semen on school premises, she said. I
think she was trying to make a joke. I showed her a colour photograph from a
previous case, the kind the police donłt like me carrying about. She turned
pale and then wiped the perspiration from her face with (oh yes) a white lace
handkerchief, which she carefully examined for any trace of red. Then she
signed.

New England. Connecticut? How?

Young soldiers come home with bad dreams.

Atrocities in a muddy trench, a bloody trench.

Young soldiers who would rather be dead than return to their
friends and families bearing this European curse. A horrible embrace, a
horrible feast. Much better to feed the rats and the worms.

The smell of the trenches drawing them for hundreds of
miles. They devour the gangrenous parts. Later the healed will attribute this
to the rats. Struggles in the mud, the blood rains down. Screams are natural
enough. Nobody will ever guess, theyłll be lost amongst the shell-shocked.

�Iłm responsible for the girls. You must be discreet."

�Discreet? Therełll be no discretion when the snow turns
red."

I may be wrong. Sometimes there is no carnival of horrors;
fear of detection dampens their natural flamboyance, their love of dark
theatre. But itłs a new moon tonight, the nadir of their strength, and already
they have announced their presence. Whatever shows so little caution is afraid
of no one.

�You mustnłt cause a panic." Her chin trembled, she pleaded
with her eyes. �You know what Iłm concerned about."

I knew, all right.

�If there were nothing to fear but fear itself," I said, �wouldnłt
life be sweet?"

So I prowl the corridors, watching for signs, preparing for
the fight. My reputation is the highest, I have never lost. My clients shake my
hand, hug and kiss me, shower me with gifts and favours. No wonder.

A thin young girl, a somnambulist, wanders past me and my
heart aches at her vulnerability. In my mind her swan neck becomes a giraffe
neck, a single throbbing artery tight with blood ready to gush and sate the
hugest appetite. How sickening, when the skin of her neck is so pale and
delicate and, I am certain, cool as the night.

In the prisons, where they mutilate their limbs with razor
blades, there is feeding every month. The gatherings in the alleys of
abortionists are indescribable. The torture cells; well who do you think runs
them? I stay away from all of these. I am no fool. Large old families in large
old houses, the better schools, the quieter, cleaner asylums call for me. My
reputation is the highest.

The gardenerłs apprentice, a quiet young lad named Jack
Rice, disappeared two days ago. The headmistress thinks itłs just a coincidence
(such a helpful boy). Nobody knows his familyłs address, but his father is said
to be a veteran and to shun the light of day.

A legless spider moves its mandibles in distress.

A girl cries out: �Whoa, nightmare!"

Strange, dark flowers appear in the fields. They open at midnight
to send a sickly sweet narcotic scent to corrupt the most innocent of dreams.

Fear comes to me, but only as an idea. I think about terror,
but I do not feel it. Fear has saved my life many times, so I do love and
respect it, when it knows its place.

I enter the dormitory itself, I walk quiet as a nightgown between
the tossing beds. Over one bed, two heavy men in dark coats shoulder a
fluttering kinematograph machine with the lens removed, while a third man holds
open a girlłs right eye. The pictures flash into the empty spaces of her brain.
Fear will not save her life; it has seduced her, possessed her, paralysed her,
as it has done to thousands, sweeping the countryside like fire or flood wherever
that one dread word is whispered. Even far from the sites of true danger, men
and women hear that word, form that image, and choke on the terror that rushes
up from their bowels. It is a plague in itself, a separate evil with a life of
its own now. I nod at the men, they nod (so very slightly) back at me, then I
walk on.

I find Jack Rice easily enough, his hobnailed boots
protruding from the end of the bed. I call to the men in dark coats to come and
hold him still, for that is what they do best of all. His girlłs disguise fades
as he struggles. I wonder what revealed the boots. Perhaps his guard was down
as he slept. Perhaps he dreamt he was discovered, and so blurred the borders of
the dream by bringing on its own fulfilment. I smile at this idea as I drive in
the stake.

The tales they later tell me are familiar: the girl he killed,
the girl whose form he took, had mocked him cruelly. We find her body, the lips
and tender parts consumed, in one of the many damp basements, crawling about
gnashing its fangs, but very weak. A matchstick would do for a stake. I hope
her parents will not be awkward.

The headmistress tries to thank me and dismiss me with her
chequebook, but the ink of her fountain pen has changed colour, and she cannot
sign the cheque with her trembling bony hand. Oh dear. Jackłs father will be
angry. Jackłs mother will be grieved. I hope he was an only child, but the odds
are against it.

The dark-coated men, unperturbed, move from bed to bed with
their sawn-off projector. Their enemies are different, but sometimes they will
pause to come to my aid. Theyłre fighting mind vampires.

Breakfast is dismal the next morning, for all the milk had
to be thrown out. The heated swimming baths are closed, but the cloying odour
escapes from the steam-dampened, padlocked wooden doors.

I ask around the village (of course a village) for word of
Jack and his family. Oh, the young vampire lad, they say merrily. He never gave
an address, of course. Hardly the thing to do. I mean, would you?

I hunt the old, dark-hidden, overgrown houses as the
fortnight slips away from me. Jackłs walking in sunlight and feeding so far
from the full moon are disturbing. What will his father be like when he decides
to strike? Every cellar I breach nearly stops my heart, but they are all empty
and peaceful; cool air and silence protest their pure innocence to me as I
scour cobwebbed corners with lamplight. I smile at the unfairness: I cannot
rejoice that a place is clean, that I smell no evil, that I will face no risks
for a few kind minutes, for every safe house is a failure, every moment without
threat only postpones the danger I must face in the end. Iłd rather not be who
I am, but my reputation is the highest.

Bloody pigeons, headless in the snow, unsettle the girls.
There are more nightmares, more night walks; a warm, damp, unnatural wind blows
an hour before dawn. I fortify the windows with steel bars, garlic and
crucifixes, but there is always a way in left unprotected, it is inevitable.

Perhaps it is my weariness, but the shadows I cast seem to
follow me with increasing reluctance. Indeed they conform to my movements, but
I swear that they do so an eyeblink too late. My reflections do not move at
all: they stare, transfixed, over my shoulder, fascinated by that empty space,
hypnotised by its potential occupants.

The headmistress complains, she expected so much more of me.
The strain is becoming too much, she sobs. Her weeping blinds her, and when she
smells why she falls screaming to the floor.

I continue to search, but I fail for the first time ever to
locate their hiding place. They will only face me when they choose to do so, at
the very height of their powers.

I leave my room at the inn and sleep in the attic of the
dormitory building. From my bed I hear the girls swapping secrets, and through
my window drifts the stench of the dark buds which break through the snow.

I dream that I lie naked in the middle of the moonlit
fields. My eyes are closed. I feel sharp snow against my back. Footsteps, girls
whispering. I recall walking past two students, overhearing: �Oh, much
handsomer than Jack!" When they saw me they blushed and turned away. A warm,
wet tongue slides across my eyelids, my lips, down my chin and throat,
awakening each tiny point of stubble it brushes. Between my ribs, across my
stomach, it leaves a snail track of sticky, moistened hair. Soft lips enclose
my penis, the warm tongue wraps and caresses it. A young voice: �You didnłt!
You canłt have! With him? Oh, tell us!"

As I shudder and struggle to prolong the pleasure, a phrase
enters my mind and jolts me into awareness: �the erect penis is engorged with
blood." Engorged. Engorged with blood.

Suddenly I have vision: I see the scene from above. My hands
are behind my back, my legs splayed, my back arched. I am utterly naked and
defenceless. A glistening streak of red bisects me, and a giant she-vampire
clad in black iron armour sucks at me noisily, an animal sound.

My view expands, and despair takes hold of me: ringing us is
a circle of her kin, some fifty feet across. Each one bears a poison-tipped
sword and a grievance against me for their friends that Iłve dispatched.

The tongue works frantically, and I understand that she had
been forbidden to strike with her fangs until the instant of ejaculation. My
concentration falters, and I feel the lips draw back.

Awake, shaving, I cut myself in three places. In the shaving
water I find a swollen leech; I slice it open and the water turns black and
foul.

A serving girl discovers the headmistress; she has hanged herself
in her Sunday best (now who will sign my cheques?) after writing the word with
lipstick and rouge upon every surface of her room. The servants leave to cross
the ocean, and the teachers run away to marry their sweethearts.

I must defend the girls alone.

As if in an instant, the moon is full.

The lights of the village go out.

The snow turns to putrid flesh, blood creeps across all
floors and up all walls. The girls huddle stickily in clots of terror, but I
scream at them to master fear, to use fear, never to let it cripple them and
conquer them. And they are strong, they do not succumb.

Jackłs family come up from the basements, where they have
been, no doubt, for months. Four tall brothers, three hissing sisters first.
The iron cross, the mallet, the stake: all grow slippery in palms sweating
blood. Yet I will defeat them, I will not lose my nerve.

I gather the uneasy students into a single room and ring
them with a fence of crucifixes. The Rices are cunning, they taunt me from a
distance, speak of the siege they will subject us to which will turn us into
cannibals. The school girls plait each otherłs hair for comfort; the brothers,
more handsome than Jack, flirt brazenly with them, drooling out romantic
nonsense. One girlłs yellow eyes unfocus, and her hand flies to her neck. I am
already behind her as her skin blooms with grey. She takes two steps towards
her lover, then vomits insect-riddled blood as my stake crashes through her
heart from behind. Her friends desert her, and she told them such pretty tales.

I venture out with my own protection and corner them one by
one. They are far too proud and foolish to keep together for safety. Two of the
brothers grow bored and visit the village tavern. One sister wanders alone
through the empty dormitories in search of a new pair of shoes. It doesnłt take
me long. I feel some hope.

Jackłs parents come next, dressed plainly, their fangs concealed.
They talk of the terrible loss they have suffered. They slander me in front of
the girls, telling them that I killed both Jack and the girl he loved (how can
I refute that?) and that I will kill them all. They urge the girls to expel me
from the room for their safetyłs sake: they need not leave the room themselves,
but they must not let me stay or they will all die in agony to satisfy my
craving for blood.

In their fervent, pleading seduction they come a few feet
closer than wisdom would have decreed, and I spring my trap: a wire net in
which two dozen crucifixes are embedded. They crawl and writhe as I smash in
the stakes. Their hearts are like granite but I am strong and purposeful and I
do not flinch.

I catch my breath. Hunched over the pair of corpses
crumbling into dust, I feel a slight vibration through the floor. Before my reason
has grasped its meaning I find myself, incredibly, weeping with terror.

I turn to a roar louder than thunder. Jackłs father, it
seems, smuggled home a friend, ancient and powerful. For a moment I cannot
move: enough, surely Iłve faced enough! Splintering the old stone floor, red
chips flying. So fast, and I have hesitated, there is nothing now that I can
do. All the girls are gone, down into the very oldest basement, when I skid
into what remains of the room. I grab a cross and try to leap into the hole in
the floor, but blood spurts from it with such pressure that I cannot even
approach it. I roar useless curses at the thing which has defeated me, as the
red tide sweeps me from the building and dumps me, a helpless insect, upon the
rotting snow.

The dark-coated men, unperturbed as always, press their projector
to my tired right eye, and their soothing pictures flash into the empty spaces
of my mind.

My reputation is the highest, but theyłre fighting mind vampires.

The End

Mister Volition

�Give me the patch."

He hesitates, despite the gun, long enough to confirm that
the thing must be genuine. Hełs cheaply dressed but expensively groomed: manicured
and depilated, with the baby-smooth skin of rich middle age. Any card in his
wallet would be p-cash only, anonymous but encrypted, useless without his own
living fingerprints. Hełs wearing no jewellery, and his watch phone is plastic;
the patch is the only thing worth taking. Good fakes cost 15 cents, good real
ones 15 Kbut hełs the wrong age, and the wrong class, to want to wear a fake
for the sake of fashion.

He tugs at the patch gently, and it dislodges itself from
his skin; the adhesive rim doesnłt leave the faintest weal, or pluck a single
hair from his eyebrow. His newly naked eye doesnłt blink or squintbut I know
itłs not truly sighted yet; the suppressed perceptual pathways take hours to
reawaken.

He hands me the patch; I half expect it to stick to my palm,
but it doesnłt. The outer face is black, like anodised metal, with a silver-gray
logo of a dragon in one cornerdrawn �escaping" from a cut-and-folded drawing
of itself, to bite its own tail. Recursive Visions, after Escher. I press the
gun harder against his stomach to remind him of its presence, while I glance
down and turn the thing over. The inner face appears velvet black at firstbut
as I tilt it, I catch the reflection of a street light, rainbow-diffracted by
the array of quantum-dot lasers. Some plastic fakes are molded with pits which
give a similar effect, but the sharpness of this imagedissected into colors,
but not blurred at allis like nothing Iłve ever seen before.

I look up at him, and he meets my gaze warily. I know what
hełs feelingthat ice water in the bowelsbut therełs something more than fear
in his eyes: a kind of dazed curiosity, as if hełs drinking in the strangeness
of it all. Standing here at three in the morning with a gun to his intestines.
Robbed of his most expensive toy. Wondering what else hełs going to lose.

I smile sadlyand I know how that looks through the balaclava.

�You should have stayed up at the Cross. What did you want
to come down here for? Looking for something to fuck? Something to snort? You
should have hung around the nightclubs, and it all would have come to you."

He doesnłt replybut he doesnłt avert his eyes. It looks as
if hełs struggling hard to understand it all: his terror, the gun, this moment.
Me. Trying to take it all in and make sense of it, like an oceanographer caught
in a tidal wave. I canłt decide if thatłs admirable, or just irritating.

�What were you looking for? _A new experience?_ Iłll give
you a new experience."

Something skids along the ground behind us in the wind: plastic
wrapping, or a cluster of twigs. The street is all terraces converted to office
space, barred and silent, wired against intruders but otherwise oblivious.

I pocket the patch, and slide the gun higher. I tell him
plainly, �If I kill you, Iłll put a bullet through your heart. Clean and fast,
I promise; I wonłt leave you lying here bleeding your guts out."

He makes as if to speak, but then changes his mind. He just
stares at my masked face, transfixed. The wind rises up again, cool and
impossibly gentle. My watch beeps a short sequence of tones which means itłs
successfully blocking a signal from his personal safety implant. Wełre alone in
a tiny patch of radio silence: phases canceling, forces finely balanced.

I think: _I can spare him ... or not_and the lucidity
begins, the tearing of the veil, the parting of the fog. _Itłs all in my hands
now._ I donłt look upbut I donłt need to: I can feel the stars wheeling around
me.

I whisper, �I can do it, I can kill you." Wełre still
staring at each otherbut Iłm staring right through him now; Iłm no sadist, I
donłt need to see him squirm. His fear is outside me, and what matters is
within: _My freedom, the courage to embrace it, the strength to face everything
I am without flinching_.

My hand has grown numb; I slide my finger across the
trigger, waking the nerve ends. I can feel the perspiration cooling on my
forearms, the muscles in my jaw aching from my frozen smile. I can feel my
whole body, coiled, tensed, impatient but obedient, awaiting my command.

I pull the gun back, then pistol-whip him hard, smashing the
handle across his temple. He cries out and collapses to his knees, blood
pouring into one eye. I back away, observing him carefully. He puts down his
hands to keep himself from falling on his face, but hełs too stunned to do
anything but kneel there, bleeding and moaning.

I turn and run, tearing off the balaclava, pocketing the
gun, speeding up as I go.

His implant will have made contact with a patrol car in a
matter of seconds. I weave through the alleys and deserted side-streets, drunk
on the pure visceral chemistry of flightbut still in control, riding instinct
smoothly. I hear no sirensbut chances are they wouldnłt use them, so I dive
for cover at every approaching engine. A map of these streets is burnt into my
skull, down to every tree, every wall, every rusting car body. Iłm never more
than seconds away from shelter of some kind.

Home looms like a mirage, but itłs real, and I cross the
last lit ground with my heart pounding, trying not to whoop with elation as I
unlock the door and slam it behind me.

Iłm soaked in sweat. I undress, and pace the house until Iłm
calm enough to stand beneath the shower, staring up at the ceiling, listening
to the music of the exhaust fan. _I could have killed him._ The triumph of it
surges through my veins. _It was my choice, alone. There was nothing to stop
me._

I dry myself, and stare into the mirror, watching as the
steamed glass slowly clears. Knowing that I could have pulled the trigger is
enough. Iłve faced the possibility; therełs nothing left to prove. Itłs not the
act thatłs importantone way or the other. What matters is overcoming
everything that stands in the way of freedom.

_But next time?_

Next time, Iłll do it.

Because I can.

* * * *

I take the patch to Tran, in his battered Redfern terrace
full of posters of deservedly obscure Belgian chainsaw bands. He says, �Recursive
Visions Introscape 3000. Retails at 35 K."

�I know. I checked."

�Alex! Iłm hurt." He smiles, showing acid-etched teeth. Too
much throwing up; someone should tell him hełs already thin enough.

�So what can you get me?"

�Maybe 18 or 20. But it could take months to find a buyer.
If you want it off your hands right now, Iłll give you 12."

�Iłll wait."

�Suit yourself." I reach out to take it back, but he pulls
away. �Donłt be so impatient!" He plugs a fiber jack into a tiny socket in the
rim, then starts typing on the laptop at the heart of his jury-rigged test
bench.

�If you break it, Iłll fucking kill you."

He groans. �Yeah, my big clumsy photons might smash some
delicate little watch-spring in there."

�You know what I mean. You can still lock it up."

�If youłre going to have it for six months, donłt you want
to know what software itłs running?"

I almost choke. �You think Iłm going to _use it?_ Itłs probably
running some executive stress monitor. _Blue Monday_: ęLearn to match the color
of the mood display panel with the reference hue beside it, for optimal
productivity and total well-being.ł"

�Donłt knock biofeedback till youłve tried it. This might
even be the premature ejaculation cure youłve been searching for."

I thump his scrawny neck, then look over his shoulder at the
laptop screen, a blur of scrolling hexadecimal gibberish. �What exactly are you
doing?"

�Every manufacturer reserves a block of codes with the ISO,
so remotes canłt accidentally trigger the wrong devices. But they use the same
ones for cabled stuff, too. So we only have to try the codes Recursive Visions"

An elegant, marbled-gray interface window appears on the
screen. The heading says *Pandemonium*. The only option is a button labeled
*Reset*.

Tran turns to me, mouse in hand. �Never heard of
_Pandemonium_. Sounds like some kind of psychedelic shit. But if itłs read his
head, and the evidence is in there ..." He shrugs. �Iłll have to do it before I
sell it, so I might as well do it now."

�Okay."

He fires the button, and a query appears: *Delete stored
map, and prepare for a new wearer?* Tran clicks *Yes*.

He says, �Wear and enjoy. No charge."

�Youłre a saint." I take the patch. �But Iłm not going to
wear it if I donłt know what it does."

He calls up another database, and types *PAN**. �Ah. No catalog
entry. Soitłs black market ... unapproved!" He grins at me, like a schoolkid
daring another to eat a worm. �But whatłs the worst it can do?"

�I donłt know. Brainwash me?"

�I doubt it. Patches canłt show naturalistic images. Nothing
strongly representationaland no text. They ran trials with music videos, stock
prices, language lessons ... but the users kept bumping into things. All they
can display now is abstract graphics. How do you brainwash someone with that?"

I raise the thing to my left eye experimentallybut I know
it wonłt even light up until it sticks firmly in place.

Tran says, �Whatever it does ... if you think of it
information-theoretically, it canłt show you anything that isnłt there in your
skull already."

�Yeah? That much boredom could kill me."

Still, it does seem crazy to waste the opportunity. Anyone
with a machine as expensive as this probably paid a small fortune for the software,
tooand if itłs weird enough to be illegal, it might actually be a buzz.

Tranłs losing interest. �Itłs your decision."

�Exactly."

I hold the patch in place over my eye, and let the rim fuse
gently with my skin.

* * * *

Mira says, �Alex? Arenłt you going to tell me?"

�Huh?" I peer at her groggily; shełs smiling, but she looks
faintly hurt.

�I want to know what it showed you!" She leans over and
starts tracing the ridge of my cheekbone with her fingertipas if shełd like to
touch the patch itself, but canłt quite bring herself to do that. �What did you
see? Tunnels of light? Ancient cities bursting into flame? Silver angels
fucking in your brain?"

I remove her hand. �Nothing."

�I donłt believe you."

But itłs true. No cosmic fireworks; if anything, the
patterns became more subdued the more I lost myself in the sex. But the details
are elusiveas they usually are, unless Iłve been making a conscious effort to
picture the display.

I try to explain. �Most of the time, I donłt see anything.
Do you ęseeł your nose, your eyelashes? The patch is like that. After the first
few hours, the image just ... vanishes. It doesnłt look like anything real, it
doesnłt move when you move your headso your brain realizes itłs got nothing to
do with the outside world, and starts filtering it out."

Mira is scandalized, as if Iłve cheated her somehow. �You
canłt even see what itłs showing you? Then ... whatłs the point?"

�You donłt _see_ the image floating in front of youbut you
can still know about it. Itłs like ... therełs a neurological condition called
blindsight, where people lose all sense of visual awarenessbut they can still
guess whatłs in front of them, if they really try, because the information is
still coming through"

�Like clairvoyance. I understand." She fingers the ankh on
her neck chain.

�Yeah, itłs uncanny. Shine a blue light in my eye ... and by
some strange magic, Iłll know that itłs blue."

Mira groans and flops back onto the bed. A car goes by, and
the headlights through the curtains illuminate the statue on the bookshelf: a
jackal-headed woman in the lotus position, sacred heart exposed beneath one
breast. Very hip and syncretic. Mira once told me, deadpan: _This is my soul,
passed down from incarnation to incarnation. It used to belong to Mozartand
before that, Cleopatra._ The inscription on the base says Budapest, 2005. But
the strangest thing is, they made it like a Russian doll: inside Mirałs soul is
another soul, and inside that is a third, and a fourth. I said: _This last onełs
just dead wood. Nothing inside. Doesnłt that worry you?_

I concentrate, and try to summon up the image again. The
patch constantly measures pupil dilation, and the focal distance of the masked
eyełs lensboth of which naturally track the unmasked eyeand adjusts the
synthetic hologram accordingly. So the image never goes out of focus, or
appears too bright, or too dimwhatever the unmasked eye is looking at. No real
object could ever behave like that; no wonder the brain shunts the data so
readily. Even in the first few hourswhen I effortlessly saw the patterns
superimposed on everythingthey seemed more like vivid mental images than any
kind of trick with light. Now, the whole idea that I could �just look" at the
hologram and automatically �see it" is ludicrous; the reality is more like
groping an object in the dark, and attempting to picture it.

What I picture is: elaborately branched threads of color,
flashing against the grayness of the roomlike pulses of fluorescent dye
injected into fine veins. The image seems bright, but not dazzling; I can still
see into the shadows around the bed. Hundreds of these branched patterns are
flashing simultaneouslybut most are faint, and very short-lived. Maybe ten or
twelve dominate at any given momentglowing intensely for about half a second
each, before they fade and others take over. Sometimes it seems that one of
these �strong" patterns passes on its strength directly to a neighboring
pattern, summoning it out of the darknessand sometimes the two can be seen lit
up together, tangled edges entwined. At other times, the strength, the
brightness, seems to come out of nowherethough occasionally I catch two or
three subtle cascades in the background, each one alone almost too faint and
too rapid to follow, converging on a single pattern and triggering a bright, sustained
flash.

The wafer of superconducting circuitry buried in the patch
is imaging my entire brain. These patterns _could_ be individual neuronsbut
what would be the point of such a microscopic view? More likely, theyłre much
larger systemsnetworks of tens of thousands of neuronsand the whole thing is
some kind of functional map: connections preserved, but distances rearranged
for ease of interpretation. Only a neurosurgeon would care about the actual
anatomical locations.

Butexactly which systems am I being shown? And how am I
meant to respond to the sight of them?

Most patchware is biofeedback. Measures of stressor depression,
arousal, concentration, whateverare encoded in the colors and shapes of the
graphics. Because the patch image �vanishes", itłs not a distractionbut the
information remains accessible. In effect, regions of the brain not naturally
wired to �know about" each other are put in touch, allowing them to modulate
each other in new ways. Or thatłs the hype. But biofeedback patchware should
make its target clear: there should be some fixed template held up beside the
realtime display, showing the result to aim for. All this is showing me is ...
pandemonium.

Mira says, �I think you better go now."

The patch image almost vanishes, like a cartoon
thought-bubble prickedbut I make an effort, and manage to hang on to it.

�Alex? I think you should go."

Hairs rise on the back of my neck. I saw ... _what?_ The
same patterns, as she spoke the same words? I struggle to replay the sequence
from memory, but the patterns in front of methe patterns for struggling to
remember?render that impossible. And by the time I let the image fade, itłs
too late; I donłt know what I saw.

Mira puts a hand on my shoulder. �I want you to leave."

My skin crawls. Even without the image in front of me, I
know the same patterns are firing. _"I think you should go."

�I want you to leave."_ Iłm not seeing the sounds encoded in
my brain. Iłm seeing the meaning.

And even now, just thinking about the meaningI _know_ that
the sequence is being replayed, faintly.

Mira shakes me angrily, and I finally turn to her. �Whatłs
your problem? You wanted to screw the patch, and I got in the way?"

�Very funny. Just go."

I dress slowly, to annoy her. Then I stand by the bed,
looking at her thin body hunched beneath the sheets. I think: _I could hurt her
badly, if I wanted to. It would be so simple._

She watches me uneasily. I feel a surge of shame: the truth
is, I donłt even want to frighten her. But itłs too late; I already have.

She lets me kiss her goodbye, but her whole body is rigid
with distrust. My stomach churns. _Whatłs happening to me? What am I becoming?_

Out on the street, though, in the cold night air, the
lucidity takes hold. _Love, empathy, compassion_ ... all these obstacles to
freedom must be overcome. I need not choose violencebut my choices are
meaningless if theyłre encumbered by social mores and sentimentality, hypocrisy
and self-delusion.

Nietzsche understood. Sartre and Camus understood.

I think calmly: _There was nothing to stop me. I could have
done anything. I could have broken her neck._ But I chose not to. _I chose._ So
how did that happen? Howand where? When I spared the owner of the patch ...
when I chose not to lay a finger on Mira ... in the end, it was my body that
acted one way, not the other_but where did it all begin?_

If the patch is displaying everything that happens in my
brainor everything that matters: thoughts, meanings, the highest levels of
abstractionthen if Iłd known how to read those patterns, could I have followed
the whole process? _Traced it back to the first cause?_

I halt in mid-step. The idea is vertiginous ... and
exhilarating. Somewhere deep in my brain, there _must_ be the �I": the fount of
all action, the self who decides. Untouched by culture, upbringing, genesthe
source of human freedom, utterly autonomous, responsible only to itself. Iłve
always known thatbut Iłve been struggling all these years to make it clearer.

If the patch could hold up a mirror to my soulif I could
watch _my own will_ reaching out from the center of my being _as I pulled the
trigger_

It would be a moment of perfect honesty, perfect understanding.

Perfect freedom.

* * * *

Home, I lie in the dark, bring back the image, experiment.
If Iłm going to follow the river upstream, I have to map as much territory as I
can. Itłs not easy: monitoring my thoughts, monitoring the patterns, trying to
find the links. Am I seeing the patterns corresponding to the ideas themselves,
as I force myself to free-associate? Or am I seeing patterns bound up more with
the whole balancing act of attentionbetween the image itself, and the thoughts
which Iłm hoping the image reflects?

I turn on the radio, find a talk showand try to concentrate
on the words without letting the patch image slip away. I manage to discern the
patterns fired by a few wordsor at least, patterns which are common to every
cascade which appears when those words are usedbut after the fifth or sixth
word, Iłve lost track of the first.

I switch on the light, grab some paper, start trying to
sketch a dictionary. But itłs hopeless. The cascades happen too fastand
everything I do to try to capture one pattern, to freeze the moment, is an
intrusion which sweeps the moment away.

Itłs almost dawn. I give up, and try to sleep. Iłll need
money for rent soon, Iłll have to do somethingunless I take up Tranłs offer
for the patch. I reach under the mattress and check that the gunłs still there.

I think back over the last few years. One worthless degree.
Three years unemployed. The safe daytime house jobs. Then the nights. Stripping
away layer after layer of illusion. Love, hope, morality ... it all has to be
overcome. I canłt stop now.

And I know how it has to end.

As light begins to penetrate the room, I feel a sudden shift
... _in what?_ Mood? Perception? I stare up at the narrow strip of sunlight on
the crumbling plaster of the ceilingand nothing looks different, nothing has
changed. I scan my body mentally, as if I might be suffering from some kind of
pain too unfamiliar to apprehend instantlybut all I get back is the tension of
my own uncertainty and confusion.

The strangeness intensifiesand I cry out involuntarily. I
feel as if my skin is bursting, and ten thousand maggots are crawling from the
liquid flesh beneathexcept that therełs nothing to explain this feeling: no
vision of wounds, or insectsand absolutely no pain. No itch, no fever, no
chilled sweat ... nothing. Itłs like some cold-turkey horror story, some
nightmare attack of DTsbut stripped of every symptom save the horror itself.

I swing my legs off the bed and sit up, clutching my stomachbut
itłs an empty gesture: I donłt even want to puke. Itłs not my guts that are
heaving.

I sit and wait for the turmoil to pass.

It doesnłt.

I almost tear the patch off_what else can it be?_but I
change my mind. I want to try something, first. I switch on the radio.

�cyclone warning for the north-west coast"

The ten thousand maggots flow and churn; the words hit them
like the blast from a firehose. I slam the radio off, stilling the upheavaland
then the words echo in my brain:

_cyclone_

The cascade runs a loop around the concept, firing off the
patterns for the sound itself; a faint vision of the written word; an image
abstracted from a hundred satellite weather maps; news footage of wind-blown
palmsand more, much more, too much to grasp.

_cyclone warning_

Most �warning" patterns were already firing, prepared by the
context, anticipating the obvious. The patterns for the height-of-the-storm news
footage strengthen, and trigger others for morning-after images of people
outside damaged homes.

_north-west coast_

The pattern for the satellite weather map _tightens_,
focusing its energy on one rememberedor constructedimage where the swirl of
clouds is correctly placed. Patterns fire for the names of half a dozen
north-west towns, and images of tourist spots ... until the cascade trails away
into vague associations with spartan rural simplicity.

And I understand whatłs happening. (Patterns fire for
_understand_, patterns fire for _patterns_, patterns fire for _confused,
overwhelmed, insane_ ... )

The process damps down, slightly (patterns fire for all
these concepts). _I can grasp this calmly, I can see it through_ (patterns
fire). I sit with my head against my knees (patterns fire) trying to focus my
thoughts enough to cope with all the resonances and associations which the
patch (patterns fire) keeps showing me through my not-quite-seeing left eye.

There was never any need to do the impossible: to sit down
and draw a dictionary on paper. In the last ten days, the patterns have etched
their own dictionary into my brain. No need to observe and remember,
consciously, which pattern corresponds to which thought; Iłve spent every
waking moment exposed to exactly those associationsand theyłve burned
themselves into my synapses from sheer repetition.

And now itłs paying off. I donłt need the patch to tell me
merely what Iłd tell myself Iłm thinkingbut now itłs showing me all the rest:
all the details too faint and fleeting to capture with mere introspection. Not
the single, self-evident stream of consciousnessthe sequence defined by the
strongest pattern at any momentbut all the currents and eddies churning
beneath.

The whole chaotic process of thought.

The pandemonium.

* * * *

Speaking is a nightmare. I practice alone, talking back to
the radio, too unsteady to risk even a phone call until I can learn not to
seize up, or veer off track.

I can barely open my mouth without sensing a dozen patterns
for words and phrases _rising to the opportunity_, competing for the chance to
be spokenand the cascades which should have zeroed in on one choice in a
fraction of a second (they must have, before, or the whole process would never
have worked) are kept buzzing inconclusively by the very fact that Iłve become
so aware of all the alternatives. After a while, I learn to suppress this feedbackat
least enough to avoid paralysis. But it still feels very strange.

I switch on the radio. A talk-back caller says: �Wasting taxpayersł
money on rehabilitation is just admitting that we didnłt keep them in long
enough."

Cascades of patterns flesh out the bare sense of the words
with a multitude of associations and connections ... but theyłre _already_
entwined with cascades building possible replies, invoking their own
associations.

I respond as rapidly as I can: �Rehabilitation is cheaper.
And what are you suggestinglocking people up until theyłre too senile to
re-offend?" As I speak, the patterns for the chosen words flash triumphantlywhile
those for twenty or thirty other words and phrases are only now fading ... as
if hearing what Iłve actually said is the only way they can be sure that theyłve
lost their chance to be spoken.

I repeat the experiment, dozens of times, until I can �see"
all the alternative reply-patterns clearly. I watch them spinning their
elaborate webs of meaning across my mind, in the hope of being chosen.

But ... _chosen where, chosen how?_

Itłs still impossible to tell. If I try to slow the process
down, my thoughts seize up completelybut if I manage to get a reply out, therełs
no real hope of following the dynamics. A second or two later, I can still �see"
most of the words and associations which were triggered along the way ... but
trying to trace the decision for what was finally spoken back to its source_back
to my self_is like trying to allocate blame in a thousand-car pile-up from a
single blurred time-exposure of the whole event.

I decide to rest for an hour or two. (Somehow, I decide.)
The feeling of decomposing into a squirming heap of larvae has lost its edgebut
I canłt shut down my awareness of the pandemonium completely. I could try
taking off the patchbut it doesnłt seem worth the risk of a long slow process
of re-acclimatization when I put it back on.

Standing in the bathroom, shaving, I stop to look myself in
the eye. _Do I want to go through with this? Watch my mind in a mirror while I
kill a stranger? What would it change? What would it prove?_

It would prove that therełs a spark of freedom inside me
which no one else can touch, no one else can claim. It would prove that Iłm
finally responsible for everything I do.

I feel something rising up in the pandemonium. Something
emerging from the depths. I close both eyes, steady myself against the sinkthen
I open them, and gaze into both mirrors again.

And I finally see it, superimposed across the image of my
face: an intricate, stellated pattern, like some kind of luminous benthic
creature, sending delicate threads out to touch ten thousand words and symbolsall
the machinery of thought at its command. It hits me with a jolt of _deja vu_: Iłve
been �seeing" this pattern for days. Whenever I thought of myself as a subject,
an actor. Whenever I reflected on the power of the will. Whenever I thought
back to the moment when I almost pulled the trigger ...

I have no doubt, this is it. _The self that chooses. The
self thatłs free_.

I catch my eye again, and the pattern streams with lightnot
at the mere sight of my face, but at the sight of myself watching, and knowing
that Iłm watchingand knowing that I could turn away, at any time.

I stand and stare at the wondrous thing. _What do I call
this?_ �I"? �Alex"? Neither really fits; their meaning is exhausted. I hunt for
the word, the image, which gives the strongest response. My own face in the
mirror, from the outside, evokes barely a flickerbut when I _feel_ myself
sitting nameless in the dark cave of the skulllooking out through the eyes,
controlling the body ... _making the decisions, pulling the strings_ ... the
pattern blazes with recognition.

I whisper, �Mister Volition. Thatłs who I am."

My head begins to throb. I let the patch image fade from vision.

As I finish shaving, I examine the patch from the outside,
for the first time in days. The dragon breaking out of its own insubstantial
portrait to attain solidityor at least, portrayed that way. I think of the man
I stole it from, and I wonder if he ever saw into the pandemonium as deeply as
I have.

But he canłt haveor he never would have let me take the
patch. Because now that Iłve glimpsed the truth, I know Iłd defend the power to
see it this way, to the death.

* * * *

I leave home around midnight, scout the area, take its
pulse. Every night there are subtly different flows of activity between the
clubs, the bars, the brothels, the gambling houses, the private parties. Itłs
not the crowds Iłm after, though. Iłm looking for a place where no one has
reason to go.

I finally choose a construction site, flanked by deserted
offices. Therełs a patch of ground protected from the two nearest street lights
by a large skip near the road, casting a black triangular umbra. I sit on the
dew-wet sandand cement dustgun and balaclava in my jacket within easy reach.

I wait calmly. Iłve learned to be patientand there are
nights when Iłve faced the dawn empty-handed. Most nights, though, someone
takes a shortcut. Most nights, someone gets lost.

I listen for footsteps, but I let my mind wander. I try to
follow the pandemonium more closely, seeing if I can absorb the sequence of
images passively, while Iłm thinking of something elseand then replay the
memory, the movie of my thoughts.

I make a fist, then open it. I make a fist, then ... donłt.
I try to catch Mister Volition in the act, exercising my powers of whim. Reconstructing
what I think I �saw", the thousand-tendrilled pattern certainly flashes
brightlybut memory plays strange tricks: I canłt get the sequence right. Every
time I run the movie in my head, I see most of the other patterns involved in
the action flashing _first_sending cascades converging on Mister Volition, making
_it_ firethe very opposite of what I know is true. Mister Volition lights up
the instant I feel myself choose ... so how can anything but mental static
precede that pivotal moment?

I practice for more than an hour, but the illusion persists.
Some distortion of temporal perception? Some side-effect of the patch?

_Footsteps approaching. One person._

I slip on the balaclava, wait a few seconds. Then I rise
slowly to a crouch, and sneak a look around the edge of the skip. Hełs passed
it, and hełs not looking back.

I follow. Hełs walking briskly, hands in jacket pockets.
When Iłm three meters behind himclose enough to discourage most people from
making a runI call out softly: �Halt."

He glances back over his shoulder first, then wheels around.
Hełs young, 18 or 19, taller than me and probably stronger. Iłll have to watch
out for any dumb bravado. He doesnłt quite rub his eyes, but the balaclava
always seems to produce an expression of disbelief. That, and the air of calm:
when I fail to wave my arms and scream Hollywood obscenities, some people canłt
quite bring themselves to accept that itłs real.

I move closer. Hełs wearing a diamond stud in one ear. Tiny,
but better than nothing. I point to it, and he hands it over. He looks grim,
but I donłt think hełs going to try anything stupid.

�Take out your wallet, and show me whatłs in it."

He does this, fanning the contents for inspection like a
hand of cards. I choose the e-cash, e for easily hacked; I canłt read the balance,
but I slip it in my pocket and let him keep the rest.

�Now take off your shoes."

He hesitates, and lets a flash of pure resentment show in
his eyes. Too afraid to answer back, though. He complies clumsily, standing on
one foot at a time. I donłt blame him: Iłd feel more vulnerable, sitting. Even
if it makes no difference at all.

While I tie the shoes by their laces to the back of my belt,
one-handed, he looks at me as if hełs trying to judge whether I understand that
he has nothing else to offertrying to decide if Iłm going to be disappointed,
and angry. I gaze back at him, not angry at all, just trying to fix his face in
my memory.

For a second, I try to visualize the pandemoniumbut therełs
no need. Iłm reading the patterns entirely on their own terms nowtaking them
in, and understanding them fully, through the new sensory channel which the
patch has carved out for itself from the neurobiology of vision.

And I know that Mister Volition is firing.

I raise the gun to the strangerłs heart, and click off the
safety. His composure melts, his face screws up. He starts shaking, and tears
appear, but he doesnłt close his eyes. I feel a surge of compassion_and �see"
it, too_but itłs outside Mister Volition, and only Mister Volition can choose.

The stranger asks simply, pitifully, �Why?"

�Because I can."

He closes his eyes, teeth chattering, a thread of mucus
dangling from one nostril. I wait for the moment of lucidity, the moment of
perfect understanding, the moment I step outside the flow of the world and take
responsibility for myself.

Instead, a different veil partsand the pandemonium shows itself
to itself, in every detail:

The patterns for the concepts of _freedom, self-knowledge,
courage, honesty, responsibility_ are all firing brightly. Theyłre spinning
cascadesvast tangled streamers hundreds of patterns longbut now, all the
connections, all the causal relationships, are finally crystal clear.

And nothing is flowing out of any fount of action, any
irreducible, autonomous self. Mister Volition is firingbut itłs just one more
pattern among thousands, one more elaborate cog. It taps into the cascades
around it with a dozen tentacles and jabbers wildly, �I I I"claiming
responsibility for everythingbut in truth, itłs no different from any of the
rest.

My throat emits a retching sound, and my knees almost
buckle. _This is too much to know, too much to accept._ Still holding the gun
firmly in place, I reach up under the balaclava and tear off the patch.

It makes no difference. The show plays on. The brain has internalized
all the associations, all the connectionsand the meaning keeps unfolding,
relentlessly.

_There is no first cause in here, no place where decisions
can begin._ Just a vast machine of vanes and turbines, driven by the causal
flow which passes through ita machine built out of words made flesh, images
made flesh, ideas made flesh.

_There is nothing else: only these patterns, and the
connections between them._ �Choices" happen everywherein every association,
every linkage of ideas. The whole structure, the whole machine, �decides."

_And Mister Volition?_ Mister Volition is nothing but the
idea of itself. The pandemonium can imagine anything: Santa Claus, God ... the
human soul. It can build a symbol for any idea, and wire it up to a thousand
othersbut that doesnłt mean that the thing the symbol represents could ever be
real.

I stare in horror and pity and shame at the man trembling in
front of me. _Who am I sacrificing him to?_ I could have told Mira: _One little
soul doll is one too many._ So why couldnłt I tell myself? There is no second
self inside the self, no inner puppeteer to pull the strings and make the
choices. There is only the whole machine.

And under scrutiny, the jumped-up cog is shriveling. Now
that the pandemonium can see itself completely, Mister Volition makes no sense
at all.

There is nothing, no one to kill for: no emperor in the mind
to defend to the death. And there are no barriers to freedom to be _overcome_love,
hope, morality ... tear all that beautiful machinery down, and therełd be
nothing left but a few nerve cells twitching at randomnot some radiant
purified unencumbered _Uebermensch_. The only freedom lies in being this
machine, and not another.

So this machine lowers the gun, raises a hand in a clumsy gesture
of contrition, turns, and flees into the night. Not stopping for breathand
wary as ever of the danger of pursuitbut crying tears of liberation all the
way.

* * * *

_Authorłs note:_ This story was inspired by the �pandemonium"
cognitive models of Marvin Minsky, Daniel C. Dennett, and others. However, the
rough sketch Iłve presented here is only intended to convey a general sense of
how these models work; it doesnłt begin to do justice to the fine points.
Detailed models are described in _Consciousness Explained_ by Dennett, and _The
Society of Mind_ by Minsky.

Mitochondrial Eve

With hindsight, I can date the beginning of my involvement
in the Ancestor Wars precisely: _Saturday, June 2, 2007._ That was the night
Lena dragged me along to the Children of Eve to be mitotyped. Wełd been out to
dinner, it was almost midnight, but the sequencing bureau was open 24 hours.

�Donłt you want to discover your place in the human family?"
she asked, fixing her green eyes on me, smiling but earnest. �Donłt you want to
find out exactly where you belong on the Great Tree?"

The honest answer would have been: _What sane person could
possibly care?_ Wełd only known each other for five or six weeks, though; I
wasnłt yet comfortable enough with our relationship to be so blunt.

�Itłs very late," I said cautiously. �And you know I have to
work tomorrow." I was still fighting my way up through post-doctoral
qualifications in physics, supporting myself by tutoring undergraduates and
doing all the tedious menial tasks which tenured academics demanded of their
slaves. Lena was a communications engineerand at 25, the same age as I was,
shełd had real paid jobs for almost four years.

�You always have to work. Come on, Paul! Itłll take fifteen
minutes."

Arguing the point would have taken twice as long. So I told
myself that it could do no harm, and I followed her north through the gleaming
city streets.

It was a mild winter night; the rain had stopped, the air
was still. The Children owned a sleek, imposing building in the heart of
Sydney, prime real estate, an ostentatious display of the movementłs wealth.
ONE WORLD, ONE FAMILY proclaimed the luminous sign above the entrance. There
were bureaus in over a hundred cities (although Eve took on various �culturally
appropriate" names in different places, from Sakti in parts of India, to Elełele
in Samoa) and Iłd heard that the Children were working on street-corner
vending-machine sequencers, to recruit members even more widely.

In the foyer, a holographic bust of Mitochondrial Eve
herself, mounted on a marble pedestal, gazed proudly over our heads. The artist
had rendered our hypothetical ten-thousand-times-great grandmother as a
strikingly beautiful woman. A subjective judgment, certainlybut her lean,
symmetrical features, her radiant health, her purposeful stare, didnłt really
strike me as amenable to subtleties of interpretation. The esthetic buttons
being pushed were labeled, unmistakably: _warrior, queen, goddess_. And I had
to admit that I felt a certain bizarre, involuntary swelling of pride at the
sight of her ... as if her regal bearing and fierce eyes somehow �ennobled" me
and all her descendants ... as if the �character" of the entire species, our
potential for virtue, somehow depended on having at least one ancestor who
could have starred in a Leni Riefenstahl documentary.

This Eve was black, of course, having lived in sub-Saharan
Africa some 200,000 years agobut almost everything else about her was
guesswork. Iłd heard palaeontologists quibble about the too-modern features,
not really compatible with any of the sparse fossil evidence for her
contemporariesł appearance. Still, if the Children had chosen as their symbol
of universal humanity a few fissured brown skull fragments from the Omo River
in Ethiopia, the movement would surely have vanished without a trace. And
perhaps it was simply mean-spirited of me to think of their Evełs beauty as a
sign of fascism. The Children had already persuaded over two million people to
acknowledge, explicitly, a common ancestry which transcended their own
superficial differences in appearance; this all-inclusive ethos seemed to
undercut any argument linking their obsession with _pedigree_ to anything
unsavoury.

I turned to Lena. �You know the Mormons baptised her posthumously,
last year?"

She shrugged the appropriation off lightly. �Who cares? This
Eve belongs to everyone, equally. Every culture, every religion, every
philosophy. Anyone can claim her as their own; it doesnłt diminish her at all."
She regarded the bust admiringly, almost reverently.

I thought: _She sat through four hours of Marx Brothers
films with me last weekbored witless, but uncomplaining. So I can do this for
her, canłt I?_ It seemed like a simple matter of give and takeand it wasnłt as
if I was being pressured into an embarrassing haircut, or a tattoo.

We walked through into the sequencing lounge.

We were alone, but a disembodied voice broke through the
ambience of endangered amphibians and asked us to wait. The room was plushly
carpeted, with a circular sofa in the middle. Artwork from around the world
decorated the walls, from an uncredited Arnhem Land dot painting to a Francis
Bacon print. The explanatory text below was a worry: dire Jungian psychobabble
about �universal primal imagery" and �the collective unconscious." I groaned
aloudbut when Lena asked what was wrong, I just shook my head innocently.

A man in white trousers and a short white tunic emerged from
a camouflaged door, wheeling a trolley packed with impressively minimalist
equipment, reminiscent of expensive Scandinavian audio gear. He greeted us both
as �cousin", and I struggled to keep a straight face. The badge on his tunic
bore his name, Cousin Andre, a small reflection hologram of Eve, and a sequence
of letters and numbers which identified his mitotype. Lena took charge, explaining
that she was a member, and shełd brought me along to be sequenced.

After paying the feea hundred dollars, blowing my
recreation budget for the next three monthsI let Cousin Andre prick my thumb
and squeeze a drop of blood onto a white absorbent pad, which he fed into one
of the machines on the trolley. A sequence of delicate whirring sounds ensued,
conveying a reassuring sense of precision engineering at work. Which was odd, because
Iłd seen ads for similar devices in _Nature_ which boasted of no moving parts
at all.

While we waited for the results, the room dimmed and a large
hologram appeared, projected from the wall in front of us: a micrograph of a
single living cell. _From my own blood?_ More likely, not from anyonełsjust a
convincing photorealist animation.

�Every cell in your body," Cousin Andre explained, �contains
hundreds or thousands of mitochondria: tiny power plants which extract energy
from carbohydrates." The image zoomed in on a translucent organelle, rod-shaped
with rounded endsrather like a drug capsule. �The majority of the DNA in any
cell is in the nucleus, and comes from both parentsbut therełs also DNA in the
mitochondria, inherited from the mother alone. So itłs easier to use
mitochondrial DNA to trace your ancestry."

He didnłt elaborate, but Iłd heard the theory in full
several times, starting with high school biology. Thanks to recombinationthe
random interchange of stretches of DNA between paired chromosomes, in the
lead-up to the creation of sperm or ovaevery chromosome carried genes from
tens of thousands of different ancestors, stitched together seamlessly. From a
palaeogenetic perspective, analyzing nuclear DNA was like trying to make sense
of �fossils" which had been forged by cementing together assorted bone
fragments from ten thousand different individuals.

Mitochondrial DNA came, not in paired chromosomes, but in
tiny loops called plasmids. There were hundreds of plasmids in every cell, but
they were all identical, and they all derived from the ovum alone. Mutations
asideone every 4,000 years or soyour mitochondrial DNA was exactly the same
as that of your mother, your maternal grandmother, great-grandmother, and so
on. It was also exactly the same as that of your siblings, your maternal first
cousins, second cousins, third cousins ... until different mutations striking
the plasmid on its way down through something like 200 generations finally
imposed some variation. But with 16,000 DNA base pairs in the plasmid, even the
50 or so point mutations since Eve herself didnłt amount to much.

The hologram dissolved from the micrograph into a multicolored
diagram of branching lines, a giant family tree starting from a single apex
labeled with the ubiquitous image of Eve. Each fork in the tree marked a
mutation, splitting Evełs inheritance into two slightly different versions. At
the bottom, the tips of the hundreds of branches showed a variety of faces,
some men, some womenindividuals or composites, I couldnłt say, but each one
presumably represented a different group of (roughly) 200th maternal cousins,
all sharing a mitotype: their own modest variation on the common
200,000-year-old theme.

�And here you are," said Cousin Andre. A stylized magnifying
glass materialized in the foreground of the hologram, enlarging one of the tiny
faces at the bottom of the tree. The uncanny resemblance to my own features was
almost certainly due to a snapshot taken by a hidden camera; mitochondrial DNA
had no effect whatsoever on appearance.

Lena reached into the hologram and began to trace my descent
with one fingertip. �Youłre a Child of Eve, Paul. You know who you are, now.
And no one can ever take that away from you." I stared at the luminous tree,
and felt a chill at the base of my spinethough it had more to do with the
Childrenłs proprietary claim over the entire species than any kind of awe in
the presence of my ancestors.

Eve had been nothing special, no watershed in evolution; she
was simply defined as the most recent common ancestor, by an unbroken female
line, of every single living human. And no doubt shełd had thousands of female
contemporaries, but time and chancethe random death of daughterless women,
catastrophes of disease and climatehad eliminated every mitochondrial trace of
them. There was no need to assume that her mitotype had conferred any special
advantages (most variation was in junk DNA, anyway); statistical fluctuations
alone meant that one maternal lineage would replace all the others, eventually.

Evełs existence was a logical necessity: some human (or hominid)
of one era or another had to fit the bill. It was only the timing which was
contentious.

The timing, and its implications.

A world globe some two meters wide appeared beside the Great
Tree; it had a distinctive Earth-from-space look, with heavy white cumulus
swirling over the oceans, but the sky above the continents was uniformly
cloudless. The Tree quivered and began to rearrange itself, converting its
original rectilinear form into something much more misshapen and organicbut flexing
its geometry without altering any of the relationships it embodied. Then it
draped itself over the surface of the globe. Lines of descent became migratory
routes. Between eastern Africa and the Levant, the tracks were tightly bunched
and parallel, like the lanes of some Palaeolithic freeway; elsewhere, less
constrained by the geography, they radiated out in all directions.

A recent Eve favored the �Out of Africa" hypothesis: modern
_Homo sapiens_ had evolved from the earlier _Homo erectus_ in one place only,
and had then migrated throughout the world, out-competing and replacing the
local _Homo erectus_ everywhere they wentand developing localized racial
characteristics only within the last 200,000 years. The single birthplace of
the species was most likely Africa, because Africans showed the greatest (and
hence oldest) mitochondrial variation; all other groups seemed to have
diversified more recently from relatively small �founder" populations.

There were rival theories, of course. More than a million
years before _Homo sapiens_ even existed, _Homo erectus_ itself had spread as
far as Java, acquiring its own regional differences in appearanceand _Homo
erectus_ fossils in Asia and Europe seemed to share at least some of the
distinguishing characteristics of living Asians and Europeans. But �Out of
Africa" put that down to convergent evolution, not ancestry. If _Homo erectus_
had turned into _Homo sapiens_ independently in several places, then the mitochondrial
difference between, say, modern Ethiopians and Javanese should have been five
or ten times as great, marking their long separation since a much earlier Eve.
And even if the scattered _Homo erectus_ communities had not been totally
isolated, but had interbred with successive waves of migrants over the past one
or two million yearshybridizing with them to create modern humans, and yet
somehow retaining their distinctive differencesthen distinct mitochondrial
lineages much older than 200,000 years probably should have survived, too.

One route on the globe flashed brighter than the rest.
Cousin Andre explained, �This is the path your own ancestors took. They left
Ethiopiaor maybe Kenya or Tanzaniaheading north, about 150,000 years ago.
They spread slowly up through Sudan, Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria and Turkey
while the interglacial stretched on. By the start of the last Ice Age, the
eastern shore of the Black Sea was their home ..." As he spoke, tiny pairs of
footprints materialized along the route.

He traced the hypothetical migration through the Caucasus
Mountains, and all the way to northern Europewhere the limits of the technique
finally cut the story dead: some four millennia ago (give or take three), when
my Germanic two-hundredish-great grandmother had given birth to a daughter with
a single change in her mitochondrial junk DNA: the last recorded tick of the
molecular clock.

Cousin Andre wasnłt finished with me, though. �As your ancestors
moved into Europe, their relative genetic isolation, and the demands of the
local climate, gradually led them to acquire the characteristics which are
known as Caucasian. But the same route was traveled many times, by wave after
wave of migrants, sometimes separated by thousands of years. And though, at
every step along the way, the new travelers interbred with those whołd gone
before, and came to resemble them ... dozens of separate maternal lines can
still be traced back along the routeand then down through history again, along
different paths."

My very closest maternal cousins, he explainedthose with exactly
the same mitotypewere, not surprisingly, mostly Caucasians. And expanding the
circle to include up to 30 base pair differences brought in about 5 per cent of
all Caucasiansthe 5 per cent with whom I shared a common maternal ancestor whołd
lived some 120,000 years ago, probably in the Levant.

But a number of that womanłs own cousins had apparently
headed east, not north. Eventually, their descendants had made it all the way
across Asia, down through Indochina, and then south through the archipelagos,
traveling across land bridges exposed by the low ocean levels of the Ice Age,
or making short sea voyages from island to island. Theyłd stopped just short of
Australia.

So I was more closely related, maternally, to a small group
of New Guinean highlanders than I was to 95 per cent of Caucasians. The
magnifying glass reappeared beside the globe, and showed me the face of one of
my living 6000th cousins. The two of us were about as dissimilar to the naked
eye as any two people on Earth; of the handful of nuclear genes which coded for
attributes like pigmentation and facial bone structure, one set had been
favored in frozen northern Europe, and another in this equatorial jungle. But
enough mitochondrial evidence had survived in both places to reveal that the local
homogenization of appearance was just a veneer, a recent gloss over an ancient
network of invisible family connections.

Lena turned to me triumphantly. �You see? All the old myths
about race, culture, and kinshipinstantly refuted! These peoplełs immediate
ancestors lived in isolation for thousands of years, and didnłt set eyes on a
single white face until the twentieth century. Yet theyłre nearer to you than I
am!"

I nodded, smiling, trying to share her enthusiasm. It _was_
fascinating to see the whole naive concept of �race" turned inside out like
thisand I had to admire the Childrenłs sheer audacity at claiming to be able
to map hundred-thousand-year-old relationships with such precision. But I
couldnłt honestly say that my life had been transformed by the revelation that
certain white total strangers were more distant cousins to me than certain
black ones. Maybe there were die-hard racists who would have been shaken to the
core by news like this ... but it was hard to imagine them rushing along to the
Children of Eve to be mitotyped.

The far end of the trolley beeped, and ejected a badge just
like Cousin Andrełs. He offered it to me; when I hesitated, Lena took it and
pinned it proudly to my shirt.

Out on the street, Lena announced soberly, �Eve is going to
change the world. Wełre lucky; wełll live to see it happen. Wełve had a century
of people being slaughtered for belonging to the wrong kinship groupsbut soon,
_everyone_ will understand that there are older, deeper blood ties which
confound all their shallow historical prejudices."

_You mean ... like the Biblical Eve confounded all the prejudices
of fundamentalist Christians? Or like the image of the Earth from space put an
end to war and pollution?_ I tried diplomatic silence; Lena regarded me with
consternation, as if she couldnłt quite believe that I could harbor any doubts
after my own unexpected _blood ties_ had been revealed.

I said, �Do you remember the Rwandan massacres?"

�Of course."

�Werenłt they more to do with a class systemwhich the Belgian
colonists exacerbated for the sake of administrative conveniencethan anything
you could describe as enmity between _kinship groups?_ And in the Balkans"

Lena cut me off. �Look, sure, any incident you can point to
will have a convoluted history. Iłm not denying that. But it doesnłt mean that
the solution has to be impossibly complicated, too. And if everyone involved
had known what we know, had _felt_ what wełve felt" she closed her eyes and
smiled radiantly, an expression of pure contentment and tranquility �that deep
sense of belonging, through Eve, to a single family which encompasses all of
humanity ... do you honestly imagine that they could have turned on each other
like that?"

I should have protested, in tones of bewilderment: _What �deep
sense of belonging"? I felt nothing. And the only thing the Children of Eve are
doing is preaching to the converted._

What was the worst that could have happened? If wełd broken
up, right there and then, over _the political significance of palaeogenetics_,
then the relationship was obviously doomed from the start. And however much I
hated confrontation, it was a fine line between tact and dishonesty, between
accommodating our differences and concealing them.

And yet. The issue seemed far too arcane to be worth
fighting overand though Lena clearly held some passionate views on it, I
couldnłt really see the topic arising again if I kept my big mouth shut, just
this once.

I said, �Maybe youłre right." I slipped an arm around her,
and she turned and kissed me. It began to rain again, heavily, the downpour
strangely calm in the still air. We ended up back at Lenałs flat, saying very
little for the rest of the night.

I was a coward and a fool, of coursebut I had no way of
knowing, then, just how much it would cost me.

* * * *

A few weeks later, I found myself showing Lena around the
basement of the UNSW physics department, where my own research equipment was
crammed into one corner. It was late at night (again), and we were alone in the
building; variously colored fluorescent display screens hovered in the
darkness, like distant icons for the other post-doctoral projects in some
chilly academic cyberspace.

I couldnłt find the chair Iłd bought for myself (despite
security measures escalating from a simple name tag to increasingly sophisticated
computerized alarms, it was always being borrowed), so we stood on the cold
bare concrete beside the apparatus, lit by a single fading ceiling panel, and I
conjured up sequences of zeros and ones which echoed the strangeness of the
quantum world.

The infamous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlationthe entanglement
of two microscopic particles into a single quantum systemhad been investigated
experimentally for over twenty years, but it had only recently become possible
to explore the effect with anything more complicated than pairs of photons or
electrons. I was working with hydrogen atoms, produced when a single hydrogen
molecule was dissociated with a pulse from an ultraviolet laser. Certain
measurements carried out on the separated atoms showed statistical correlations
which only made sense if a single wave function encompassing the two responded
to the measurement process instantaneouslyregardless of how far apart the individual
atoms had traveled since their tangible molecular bonds were broken: meters,
kilometers, light-years.

The phenomenon seemed to mock the whole concept of distancebut
my own work had recently helped to dispel any notion that EPR might lead to a
faster-than-light signaling device. The theory had always been clear on that
point, though some people had hoped that a flaw in the equations would provide
a loophole.

I explained to Lena, �Take two machines stocked with
EPR-correlated atoms, one on Earth and one on Mars, both capable of, say,
measuring orbital angular momentum either vertically or horizontally. The
results of the measurements would always be random ... but the machine on Mars
could be made to emit data which either did, or didnłt, mimic precisely the
random data coming out of the machine on Earth at the very same time. And that
mimicry could be switched on and offinstantaneouslyby altering the type of
measurements being made on Earth."

�Like having two coins which are guaranteed to fall the same
way as each other," she suggested, �so long as theyłre both being thrown
right-handed. But if you start throwing the coin on Earth with your left hand,
the correlation vanishes."

�Yeahthatłs a perfect analogy." I realized belatedly that
shełd probably heard this all beforequantum mechanics and information theory
were the foundations of her own field, after allbut she was listening
politely, so I continued. �But even when the coins are magically agreeing on
every single toss ... theyłre both still giving equal numbers of heads and
tails, at random. So therełs no way of encoding any message into the data. You
canłt even tell, from Mars, when the correlation starts and stopsnot unless
the data from Earth gets sent along for comparison, by some conventional means
like a radio transmissiondefeating the whole point of the exercise. EPR itself
communicates nothing."

Lena contemplated this thoughtfully, though she was clearly
unsurprised by the verdict.

She said, �It communicates nothing between separated atomsbut
if you bring them together, instead, it can still tell you what theyłve done in
the past. You do a control experiment, donłt you? You make the same
measurements on atoms which were never paired?"

�Yeah, of course." I pointed to the third and fourth columns
of data on the screen; the process itself was going on silently as we spoke,
inside an evacuated chamber in a small gray box concealed behind all the
electronics. �The results are completely uncorrelated."

�So, basically, this machine can tell you whether or not two
atoms have been bonded together?"

�Not individually; any individual match could just be
chance. But given enough atoms with a common historyyes." Lena was smiling
conspiratorially. I said, �What?"

�Just ... humor me for a moment. Whatłs the next stage?
Heavier atoms?"

�Yes, but therełs more. Iłll split a hydrogen molecule, let
the two separate hydrogen atoms combine with two fluorine atomsany old ones,
not correlatedthen split both hydrogen fluoride molecules and make
measurements on _the fluorine atoms_ ... to see if I can pick up an indirect
correlation between them: a second-order effect inherited from the original
hydrogen molecule."

The truth was, I had little hope of getting funded to take
the work that far. The basic experimental facts of EPR had been settled now, so
there wasnłt much of a case for pushing the measurement technology any further.

�In theory," Lena asked innocently, �could you do the same
with something much larger? Like ... DNA?"

I laughed. �No."

�I donłt mean: could you do it, here, a week from tomorrow?
Butif two strands of DNA had been bonded together ... would there be any
correlation at all?"

I balked at the idea, but confessed, �There might be. I canłt
give you the answer off the top of my head; Iłd have to borrow some software
from the biochemists, and model the interaction precisely."

Lena nodded, satisfied. �I think you should do that."

�_Why?_ Iłll never be able to try it, for real."

�Not with this junkyard-grade equipment."

I snorted. �So tell me whołs going to pay for something better?"

Lena glanced around the grim basement, as if she wanted to
record a mental snapshot of the low point of my careerbefore everything
changed completely. �Whołd finance research into a means of detecting the
quantum fingerprint of DNA bonding? Whołd pay for a chance of computingnot to
the nearest few millennia, but to the nearest _cell division_how long ago two
mitochondrial plasmids were in contact?"

I was scandalized. _This_ was the idealist who believed that
the Children of Eve were the last great hope for world peace?

I said, �Theyłd never fall for it."

Lena stared at me blankly for a second, then shook her head,
amused. �Iłm not talking about pulling a confidence trickbegging for a
research grant on false pretences."

�Well, good. But?"

�Iłm talking about taking the moneyand doing a job that has
to be done. Sequencing technology has been pushed as far as it can gobut our
opponents still keep finding things to quibble about: the mitochondrial
mutation rate, the method of choosing branch points for the most probable tree,
the details of lineage loss and survival. Even the palaeogeneticists who are on
our side keep changing their minds about everything. Evełs age goes up and down
like the Hubble constant."

�It canłt be that bad, surely."

Lena seized my arm; her excitement was electric, I felt it
flow into me. Or maybe shełd just pinched a nerve.

�_This_ could transform the whole field. No more guesswork,
no more conjecture, no more assumptionsjust a single, indisputable family
tree, stretching back 200,000 years."

�It may not even be possible"

�But youłll find out? Youłll look into it?"

I hesitatedbut I couldnłt think of a single good reason to
refuse. �Yes."

Lena smiled. �With _quantum palaeogenetics_ ... youłll have
the power to bring Eve to life for the world in a way that no one has ever done
before."

* * * *

Six months later, the funds ran out for my work at the
university: the research, the tutoring, everything. Lena offered to support me
for three months while I put together a proposal to submit to the Children. We
were already living together, already sharing expenses; somehow, that made it
much easier to rationalize. And it was a bad time of year to be looking for
work, I was going to be unemployed anyway ...

As it turned out, computer modeling suggested that a measurable
correlation between segments of DNA could be picked out against the statistical
noisegiven enough plasmids to work with: more like a few liters of blood per
person than a single drop. But I could already see that the technical problems
would take years of work to assess properly, let alone overcome. Writing it all
up was good practice for future corporate grant applicationsbut I never
seriously expected anything to come of it.

Lena came with me to the meeting with William Sachs, the
Childrenłs West Pacific Research Director. He was in his late fifties, and
_very_ conservatively dressed, from the classic Benetton AIDS ISNłT NICE
T-shirt to the Mambo World Peace surfing dove motif board shorts. A slightly
younger version smiled down from a framed cover of _Wired_; hełd been guru of
the month in April 2005.

�The university physics department will be contracted to provide
overall supervision," I explained nervously. �Therełll be independent audits of
the scientific quality of the work every six months, so therełs no possibility
of the research running off the rails."

�The EPR correlation," mused Sachs, �proves that all life is
bound together holistically into a grand unified meta-organism, doesnłt it?"

�No." Lena kicked me hard under the desk.

But Sachs didnłt seem to have heard me. �Youłll be listening
in to Gaiałs own theta rhythm. The secret harmony which underlies everything:
synchronicity, morphic resonance, transmigration ..." He sighed dreamily. �I
_adore_ quantum mechanics. You know my Tai Chi master wrote a book about it?
_Schroedingerłs Lotus_you must have read it. What a mind-fuck! And hełs
working on a sequel, _Heisenbergłs Mandala_"

Lena intervened before I could open my mouth again. �Maybe
... later generations will be able to trace the correlation as far as other
species. But in the foreseeable future, even reaching as far as Eve will be a
major technical challenge."

Cousin William seemed to come back down to Earth. He picked
up the printed copy of the application and turned to the budget details at the
end, which were mostly Lenałs work.

�Five million dollars is a lot of money."

�Over ten years," Lena said smoothly. �And donłt forget that
therełs a 125 per cent tax deduction on R&D expenditure this financial
year. By the time you factor in the notional patent rights"

�You really believe the spinoffs will be valued this highly?"

�Just look at Teflon."

�Iłll have to take this to the board."

* * * *

When the good news came through by email, a fortnight later,
I was almost physically sick.

I turned to Lena. �What have I done? What if I spend ten
years on this, and it all comes to nothing?"

She frowned, puzzled. �There are no guarantees of successbut
youłve made that clear, you havenłt been dishonest. Every great endeavor is
plagued with uncertaintiesbut the Children have decided to accept the risks."

In fact, I hadnłt been agonizing over the morality of
relieving rich idiots with a global motherhood fixation of large sums of moneyand
quite possibly having nothing to give them in return. I was more worried about
what it would mean for my career if the research turned out to be a cul-de-sac,
and produced no results worth publishing.

Lena said, �Itłs all going to work out perfectly. I have
faith in you, Paul."

And that was the worst of it. She did.

We loved each otherand we were, both, using each other. But
I was the one who kept on lying about what was soon to become the most
important thing in our lives.

* * * *

In the winter of 2010, Lena took three months off work to travel
to Nigeria in the name of technology transfer. Her official role was to advise
the new government on the modernisation of the communications infrastructurebut
she was also training a few hundred local operators for the Childrenłs latest
low cost sequencer. My EPR technique was still in its infancybarely able to distinguish
identical twins from total strangersbut the original mitochondrial DNA
analyzers had become extremely small, rugged and cheap.

Africa had proved highly resistant to the Children in the
past, but it seemed that the movement had finally gained a foothold. Every time
Lena called me from Lagosher eyes shining with missionary zealI went and
checked the Great Tree, trying to decide whether its scrambling of traditional
notions of familial proximity would render the ex-combatants in the recent
civil war more, or less, fraternal toward each other if the sequencing fad
really took off. The factions were already so ethnically mixed, though, that it
was impossible to come to a definite verdict; so far as I could tell, the war
had been fought between alliances shaped as much by certain 21st-century acts
of political patronage as by any invocation of ancient tribal loyalties.

Near the end of her stay, Lena called me in the early hours
of the morning (my time), so angry she was almost in tears. �Iłm flying
straight to London, Paul. Iłll be there in three hours."

I squinted at the bright screen, dazed by the tropical
sunshine behind her. �Why? Whatłs happened?" I had visions of the Children
undermining the fragile cease-fire, igniting some unspeakable ethnic holocaustthen
flying out to have their wounds tended by the best microsurgeons in the world,
while the country descended into chaos behind them.

Lena reached off-camera and hit a button, pasting a section
of a news report into a corner of the transmission. The headline read:
Y-CHROMOSOME ADAM STRIKES BACK! The picture below showed a near-naked,
muscular, blond white man (curiously devoid of body hairrather like
Michelangelołs _David_ in a bison-skin loin-cloth) aiming a spear at the reader
with suitably balletic grace.

I groaned softly. It had only been a matter of time. In the
cell divisions leading up to sperm production, most of the DNA of the Y
chromosome underwent recombination with the X chromosomebut part of it remained
aloof, unscrambled, passed down the purely paternal line with the same fidelity
as mitochondrial DNA passed from mother to daughter. In fact, with more
fidelity: mutations in nuclear DNA were much less frequent, which made it a
much less useful molecular clock.

�They claim theyłve found a single male ancestor for all
northern Europeansjust 20,000 years ago! And theyłre presenting this
_bullshit_ at a palaeogenetics conference in Cambridge tomorrow!" I scanned the
article as Lena wailed; the news report was all tabloid hype, it was difficult
to tell what the researchers were actually asserting. But a number of right
wing groups whołd long been opposed to the Children of Eve had embraced the
results with obvious glee.

I said, �So why do you have to be there?"

�To defend Eve, of course! We canłt let them get away with
this!"

My head was throbbing. �If itłs bad science, let the experts
refute it. Itłs not your problem."

Lena was silent for a while, then protested bitterly, �You
_know_ male lineages are lost faster than female ones. Thanks to polygyny, a
single paternal line can dominate a population in far fewer generations than a
maternal line."

�So the claim might be right? There might have been a
single, recent ęnorthern European Adamł?"

�Maybe," Lena admitted begrudgingly. �But ... _so what?_
Whatłs that supposed to prove? They havenłt even _tried_ to look for an Adam
whołs a father to the whole species!"

I wanted to reply: Of course it proves nothing, changes nothing.
_No sane person could possibly care._ But ... who made _kinship_ such a big
issue in the first place? Who did their best to propagate the notion that
everything that matters depends on _family ties?_

It was far too late, though. Turning against the Children
would have been sheer hypocrisy; Iłd taken their money, Iłd played along.

And I couldnłt abandon Lena. If my love for her went no further
than the things we agreed on, then that wasnłt love at all.

I said numbly, �I should make the 3 ołclock flight to
London. Iłll meet you at the conference."

* * * *

The tenth annual World Palaeogenetics Forum was being held
in a pyramid-shaped building in an astroturfed science park, far from the
university campus. The placard-waving crowd made it easy to spot. HANDS OFF
EVE! DIE, NAZI SCUM! NEANDERTHALS OUT! (_What?_) As the taxi drove away, my
jet-lag caught up with me and my knees almost buckled. My aim was to find Lena
as rapidly as possible and get us both out of harmłs way. Eve could look after
herself.

She was there, of course, gazing with serene dignity from a
dozen T-shirts and banners. But the Childrenand their marketing consultantshad
recently been �fine-tuning" her image, and this was the first chance Iłd had to
see the results of all their focus groups and consumer feedback workshops. The
new Eve was slightly paler, her nose a little thinner, her eyes narrower. The
changes were subtle, but they were clearly aimed at making her look more �pan-racial"more
like some far-future common descendant, bearing traces of every modern human
population, than a common ancestor whołd lived in one specific place: Africa.

And in spite of all my cynicism, this redesign made me queasier
than any of the other cheap stunts the Children had pulled. It was as if theyłd
decided, after all, that they couldnłt really imagine a world where everyone
would accept an African Evebut they were so committed to the idea that they
were willing to keep bending the truth, for the sake of broadening her appeal,
until ... _what?_ They gave her, not just a different name, but a different
face in every country?

I made it into the lobby, merely spat on by two or three picketers.
Inside, things were much quieter, but the academic palaeogeneticists were
darting about furtively, avoiding eye contact. One poor woman had been cornered
by a news crew; as I passed, the interviewer was insisting heatedly, �But you
must admit that violating the origin myths of indigenous Amazonians is a crime
against humanity." The outer wall of the pyramid was tinted blue, but more or
less transparent, and I could see another crowd of demonstrators pressed
against one of the panels, peering in. Plain-clothes security guards whispered
into their wrist-phones, clearly afraid for their Masarini suits.

Iłd tried to call Lena a dozen times since the airport, but
some bottleneck in the Cambridge footprint had kept me on hold. Shełd pulled
strings and got us both listed on the attendance databasethe only reason Iłd
been allowed through the front doorbut that only proved that being inside the
building was no guarantee of non-partisanship.

Suddenly, I heard shouting and grunting from nearby, then a
chorus of cheers and the sound of heavy sheet plastic popping out of its frame.
News reports had mentioned both pro-Eve demonstrators, and pro-Adamthe latter
allegedly much more violent. I panicked and bolted down the nearest corridoralmost
colliding with a wiry young man heading in the opposite direction. He was tall,
white, blond, blue-eyed, radiating Teutonic menace ... and part of me wanted to
scream in outrage: Iłd been reduced, against my will, to pure imbecilic racism.

Still, he was carrying a pool cue.

But as I backed away warily, his sleeveless T-shirt began
flashing up the words: THE GODDESS IS AFOOT!

�So what are you?" he sneered. �A Son of Adam?"

I shook my head slowly. _What am I?_ Iłm a _Homo sapiens_,
you moron. Canłt you recognize your own species?

I said, �Iłm a researcher with the Children of Eve." At
faculty cocktail parties, I was always �an independent palaeogenetics research
physicist", but this didnłt seem the time to split hairs.

�Yeah?" He grimaced with what I took at first to be
disbelief, and advanced threateningly. �So _youłre_ one of the fucking patriarchal,
materialistic bastards whołs trying to reify the Archetype of the Earth Mother
and rein in her boundless spiritual powers?"

That left me too stupefied to see what was coming. He jabbed
me hard in the solar plexus with the pool cue; I fell to my knees, gasping with
pain. I could hear the sound of boots in the lobby, and hoarsely chanted
slogans.

The Goddess-worshipper grabbed me by one shoulder and
wrenched me to my feet, grinning. �No hard feelings, though. Wełre still on the
same side, herearenłt we? So letłs go beat up some Nazis!"

I tried to pull free, but it was already too late; the Sons
of Adam had found us.

* * * *

Lena came to visit me in hospital. �I knew you should have
stayed in Sydney."

My jaw was wired; I couldnłt answer back.

�You have to look after yourself; your workłs more important
than ever, now. Other groups will find their own Adamsand the whole unifying
message of Eve will be swamped by the tribalism inherent in the idea of recent
male ancestors. We canłt let a few promiscuous Cro-Magnon men ruin everything."

�Gmm mmm mmmn."

�We have mitochondrial sequencing ... they have Y-chromosome
sequencing. Sure, our molecular clock is already more accurate ... but we need
a spectacular advantage, something anyone can grasp. Mutation rates, mitotypes:
itłs all too abstract for the person in the street. If we can construct exact
family trees with EPRstarting with peoplełs known relatives ... but extending
that same sense of precise kinship across 10,000 generations, all the way back
to Evethen _that_ will give us an immediacy, a credibility, that will leave
the Sons of Adam for dead."

She stroked my brow tenderly. �You can win the Ancestor Wars
for us, Paul. I know you can."

�Mmm nnn," I conceded.

Iłd been ready to denounce both sides, resign from the EPR
projectand even walk away from Lena, if it came to that.

Maybe it was more pride than love, more weakness than commitment,
more inertia than loyalty. Whatever the reason, though, I couldnłt do it. I
couldnłt leave her.

The only way forward was to try to finish what Iłd started.
To give the Children their watertight, absolute proof.

* * * *

While the rival ancestor cults picketed and fire-bombed each
other, rivers of blood flowed through my apparatus. The Children had supplied
me with two-liter samples from no fewer than 50,000 members, worldwide; my lab
would have put the most garish Hammer Horror film set to shame.

Trillions of plasmids were analyzed. Electrons in a certain
low-energy hybrid orbitala quantum mixture of two different-shaped charge
distributions, potentially stable for thousands of yearswere induced by
finely-tuned laser pulses to collapse into one particular state. And though
every collapse was random, the orbital Iłd chosen wasvery slightlycorrelated
across paired strands of DNA. Quadrillions of measurements were accumulated,
and compared. With enough plasmids measured for each individual, the faint
signature of any shared ancestry could rise up through the statistical noise.

The mutations behind the Childrenłs Great Tree no longer mattered;
in fact, I was looking at stretches of the plasmid most likely to have stayed
unblemished all the way back to Eve, since it was the intimate chemical contact
of flawless DNA replication which gave the only real chance of a correlation.
And as the glitches in the process were ironed-out, and the data mounted up,
results finally began to emerge.

The blood donors included many close family groups; I analyzed
the data blind, then passed the results to one of my research assistants, to be
checked against the known relationships. Early in June 2013, I scored 100 per
cent on sibling detection in a thousand samples; a few weeks later, I was doing
the same on first and second cousins.

Soon, we hit the limits of the recorded genealogy; to
provide another means of cross-checking, I started analyzing nuclear genes as
well. Even distant cousins were likely to have at least some genes from a
common ancestorand EPR could date that ancestor precisely.

News of the project spread, and I was deluged with crank
mail and death threats. The lab was fortified; the Children hired bodyguards
for everyone involved in the work, and their families.

The quantity of information just kept growing, but the Childrenhorrified
by the thought that the Adams might out-do them with rival technologykept
voting me more and more money. I upgraded our supercomputers, twice. And though
mitochondria alone could lead me to Eve, for book-keeping purposes I found
myself tracing the nuclear genes of hundreds of thousands of ancestors, male
and female.

In the spring of 2016, the database reached a kind of
critical mass. We hadnłt sampled more than the tiniest fraction of the worldłs
populationbut once it was possible to reach back just a few dozen generations,
all the apparently separate lineages began to join up. Autosomal nuclear genes
zig-zagged heedlessly between the purely-maternal tree of the Eves and the
purely-paternal tree of the Adams, filling in the gaps ... until I found myself
with genetic profiles of virtually everyone whołd been alive on the planet in
the early ninth century (and left descendants down to the present). I had no
names for any of these people, or even definite geographical locationsbut I
knew the place of every one of them on my own Great Tree, precisely.

I had a snapshot of the genetic diversity of the entire
human species. From that point on there was no stopping the cascade, and I
pursued the correlations back through the millennia.

* * * *

By 2017, Lenałs worst predictions had all come true. Dozens
of different Adams had been proclaimed around the worldand the trend was to
look for the common paternal lineage of smaller and smaller populations,
converging on ever more recent ancestors. Many were now supposedly historical
figures; rival Greek and Macedonian groups were fighting it out over who had
the right to call themselves the Sons of Alexander the Great. Y-chromosomal
ethnic classification had become government policy in three eastern European
republicsand, allegedly, corporate policy in certain multinationals.

The smaller the populations analyzed, of courseunless they
were massively in-bredthe less likely it was that everyone targeted really
would share a single Adam. So the first male ancestor to be identified became �the
father of his people" ... and anyone else became a kind of gene-polluting
barbarian rapist, whose hideous taint could still be detected. And weeded out.

Every night, I lay awake into the early hours, trying to
understand how I could have ended up at the center of so much conflict over
something so idiotic. I still couldnłt bring myself to confess my true feelings
to Lena, so Iłd pace the house with the lights out, or lock myself in my study
with the bullet-proof shutters closed and sort through the latest batch of hate
mail, paper and electronic, hunting for evidence that anything I might discover
about Eve would have the slightest positive effect on anyone who wasnłt already
a fanatical supporter of the Children. Hunting for some sign that there was
hope of ever doing more than preaching to the converted.

I never did find the encouragement I was looking forbut
there was one postcard which cheered me up, slightly. It was from the High
Priest of the Church of the Sacred UFO, in Kansas City.

_Dear Earth-dweller:_

_Please use your BRAIN! As anyone KNOWS in this SCIENTIFIC
age, the origin of the races is now WELL UNDERSTOOD! Africans traveled here
after the DELUGE from Mercury, Asians from Venus, Caucasians from Mars, and the
people of the Pacific islands from assorted asteroids. If you donłt have the
NECESSARY OCCULT SKILLS to project rays from the continents to the ASTRAL PLANE
to verify this, a simple analysis of TEMPERAMENT and APPEARANCE should make
this obvious even to YOU!_

_But please donłt put WORDS into MY mouth! Just because wełre
all from different PLANETS doesnłt mean we canłt still be FRIENDS._

* * * *

Lena was deeply troubled. �But how can you hold a media conference
tomorrow, when Cousin William hasnłt even seen the final results?" It was
Sunday, January 28th, 2018. Wełd said goodnight to the bodyguards and gone to
bed in the reinforced concrete bunker the Children had installed for us after a
nasty incident in one of the Baltic states.

I said, �Iłm an independent researcher. Iłm free to publish
data at any time. Thatłs what it says in the contract. Any advances in the
measurement technology have to go through the Childrenłs lawyersbut not the
palaeogenetic results."

Lena tried another tack. �But if this work hasnłt been
peer-reviewed"

�It has. The paperłs already been accepted by _Nature_; it
will be published the day after the conference. In fact," I smiled innocently, �Iłm
really only doing it as a favor to the editor. Shełs hoping it will boost sales
for the issue."

Lena fell silent. Iłd told her less and less about the work
over the preceding six months; Iłd let her assume that technical problems were
holding up progress.

Finally she said, �Wonłt you at least say if itłs good newsor
bad?"

I couldnłt look her in the eye, but I shook my head. �Nothing
that happened 200,000 years ago is any kind of news at all."

* * * *

Iłd hired a public auditorium for the media conferencefar
from the Childrenłs office towerpaying for it myself, and arranging for
independent security. Sachs and his fellow directors were not impressed, but
short of kidnapping me there was little they could do to shut me up. Therełd
never been any suggestion of fabricating the results they wantedbut therełd
always been an unspoken assumption that only _the right data_ would ever be released
with this much fanfareand the Children would have ample opportunity to put
their own spin on it, first.

Behind the podium, my hands were shaking. Over two thousand
journalists from across the planet had turned upand many of them were wearing
symbols of allegiance to one ancestor or another.

I cleared my throat and began. The EPR technique had become
common knowledge; there was no need to explain it again. I said, simply, �Iłd
like to show you what Iłve discovered about the origins of _Homo sapiens_."

The lights went down and a giant hologram, some thirty
meters high, appeared behind me. It was, I announced, a family treenot a rough
history of genes or mutations, but an exact generation-by-generation diagram of
both female and male parentage for the entire human populationfrom the ninth
century, back. A dense thicket in the shape of an inverted funnel. The audience
remained silent, but there was an air of impatience; this tangle of a billion
tiny lines was indecipherableit told them absolutely nothing. But I waited,
letting the impenetrable diagram rotate once, slowly.

�The Y-chromosome mutational clock," I said, �is wrong. Iłve
traced the paternal ancestries of groups with similar Y-types back hundreds of
thousands of yearsand they never converge on any one man." A murmur of
discontent began; I boosted the amplifier volume and drowned it out. �_Why
not?_ How can there be so little mutational diversity, if the DNA doesnłt all
spring from a single, recent source?" A second hologram appeared, a
double-helix, a schematic of the Y-typing region. �Because mutations happen,
again and again, at _exactly the same sites_. Make two, or threeor fiftycopying
errors in the same location, and it still only looks like itłs one step away
from the original." The double helix hologram was divided and copied, divided
and copied; the accumulated differences in each generation were highlighted. �The
proof-reading enzymes in our cells must have specific blind spots, specific
weaknesseslike words that are easy to misspell. And therełs still a chance of
purely random errors, at any site at allbut only on a time scale of millions
of years.

�All the Y-chromosome Adams," I said, �are fantasy. There
are no individual fathers to any race, or tribe, or nation. Living northern
Europeans, for a start, have over a thousand distinct paternal lineages dating
to the late Ice Ageand those thousand ancestors, in turn, are the descendants
of over two hundred different male African migrants." Colors flashed up in the
gray maze of the Tree, briefly highlighting the lineages.

A dozen journalists sprang to their feet and started
shouting abuse. I waited for the security guards to escort them from the
building.

I looked out across the crowd, searching for Lena, but I
couldnłt find her. I said, �The same is true of mitochondrial DNA. The
mutations overwrite themselves; the molecular clock is wrong. There was no Eve
200,000 years ago." An uproar began, but I kept talking. �_Homo erectus_ spread
out of Africadozens of times, over two million years, the new migrants always
interbreeding with the old ones, never replacing them." A globe appeared, the
entire Old World so heavily decorated with crisscrossing paths that it was
impossible to glimpse a single square kilometer of ground. �_Homo sapiens_
arose everywhere, at oncemaintained as one species, worldwide, partly because
of migrant gene flowand partly thanks to the parallel mutations which
invalidate all the clocks: mutations taking place in a random order, but biased
toward the same sites." A hologram showed four stretches of DNA, accumulating
mutations; at first, the four strands grew increasingly dissimilar, as the
sparse random scatter struck them differentlybut as more and more of the same
vulnerable sites were hit, they all came to bear virtually the same scars.

�So modern racial differences are up to two million years
oldinherited from the first _Homo erectus_ migrantsbut all of the subsequent
evolution has marched in parallel, everywhere ... because _Homo erectus_ never
really had much choice. In a mere two million years, different climates could
favor different genes for some superficial local adaptionsbut everything
leading to _Homo sapiens_ was already latent in every migrantłs DNA before they
left Africa."

There was a momentary hush from the Eve supportersmaybe
because no one could decide anymore whether the picture I was painting was
_unifying_ or _divisive_. The truth was just too gloriously messy and
complicated to serve any political purpose at all.

I continued. �But if there was ever an Adam or an Eve, they
were long before _Homo sapiens_, long before _Homo erectus_. Maybe they were
... _Australopithecus_?" I displayed two stooped, hairy, ape-like figures.
People started throwing their video cameras. I hit a button under the podium,
raising a giant perspex shield in front of the stage.

�Burn all your _symbols!_" I shouted. �Male and female,
tribal and global. Give up your Fatherlands and your Earth Mothersitłs
Childhoodłs End! Desecrate your ancestors, screw your cousinsjust do what you
think is right _because itłs right_."

The shield cracked. I ran for the stage exit.

The security guards had all vanishedbut Lena was sitting in
our armor-plated Volvo in the basement car park, with the engine running. She
wound down the mirrored side window.

�I watched your little performance on the net." She gazed at
me calmly, but there was rage and pain in her eyes. I had no adrenaline left,
no strength, no pride; I fell to my knees beside the car.

�I love you. Forgive me."

�Get in," she said. �Youłve got a lot of explaining to do."

The Moral Virologist

Out on the street, in the dazzling sunshine of a warm
Atlanta morning, a dozen young children were playing. Chasing, wrestling, and
hugging each other, laughing and yelling, crazy and jubilant for no other
reason than being alive on such a day. Inside the gleaming white building,
though, behind double-glazed windows, the air was slightly chillythe way John
Shawcross preferred itand nothing could be heard but the air-conditioning, and
a faint electrical hum.

The schematic of the protein molecule trembled very
slightly. Shawcross grinned, already certain of success. As the pH displayed in
the screenłs top left crossed the critical valuethe point at which, according
to his calculations, the energy of conformation B should drop below that of
conformation Athe protein suddenly convulsed and turned completely inside-out.
It was exactly as he had predicted, and his binding studies had added strong
support, but to see the transformation (however complex the algorithms that had
led from reality to screen) was naturally the most satisfying proof.

He replayed the event, backwards and forwards several times,
utterly captivated. This marvellous device would easily be worth the eight
hundred thousand hełd paid for it. The salesperson had provided several
impressive demonstrations, of course, but this was the first time Shawcross had
used the machine for his own work. Images of proteins in solution! Normal X-ray
diffraction could only work with crystalline samples, in which a moleculełs
configuration often bore little resemblance to its aqueous, biologically
relevant, form. An ultrasonically stimulated semi-ordered liquid phase was the
key, not to mention some major breakthroughs in computing; Shawcross couldnłt
follow all the details, but that was no impediment to using the machine. He
charitably wished upon the inventor Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and
medicine; viewed the stunning results of his experiment once again, then
stretched, rose to his feet, and went out in search of lunch.

On his way to the delicatessen, he passed that bookshop, as
always. A lurid new poster in the window caught his eye: a naked young man
stretched out on a bed in a state of postcoital languor, one corner of the
sheet only just concealing his groin. Emblazoned across the top of the poster,
in imitation of a glowing red neon sign, was the bookłs title: A Hot Nightłs
Safe Sex. Shawcross shook his head in anger and disbelief. What was wrong with
people? Hadnłt they read his advertisement? Were they blind? Stupid? Arrogant?
Safety lay only in the obedience of Godłs laws.

After eating, he called in at a newsagent that carried
several foreign papers. The previous Saturdayłs editions had arrived, and his
advertisement was in all of them, where necessary translated into the
appropriate languages. Half a page in a major newspaper was not cheap anywhere
in the world, but then, money had never been a problem.

ADULTERERS! SODOMITES!

REPENT AND BE SAVED!

ABANDON YOUR WICKEDNESS NOW

OR DIE AND BURN FOREVER!

He couldnłt have put it more plainly, could he? Nobody could
claim that they hadnłt been warned.

In 1981, Matthew Shawcross bought a tiny, run-down cable TV
station in the Bible belt, which until then had split its air time between
scratchy black-and-white film clips of fifties gospel singers, and local
novelty acts such as snake handlers (protected by their faith, not to mention
the removal of their petsł venom glands) and epileptic children (encouraged by
their parentsł prayers, and a carefully timed withdrawal of medication, to let
the spirit move them). Matthew Shawcross dragged the station into the nineteen
eighties, spending a fortune on a thirty-second computer-animated station ID (a
fleet of pirouetting, crenellated spaceships firing crucifix-shaped missiles
into a relief map of the USA, chiselling out the station logo of Liberty,
holding up, not a torch, but a cross), showing the latest, slickest gospel rock
video clips, �Christian" soap operas and �Christian" game shows, and, above
all, identifying issuescommunism, depravity, godlessness in schoolswhich
could serve as the themes for telethons to raise funds to expand the station,
so that future telethons might be even more successful.

Ten years later, he owned one of the countryłs biggest cable
TV networks.

John Shawcross was at college, on the verge of taking up paleontology,
when AIDS first began to make the news in a big way. As the epidemic
snowballed, and the spiritual celebrities he most admired (his father included)
began proclaiming the disease to be Godłs will, he found himself increasingly
obsessed by it. In an age where the word miracle belonged to medicine and
science, here was a plague, straight out of the Old Testament, destroying the
wicked and sparing the righteous (give or take some haemophiliacs and
transfusion recipients), proving to Shawcross beyond any doubt that sinners
could be punished in this life, as well as in the next. This was, he decided,
valuable in at least two ways: not only would sinners to whom damnation had
seemed a remote and unproven threat now have a powerful, worldly reason to
reform, but the righteous would be strengthened in their resolve by this unarguable
sign of heavenly support and approval.

In short, the mere existence of AIDS made John Shawcross
feel good, and he gradually became convinced that some kind of personal
involvement with HIV, the AIDS virus, would make him feel even better. He lay
awake at night, pondering Godłs mysterious ways, and wondering how he could get
in on the act. AIDS research would be aimed at a cure, so how could he possibly
justify involving himself with that?

Then, in the early hours of one cold morning, he was woken
by sounds from the room next to his. Giggling, grunting, and the squeaking of
bed springs. He wrapped his pillow around his ears and tried to go back to
sleep, but the sounds could not be ignorednor could the effect they wrought on
his own fallible flesh. He masturbated for a while, on the pretext of trying to
manually crush his unwanted erection, but stopped short of orgasm and lay,
shivering, in a state of heightened moral perception. It was a different woman
every week; hełd seen them leaving in the morning. Hełd tried to counsel his
fellow student, but had been mocked for his troubles. Shawcross didnłt blame
the poor young man; was it any wonder people laughed at the truth, when every
movie, every book, every magazine, every rock song, still sanctioned promiscuity
and perversion, making them out to be normal and good? The fear of AIDS might
have saved millions of sinners, but millions more still ignored it, absurdly
convinced that their chosen partners could never be infected, or trusting in
condoms to frustrate the will of God!

The trouble was, vast segments of the population had, in
spite of their wantonness, remained uninfected, and the use of condoms,
according to the studies hełd read, did seem to reduce the risk of transmission.
These facts disturbed Shawcross a great deal. Why would an omnipotent God
create an imperfect tool? Was it a matter of divine mercy? That was possible,
he conceded, but it struck him as rather distasteful: sexual Russian roulette
was hardly a fitting image of the Lordłs capacity for forgiveness.

OrShawcross tingled all over as the possibility crystalised
in his brainmight AIDS be no more than a mere prophetic shadow, hinting at a
future plague a thousand times more terrible? A warning to the wicked to change
their ways while they still had time? An example to the righteous as to how
they might do His will?

Shawcross broke into a sweat. The sinners next door moaned
as if already in Hell, the thin dividing wall vibrated, the wind rose up to
shake the dark trees and rattle his window. What was this wild idea in his
head? A true message from God, or the product of his own imperfect
understanding? He needed guidance! He switched on his reading lamp and picked
up his Bible from the bedside table. With his eyes closed, he opened the book
at random.

He recognised the passage at the very first glance. He ought
to have; hełd read it and reread it a hundred times, and knew it almost by
heart. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

At first, he tried to deny his destiny: He was unworthy! A
sinner himself! An ignorant child! But everyone was unworthy, everyone was a
sinner, everyone was an ignorant child in Godłs eyes. It was pride, not
humility, that spoke against Godłs choice of him.

By morning, not a trace of doubt remained.

Dropping paleontology was a great relief; defending Creationism
with any conviction required a certain, very special, way of thinking, and he
had never been quite sure that he could master it. Biochemistry, on the other
hand, he mastered with ease (confirmation, if any was needed, that hełd made
the right decision). He topped his classes every year, and went on to do a PhD
in Molecular Biology at Harvard, then postdoctoral work at the NIH, and fellowships
in Canada and France. He lived for his work, pushing himself mercilessly, but
always taking care not to be too conspicuous in his achievements. He published
very little, usually as a modest third or fourth co-author, and when at last he
flew home from France, nobody in his field knew, or would have much cared, that
John Shawcross had returned, ready to begin his real work.

Shawcross worked alone in the gleaming white building that
served as both laboratory and home. He couldnłt risk taking on employees, no
matter how closely their beliefs might have matched his own. He hadnłt even let
his parents in on the secret; he told them he was engaged in theoretical
molecular genetics, which was a lie of omission onlyand he had no need to beg
his father for money week by week since, for tax reasons, twenty-five percent
of the Shawcross empirełs massive profit was routinely payed into accounts in
his name.

His lab was filled with shiny grey boxes, from which ribbon
cables snaked to PCs; the latest generation, fully automated, synthesisers and
sequencers of DNA, RNA, and proteins (all available off the shelf, to anyone
with the money to buy them). Half a dozen robot arms did all the grunt work:
pipetting and diluting reagents, labelling tubes, loading and unloading
centrifuges.

At first Shawcross spent most of his time working with computers,
searching databases for the sequence and structure information that would
provide him with starting points, later buying time on a supercomputer to
predict the shapes and interactions of molecules as yet unknown.

When aqueous X-ray diffraction become possible, his work
sped up by a factor of ten; to synthesise and observe the actual proteins and
nucleic acids was now both faster, and more reliable, than the hideously
complex process (even with the best short-cuts, approximations and tricks) of
solving Schr�dingerłs equation for a molecule consisting of hundreds of
thousands of atoms.

Base by base, gene by gene, the Shawcross virus grew.

As the woman removed the last of her clothes, Shawcross, sitting
naked on the motel roomłs plastic bucket chair, said, �You must have had sexual
intercourse with hundreds of men."

�Thousands. Donłt you want to come closer, honey? Can you
see okay from there?"

�I can see fine."

She lay back, still for a moment with her hands cupping her
breasts, then she closed her eyes and began to slide her palms across her
torso.

This was the two hundredth occasion on which Shawcross had
paid a woman to tempt him. When he had begun the desensitising process five
years before, he had found it almost unbearable. Tonight he knew he would sit
calmly and watch the woman achieve, or skilfully imitate, orgasm, without
experiencing even a flicker of lust himself.

�You take precautions, I suppose."

She smiled, but kept her eyes closed. �Damn right I do. If a
man wonłt wear a condom, he can take his business elsewhere. And I put it on,
he doesnłt do it himself. When I put it on, it stays on. Why, have you changed
your mind?"

�No. Just curious."

Shawcross always paid in full, in advance, for the act he
did not perform, and always explained to the woman, very clearly at the start,
that at any time he might weaken, he might make the decision to rise from the
chair and join her. No mere circumstantial impediment could take any credit for
his inaction; nothing but his own free will stood between him and mortal sin.

Tonight, he wondered why he continued. The �temptation" had
become a formal ritual, with no doubt whatsoever as to the outcome.

No doubt? Surely that was pride speaking, his wiliest and
most persistent enemy. Every man and woman forever trod the edge of a precipice
over the inferno, at risk more than ever of falling to those hungry flames when
he or she least believed it possible.

Shawcross stood and walked over to the woman. Without hesitation,
he placed one hand on her ankle. She opened her eyes and sat up, regarding him
with amusement, then took hold of his wrist and began to drag his hand along
her leg, pressing it hard against the warm, smooth skin.

Just above the knee, he began to panicbut it wasnłt until his
fingers struck moisture that he pulled free with a strangled mewling sound, and
staggered back to the chair, breathless and shaking.

That was more like it.

The Shawcross virus was to be a masterful piece of
biological clockwork (the likes of which William Paley could never have imaginedand
which no godless evolutionist would dare attribute to the �blind watchmaker" of
chance). Its single strand of RNA would describe, not one, but four potential
organisms.

Shawcross virus A, SVA, the �anonymous" form, would be
highly infectious, but utterly benign. It would reproduce within a variety of
host cells in the skin and mucous membranes, without causing the least
disruption to normal cellular functions. Its protein coat had been designed so
that every exposed site mimicked some portion of a naturally occurring human
protein; the immune system, being necessarily blind to these substances (to
avoid attacking the body itself), would be equally blind to the invader.

Small numbers of SVA would make their way into the blood
stream, infecting T-lymphocytes, and triggering stage two of the virusłs
genetic program. A system of enzymes would make RNA copies of hundreds of genes
from every chromosome of the host cellłs DNA, and these copies would then be
incorporated into the virus itself. So, the next generation of the virus would
carry with it, in effect, a genetic fingerprint of the host in which it had
come into being.

Shawcross called this second form SVC, the C standing for �customised"
(since every individualłs unique genetic profile would give rise to a unique
strain of SVC), or �celibate" (because, in a celibate person, only SVA and SVC
would be present).

SVC would be able to survive only in blood, semen and vaginal
fluids. Like SVA, it would be immunologically invisible, but with an added
twist: its choice of camouflage would vary wildly from person to person, so
that even if its disguise was imperfect, and antibodies to a dozen (or a
hundred, or a thousand) particular strains could be produced, universal
vaccination would remain impossible.

Like SVA, it would not alter the function of its hostswith
one minor exception. When infecting cells in the vaginal mucous membrane, the
prostate, or the seminiferous epithelium, it would cause the manufacture and
secretion from these cells of several dozen enzymes specifically designed to
degrade varieties of rubber. The holes created by a brief exposure would be
invisibly smallbut from a viral point of view, theyłd be enormous.

Upon reinfecting T-cells, SVC would be capable of making an �informed
decision" as to what the next generation would be. Like SVA, it would create a
genetic fingerprint of its host cell. It would then compare this with its
stored, ancestral copy. If the two fingerprints were identicalproving that the
customised strain had remained within the body in which it had begunits
daughters would be, simply, more SVC.

However, if the fingerprints failed to match, implying that
the strain had now crossed into another personłs body (and if gender-specific
markers showed that the two hosts were not of the same sex), the daughter virus
would be a third variety, SVM, containing both fingerprints. The M stood for �monogamous",
or �marriage certificate". Shawcross, a great romantic, found it almost unbearably
sweet to think of two peoplełs love for each other being expressed in this way,
deep down at the subcellular level, and of man and wife, by the very act of
making love, signing a contract of faithfulness until death, literally in their
own blood.

SVM would be, externally, much like SVC. Of course, when it
infected a T-cell it would check the hostłs fingerprint against both stored
copies, and if either one matched, all would be well, and more SVM would be
produced.

Shawcross called the fourth form of the virus SVD. It could
arise in two ways; from SVC directly, when the gender markers implied that a
homosexual act had taken place, or from SVM, when the detection of a third
genetic fingerprint suggested that the molecular marriage contract had been
violated.

SVD forced its host cells to secrete enzymes that catalysed
the disintegration of vital structural proteins in blood vessel walls. Sufferers
from an SVD infection would undergo massive haemorrhaging all over their body.
Shawcross had found that mice died within two or three minutes of an injection
of pre-infected lymphocytes, and rabbits within five or six minutes; the timing
varied slightly, depending on the choice of injection site.

SVD was designed so that its protein coat would degrade in
air, or in solutions outside a narrow range of temperature and pH, and its RNA
alone was non-infectious. Catching SVD from a dying victim would be almost
impossible. Because of the swiftness of death, an adulterer would have no time
to infect their innocent spouse. The widow or widower would, of course, be
sentenced to a life of celibacy, but Shawcross did not think this too harsh: it
took two people to make a marriage, he reasoned, and some small share of the
blame could always be apportioned to the other partner.

Even assuming that the virus fulfilled its design goals
precisely, Shawcross acknowledged a number of complications:

Blood transfusions would become impractical until a
foolproof method of killing the virus in vitro was found. Five years ago this
would have been tragic, but Shawcross was encouraged by the latest work in
synthetic and cultured blood components, and had no doubt that his epidemic
would cause more funds and manpower to be diverted into the area. Transplants
were less easily dealt with, but Shawcross thought them somewhat frivolous
anyway, an expensive and rarely justifiable use of scarce resources.

Doctors, nurses, dentists, paramedics, police, undertakers ...
well, in fact everyone, would have to take extreme precautions to avoid
exposure to other peoplełs blood. Shawcross was impressed, though of course not
surprised, at Godłs foresight here: the rarer and less deadly AIDS virus had
gone before, encouraging practices verging on the paranoid in dozens of
professions, multiplying rubber glove sales by orders of magnitude. Now the
overkill would all be justified, since everyone would be infected with, at the
very least, SVC.

Rape of virgin by virgin would become a sort of biological
shot-gun wedding; any other kind would be murder and suicide. The death of the
victim would be tragic, of course, but the near-certain death of the rapist
would surely be an overwhelming deterrent. Shawcross decided that the crime
would virtually disappear.

Homosexual incest between identical twins would escape punishment,
since the virus could have no way of telling one from the other. This omission
irritated Shawcross, especially since he was unable to find any published
statistics that would allow him to judge the prevalence of such abominable
behaviour. In the end he decided that this minor flaw would constitute a
necessary, token remnanta kind of moral fossilof manłs inalienable potential
to consciously choose evil.

It was in the northern summer of 2000 that the virus was completed,
and tested as well as it could be in tissue culture experiments and on
laboratory animals. Apart from establishing the fatality of SVD (created by
test-tube simulations of human sins of the flesh), rats, mice and rabbits were
of little value, because so much of the virusłs behaviour was tied up in its
interaction with the human genome. In cultured human cell lines, though, the
clockwork all seemed to unwind, exactly as far, and never further, than appropriate
to the circumstances; generation after generation of SVA, SVC and SVM remained
stable and benign. Of course more experiments could have been done, more time
put aside to ponder the consequences, but that would have been the case
regardless.

It was time to act. The latest drugs meant that AIDS was now
rarely fatalat least, not to those who could afford the treatment. The third
millenium was fast approaching, a symbolic opportunity not to be ignored.
Shawcross was doing Godłs work; what need did he have for quality control?
True, he was an imperfect human instrument in Godłs hands, and at every stage
of the task he had blundered and failed a dozen times before achieving
perfection, but that was in the laboratory, where mistakes could be discovered
and rectified easily. Surely God would never permit anything less than an
infallible virus, His will made RNA, out into the world.

So Shawcross visited a travel agent, then infected himself
with SVA.

Shawcross went west, crossing the Pacific at once, saving
his own continent for last. He stuck to large population centres: Tokyo,
Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok, Manilla, Sydney, New Delhi, Cairo. SVA could survive
indefinitely, dormant but potentially infectious, on any surface that wasnłt
intentionally sterilised. The seats in a jet, the furniture in a hotel room,
arenłt autoclaved too often.

Shawcross didnłt visit prostitutes; it was SVA that he
wanted to spread, and SVA was not a venereal disease. Instead, he simply played
the tourist, sight-seeing, shopping, catching public transport, swimming in
hotel pools. He relaxed at a frantic pace, adopting a schedule of remorseless
recreation that, he soon felt, only divine intervention sustained.

Not surprisingly, by the time he reached London he was a
wreck, a suntanned zombie in a fading floral shirt, with eyes as glazed as the
multicoated lens of his obligatory (if filmless) camera. Tiredness, jet lag,
and endless changes of cuisine and surroundings (paradoxically made worse by an
underlying, glutinous monotony to be found in food and cities alike), had all
worked together to slowly drag him down into a muddy, dreamlike state of mind.
He dreamt of airports and hotels and jets, and woke in the same places, unable
to distinguish between memories and dreams.

His faith held out through it all, of course, invulnerably
axiomatic, but he worried nonetheless. High altitude jet travel meant extra
exposure to cosmic rays; could he be certain that the virusłs mechanisms for
self checking and mutation repair were fail-safe? God would be watching over
all the trillions of replications, but still, he would feel better when he was
home again, and could test the strain hełd been carrying for any evidence of
defects.

Exhausted, he stayed in his hotel room for days, when he
should have been out jostling Londoners, not to mention the crowds of
international tourists making the best of the end of summer. News of his plague
was only now beginning to grow beyond isolated items about mystery deaths;
health authorities were investigating, but had had little time to assemble all
the data, and were naturally reluctant to make premature announcements. It was
too late, anyway; even if Shawcross had been found and quarantined at once, and
all national frontiers sealed, people he had infected so far would already have
taken SVA to every corner of the globe.

He missed his flight to Dublin. He missed his flight to
Ontario. He ate and slept, and dreamt of eating, sleeping and dreaming. The
Times arrived each morning on his breakfast tray, each day devoting more and
more space to proof of his success, but still lacking the special kind of
headline he longed for: a black and white acknowledgement of the plaguełs
divine purpose. Experts began declaring that all the signs pointed to a
biological weapon run amok, with Libya and Iraq the prime suspects; sources in
Israeli intelligence had confirmed that both countries had greatly expanded
their research programs in recent years. If any epidemiologist had realised
that only adulterers and homosexuals were dying, the idea had not yet filtered
through to the press.

Eventually, Shawcross checked out of the hotel. There was no
need for him to travel through Canada, the States, or Central and South
America; all the news showed that other travellers had long since done his job
for him. He booked a flight home, but had nine hours to kill.

�I will do no such thing! Now take your money and get out."

�But"

�Straight sex, it says in the foyer. Canłt you read?"

�I donłt want sex. I wonłt touch you. You donłt understand.
I want you to touch yourself. I only want to be tempted"

�Well, walk down the street with both eyes open, that should
be temptation enough." The woman glared at him, but Shawcross didnłt budge.
There was an important principle at stake. �Iłve paid you!" he whined.

She dropped the notes on his lap. �And now you have your
money back. Good night."

He climbed to his feet. �Godłs going to punish you. Youłre
going to die a horrible death, blood leaking out of all your veins"

�Therełll be blood leaking out of you if I have to call the
lads to assist you off the premises."

�Havenłt you read about the plague? Donłt you realise what
it is, what it means? Itłs Godłs punishment for fornicators"

�Oh, get out, you blaspheming lunatic."

�Blaspheming?" Shawcross was stunned. �You donłt know who
youłre talking to! Iłm Godłs chosen instrument!"

She scowled at him. �Youłre the devilłs own arsehole, thatłs
what you are. Now clear off."

As Shawcross tried to stare her down, a peculiar dizziness
took hold of him. She was going to die, and he would be responsible. For
several seconds, this simple realisation sat unchallenged in his brain, naked,
awful, obscene in its clarity. He waited for the usual chorus of abstractions
and rationalisations to rise up and conceal it.

And waited.

Finally he knew that he couldnłt leave the room without
doing his best to save her life.

�Listen to me! Take this money and let me talk, thatłs all.
Let me talk for five minutes, then Iłll go."

�Talk about what?"

�The plague. Listen! I know more about the plague than anyone
else on the planet." The woman mimed disbelief and impatience. �Itłs true! Iłm
an expert virologist, I work for, ah, I work for the Centres for Disease
Control, in Atlanta, Georgia. Everything Iłm going to tell you will be made
public in a couple of days, but Iłm telling you now, because youłre at risk
from this job, and in a couple of days it might be too late."

He explained, in the simplest language he could manage, the
four stages of the virus, the concept of a stored host fingerprint, the fatal
consequences if a third personłs SVM ever entered her blood. She sat through it
all in silence.

�Do you understand what Iłve said?"

�Sure I do. That doesnłt mean I believe it."

He leapt to his feet and shook her. �Iłm deadly serious! Iłm
telling you the absolute truth! God is punishing adulterers! AIDS was just a
warning; this time no sinner will escape! No one!"

She removed his hands. �Your God and my God donłt have a lot
in common."

�Your God!" he spat.

�Oh, and arenłt I entitled to one? Excuse me. I thought theyłd
put it in some United Nations Charter: Everyonełs issued with their own God at
birth, though if you break Him or lose Him along the way therełs no free
replacement."

�Now whołs blaspheming?"

She shrugged. �Well, my Godłs still functioning, but yours
sounds a bit of a disaster. Mine might not cure all the problems in the world,
but at least he doesnłt bend over backwards to make them worse."

Shawcross was indignant. �A few people will die. A few sinners,
it canłt be helped. But think of what the world will be like when the message
finally gets through! No unfaithfulness, no rape; every marriage lasting until
death"

She grimaced with distaste. �For all the wrong reasons."

�No! It might start out that way. People are weak, they need
a reason, a selfish reason, to be good. But given time it will grow to be more
than that; a habit, then a tradition, then part of human nature. The virus wonłt
matter any more. People will have changed."

�Well, maybe; if monogamy is inheritable, I suppose natural
selection would eventually"

Shawcross stared at her, wondering if he was losing his
mind, then screamed, �Stop it! There is no such thing as ęnatural selection"
Hełd never been lectured on Darwinism in any brothel back home, but then what
could he expect in a country run by godless socialists? He calmed down
slightly, and added, �I meant a change in the spiritual values of the world
culture."

The woman shrugged, unmoved by the outburst. �I know you donłt
give a damn what I think, but Iłm going to tell you anyway. You are the
saddest, most screwed-up man Iłve set eyes on all week. So, youłve chosen a
particular moral code to live by; thatłs your right, and good luck to you. But
you have no real faith in what youłre doing; youłre so uncertain of your choice
that you need God to pour down fire and brimstone on everyone whołs chosen
differently, just to prove to you that youłre right. God fails to oblige, so
you hunt through the natural disastersearthquakes, floods, famines, epidemicswinnowing
out examples of the ępunishment of sinnersł. You think youłre proving that Godłs
on your side? All youłre proving is your own insecurity."

She glanced at her watch. �Well, your five minutes are long
gone, and I never talk theology for free. Iłve got one last question though, if
you donłt mind, since youłre likely to be the last ęexpert virologistł I run
into for a while."

�Ask." She was going to die. Hełd done his best to save her,
and hełd failed. Well, hundreds of thousands would die with her. He had no
choice but to accept that; his faith would keep him sane.

�This virus that your Godłs designed is only supposed to
harm adulterers and gays? Right?"

�Yes. Havenłt you listened? Thatłs the whole point! The mechanism
is ingenious, the DNA fingerprint"

She spoke very slowly, opening her mouth extra wide, as if addressing
a deaf or demented person. �Suppose some sweet, monogamous, married couple have
sex. Suppose the woman becomes pregnant. The child wonłt have exactly the same
set of genes as either parent. So what happens to it? What happens to the baby?"

Shawcross just stared at her. What happens to the baby? His
mind was blank. He was tired, he was homesick ... all the pressure, all the
worries ... hełd been through an ordealhow could she expect him to think
straight, how could she expect him to explain every tiny detail? What happens
to the baby? What happens to the innocent, newly made child? He struggled to
concentrate, to organise his thoughts, but the absolute horror of what she was
suggesting tugged at his attention, like a tiny, cold, insistent hand, dragging
him, inch by inch, towards madness.

Suddenly, he burst into laughter; he almost wept with
relief. He shook his head at the stupid whore, and said, �You canłt trick me
like that! I thought of babies back in ę94! At little Joelłs christeninghełs
my cousinłs boy." He grinned and shook his head again, giddy with happiness. �I
fixed the problem: I added genes to SVC and SVM, for surface receptors to half
a dozen foetal blood proteins; if any of the receptors are activated, the next
generation of the virus is pure SVA. Itłs even safe to breast feed, for about a
month, because the foetal proteins take a while to be replaced."

�For about a month," echoed the woman. Then, �What do you
mean, you added genes ... ?"

Shawcross was already bolting from the room.

He ran, aimlessly, until he was breathless and stumbling,
then he limped through the streets, clutching his head, ignoring the stares and
insults of passers-by. A month wasnłt long enough, hełd known that all along,
but somehow hełd forgotten just what it was hełd intended to do about it. Therełd
been too many details, too many complications.

Already, children would be dying.

He came to a halt in a deserted side street, behind a row of
tawdry nightclubs, and slumped to the ground. He sat against a cold brick wall,
shivering and hugging himself. Muffled music reached him, thin and distorted.

Where had he gone wrong? Hadnłt he taken his revelation of
Godłs purpose in creating AIDS to its logical conclusion? Hadnłt he devoted his
whole life to perfecting a biological machine able to discern good from evil?
If something so hideously complex, so painstakingly contrived as his virus,
still couldnłt do the job ...

Waves of blackness moved across his vision.

What if hełd been wrong, from the start?

What if none of his work had been Godłs will, after all?

Shawcross contemplated this idea with a shell-shocked kind
of tranquillity. It was too late to halt the spread of the virus, but he could
go to the authorities and arm them with the details that would otherwise take
them years to discover. Once they knew about the foetal protein receptors, a
protective drug exploiting that knowledge might be possible in a matter of
months.

Such a drug would enable breast feeding, blood transfusions
and organ transplants. It would also allow adulterers to copulate, and
homosexuals to practise their abominations. It would be utterly morally
neutral, the negation of everything hełd lived for. He stared up at the blank
sky, with a growing sense of panic. Could he do that? Tear himself down and
start again? He had to! Children were dying. Somehow, he had to find the
courage.

Then, it happened. Grace was restored. His faith flooded
back like a tide of light, banishing his preposterous doubts. How could he have
contemplated surrender, when the real solution was so obvious, so simple?

He staggered to his feet, then broke into a run again,
reciting to himself, over and over, to be sure hełd get it right this time: �ADULTERERS!
SODOMITES! MOTHERS BREAST FEEDING INFANTS OVER THE AGE OF FOUR WEEKS! REPENT
AND BE SAVED ..."

Neighbourhood Watch

My retainers keep me on ice. Dry ice. It slows my
metabolism, takes the edge off my appetite, slightly. I lie, bound with heavy
chains, between two great slabs of it, naked and sweating, trying to sleep
through the torment of a summerłs day.

Theyłve given me the local fall-out shelter, the very
deepest room they could find, as I requested. Yet my senses move easily through
the earth and to the surface, out across the lazy, warm suburbs, restless
emissaries skimming the sun-soaked streets. If I could rein them in I would,
but the instinct that drives them is a force unto itself, a necessary
consequence of what I am and the reason I was brought into being.

Being, I have discovered, has certain disadvantages. I
intend seeking compensation, just as soon as the time is right.

In the dazzling, clear mornings, in the brilliant, cloudless
afternoons, children play in the park, barely half a mile from me. They know Iłve
arrived; part of me comes from each one of their nightmares, and each of their
nightmares comes partly from me. Itłs day time now, though, so under safe blue
skies they taunt me with foolish rhymes, mock me with crude imitations, tell
each other tales of me which take them almost to the edge of hysterical fear,
only to back away, to break free with sudden careless laughter. Oh, their
laughter! I could put an end to it so quickly ...

�Oh yeah?" David is nine, hełs their leader. He pulls an
ugly face in my direction. �Great tough monster! Sure." I respond instinctively:
I reach out, straining, and a furrow forms in the grass, snakes towards his
bare feet. Nearly. My burning skin hollows the ice beneath me. Nearly. David
watches the ground, unimpressed, arms folded, sneering. Nearly! But the
contract, one flimsy page on the bottom shelf of the Mayorłs grey safe, speaks
the final word: No. No loophole, no argument, no uncertainty, no imprecision. I
withdraw, there is nothing else I can do. This is the source of my agony: all
around me is living flesh, flesh that by nature I could joyfully devour in an
endless, frantic, ecstatic feast, but I am bound by my signature in blood to
take only the smallest pittance, and only in the dead of night.

For now.

Well, never mind, David. Be patient. All good things take
time, my friend.

�No fucking friend of mine!" he says, and spits into the
furrow. His brother sneaks up from behind and, with a loud shout, grabs him.
They roar at each other, baring their teeth, arms spread wide, fingers curled
into imitation claws. I must watch this, impassive. Sand trickles in to fill
the useless furrow. I force the tense muscles of my shoulders and back to
relax, chanting: be patient, be patient.

Only at night, says the contract. After eleven, to be
precise. Decent people are not out after eleven, and decent people should not
have to witness what I do.

Andrews is seventeen, and bored. Andrew, I understand. This
suburb is a hole, you have my deepest sympathies. What do they expect you to do
around here? On a warm night like this a young man can grow restless. I know;
your dreams, too, shaped me slightly (my principal creators did not expect
that). You need adventure. So keep your eyes open, Andrew, there are
opportunities everywhere.

The sign on the chemistłs window says no money, no drugs,
but you are no fool. The back windowłs frame is rotting, the nails are loose,
it falls apart in your hands. Like cake. Must be your lucky night, tonight.

The cash drawerłs empty (oh shit!) and you can forget about
that safe, but a big, glass candy jar of valium beats a handful of Swiss health
bars, doesnłt it? There are kids dumb enough to pay for those, down at the
primary school.

Only those who break the law, says the contract. A list of
statutes is provided, to be precise. Parking offences, breaking the speed limit
and cheating on income tax are not included; decent people are only human,
after all. Breaking and entering is there, though, and stealing, well, that
dates right back to the old stone tablets.

No loophole, Andrew. No argument.

Andrew has a flick knife, and a deathłs head tattoo. Hełs
great in a fight, our Andrew. Knows some karate, once did a little boxing, he
has no reason to be afraid. He walks around like he owns the night. Especially
when therełs nobody around.

So whatłs that on the wind? Sounds like someone breathing,
someone close by. Very even, slow, steady, powerful. Where is the bastard? You
can see in all directions, but therełs no one in sight. What, then? Do you
think itłs in your head? That doesnłt seem likely.

Andrew stands still for a moment. He wants to figure this
out for himself, but I canłt help giving him hints, so the lace of his left
sand-shoe comes undone. He puts down the jar and crouches to retie it.

The ground, it seems, is breathing.

Andrew frowns. Hełs not happy about this. He puts one ear
against the footpath, then pulls his head away, startled by the soundłs
proximity. Under that slab of paving, he could swear.

A gas leak! Fuck it, of course. A gas leak, or something
like that. Something mechanical. An explanation. Pipes, water, gas, pumps,
shit, who knows? Yeah. Therełs a whole world of machinery just below the
street, enough machinery to explain anything. But it felt pretty strange for a
while there, didnłt it?

He picks up the jar. The paving slab vibrates. He plants a
foot on it, to suggest that it stays put, but it does not heed his weight. I
toss it gently into the air, knocking him aside into somebodyłs ugly letter
box.

The contract is singing to me now. Ah, blessed, beautiful document!
I hear you. Did I ever truly resent you? Surely not! For to kill with you as my
accomplice, even once, is sweeter by far than the grossest bloodbath I can
dream of, without your steady voice, your calm authority, your proud mask of
justice. Forgive me! In the daylight I am a different creature, irritable and
weak. Now we are in harmony, now we are in blissful accord. Our purposes are
one. Sing on!

Andrew comes forward cautiously, sniffing for gas, a little
uneasy but determined to view the comprehensible cause. A deep, black hole. He
squats beside it, leans over, strains his eyes but makes out nothing.

I inhale.

Mrs Bold has come to see me. She is Chairman of the local Citizens
Against Crime, those twelve fine men and women from whose dreams (chiefly, but
not exclusively) I was formed. Theyłve just passed a motion congratulating me
(and hence themselves) on a successful first month. Burglaries, says Mrs Bold,
have plummeted.

�The initial contract, you understand, is only for three
months, but Iłm almost certain wełll want to extend it. Therełs a clause allowing
for that, one month at a time."

�Both parties willing."

�Of course. We were all of us determined that the contract
be scrupulously fair. You mustnłt think of yourself as our slave."

�I donłt."

�Youłre our business associate. We all agreed from the start
that that was the proper relationship. But you do like it here, donłt you?"

�Very much."

�We canłt increase the payment, you know. Six thousand a
month, well, wełve really had to scrape to manage that much. Worth every cent,
of course, but ... �

Thatłs a massive lie, of course: six thousand is the very
least they could bring themselves to pay me. Anything less would have left them
wondering if they really owned me. The money helps them trust me, the money
makes it all familiar: theyłre used to buying people. If theyłd got me for
free, theyłd never sleep at night. These are fine people, understand.

�Relax, Mrs Bold. I wonłt ask for another penny. And I
expect to be here for a very long time."

�Oh, thatłs wonderful. Come the end of the year Iłll be
talking to the insurance companies about dropping the outrageous premiums. Youłve
no idea how hard itłs been for the small retailers." She is ten feet from the
doorway of my room, peering in through the fog of condensed humidity. With the
dry ice and chains she can see very little of me, but this meagre view is
enough to engender wicked thoughts. Who can blame her? Iłm straight out of her
dreams, after all. Would you indeed, Mrs Bold? I wonder. She feels two strong
hands caressing her gently. Three strong hands. Four, five, six. Such manly
hands, except the nails are rather long. And sharp. �Do you really have to stay
in there? Trussed up like that?" Her voice is even, quite a feat. �Wełre having
celebratory drinks at my house tomorrow, and youłd be very welcome."

�Youłre so kind, Mrs Bold, but for now I do have to stay
here. Like this. Some other time, I promise."

She shakes the hands away. I could insist, but Iłm such a gentleman.
�Some other time, then."

�Goodbye, Mrs Bold."

�Goodbye. Keep up the good work. Oh, I nearly forgot! I have
a little gift." She pulls a brown-wrapped shape from her shopping bag. �Do you
like lamb?"

�Youłre too generous!"

�Not me. Mr Simmons, the butcher, thought you might like it.
Hełs a lovely old man. He used to lose so much stock before you started work,
not to mention the vandalism. Where shall I put it?"

�Hold it towards me from where you are now. Stretch out your
arms."

Lying still, ten feet away, I burst the brown paper into
four segments which flutter to the floor. Mrs Bold blinks but does not flinch.
The red, wet flesh is disgustingly cold, but Iłm far too polite to refuse any
offering. A stream of meat flows from the joint, through the doorway, to vanish
in the mist around my head. I spin the bone, pivoted on her palms, working
around it several times until it is clean and white, then I tip it from her
grip so that it points towards me, and I suck out the marrow in a single, quick
spurt.

Mrs Bold sighs deeply, then shakes her head, smiling. �I
wish my husband ate like that! Hełs become a vegetarian, you know. I keep
telling him itłs unnatural, but he pays no attention. Red meat has had such a
bad name lately, with all those stupid scientists scaremongering, saying it
causes this and that, but I personally canłt see how any one can live without
it and feel that theyłre having a balanced diet. We were meant to eat it, thatłs
just the way people are."

�Youłre absolutely right. Please thank Mr Simmons for me."

�I shall. And thank you again, for what youłre doing for
this community."

�My pleasure."

Mrs Bold dreams of me. Me? His face is like a film starłs!
There are a few factual touches, though: we writhe on a plain of ice, and I am
draped in chains. Itłs a strange kind of feedback, to see your dreams made
flesh, and then to dream of what you saw. Can she really believe that the
solid, sweating creature in the fall-out shelter is no more and no less than
the insubstantial lover who knows her every wish? In her dream I am a noble
protector, keeping her and her daughters safe from rapists, her son safe from
pushers, her domestic appliances safe from thieves; and yes, I do these things,
but if she knew why shełd run screaming from her bed. In her dream I bite her,
but my teeth donłt break the skin. I scratch her, but only as much as she needs
to enjoy me. I could shape this dream into a nightmare, but why telegraph the
truth? I could wake her in a sweat of blood, but why let the sheep know itłs
headed for slaughter? Let her believe that Iłm content to keep the wolves at
bay.

Davidłs still awake, reading. I rustle his curtain but he
doesnłt look up. He makes a rude sign, though, aimed with precision. A curious
child. He canłt have seen the contract, he canłt know that I canłt yet harm
him, so why does he treat me with nonchalant contempt? Does he lack
imagination? Does he fancy himself brave? I canłt tell.

Street lamps go off at eleven now; they used to stay on all
night, but thatłs no longer necessary. Most windows are dark; behind one a man
dreams hełs punching his boss, again and again, brutal, unflinching, insistent,
with the rhythm of a factory process, a glassy eyed jogger, or some other
machine. His wife thinks shełs cutting up the children; the act appals her, and
shełs hunting desperately for a logical flaw or surreal piece of furniture to
prove that the violence will be consequence-free. Shełs still hunting. The
children have other things to worry about: theyłre dreaming of a creature eight
feet tall, with talons and teeth as long and sharp as carving knives, hungry as
a wild fire and stronger than steel. It lives deep in the ground, but it has
very, very, very long arms. When theyłre good the creature may not touch them,
but if they do just one thing wrong ...

I love this suburb. I honestly do. How could I not, born as
I was from its sleeping soul? These are my people. As I rise up through the
heavy night heat, and more and more of my domain flows into sight, I am moved
almost to tears by the beauty of all that I see and sense. Part of me says:
sentimental fool! But the choking feeling will not subside. Some of my creators
have lived here all their lives, and a fraction of their pride and contentment
flows in my veins.

A lone car roars on home. A blue police van is parked
outside a brothel; inside, handcuffs and guns are supplied by the management:
they look real, they feel real, but no one gets hurt. One copłs been here twice
a week for three years, the otherłs been dragged along to have his problem
cured: squeezing the trigger makes him wince, even at target practice. From
tonight hełll never flinch again. The woman thinks: Iłd like to take a trip.
Very soon. To somewhere cold. My life smells of menłs sweat.

I hear a husband and wife screaming at each other. It echoes
for blocks, with dogs and babies joining in. I steer away, itłs not my kind of
brawl.

Linda has a spray can. Hi Linda, like your hair-cut. Do you
know how much that poster cost? What do you mean, sexist pornography? The
people who designed it are creative geniuses, havenłt you heard them say so?
Besides, what do you call those posters of torn-shirted actors and
tight-trousered rock stars all over your bedroom walls? And how would you like
it if the agency sent thugs around to spray your walls with nasty slogans? You
donłt force your images on the public? Theyłll have to read your words, wonłt
they? Answering? Debating? Redressing the imbalance? Cut it out, Linda, come
down to earth. No, lower. Lower still.

Hair gel gives me heartburn. I must remember that.

Bruno, Pete and Colin have a way with locked cars.

Alarms are no problem. So fast, so simple; Iłm deeply impressed.
But the enginełs making too much noise, boys, youłre waking honest workers who
need their eight hoursł sleep.

Itłs exhilarating, though, I have to admit that: squealing
around every corner, zooming down the wrong side of the road. Part of the
thrill, of course, is the risk of getting caught.

They screech to a halt near an all-night liquor store. The
cashier takes their money, but thatłs his business; selling alcohol to minors
is not on my list. On the way back, Pete drops a dollar coin between the bars
of a storm water drain. The cashier has his radio up very loud, and his eyes
are on his magazine. Bruno vomits as he runs, while Pete and Collinłs bones
crackle and crunch their way through the grille.

Bruno heads, incredibly, for the police station. Deep down,
he feels that he is good. A little wild, thatłs all, a rebel, a minor
non-conformist in the honourable tradition. He messes around with other peoplełs
property, he drinks illegally, he drives illegally, he screws girls as young as
himself, illegally, but he has a heart of gold, and hełd never hurt a fly
(except in self-defence). Half this countryłs heroes have been twice as bad as
him. The archetype (he begs me) is no law-abiding puritan goody-goody.

Put a sock in it, Bruno. This is Mrs Bold and friends
talking: itłs just your kind of thoughtless hooliganism thatłs sapping this
nationłs strength. Donłt try invoking Ned Kelly with us! In any case (Bruno
knew this was coming), wełre third generation Australians, and youłre only
second, so wełll judge the archetypes, thank you very much!

The sergeant on duty might have seen a boyłs skeleton run
one step out of its flesh before collapsing, but I doubt it. With the light so
strong inside, so weak outside, he probably saw nothing but his own reflection.

Davidłs still up. Disgraceful child! I belch in his room
with the stench of fresh blood; he raises one eyebrow then farts, louder and
more foul.

Mrs Bold is still dreaming. I watch myself as she imagines
me: so handsome, so powerful, bulging with ludicrous muscles yet gentle as a
kitten. She whispers in �my" ear: Never leave me! Unable to resist, I touch
her, very briefly, with a hand shełs never felt before: the hand that brought
me Linda, the hand that brought me Pete.

The long, cold tongue of a venomous snake darts from the tip
of her dream-loverłs over-sized cock. She wakes with a shout, bent double with
revulsion, but the dream is already forgotten. I blow her a kiss and depart.

Itłs been a good night.

David knows that somethingłs up. Hełs the smartest kid for a
hundred miles, but it will do him no good. When the contract expires therełll
be nothing to hold me.

A clause allowing for an extension! Both parties willing!
Ah, the folly of amateur lawyers! What do they think will happen when I choose
not to take up the option? The contract, the only force they have, is silent.
They dreamed it into being together with me, a magical covenant that I
literally cannot disobey, but they stuffed up the details, they failed with the
fine print. I suppose itłs difficult to dream with precision, to concentrate on
clauses while your mind is awash with equal parts of lust and revenge. Well, Iłm
not going to magically dissolve into dream-stuff. Iłll be staying right here,
in this comfortable basement, but without the chains, without the dry ice. Iłll
be done with the feverish torture of abstinence, when the contract expires.

David sits in the sunshine, talking with his friends.

�What will we do when the monster breaks loose?"

�Hide!"

�He can find us anywhere."

�Get on a plane. He couldnłt reach us on a plane."

�Whołs got that much money?"

Nobody.

�We have to kill him. Kill him before he can get us."

�How?"

How indeed, little David? With a sling-shot? With your puny
little fists? Be warned: trespass is a serious crime, so is attempted murder,
and I have very little patience with criminals.

�Iłll think of a way." He stares up into the blue sky. �Hey,
monster! Wełre gonna get you! Chop you into pieces and eat you for dinner! Yum,
yum, youłre delicious!" The ritual phrases are just for the little kids, who
squeal with delight at the audacity of such table-turning. Behind the word
sounds, behind his stare, David is planning something very carefully. His mind
is in a blind spot, I canłt tell what hełs up to, but forget it, David,
whatever it is. I can see your future, and itłs a big red stain, swarming with
flies.

�Hey monster! If you donłt like it, come and get me! Come
and get me now!" The youngest cover their eyes, not knowing if they want to
giggle or scream. �Come on, you dirty coward! Come and chew me in half, if you
can!" He jumps to his feet, dances around like a wounded gorilla. �Thatłs how
you look, thatłs how you walk! Youłre ugly and youłre sick and youłre a filthy
fucking coward! If you donłt come out and face me, then everything I say about
you is true, and every one will know it!"

I write in the sand: NEXT THURSDAY. MIDNIGHT.

A little girl screams, and her brother starts crying. This
is no longer fun, is it? Tell Mummy how that nasty David frightened you.

David bellows: �Now! Come here now!"

I deepen the letters, then fill them with the blood of
innocent burrowing creatures. David scuffs over the words with one foot, then
fills his lungs and roars like a lunatic: �NOW!"

I throw half a ton of sand skywards, and it rains down into
their hair and eyes. Children scatter, but David stands his ground. He kneels
on the sand, talks to me in a whisper:

�What are you afraid of?"

I whisper back: �Nothing, child."

�Donłt you want to kill me? Thatłs what you keep saying."

�Donłt fret, child, Iłll kill you soon."

�Kill me now. If you can."

�You can wait, David. When the time comes it will be worth
all the waiting. But tell your mother to buy herself a new scrubbing brush,
therełll be an awful lot of cleaning up to do."

�Why should I wait? What are you waiting for? Are you feeling
weak today? Are you feeling ill? Is it too much effort, a little thing like
killing me?"

This child is becoming an irritation.

�The time must be right."

He laughs out loud, then pushes his hands into the sand. �Bullshit!
Youłre afraid of me!" Therełs nobody in sight, he has the park to himself now;
if hełs acting, hełs acting for me alone. Perhaps he is insane. He buries his
arms half-way to his elbows, and I can sense him reaching for me; he imagines
his arms growing longer and longer, tunnelling through the ground, seeking me
out. �Come on! Grab me! I dare you to try it! Fucking coward!" For a while I am
silent, relaxed. I will ignore him. Why waste my time exchanging threats with
an infant? I notice that Iłve broken my chains in several places, and burnt a
deep hollow in the dry ice around me. It suddenly strikes me as pathetic, to
need such paraphernalia simply in order to fast. Why couldnłt those incompetent
dreamers achieve what they claimed to be aiming for: a dispassionate
executioner, a calm, efficient tradesman? I know why: I come from deeper dreams
than they would ever willingly acknowledge; my motives are their motives,
exposed, with a vengeance. Well, six more days will bring the end of all
fasting. Only six more days. My breathing, usually so measured, is ragged,
uncertain.

In Davidłs mind, his hands have reached this room.

�Donłt you want to eat me? Monster? Arenłt you hungry today?"

With hard, sharp claws I grab his hands, and, half a mile
away, he feels my touch. The faintest tremor passes through his arms, but he
doesnłt pull back. He closes his hands on the claws he feels in the sand, he
grips them with all his irrelevant strength.

�OK, monster. Iłve got you now. Come up and fight."

He strains for ten seconds with no effect. I slam him down
into the loose yellow sand, armpit deep, and blood trickles from his nose.

The agony of infraction burns through my guts, while the hunger
brought on by the smell of his blood grips every muscle in my body and commands
me to kill him. I bellow with frustration. My chains snap completely and I
rampage through the basement, snapping furniture and bashing holes in the
walls. The contract calmly sears a hole in my abdomen. I didnłt mean to harm
him! It was an accident! We were playing, I misjudged my strength, I was a
little bit too rough ... and I long to tear the sweet flesh from his face while
he screams out for mercy. The burly thugs they employ as my minders cower in a
corner while I squeeze out the light bulbs and tear wiring from the ceiling.

David whispers: �Canłt you taste my blood? Itłs here on the
sand beside me."

�David, I swear to you, you will be first. Thursday on the
stroke of midnight, you will be first."

�Canłt you smell it? Canłt you taste it?"

I blast him out of the sandpit, and he lies winded but undamaged
on his back on the grass. The patch of bloodied sand is dispersed. David,
incredibly, is still muttering taunts. I am tired, weak, crippled; I shut him
out of my mind, I curl up on the floor to wait for nightfall.

My keepers, with candles and torches, tiptoe around me,
sweeping up the debris, assessing the damage. Six more days. I am immortal, I
will live for a billion years, I can live through six more days.

There had better be some crime tonight.

�Hello? Are you there?"

�Come in, Mrs Bold. What an honour."

�Itłs after eleven, Iłm so sorry, I hope you wonłt let me
interrupt your work."

�Itłs perfectly all right, I havenłt even started yet."

�Where are the men? I didnłt see a soul on my way in."

�I sent them home. I know, theyłre paid a fortune, but itłs
so close to Christmas, I thought an evening with their families ... �

�That was sweet of you." Standing in the foyer, she canłt
see me at all tonight. Condensation fills my room completely, and wisps swirl
out to tease her. She thinks about walking right in and tearing off her
clothes, but who could really face their dreams, awake? She enjoys the tension,
though, enjoys half-pretending that she could, in fact, do it.

�Iłve been meaning to pop in for ages. I canłt believe Iłve
left it so late! I was up on the ground floor earlier tonight, but the stupid
lifts werenłt working and I didnłt have my keys to the stairs, so I went and
did some shopping. Shopping! You wouldnłt believe the crowds! In this heat itłs
so exhausting. Then when I got home the children were fighting and the dog was
being sick on the carpet, it was just one thing after another. So here I am at
last."

�Yes."

�Iłll get to the point. I left a thing here the other day
for you to sign, just a little agreement formalising the extension of the contract
for another month. Iłve signed it, and the Mayorłs signed it, so as soon as we
have your mark it will all be out of the way, and things can just carry on
smoothly without any fuss."

�Iłm not going to sign anything."

That doesnłt perturb her at all.

�What do you want? More money? Better premises?"

�Money has no value for me. And Iłll keep this place, I
rather like it."

�Then what do you want?"

�An easing of restrictions. Greater independence. The
freedom to express myself."

�We could extend your hours. Ten until five. No, not until
five, itłs too light by five. Ten until four?"

�Oh, Mrs Bold, I fear I have a shock for you. You see, I donłt
wish to stay under your contract at all."

�But you canłt exist without the contract."

�Why do you say that?"

�The contract rules you, it defines you. You can no more
break it than I can levitate to the moon or walk on water."

�I donłt intend breaking it. Iłm merely going to allow it to
lapse. Iłve decided to go freelance, you see."

�Youłll vanish, youłll evaporate, youłll go right back where
you came from."

�I donłt think so. But why argue? In forty minutes, one of
us will be right. Or the other. Stay around and see what happens."

�You canłt force me to stay here."

�I wouldnłt dream of it."

�I could be back in five minutes with some very nasty characters."

�Donłt threaten me, Mrs Bold. I donłt like it. Be very
careful what you say."

�Well, what do you plan to do with your new-found freedom?"

�Use your imagination."

�Harm the very people whołve given you life, I suppose. Show
your gratitude by attacking your benefactors."

�Sounds good to me."

�Why?"

�Because Iłll enjoy it. Because it will make me feel warm,
deep inside. It will make me feel satisfied. Fulfilled."

�Then youłre no better than the criminals, are you?"

�To hear that tired old clich� slip so glibly from your
lips, Mrs Bold, is truly boring. Moral philosophy of every calibre, from the
ethereal diversions of theologians and academics, to the banalities spouted by
politicians, business leaders, and self-righteous, self-appointed pillars of
the community like you, is all the same to me: noise, irrelevant noise. I kill
because I like to kill. Thatłs the way you made me. Like it or not, thatłs the
way you are."

She draws a pistol and fires into the doorway.

I burst her skin and clothing into four segments which
flutter to the floor. She runs for the stairs, and for a moment I seriously consider
letting her go: the image of a horseless, red Godiva sprinting through the
night, waking the neighbourhood with her noises of pain, would be an elegant
way to herald my reign. But appetite, my curse and my consolation, my cruel
master and my devoted concubine, can never be denied.

I float her on her back a few feet above the ground, then I
tilt her head and force open her jaws. First her tongue and oesophagus, then
rich fragments from the walls of the digestive tract, rush from her mouth to
mine. We are joined by a glistening cylinder of offal.

When she is empty inside, I come out from my room, and
bloody my face and hands gobbling her flesh. Itłs not the way I normally eat,
but I want to look good for David.

David is listening to the radio. Everyone else in the house
is asleep. I hear the pips for midnight as I wait at the door of his room, but
then he switches off the radio and speaks:

�In my dream, the creature came at midnight. He stood in the
doorway, covered in blood from his latest victim."

The door swings open, and David looks up at me, curious but
calm. Why, how, is he so calm? The contract is void, I could tear him apart
right now, but I swear hełll show me some fear before dying. I smile down at
him in the very worst way I can, and say:

�Run, David! Quick! Iłll close my eyes for ten seconds, I
promise not to peek. Youłre a fast runner, you might stay alive for three more
minutes. Ready?"

He shakes his head. �Why should I run? In my dream, you
wanted me to run, but I knew it was the wrong thing to do. I wanted to run, but
I didnłt, I knew it would only make things worse."

�David, you should always run, you should always try, therełs
always some small chance of escaping."

He shakes his head again. �Not in my dream. If you run, the
creature will catch up with you. If you run, youłll slip and break a leg, or
youłll reach a blind alley, or youłll turn a corner and the creature will be
there, waiting."

�Ah, but this isnłt your dream now, David. Maybe youłve seen
me in your dreams, but now youłre wide awake, and Iłm real, David, and when I
kill you, you wonłt wake up."

�I know that."

�The pain will be real pain, David. Have you thought about
that? If you think your dreams have made you ready to face me, then think about
the pain."

�Do you know how many times Iłve dreamed about you?"

�No, tell me."

�A thousand times. At least. Every night for three years, almost."

�Iłm honoured. You must be my greatest fan."

�When I was six, you used to scare me. Iłd wake up in the
middle of the night, screaming and screaming, and Dad would have to come in and
lie beside me until I fell asleep again. You never used to catch me, though. Iłd
always wake up just in time."

�Thatłs not going to happen tonight."

�Let me finish."

�Iłm so sorry, please continue."

�After a while, after Iłd had the dream about a hundred
times, I started to learn things. I learnt not to run. I learnt not to struggle.
That changed the dream a lot, took away all the fear. I didnłt mind at all,
when you caught me. I didnłt wake up screaming. The dream went on, and you
killed me, and I still didnłt mind, I still didnłt wake up."

I reach down and grab him by the shoulders, I raise him high
into the air. �Are you afraid now, David?" I can feel him trembling, very
slightly: hełs human after all. But he shows no other signs of fear. I dig my
claws into his back, and the pain brings tears to his eyes. The smell awakens
my appetite, and I know the talking will soon be over.

�Ah, you look miserable now, little David. Did you feel
those claws in your dreams? I bet you didnłt. My teeth are a thousand times
sharper, David. And I wonłt kill you nicely. I wonłt kill you quickly."

Hełs smiling at me, laughing at me, even as he grimaces with
agony.

�I havenłt told you the best part yet. You didnłt let me
finish."

�Tell me the best part, David. I want to hear the best part
before I eat your tongue."

�Killing me destroyed you, every single time. You canłt kill
the dreamer and live! When Iłm dead, youłll be dead too."

�Do you think Iłm stupid? Do you think stupid talk like that
is going to save your life? Youłre not the only dreamer, David, youłre not even
one of the twelve. Every one for miles around helped in making me, child, and
one less out of all those thousands isnłt going to hurt me at all."

�Believe that if you like." I squeeze him, and blood pours
down his back. I open my jaws, wide as his head. �Youłll find out if Iłm right
or not." I wanted to torture him, to make it last, but now my hunger has killed
all subtlety, and all I can think of is biting him in two. Shutting him up for
good, proving him wrong. �One thousand times, big tough monster! Has anyone
else dreamed about you one thousand times?"

His parents are outside the room, watching, paralysed. He
sees them and cries out, �I love you!" and I realise at last that he truly does
know he is about to die. I roar with all my strength, with all the frustration
of three months in chains and this mad childłs mockery, but as I close my jaws
I hear him whisper:

�And no one else dreamed of your death, did they?"

Copyright (c) Greg Egan, 1986. All rights reserved.

First published in Aphelion #5, Summer 1986/87. Revised
Wednesday, 23 May 2001

Oceanic

1

The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing
grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no
longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and
the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in
darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me
sink back down again.

In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, �Do
you believe in God?"

My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didnłt
reply straight away. Iłd never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit
cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a
cloud of disturbed insects.

�Martin?"

�Iłm awake."

�Do you believe in God?"

�Of course." Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone
talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since hełd joined
the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau
before dawn. Iłd often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far
wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted
gratefully back to sleep.

Our family had always been Transitional, but Daniel was fifteen,
old enough to choose for himself. My mother accepted this with diplomatic
silence, but my father seemed positively proud of Danielłs independence and
strength of conviction. My own feelings were mixed. Iłd grown used to swimming
in my older brotherłs wake, but Iłd never resented it, because hełd always let
me in on the view ahead: reading me passages from the books he read himself,
teaching me words and phrases from the languages he studied, sketching some of
the mathematics I was yet to encounter first-hand. We used to lie awake half
the night, talking about the cores of stars or the hierarchy of transfinite
numbers. But Daniel had told me nothing about the reasons for his conversion,
and his ever-increasing piety. I didnłt know whether to feel hurt by this
exclusion, or simply grateful; I could see that being Transitional was like a
pale imitation of being Deep Church, but I wasnłt sure that this was such a bad
thing if the wages of mediocrity included sleeping until sunrise.

Daniel said, �Why?"

I stared up at the underside of his bunk, unsure whether I
was really seeing it or just imagining its solidity against the cabinłs ordinary
darkness. �Someone must have guided the Angels here from Earth. If Earthłs too
far away to see from Covenant ... how could anyone find Covenant from Earth,
without Godłs help?"

I heard Daniel shift slightly. �Maybe the Angels had better
telescopes than us. Or maybe they spread out from Earth in all directions,
launching thousands of expeditions without even knowing what theyłd find."

I laughed. �But they had to come _here_, to be made flesh
again!" Even a less-than-devout ten-year-old knew that much. God prepared
Covenant as the place for the Angels to repent their theft of immortality. The
Transitionals believed that in a million years we could earn the right to be
Angels again; the Deep Church believed that wełd remain flesh until the stars
fell from the sky.

Daniel said, �What makes you so sure that there were ever
really Angels? Or that God really sent them Her daughter, Beatrice, to lead
them back into the flesh?"

I pondered this for a while. The only answers I could think
of came straight out of the Scriptures, and Daniel had taught me years ago that
appeals to authority counted for nothing. Finally, I had to confess: �I donłt
know." I felt foolish, but I was grateful that he was willing to discuss these
difficult questions with me. I wanted to believe in God for the right reasons,
not just because everyone around me did.

He said, �Archaeologists have shown that we must have arrived
about twenty thousand years ago. Before that, therełs no evidence of humans, or
any co-ecological plants and animals. That makes the Crossing older than the
Scriptures say, but there are some dates that are open to interpretation, and
with a bit of poetic license everything can be made to add up. And most biologists
think the native microfauna could have formed by itself over millions of years,
starting from simple chemicals, but that doesnłt mean God didnłt guide the
whole process. Everythingłs compatible, really. Science and the Scriptures can
both be true."

I thought I knew where he was headed, now. �So youłve worked
out a way to use science to prove that God exists?" I felt a surge of pride; my
brother was a genius!

�No." Daniel was silent for a moment. �The thing is, it
works both ways. Whateverłs written in the Scriptures, people can always come
up with different explanations for the facts. The ships might have left Earth
for some other reason. The Angels might have made bodies for themselves for
some other reason. Therełs no way to convince a non-believer that the
Scriptures are the word of God. Itłs all a matter of faith."

�Oh."

�Faithłs the most important thing," Daniel insisted. �If you
donłt have faith, you can be tempted into believing anything at all."

I made a noise of assent, trying not to sound too
disappointed. Iłd expected more from Daniel than the kind of bland assertions
that sent me dozing off during sermons at the Transitional church.

�Do you know what you have to do to get faith?"

�No."

�Ask for it. Thatłs all. Ask Beatrice to come into your
heart and grant you the gift of faith."

I protested, �We do that every time we go to church!" I
couldnłt believe hełd forgotten the Transitional service already. After the
priest placed a drop of seawater on our tongues, to symbolize the blood of
Beatrice, we asked for the gifts of faith, hope and love.

�But have you received it?"

Iłd never thought about that. �Iłm not sure." I believed in
God, didnłt I? �I might have."

Daniel was amused. �If you had the gift of faith, youłd
_know_."

I gazed up into the darkness, troubled. �Do you have to go
to the Deep Church, to ask for it properly?"

�No. Even in the Deep Church, not everyone has invited Beatrice
into their hearts. You have to do it the way it says in the Scriptures: ęlike
an unborn child again, naked and helpless.ł"

�I was Immersed, wasnłt I?"

�In a metal bowl, when you were thirty days old. Infant Immersion
is a gesture by the parents, an affirmation of their own good intentions. But
itłs not enough to save the child."

I was feeling very disoriented now. My father, at least, approved
of Danielłs conversion ... but now Daniel was trying to tell me that our familyłs
transactions with God had all been grossly deficient, if not actually
counterfeit.

Daniel said, �Remember what Beatrice told Her followers, the
last time She appeared? ęUnless you are willing to drown in My blood, you will
never look upon the face of My Mother.ł So they bound each other hand and foot,
and weighted themselves down with rocks."

My chest tightened. �And youłve done that?"

�Yes."

�_When?_"

�Almost a year ago."

I was more confused than ever. �Did Ma and Fa go?"

Daniel laughed. �No! Itłs not a public ceremony. Some
friends of mine from the Prayer Group helped; someone has to be on deck to haul
you up, because it would be arrogant to expect Beatrice to break your bonds and
raise you to the surface, like She did with Her followers. But in the water,
youłre alone with God."

He climbed down from his bunk and crouched by the side of my
bed. �Are you ready to give your life to Beatrice, Martin?" His voice sent gray
sparks flowing through the darkness.

I hesitated. �What if I just dive in? And stay under for a
while?" Iłd been swimming off the boat at night plenty of times, there was
nothing to fear from that.

�No. You have to be weighted down." His tone made it clear
that there could be no compromise on this. �How long can you hold your breath?"

�Two hundred tau." That was an exaggeration; two hundred was
what I was aiming for.

�Thatłs long enough."

I didnłt reply. Daniel said, �Iłll pray with you."

I climbed out of bed, and we knelt together. Daniel
murmured, �Please, Holy Beatrice, grant my brother Martin the courage to accept
the precious gift of Your blood." Then he started praying in what I took to be
a foreign language, uttering a rapid stream of harsh syllables unlike anything
Iłd heard before. I listened apprehensively; I wasnłt sure that I wanted
Beatrice to change my mind, and I was afraid that this display of fervor might
actually persuade Her.

I said, �What if I donłt do it?"

�Then youłll never see the face of God."

I knew what that meant: Iłd wander alone in the belly of
Death, in darkness, for eternity. And even if the Scriptures werenłt meant to
be taken literally on this, the reality behind the metaphor could only be
worse. Indescribably worse.

�But ... what about Ma and Fa?" I was more worried about
them, because I knew theyłd never climb weighted off the side of the boat at
Danielłs behest.

�That will take time," he said softly.

My mind reeled. He was absolutely serious.

I heard him stand and walk over to the ladder. He climbed a
few rungs and opened the hatch. Enough starlight came in to give shape to his
arms and shoulders, but as he turned to me I still couldnłt make out his face. �Come
on, Martin!" he whispered. �The longer you put it off, the harder it gets." The
hushed urgency of his voice was familiar: generous and conspiratorial, nothing
like an adultłs impatience. He might almost have been daring me to join him in
a midnight raid on the pantrynot because he really needed a collaborator, but
because he honestly didnłt want me to miss out on the excitement, or the
spoils.

I suppose I was more afraid of damnation than drowning, and
Iłd always trusted Daniel to warn me of the dangers ahead. But this time I wasnłt
entirely convinced that he was right, so I must have been driven by something
more than fear, and blind trust.

Maybe it came down to the fact that he was offering to make
me his equal in this. I was ten years old, and I ached to become something more
than I was; to reach, not my parentsł burdensome adulthood, but the halfway
point, full of freedom and secrets, that Daniel had reached. I wanted to be as
strong, as fast, as quick-witted and widely-read as he was. Becoming as certain
of God would not have been my first choice, but there wasnłt much point hoping
for divine intervention to grant me anything else.

I followed him up onto the deck.

He took cord, and a knife, and four spare weights of the
kind we used on our nets from the toolbox. He threaded the weights onto the
cord, then I took off my shorts and sat naked on the deck while he knotted a
figure-eight around my ankles. I raised my feet experimentally; the weights
didnłt seem all that heavy. But in the water, I knew, theyłd be more than
enough to counteract my bodyłs slight buoyancy.

�Martin? Hold out your hands."

Suddenly I was crying. With my arms free, at least I could
swim against the tug of the weights. But if my hands were tied, Iłd be
helpless.

Daniel crouched down and met my eyes. �Ssh. Itłs all right."

I hated myself. I could feel my face contorted into the mask
of a blubbering infant.

�Are you afraid?"

I nodded.

Daniel smiled reassuringly. �You know why? You know whołs
doing that? Death doesnłt want Beatrice to have you. He wants you for himself.
So hełs here on this boat, putting fear into your heart, because he _knows_ hełs
almost lost you."

I saw something move in the shadows behind the toolbox,
something slithering into the darkness. If we went back down to the cabin now,
would Death follow us? To wait for Daniel to fall asleep? If Iłd turned my back
on Beatrice, who could I ask to send Death away?

I stared at the deck, tears of shame dripping from my
cheeks. I held out my arms, wrists together.

When my hands were tiednot palm-to-palm as Iłd expected, but
in separate loops joined by a short bridgeDaniel unwound a long stretch of
rope from the winch at the rear of the boat, and coiled it on the deck. I didnłt
want to think about how long it was, but I knew Iłd never dived to that depth.
He took the blunt hook at the end of the rope, slipped it over my arms, then
screwed it closed to form an unbroken ring. Then he checked again that the cord
around my wrists was neither so tight as to burn me, nor so loose as to let me
slip. As he did this, I saw something creep over his face: some kind of doubt
or fear of his own. He said, �Hang onto the hook. Just in case. Donłt let go,
no matter what. Okay?" He whispered something to Beatrice, then looked up at
me, confident again.

He helped me to stand and shuffle over to the guard rail,
just to one side of the winch. Then he picked me up under the arms and lifted
me over, resting my feet on the outer hull. The deck was inert, a mineralized
endoshell, but behind the guard rails the hull was palpably alive: slick with
protective secretions, glowing softly. My toes curled uselessly against the
lubricated skin; I had no purchase at all. The hull was supporting some of my
weight, but Danielłs arms would tire eventually. If I wanted to back out, Iłd
have to do it quickly.

A warm breeze was blowing. I looked around, at the flat horizon,
at the blaze of stars, at the faint silver light off the water. Daniel recited:
�Holy Beatrice, I am ready to die to this world. Let me drown in Your blood,
that I might be redeemed, and look upon the face of Your Mother."

I repeated the words, trying hard to mean them.

�Holy Beatrice, I offer You my life. All I do now, I do for
You. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of faith. Come into my heart,
and grant me the gift of hope. Come into my heart, and grant me the gift of
love."

�And grant me the gift of love."

Daniel released me. At first, my feet seemed to adhere
magically to the hull, and I pivoted backward without actually falling. I clung
tightly to the hook, pressing the cold metal against my belly, and willed the
rope of the winch to snap taut, leaving me dangling in midair. I even braced
myself for the shock. Some part of me really did believe that I could change my
mind, even now.

Then my feet slipped and I plunged into the ocean and sank
straight down.

It was not like a divenot even a dive from an untried
height, when it took so long for the water to bring you to a halt that it began
to grow frightening. I was falling through the water ever faster, as if it was
air. The vision Iłd had of the rope keeping me above the water now swung to the
opposite extreme: my acceleration seemed to prove that the coil on the deck was
attached to nothing, that its frayed end was already beneath the surface. _Thatłs
what the followers had done, wasnłt it? Theyłd let themselves be thrown in
without a lifeline._ So Daniel had cut the rope, and I was on my way to the
bottom of the ocean.

Then the hook jerked my hands up over my head, jarring my
wrists and shoulders, and I was motionless.

I turned my face toward the surface, but neither starlight
nor the hullłs faint phosphorescence reached this deep. I let a stream of
bubbles escape from my mouth; I felt them slide over my upper lip, but no trace
of them registered in the darkness.

I shifted my hands warily over the hook. I could still feel
the cord fast around my wrists, but Daniel had warned me not to trust it. I
brought my knees up to my chest, gauging the effect of the weights. If the cord
broke, at least my hands would be free, but even so I wasnłt sure Iłd be able
to ascend. The thought of trying to unpick the knots around my ankles as I
tumbled deeper filled me with horror.

My shoulders ached, but I wasnłt injured. It didnłt take
much effort to pull myself up until my chin was level with the bottom of the
hook. Going further was awkwardwith my hands so close together I couldnłt
brace myself properlybut on the third attempt I managed to get my arms locked,
pointing straight down.

Iłd done this without any real plan, but then it struck me
that even with my hands and feet tied, I could try shinning up the rope. It was
just a matter of getting started. Iłd have to turn upside-down, grab the rope
between my knees, then curl updragging the hookand get a grip with my hands
at a higher point.

And if I couldnłt reach up far enough to right myself?

Iłd ascend feet-first.

I couldnłt even manage the first step. I thought it would be
as simple as keeping my arms rigid and letting myself topple backward, but in
the water even two-thirds of my body wasnłt sufficient to counterbalance the
weights.

I tried a different approach: I dropped down to hang at armłs
length, raised my legs as high as I could, then proceeded to pull myself up
again. But my grip wasnłt tight enough to resist the turning force of the
weights; I just pivoted around my center of gravitywhich was somewhere near my
kneesand ended up, still bent double, but almost horizontal.

I eased myself down again, and tried threading my feet
through the circle of my arms. I didnłt succeed on the first attempt, and then
on reflection it seemed like a bad move anyway. Even if I managed to grip the
rope between my bound feetrather than just tumbling over backward, out of
control, and dislocating my shouldersclimbing the rope _upside-down with my
hands behind my back_ would either be impossible, or so awkward and strenuous
that Iłd run out of oxygen before I got a tenth of the way.

I let some more air escape from my lungs. I could feel the
muscles in my diaphragm reproaching me for keeping them from doing what they wanted
to do; not urgently yet, but the knowledge that I had no control over when Iłd
be able to draw breath again made it harder to stay calm. I knew I could rely
on Daniel to bring me to the surface on the count of two hundred. But Iłd only
ever stayed down for a hundred and sixty. Forty more tau would be an eternity.

Iłd almost forgotten what the whole ordeal was meant to be
about, but now I started praying. _Please Holy Beatrice, donłt let me die. I
know You drowned like this to save me, but if I die it wonłt help anyone.
Daniel would end up in the deepest shit ... but thatłs not a threat, itłs just
an observation._ I felt a stab of anxiety; on top of everything else, had I
just offended the Daughter of God? I struggled on, my confidence waning. _I donłt
want to die. But You already know that. So I donłt know what You want me to
say._

I released some more stale air, wishing Iłd counted the time
Iłd been under; you werenłt supposed to empty your lungs too quicklywhen they
were deflated it was even harder not to take a breathbut holding all the
carbon dioxide in too long wasnłt good either.

Praying only seemed to make me more desperate, so I tried to
think other kinds of holy thoughts. I couldnłt remember anything from the
Scriptures word for word, but the gist of the most important part started
running through my mind.

After living in Her body for thirty years, and persuading
all the Angels to become mortal again, Beatrice had gone back up to their
deserted spaceship and flown it straight into the ocean. When Death saw Her
coming, he took the form of a giant serpent, coiled in the water, waiting. And
even though She was the Daughter of God, with the power to do anything, She let
Death swallow Her.

Thatłs how much She loved us.

Death thought hełd won everything. Beatrice was trapped inside
him, in the darkness, alone. The Angels were flesh again, so he wouldnłt even
have to wait for the stars to fall before he claimed them.

But Beatrice was part of God. Death had swallowed part of
God. This was a mistake. After three days, his jaws burst open and Beatrice
came flying out, wreathed in fire. Death was broken, shriveled, diminished.

My limbs were numb but my chest was burning. Death was still
strong enough to hold down the damned. I started thrashing about blindly,
wasting whatever oxygen was left in my blood, but desperate to distract myself
from the urge to inhale.

_Please Holy Beatrice_

_Please Daniel_

Luminous bruises blossomed behind my eyes and drifted out
into the water. I watched them curling into a kind of vortex, as if something
was drawing them in.

It was the mouth of the serpent, swallowing my soul. I
opened my own mouth and made a wretched noise, and Death swam forward to kiss
me, to breathe cold water into my lungs.

Suddenly, everything was seared with light. The serpent
turned and fled, like a pale timid worm. A wave of contentment washed over me,
as if I was an infant again and my mother had wrapped her arms around me
tightly. It was like basking in sunlight, listening to laughter, dreaming of
music too beautiful to be real. Every muscle in my body was still trying to
prise my lungs open to the water, but now I found myself fighting this almost
absentmindedly while I marveled at my strange euphoria.

Cold air swept over my hands and down my arms. I raised myself
up to take a mouthful, then slumped down again, giddy and spluttering, grateful
for every breath but still elated by something else entirely. The light that
had filled my eyes was gone, but it left a violet afterimage everywhere I
looked. Daniel kept winding until my head was level with the guard rail, then
he clamped the winch, bent down, and threw me over his shoulder.

Iłd been warm enough in the water, but now my teeth were
chattering. Daniel wrapped a towel around me, then set to work cutting the
cord. I beamed at him. �Iłm so happy!" He gestured to me to be quieter, but
then he whispered joyfully, �Thatłs the love of Beatrice. Shełll always be with
you now, Martin."

I blinked with surprise, then laughed softly at my own
stupidity. Until that moment, I hadnłt connected what had happened with
Beatrice at all. But of course it was Her. Iłd asked Her to come into my heart,
and She had.

And I could see it in Danielłs face: a year after his own
Drowning, he still felt Her presence.

He said, �Everything you do now is for Beatrice. When you
look through your telescope, youłll do it to honor Her creation. When you eat,
or drink, or swim, youłll do it to give thanks for Her gifts." I nodded
enthusiastically.

Daniel tidied everything away, even soaking up the puddles
of water Iłd left on the deck. Back in the cabin, he recited from the
Scriptures, passages that Iłd never really understood before, but which now all
seemed to be about the Drowning, and the way I was feeling. It was as if Iłd
opened the book and found myself mentioned by name on every page.

When Daniel fell asleep before me, for the first time in my
life I didnłt feel the slightest pang of loneliness. The Daughter of God was
with me: I could feel Her presence, like a flame inside my skull, radiating
warmth through the darkness behind my eyes.

Giving me comfort, giving me strength.

Giving me faith.



2

The monastery was almost four milliradians northeast of our
home grounds. Daniel and I took the launch to a rendezvous point, and met up
with three other small vessels before continuing. It had been the same routine
every tenth night for almost a yearand Daniel had been going to the Prayer
Group himself for a year before thatso the launch didnłt need much
supervision. Feeding on nutrients in the ocean, propelling itself by pumping
water through fine channels in its skin, guided by both sunlight and Covenantłs
magnetic field, it was a perfect example of the kind of legacy of the Angels
that technology would never be able to match.

Bartholomew, Rachel and Agnes were in one launch, and they
traveled beside us while the others skimmed ahead. Bartholomew and Rachel were
married, though they were only seventeen, scarcely older than Daniel. Agnes,
Rachelłs sister, was sixteen. Because I was the youngest member of the Prayer
Group, Agnes had fussed over me from the day Iłd joined. She said, �Itłs your
big night tonight, Martin, isnłt it?" I nodded, but declined to pursue the
conversation, leaving her free to talk to Daniel.

It was dusk by the time the monastery came into sight, a
conical tower built from at least ten thousand hulls, rising up from the water
in the stylized form of Beatricełs spaceship. Aimed at the sky, not down into
the depths. Though some commentators on the Scriptures insisted that the spaceship
itself had sunk forever, and Beatrice had risen from the water unaided, it was
still the definitive symbol of Her victory over Death. For the three days of
Her separation from God, all such buildings stood in darkness, but that was
half a year away, and now the monastery shone from every porthole.

There was a narrow tunnel leading into the base of the
tower; the launches detected its scent in the water and filed in one by one. I
knew they didnłt have souls, but I wondered what it would have been like for
them if theyłd been aware of their actions. Normally they rested in the dock of
a single hull, a pouch of boatskin that secured them but still left them
largely exposed. Maybe being drawn instinctively into this vast structure would
have felt even safer, even more comforting, than docking with their home boat.
When I said something to this effect, Rachel, in the launch behind me,
sniggered. Agnes said, �Donłt be horrible."

The walls of the tunnel phosphoresced pale green, but the
opening ahead was filled with white lamplight, dazzlingly richer and brighter.
We emerged into a canal circling a vast atrium, and continued around it until
the launches found empty docks.

As we disembarked, every footstep, every splash echoed back
at us. I looked up at the ceiling, a dome spliced together from hundreds of
curved triangular hull sections, tattooed with scenes from the Scriptures. The
original illustrations were more than a thousand years old, but the living
boatskin degraded the pigments on a time scale of decades, so the monks had to
constantly renew them.

�Beatrice Joining the Angels" was my favorite. Because the
Angels werenłt flesh, they didnłt grow inside their mothers; they just appeared
from nowhere in the streets of the Immaterial Cities. In the picture on the
ceiling, Beatricełs immaterial body was half-formed, with cherubs still working
to clothe the immaterial bones of Her legs and arms in immaterial muscles,
veins and skin. A few Angels in luminous robes were glancing sideways at Her,
but you could tell they werenłt particularly impressed. Theyłd had no way of
knowing, then, who She was.

A corridor with its own smaller illustrations led from the
atrium to the meeting room. There were about fifty people in the Prayer Groupincluding
several priests and monks, though they acted just like everyone else. In church
you followed the liturgy; the priest slotted-in his or her sermon, but there
was no room for the worshippers to do much more than pray or sing in unison and
offer rote responses. Here it was much less formal. There were two or three
different speakers every nightsometimes guests who were visiting the
monastery, sometimes members of the groupand after that anyone could ask the
group to pray with them, about whatever they liked.

Iłd fallen behind the others, but theyłd saved me an aisle
seat. Agnes was to my left, then Daniel, Bartholomew and Rachel. Agnes said, �Are
you nervous?"

�No."

Daniel laughed, as if this claim was ridiculous.

I said, �Iłm not." Iłd meant to sound loftily unperturbed,
but the words came out sullen and childish.

The first two speakers were both lay theologians,
Firmlanders who were visiting the monastery. One gave a talk about people who
belonged to false religions, and how they were allin effectworshipping
Beatrice, but just didnłt know it. He said they wouldnłt be damned, because
theyłd had no choice about the cultures they were born into. Beatrice would
know theyłd meant well, and forgive them.

I wanted this to be true, but it made no sense to me. Either
Beatrice _was_ the Daughter of God, and everyone who thought otherwise had
turned away from Her into the darkness, or ... there was no �or." I only had to
close my eyes and feel Her presence to know that. Still, everyone applauded
when the man finished, and all the questions people asked seemed sympathetic to
his views, so perhaps his arguments had simply been too subtle for me to
follow.

The second speaker referred to Beatrice as �the Holy Jester",
and rebuked us severely for not paying enough attention to Her sense of humor.
She cited events in the Scriptures which she said were practical jokes, and
then went on at some length about �the healing power of laughter." It was all
about as gripping as a lecture on nutrition and hygiene; I struggled to keep my
eyes open. At the end, no one could think of any questions.

Then Carol, who was running the meeting, said, �Now Martin
is going to give witness to the power of Beatrice in his life."

Everyone applauded encouragingly. As I rose to my feet and
stepped into the aisle, Daniel leaned toward Agnes and whispered sarcastically,
�This should be good."

I stood at the lectern and gave the talk Iłd been rehearsing
for days. Beatrice, I said, was beside me now whatever I did: whether I studied
or worked, ate or swam, or just sat and watched the stars. When I woke in the
morning and looked into my heart, She was there without fail, offering me
strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at night, I feared nothing, because I
knew She was watching over me. Before my Drowning, Iłd been unsure of my faith,
but now Iłd never again be able to doubt that the Daughter of God had become
flesh, and died, and conquered Death, because of Her great love for us.

It was all true, but even as I said these things I couldnłt
get Danielłs sarcastic words out of my mind. I glanced over at the row where Iłd
been sitting, at the people Iłd traveled with. What did I have in common with
them, really? Rachel and Bartholomew were married. Bartholomew and Daniel had
studied together, and still played in the same dive-ball team. Daniel and Agnes
were probably in love. And Daniel was my brother ... but the only difference
that seemed to make was the fact that he could belittle me far more efficiently
than any stranger.

In the open prayer that followed, I paid no attention to the
problems and blessings people were sharing with the group. I tried silently
calling on Beatrice to dissolve the knot of anger in my heart. But I couldnłt
do it; Iłd turned too far away from Her.

When the meeting was over, and people started moving into
the adjoining room to talk for a while, I hung back. When the others were out
of sight I ducked into the corridor, and headed straight for the launch.

Daniel could get a ride home with his friends; it wasnłt far
out of their way. Iłd wait a short distance from the boat until he caught up;
if my parents saw me arrive on my own Iłd be in trouble. Daniel would be angry,
of course, but he wouldnłt betray me.

Once Iłd freed the launch from its dock, it knew exactly
where to go: around the canal, back to the tunnel, out into the open sea. As I
sped across the calm, dark water, I felt the presence of Beatrice returning,
which seemed like a sign that She understood that Iłd had to get away.

I leaned over and dipped my hand in the water, feeling the
current the launch was generating by shuffling ions in and out of the cells of
its skin. The outer hull glowed a phosphorescent blue, more to warn other
vessels than to light the way. In the time of Beatrice, one of her followers
had sat in the Immaterial City and designed this creature from scratch. It gave
me a kind of vertigo, just imagining the things the Angels had known. I wasnłt
sure why so much of it had been lost, but I wanted to rediscover it all. Even
the Deep Church taught that there was nothing wrong with that, so long as we
didnłt use it to try to become immortal again.

The monastery shrank to a blur of light on the horizon, and
there was no other beacon visible on the water, but I could read the stars, and
sense the field lines, so I knew the launch was heading in the right direction.

When I noticed a blue speck in the distance, it was clear
that it wasnłt Daniel and the others chasing after me; it was coming from the
wrong direction. As I watched the launch drawing nearer I grew anxious; if this
was someone I knew, and I couldnłt come up with a good reason to be traveling
alone, word would get back to my parents.

Before I could make out anyone on board, a voice shouted, �Can
you help me? Iłm lost!"

I thought for a while before replying. The voice sounded almost
matter-of-fact, making light of this blunt admission of helplessness, but it
was no joke. If you were sick, your diurnal sense and your field sense could
both become scrambled, making the stars much harder to read. It had happened to
me a couple of times, and it had been a horrible experienceeven standing
safely on the deck of our boat. This late at night, a launch with only its
field sense to guide it could lose track of its position, especially if you
were trying to take it somewhere it hadnłt been before.

I shouted back our coordinates, and the time. I was fairly
confident that I had them down to the nearest hundred microradians, and few
hundred tau.

�That canłt be right! Can I approach? Let our launches talk?"

I hesitated. It had been drummed into me for as long as I
could remember that if I ever found myself alone on the water, I should give
other vessels a wide berth unless I knew the people on board. But Beatrice was
with me, and if someone needed help it was wrong to refuse them.

�All right!" I stopped dead, and waited for the stranger to
close the gap. As the launch drew up beside me, I was surprised to see that the
passenger was a young man. He looked about Bartholomewłs age, but hełd sounded
much older.

We didnłt need to tell the launches what to do; proximity
was enough to trigger a chemical exchange of information. The man said, �Out on
your own?"

�Iłm traveling with my brother and his friends. I just went
ahead a bit."

That made him smile. �Sent you on your way, did they? What
do you think theyłre getting up to, back there?" I didnłt reply; that was no
way to talk about people you didnłt even know. The man scanned the horizon,
then spread his arms in a gesture of sympathy. �You must be feeling left out."

I shook my head. There was a pair of binoculars on the floor
behind him; even before hełd called out for help, he could have seen that I was
alone.

He jumped deftly between the launches, landing on the stern
bench. I said, �Therełs nothing to steal." My skin was crawling, more with
disbelief than fear. He was standing on the bench in the starlight, pulling a
knife from his belt. The detailsthe pattern carved into the handle, the
serrated edge of the bladeonly made it seem more like a dream.

He coughed, suddenly nervous. �Just do what I tell you, and
you wonłt get hurt."

I filled my lungs and shouted for help with all the strength
I had; I knew there was no one in earshot, but I thought it might still
frighten him off. He looked around, more startled than angry, as if he couldnłt
quite believe Iłd waste so much effort. I jumped backward, into the water. A
moment later I heard him follow me.

I found the blue glow of the launches above me, then swam
hard, down and away from them, without wasting time searching for his shadow.
Blood was pounding in my ears, but I knew I was moving almost silently; however
fast he was, in the darkness he could swim right past me without knowing it. If
he didnłt catch me soon hełd probably return to the launch and wait to spot me
when I came up for air. I had to surface far enough away to be invisibleeven
with the binoculars.

I was terrified that Iłd feel a hand close around my ankle
at any moment, but Beatrice was with me. As I swam, I thought back to my
Drowning, and Her presence grew stronger than ever. When my lungs were almost
bursting, She helped me to keep going, my limbs moving mechanically, blotches
of light floating in front of my eyes. When I finally knew I had to surface, I
turned face-up and ascended slowly, then lay on my back with only my mouth and
nose above the water, refusing the temptation to stick my head up and look
around.

I filled and emptied my lungs a few times, then dived again.

The fifth time I surfaced, I dared to look back. I couldnłt
see either launch. I raised myself higher, then turned a full circle in case Iłd
grown disoriented, but nothing came into sight.

I checked the stars, and my field sense. The launches should
_not_ have been over the horizon. I trod water, riding the swell, and tried not
to think about how tired I was. It was at least two milliradians to the nearest
boat. Good swimmerssome younger than I wascompeted in marathons over
distances like that, but Iłd never even aspired to such feats of endurance.
Unprepared, in the middle of the night, I knew I wouldnłt make it.

If the man had given up on me, would he have taken our
launch? When they cost so little, and the markings were so hard to change? That
would be nothing but an admission of guilt. _So why couldnłt I see it?_ Either
hełd sent it on its way, or it had decided to return home itself.

I knew the path it would have taken; I would have seen it go
by, if Iłd been looking for it when Iłd surfaced before. But I had no hope of
catching it now.

I began to pray. I knew Iłd been wrong to leave the others,
but I asked for forgiveness, and felt it being granted. I watched the horizon
almost calmlysmiling at the blue flashes of meteors burning up high above the
oceancertain that Beatrice would not abandon me.

I was still prayingtreading water, shivering from the cool
of the airwhen a blue light appeared in the distance. It disappeared as the
swell took me down again, but there was no mistaking it for a shooting star.
_Was this Daniel and the othersor the stranger?_ I didnłt have long to decide;
if I wanted to get within earshot as they passed, Iłd have to swim hard.

I closed my eyes and prayed for guidance. _Please Holy Beatrice,
let me know._ Joy flooded through my mind, instantly: it was them, I was
certain of it. I set off as fast as I could.

I started yelling before I could see how many passengers
there were, but I knew Beatrice would never allow me to be mistaken. A flare
shot up from the launch, revealing four figures standing side by side, scanning
the water. I shouted with jubilation, and waved my arms. Someone finally spotted
me, and they brought the launch around toward me. By the time I was on board I
was so charged up on adrenaline and relief that I almost believed I could have
dived back into the water and raced them home.

I thought Daniel would be angry, but when I described what
had happened all he said was, �Wełd better get moving."

Agnes embraced me. Bartholomew gave me an almost respectful
look, but Rachel muttered sourly, �Youłre an idiot, Martin. You donłt know how
lucky you are."

I said, �I know."

Our parents were standing on deck. The empty launch had arrived
some time ago; theyłd been about to set out to look for us. When the others had
departed I began recounting everything again, this time trying to play down any
element of danger.

Before Iłd finished, my mother grabbed Daniel by the front
of his shirt and started slapping him. �I trusted you with him! _You maniac!_ I
trusted you!" Daniel half raised his arm to block her, but then let it drop and
just turned his face to the deck.

I burst into tears. �It was my fault!" Our parents never
struck us; I couldnłt believe what I was seeing.

My father said soothingly, �Look ... hełs home now. Hełs
safe. No one touched him." He put an arm around my shoulders and asked warily, �Thatłs
right, Martin, isnłt it?"

I nodded tearfully. This was worse than anything that had happened
on the launch, or in the water; I felt a thousand times more helpless, a
thousand times more like a child.

I said, �Beatrice was watching over me."

My mother rolled her eyes and laughed wildly, letting go of
Danielłs shirt. �Beatrice? _Beatrice?_ Donłt you know what could have happened
to you? Youłre too young to have given him what he wanted. He would have had to
use the knife."

The chill of my wet clothes seemed to penetrate deeper. I
swayed unsteadily, but fought to stay upright. Then I whispered stubbornly, �Beatrice
was there."

My father said, �Go and get changed, or youłre going to
freeze to death."

I lay in bed listening to them shout at Daniel. When he
finally came down the ladder I was so sick with shame that I wished Iłd
drowned.

He said, �Are you all right?"

There was nothing I could say. I couldnłt ask him to forgive
me.

�Martin?" Daniel turned on the lamp. His face was streaked
with tears; he laughed softly, wiping them away. �Fuck, you had me worried. Donłt
ever do anything like that again."

�I wonłt."

�Okay." That was it; no shouting, no recriminations. �Do you
want to pray with me?"

We knelt side by side, praying for our parents to be at
peace, praying for the man whołd tried to hurt me. I started trembling;
everything was catching up with me. Suddenly, words began gushing from my mouthwords
I neither recognized nor understood, though I knew I was praying for everything
to be all right with Daniel, praying that our parents would stop blaming him
for my stupidity.

The strange words kept flowing out of me, an incomprehensible
torrent somehow imbued with everything I was feeling. I knew what was
happening: _Beatrice had given me the Angelsł tongue._ Wełd had to surrender
all knowledge of it when we became flesh, but sometimes She granted people the
ability to pray this way, because the language of the Angels could express
things we could no longer put into words. Daniel had been able to do it ever
since his Drowning, but it wasnłt something you could teach, or even something
you could ask for.

When I finally stopped, my mind was racing. �Maybe Beatrice
planned everything that happened tonight? Maybe She arranged it all, to lead up
to this moment!"

Daniel shook his head, wincing slightly. �Donłt get carried
away. You have the gift; just accept it." He nudged me with his shoulder. �Now
get into bed, before wełre both in more trouble."

I lay awake almost until dawn, overwhelmed with happiness.
Daniel had forgiven me. Beatrice had protected and blessed me. I felt no more
shame, just humility and amazement. I knew Iłd done nothing to deserve it, but
my life was wrapped in the love of God.



3

According to the Scriptures, the oceans of Earth were
storm-tossed, and filled with dangerous creatures. But on Covenant, the oceans
were calm, and the Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm
their own mortal incarnations. The four continents and the four oceans were
rendered equally hospitable, and just as women and men were made indistinguishable
in the sight of God, so were Freelanders and Firmlanders. (Some commentators insisted
that this was literally true: God chose to blind Herself to where we lived, and
whether or not wełd been born with a penis. I thought that was a beautiful
idea, even if I couldnłt quite grasp the logistics of it.)

Iłd heard that certain obscure sects taught that half the
Angels had actually become embodied as a separate people who could live in the
water and breathe beneath the surface, but then God destroyed them because they
were a mockery of Beatricełs death. No legitimate church took this notion
seriously, though, and archaeologists had found no trace of these mythical
doomed cousins. Humans were humans, there was only one kind. Freelanders and Firmlanders
could even intermarryif they could agree where to live.

When I was fifteen, Daniel became engaged to Agnes from the
Prayer Group. That made sense: theyłd be spared the explanations and arguments
about the Drowning that they might have faced with partners who werenłt so
blessed. Agnes was a Freelander, of course, but a large branch of her family,
and a smaller branch of ours, were Firmlanders, so after long negotiations it
was decided that the wedding would be held in Ferez, a coastal town.

I went with my father to pick a hull to be fitted out as
Daniel and Agnesłs boat. The breeder, Diana, had a string of six mature hulls
in tow, and my father insisted on walking out onto their backs and personally
examining each one for imperfections.

By the time we reached the fourth I was losing patience. I
muttered, �Itłs the skin underneath that matters." In fact, you could tell a
lot about a hullłs general condition from up here, but there wasnłt much point
worrying about a few tiny flaws high above the waterline.

My father nodded thoughtfully. �Thatłs true. Youłd better
get in the water and check their undersides."

�Iłm not doing that." We couldnłt simply trust this woman to
sell us a healthy hull for a decent price; that wouldnłt have been sufficiently
embarrassing.

�Martin! This is for the safety of your brother and
sister-in-law."

I glanced at Diana to show her where my sympathies lay, then
slipped off my shirt and dived in. I swam down to the last hull in the row,
then ducked beneath it. I began the job with perverse thoroughness, running my
fingers over every square nanoradian of skin. I was determined to annoy my
father by taking even longer than he wantedand determined to impress Diana by
examining all six hulls without coming up for air.

An unfitted hull rode higher in the water than a boat full
of furniture and junk, but I was surprised to discover that even in the
creaturełs shadow there was enough light for me to see the skin clearly. After
a while I realized that, paradoxically, this was because the water was slightly
cloudier than usual, and whatever the fine particles were, they were scattering
sunlight into the shadows.

Moving through the warm, bright water, feeling the love of
Beatrice more strongly than I had for a long time, it was impossible to remain
angry with my father. He wanted the best hull for Daniel and Agnes, and so did
I. As for impressing Diana ... who was I kidding? She was a grown woman, at
least as old as Agnes, and highly unlikely to view me as anything more than a
child. By the time Iłd finished with the third hull I was feeling short of
breath, so I surfaced and reported cheerfully, �No blemishes so far!"

Diana smiled down at me. �Youłve got strong lungs."

All six hulls were in perfect condition. We ended up taking
the one at the end of the row, because it was easiest to detach.

* * * *

Ferez was built on the mouth of a river, but the docks were
some distance upstream. That helped to prepare us; the gradual deadening of the
waves was less of a shock than an instant transition from sea to land would
have been. When I jumped from the deck to the pier, though, it was like
colliding with something massive and unyielding, the rock of the planet itself.
Iłd been on land twice before, for less than a day on both occasions. The
wedding celebrations would last ten days, but at least wełd still be able to
sleep on the boat.

As the four of us walked along the crowded streets, heading
for the ceremonial hall where everything but the wedding sacrament itself would
take place, I stared uncouthly at everyone in sight. Almost no one was barefoot
like us, and after a few hundred tau on the paving stonesmuch rougher than any
deckI could understand why. Our clothes were different, our skin was darker,
our accent was unmistakably foreign ... but no one stared back. Freelanders
were hardly a novelty here. That made me even more selfconscious; the curiosity
I felt wasnłt mutual.

In the hall, I joined in with the preparations, mainly just
lugging furniture around under the directions of one of Agnesłs tyrannical
uncles. It was a new kind of shock to see so many Freelanders together in this
alien environment, and stranger still when I realized that I couldnłt
necessarily spot the Firmlanders among us; there was no sharp dividing line in
physical appearance, or even clothing. I began to feel slightly guilty; if God
couldnłt tell the difference, what was I doing hunting for the signs?

At noon we all ate outside, in a garden behind the hall. The
grass was soft, but it made my feet itch. Daniel had gone off to be fitted for
wedding clothes, and my parents were performing some vital task of their own; I
only recognized a handful of the people around me. I sat in the shade of a
tree, pretending to be oblivious to the plantłs enormous size and bizarre
anatomy. I wondered if wełd take a siesta; I couldnłt imagine falling asleep on
the grass.

Someone sat down beside me, and I turned.

�Iłm Lena. Agnesłs second cousin."

�Iłm Danielłs brother, Martin." I hesitated, then offered
her my hand; she took it, smiling slightly. Iłd awkwardly kissed a dozen
strangers that morning, all distant prospective relatives, but this time I didnłt
dare.

�Brother of the groom, doing grunt work with the rest of us."
She shook her head in mocking admiration.

I desperately wanted to say something witty in reply, but an
attempt that failed would be even worse than merely being dull. �Do you live in
Ferez?"

�No, Mitar. Inland from here. Wełre staying with my uncle."
She pulled a face. �Along with ten other people. No privacy. Itłs awful."

I said, �It was easy for us. We just brought our home with
us." _You idiot. As if she didnłt know that._

Lena smiled. �I havenłt been on a boat in years. Youłll have
to give me a tour sometime."

�Of course. Iłd be happy to." I knew she was only making
small talk; shełd never take me up on the offer.

She said, �Is it just you and Daniel?"

�Yes."

�You must be close."

I shrugged. �What about you?"

�Two brothers. Both younger. Eight and nine. Theyłre all
right, I suppose." She rested her chin on one hand and gazed at me coolly.

I looked away, disconcerted by more than my wishful thinking
about what lay behind that gaze. Unless her parents had been awfully young when
she was born, it didnłt seem likely that more children were planned. So did an
odd number in the family mean that one had died, or that the custom of equal
numbers carried by each parent wasnłt followed where she lived? Iłd studied the
region less than a year ago, but I had a terrible memory for things like that.

Lena said, �You looked so lonely, off here on your own."

I turned back to her, surprised. �Iłm never lonely."

�No?"

She seemed genuinely curious. I opened my mouth to tell her
about Beatrice, but then changed my mind. The few times Iłd said anything to
friendsordinary friends, not Drowned onesIłd regretted it. Not everyone had
laughed, but theyłd all been acutely embarrassed by the revelation.

I said, �Mitar has a million people, doesnłt it?"

�Yes."

�An area of ocean the same size would have a population of
ten."

Lena frowned. �Thatłs a bit too deep for me, Iłm afraid."
She rose to her feet. �But maybe youłll think of a way of putting it that even
a Firmlander can understand." She raised a hand goodbye and started walking
away.

I said, �Maybe I will."

* * * *

The wedding took place in Ferezłs Deep Church, a spaceship built
of stone, glass, and wood. It looked almost like a parody of the churches I was
used to, though it probably bore a closer resemblance to the Angelsł real ship
than anything made of living hulls.

Daniel and Agnes stood before the priest, beneath the apex
of the building. Their closest relatives stood behind them in two angled lines
on either side. My fatherDanielłs motherwas first in our line, followed by my
own mother, then me. That put me level with Rachel, who kept shooting
disdainful glances my way. After my misadventure, Daniel and I had eventually
been allowed to travel to the Prayer Group meetings again, but less than a year
later Iłd lost interest, and soon after Iłd also stopped going to church.
Beatrice was with me, constantly, and no gatherings or ceremonies could bring
me any closer to Her. I knew Daniel disapproved of this attitude, but he didnłt
lecture me about it, and my parents had accepted my decision without any fuss.
If Rachel thought I was some kind of apostate, that was her problem.

The priest said, �Which of you brings a bridge to this marriage?"

Daniel said, �I do." In the Transitional ceremony they no
longer asked this; it was really no one elsełs businessand in a way the
question was almost sacrilegious. Still, Deep Church theologians had explained
away greater doctrinal inconsistencies than this, so who was I to argue?

�Do you, Daniel and Agnes, solemnly declare that this bridge
will be the bond of your union until death, to be shared with no other person?"

They replied together, �We solemnly declare."

�Do you solemnly declare that as you share this bridge, so
shall you share every joy and every burden of marriageequally?"

�We solemnly declare."

My mind wandered; I thought of Lenałs parents. Maybe one of
the familyłs children was adopted. Lena and I had managed to sneak away to the
boat three times so far, early in the evenings while my parents were still out.
Wełd done things Iłd never done with anyone else, but I still hadnłt had the
courage to ask her anything so personal.

Suddenly the priest was saying, �In the eyes of God, you are
one now." My father started weeping softly. As Daniel and Agnes kissed, I felt
a surge of contradictory emotions. Iłd miss Daniel, but I was glad that Iłd
finally have a chance to live apart from him. And I wanted him to be happyI
was jealous of his happiness alreadybut at the same time, the thought of
marrying someone like Agnes filled me with claustrophobia. She was kind,
devout, and generous. She and Daniel would treat each other, and their children,
well. But neither of them would present the slightest challenge to the otherłs
most cherished beliefs.

This recipe for harmony terrified me. Not least because I
was afraid that Beatrice approved, and wanted me to follow it myself.

* * * *

Lena put her hand over mine and pushed my fingers deeper into
her, gasping. We were sitting on my bunk, face to face, my legs stretched out
flat, hers arching over them.

She slid the palm of her other hand over my penis. I bent forward
and kissed her, moving my thumb over the place shełd shown me, and her shudder
ran through both of us.

�Martin?"

�What?"

She stroked me with one fingertip; somehow it was far better
than having her whole hand wrapped around me.

�Do you want to come inside me?"

I shook my head.

�Why not?"

She kept moving her finger, tracing the same line; I could
barely think. _Why not?_ �You might get pregnant."

She laughed. �Donłt be stupid. I can control that. Youłll
learn, too. Itłs just a matter of experience."

I said, �Iłll use my tongue. You liked that."

�I did. But I want something more now. And you do, too. I
can tell." She smiled imploringly. �Itłll be nice for both of us, I promise.
Nicer than anything youłve done in your life."

�Donłt bet on it."

Lena made a sound of disbelief, and ran her thumb around the
base of my penis. �I can tell you havenłt put this inside anyone before. But
thatłs nothing to be ashamed of."

�Who said I was ashamed?"

She nodded gravely. �All right. Frightened."

I pulled my hand free, and banged my head on the bunk above us.
Danielłs old bunk.

Lena reached up and put her hand on my cheek.

I said, �I canłt. Wełre not married."

She frowned. �I heard youłd given up on all that."

�All what?"

�Religion."

�Then you were misinformed."

Lena said, �This is what the Angels made our bodies to do.
How can there be anything sinful in that?" She ran her hand down my neck, over
my chest.

�But the bridge is meant to ..." _What?_ All the Scriptures
said was that it was meant to unite men and women, equally. And the Scriptures
said God couldnłt tell women and men apart, but in the Deep Church, in the
sight of God, the priest had just made Daniel claim priority. So why should I
care what any priest thought?

I said, �All right."

�Are you sure?"

�Yes." I took her face in my hands and started kissing her.
After a while, she reached down and guided me in. The shock of pleasure almost
made me come, but I stopped myself somehow. When the risk of that had lessened,
we wrapped our arms around each other and rocked slowly back and forth.

It wasnłt better than my Drowning, but it was so much like
it that it had to be blessed by Beatrice. And as we moved in each otherłs arms,
I grew determined to ask Lena to marry me. She was intelligent and strong. She
questioned everything. It didnłt matter that she was a Firmlander; we could
meet halfway, we could live in Ferez.

I felt myself ejaculate. �Iłm sorry."

Lena whispered, �Thatłs all right, thatłs all right. Just
keep moving."

I was still hard; that had never happened before. I could
feel her muscles clenching and releasing rhythmically, in time with our motion,
and her slow exhalations. Then she cried out, and dug her fingers into my back.
I tried to slide partly out of her again, but it was impossible, she was
holding me too tightly. This was it. There was no going back.

Now I was afraid. �Iłve never" Tears were welling up in my
eyes; I tried to shake them away.

�I know. And I know itłs frightening." She embraced me more
tightly. �Just feel it, though. Isnłt it wonderful?"

I was hardly aware of my motionless penis anymore, but there
was liquid fire flowing through my groin, waves of pleasure spreading deeper. I
said, �Yes. Is it like that for you?"

�Itłs different. But itłs just as good. Youłll find out for
yourself, soon enough."

�I hadnłt been thinking that far ahead," I confessed.

Lena giggled. �Youłve got a whole new life in front of you,
Martin. You donłt know what youłve been missing."

She kissed me, then started pulling away. I cried out in
pain, and she stopped. �Iłm sorry. Iłll take it slowly." I reached down to
touch the place where we were joined; there was a trickle of blood escaping
from the base of my penis.

Lena said, �Youłre not going to faint on me, are you?"

�Donłt be stupid." I did feel queasy, though. �What if Iłm
not ready? What if I canłt do it?"

�Then Iłll lose my hold in a few hundred tau. The Angels werenłt
completely stupid."

I ignored this blasphemy, though it wasnłt just any Angel
whołd designed our bodiesit was Beatrice Herself. I said, �Just promise you
wonłt use a knife."

�Thatłs not funny. That really happens to people."

�I know." I kissed her shoulder. �I think"

Lena straightened her legs slightly, and I felt the core
break free inside me. Blood flowed warmly from my groin, but the pain had
changed from a threat of damage to mere tenderness; my nervous system no longer
spanned the lesion. I asked Lena, �Do you feel it? Is it part of you?"

�Not yet. It takes a while for the connections to form." She
ran her fingers over my lips. �Can I stay inside you, until they have?"

I nodded happily. I hardly cared about the sensations
anymore; it was just contemplating the miracle of being able to give a part of
my body to Lena that was wonderful. Iłd studied the physiological details long
ago, everything from the exchange of nutrients to the organłs independent
immune systemand I knew that Beatrice had used many of the same techniques for
the bridge as Shełd used with gestating embryosbut to witness Her ingenuity so
dramatically at work in my own flesh was both shocking and intensely moving. Only
giving birth could bring me closer to Her than this.

When we finally separated, though, I wasnłt entirely
prepared for the sight of what emerged. �Oh, that is disgusting!"

Lena shook her head, laughing. �New ones always look a bit
... encrusted. Most of that stuff will wash away, and the rest will fall off in
a few kilotau."

I bunched up the sheet to find a clean spot, then dabbed at
myherpenis. My newly formed vagina had stopped bleeding, but it was finally
dawning on me just how much mess wełd made. �Iłm going to have to wash this
before my parents get back. I can put it out to dry in the morning, after theyłre
gone, but if I donłt wash it now theyłll smell it."

We cleaned ourselves enough to put on shorts, then Lena
helped me carry the sheet up onto the deck and drape it in the water from the
laundry hooks. The fibers in the sheet would use nutrients in the water to
power the self-cleaning process.

The docks appeared deserted; most of the boats nearby belonged
to people whołd come for the wedding. Iłd told my parents I was too tired to
stay on at the celebrations; tonight theyłd continue until dawn, though Daniel
and Agnes would probably leave by midnight. To do what Lena and I had just
done.

�Martin? Are you shivering?"

There was nothing to be gained by putting it off. Before whatever
courage I had could desert me, I said, �Will you marry me?"

�Very funny. Oh" Lena took my hand. �Iłm sorry, I never
know when youłre joking."

I said, �Wełve exchanged the bridge. It doesnłt matter that
we werenłt married first, but it would make things easier if we went along with
convention."

�Martin"

�Or we could just live together, if thatłs what you want. I
donłt care. Wełre already married in the eyes of Beatrice."

Lena bit her lip. �I donłt want to live with you."

�I could move to Mitar. I could get a job."

Lena shook her head, still holding my hand. She said firmly,
�_No._ You knew, before we did anything, what it would and wouldnłt mean. You
donłt want to marry me, and I donłt want to marry you. So snap out of it."

I pulled my hand free, and sat down on the deck. _What had I
done?_ Iłd thought Iłd had Beatricełs blessing, Iłd thought this was all in Her
plan ... but Iłd just been fooling myself.

Lena sat beside me. �What are you worried about? Your parents
finding out?"

�Yes." That was the least of it, but it seemed pointless
trying to explain the truth. I turned to her. �When could we?"

�Not for about ten days. And sometimes itłs longer after the
first time."

Iłd known as much, but Iłd hoped her experience might contradict
my theoretical knowledge. _Ten days._ Wełd both be gone by then.

Lena said, �What do you think, you can never get married
now? How many marriages do you imagine involve the bridge one of the partners
was born with?"

�Nine out of ten. Unless theyłre both women."

Lena gave me a look that hovered between tenderness and incredulity.
�My estimate is about one in five."

I shook my head. �I donłt care. Wełve exchanged the bridge,
we have to be together." Lenałs expression hardened, then so did my resolve. �Or
I have to get it back."

�Martin, thatłs ridiculous. Youłll find another lover soon
enough, and then you wonłt even know what you were worried about. Or maybe youłll
fall in love with a nice Deep Church boy, and then youłll both be glad youłve
been spared the trouble of getting rid of the extra bridge."

�Yeah? Or maybe hełll just be disgusted that I couldnłt wait
until I really _was_ doing it for him!"

Lena groaned, and stared up at the sky. �Did I say something
before about the Angels getting things right? Ten thousand years without
bodies, and they thought they were qualified"

I cut her off angrily. �Donłt be so fucking blasphemous! Beatrice
knew exactly what She was doing. If we mess it up, thatłs our fault!"

Lena said, matter-of-factly, �In ten yearsł time, therełll
be a pill youłll be able to take to keep the bridge from being passed, and
another pill to make it pass when it otherwise wouldnłt. Wełll win control of
our bodies back from the Angels, and start doing exactly what we like with
them."

�Thatłs sick. That really is sick."

I stared at the deck, suffocating in misery. _This was what
Iłd wanted, wasnłt it? A lover who was the very opposite of Danielłs sweet,
pious Agnes?_ Except that in my fantasies, wełd always had a lifetime to debate
our philosophical differences. Not one night to be torn apart by them.

I had nothing to lose, now. I told Lena about my Drowning.
She didnłt laugh; she listened in silence.

I said, �Do you believe me?"

�Of course." She hesitated. �But have you ever wondered if there
might be another explanation for the way you felt, in the water that night? You
were starved of oxygen"

�People are starved of oxygen all the time. Freelander kids
spend half their lives trying to stay underwater longer than the last time."

Lena nodded. �Sure. But thatłs not quite the same, is it?
You were pushed beyond the time you could have stayed under by sheer willpower.
And ... you were cued, you were told what to expect."

�Thatłs not true. Daniel never told me what it would be
like. I was _surprised_ when it happened." I gazed back at her calmly, ready to
counter any ingenious hypothesis she came up with. I felt chastened, but almost
at peace now. This was what Beatrice had expected of me, before wełd exchanged
the bridge: not a dead ceremony in a dead building, but the honesty to tell
Lena exactly who shełd be making love with.

We argued almost until sunrise; neither of us convinced the
other of anything. Lena helped me drag the clean sheet out of the water and
hide it below deck. Before she left, she wrote down the address of a friendłs
house in Mitar, and a place and time we could meet.

Keeping that appointment was the hardest thing Iłd ever done
in my life. I spent three solid days ingratiating myself with my Mitar-based
cousins, to the point where they would have had to be openly hostile to get out
of inviting me to stay with them after the wedding. Once I was there, I had to
scheme and lie relentlessly to ensure that I was free of them on the
predetermined day.

In a strangerłs house, in the middle of the afternoon, Lena
and I joylessly reversed everything that had happened between us. Iłd been
afraid that the act itself might rekindle all my stupid illusions, but when we
parted on the street outside, I felt as if I hardly knew her.

I ached even more than I had on the boat, and my groin was
palpably swollen, but in a couple of days, I knew, nothing less than a loverłs
touch or a medical examination would reveal what Iłd done.

In the train back to the coast, I replayed the entire
sequence of events in my mind, again and again. _How could I have been so
wrong?_ People always talked about the power of sex to confuse and deceive you,
but Iłd always believed that was just cheap cynicism. Besides, I hadnłt blindly
surrendered to sex; Iłd thought Iłd been guided by Beatrice.

_If I could be wrong about that_

Iłd have to be more careful. Beatrice always spoke clearly,
but Iłd have to listen to Her with much more patience and humility.

That was it. That was what Shełd wanted me to learn. I
finally relaxed and looked out the window, at the blur of forest passing by,
another triumph of the ecopoiesis. If I needed proof that there was always
another chance, it was all around me now. The Angels had traveled as far from
God as anyone could travel, and yet God had turned around and given them
Covenant.



4

I was nineteen when I returned to Mitar, to study at the
cityłs university. Originally, Iłd planned to specialize in the ecopoiesisand
to study much closer to homebut in the end Iłd had to accept the nearest thing
on offer, geographically and intellectually: working with Barat, a Firmlander
biologist whose real interest was native microfauna. �Angelic technology is a
fascinating subject in its own right," he told me. �But we canłt hope to work
backward and decipher terrestrial evolution from anything the Angels created.
The best we can do is try to understand what Covenantłs own biosphere was like,
before we arrived and disrupted it."

I managed to persuade him to accept a compromise: my thesis
would involve the impact of the ecopoiesis on the native microfauna. That would
give me an excuse to study the Angelsł inventions, alongside the drab
unicellular creatures that had inhabited Covenant for the last billion years.

�The impact of the ecopoiesis" was far too broad a subject,
of course; with Baratłs help, I narrowed it down to one particular unresolved
question. There had long been geological evidence that the surface waters of
the ocean had become both more alkaline, and less oxygenated, as new species
shifted the balance of dissolved gases. Some native species must have retreated
from the wave of change, and perhaps some had been wiped out completely, but
there was a thriving population of zooytes in the upper layers at present. So
had they been there all along, adapting _in situ_? Or had they migrated from
somewhere else?

Mitarłs distance from the coast was no real handicap in studying
the ocean; the university mounted regular expeditions, and I had plenty of
library and lab work to do before embarking on anything so obvious as gathering
living samples in their natural habitat. Whatłs more, river water, and even
rainwater, was teeming with closely related species, and since it was possible
that these were the reservoirs from which the �ravaged" ocean had been re-colonized,
I had plenty of subjects worth studying close at hand.

Barat set high standards, but he was no tyrant, and his
other students made me feel welcome. I was homesick, but not morbidly so, and I
took a kind of giddy pleasure from the vivid dreams and underlying sense of
disorientation that living on land induced in me. I wasnłt exactly fulfilling
my childhood ambition to uncover the secrets of the Angelsand I had fewer
opportunities than Iłd hoped to get side-tracked on the ecopoiesis itselfbut
once I started delving into the minutiae of Covenantłs original, wholly
undesigned biochemistry, it turned out to be complex and elegant enough to hold
my attention.

I was only miserable when I let myself think about sex. I
didnłt want to end up like Daniel, so seeking out another Drowned person to
marry was the last thing on my mind. But I couldnłt face the prospect of
repeating my mistake with Lena; I had no intention of becoming physically
intimate with anyone unless we were already close enough for me to tell them
about the most important thing in my life. But that wasnłt the order in which
things happened, here. After a few humiliating attempts to swim against the
current, I gave up on the whole idea, and threw myself into my work instead.

Of course, it _was_ possible to socialize at Mitar
University without actually exchanging bridges with anyone. I joined an informal
discussion group on Angelic culture, which met in a small room in the studentsł
building every tenth nightjust like the old Prayer Group, though I was under
no illusion that this one would be stacked with believers. It hardly needed to
be. The Angelsł legacy could be analyzed perfectly well without reference to Beatricełs
divinity. The Scriptures were written long after the Crossing by people of a
simpler age; there was no reason to treat them as infallible. If non-believers
could shed some light on any aspect of the past, I had no grounds for rejecting
their insights.

�Itłs obvious that only one faction came to Covenant!" That
was Celine, an anthropologist, a woman so much like Lena that I had to make a
conscious effort to remind myself, every time I set eyes on her, that nothing
could ever happen between us. �_Wełre_ not so homogeneous that wełd all choose
to travel to another planet and assume a new physical form, whatever cultural
forces might drive one small group to do that. So why should the Angels have
been unanimous? The other factions must still be living in the Immaterial
Cities, on Earth, and on other planets."

�Then why havenłt they contacted us? In twenty thousand
years, youłd think theyłd drop in and say hello once or twice." David was a
mathematician, a Freelander from the southern ocean.

Celine replied, �The attitude of the Angels who came here
wouldnłt have encouraged visitors. If all we have is a story of the Crossing in
which Beatrice persuades every last Angel in existence to give up immortalitya
version that simply erases everyone else from historythat doesnłt suggest much
of a desire to remain in touch."

A woman I didnłt know interjected, �It might not have been
so clear-cut from the start, though. Therełs evidence of settler-level
technology being deployed for more than three thousand years after the
Crossing, long after it was needed for the ecopoiesis. New species continued to
be created, engineering projects continued to use advanced materials and energy
sources. But then in less than a century, it all stopped. The Scriptures merge
three separate decisions into one: renouncing immortality, migrating to
Covenant, and abandoning the technology that might have provided an escape
route if anyone changed their mind. But we _know_ it didnłt happen like that.
Three thousand years after the Crossing, something changed. The whole
experiment suddenly became irreversible."

These speculations would have outraged the average pious
Freelander, let alone the average Drowned one, but I listened calmly, even
entertaining the possibility that some of them could be true. The love of
Beatrice was the only fixed point in my cosmology; everything else was open to
debate.

Still, sometimes the debate was hard to take. One night,
David joined us straight from a seminar of physicists. What hełd heard from the
speaker was unsettling enough, but hełd already moved beyond it to an even less
palatable conclusion.

�Why did the Angels choose mortality? After ten thousand
years without death, why did they throw away all the glorious possibilities
ahead of them, to come and die like animals on this ball of mud?" I had to bite
my tongue to keep from replying to his rhetorical question: because God is the
only source of eternal life, and Beatrice showed them that all they really had
was a cheap parody of that divine gift.

David paused, then offered his own answerwhich was itself a
kind of awful parody of Beatricełs truth. �Because they discovered that they
werenłt immortal, after all. They discovered that _no one can be_. Wełve always
known, as they must have, that the universe is finite in space and time. Itłs
destined to collapse eventually: ęthe stars will fall from the sky.ł But itłs
easy to _imagine_ ways around that." He laughed. �We donłt know enough physics
yet, ourselves, to rule out anything. Iłve just heard an extraordinary woman
from Tia talk about coding our minds into waves that would orbit the shrinking
universe so rapidly that we could think _an infinite number of thoughts_ before
everything was crushed!" David grinned joyfully at the sheer audacity of this
notion. I thought primly: what blasphemous nonsense.

Then he spread his arms and said, �Donłt you see, though? If
the Angels _had_ pinned their hopes on something like thatsome ingenious trick
that would keep them from sharing the fate of the universe_but then they
finally gained enough knowledge to rule out every last escape route_, it would have
had a profound effect on them. Some small faction could then have decided that
since they were mortal after all, they might as well embrace the inevitable,
and come to terms with it in the way their ancestors had. In the flesh."

Celine said thoughtfully, �And the Beatrice myth puts a religious
gloss on the whole thing, but that might be nothing but a _post hoc_
reinterpretation of a purely secular revelation."

This was too much; I couldnłt remain silent. I said, �If Covenant
really was founded by a pack of terminally depressed atheists, what could have
changed their minds? Where did the desire to impose a ę_post hoc_
reinterpretationł _come from?_ If the revelation that brought the Angels here
was ęsecularł, why isnłt the whole planet still secular today?"

Someone said snidely, �Civilization collapsed. What do you
expect?"

I opened my mouth to respond angrily, but Celine got in
first. �No, Martin has a point. If Davidłs right, the rise of religion needs to
be explained more urgently than ever. And I donłt think anyonełs in a position
to do that yet."

Afterward, I lay awake thinking about all the other things I
should have said, all the other objections I should have raised. (And thinking
about Celine.) Theology aside, the whole dynamics of the group was starting to
get under my skin; maybe Iłd be better off spending my time in the lab,
impressing Barat with my dedication to his pointless fucking microbes.

Or maybe Iłd be better off at home. I could help out on the
boat; my parents werenłt young anymore, and Daniel had his own family to look
after.

I climbed out of bed and started packing, but halfway
through I changed my mind. I didnłt really want to abandon my studies. And Iłd
known all along what the antidote was for all the confusion and resentment I
was feeling.

I put my rucksack away, switched off the lamp, lay down,
closed my eyes, and asked Beatrice to grant me peace.

* * * *

I was woken by someone banging on the door of my room. It
was a fellow boarder, a young man I barely knew. He looked extremely tired and
irritable, but something was overriding his irritation.

�Therełs a message for you."

My mother was sick, with an unidentified virus. The hospital
was even further away than our home grounds; the trip would take almost three
days.

I spent most of the journey praying, but the longer I
prayed, the harder it became. I _knew_ that it was possible to save my motherłs
life with one word in the Angelsł tongue to Beatrice, but the number of ways in
which I could fail, corrupting the purity of the request with my own doubts, my
own selfishness, my own complacency, just kept multiplying.

The Angels created nothing in the ecopoiesis that would harm
their own mortal incarnations. The native life showed no interest in
parasitizing us. But over the millennia, our own DNA had shed viruses. And
since Beatrice Herself chose every last base pair, that must have been what She
intended. Aging was not enough. Mortal injury was not enough. Death had to come
without warning, silent and invisible.

Thatłs what the Scriptures said.

The hospital was a maze of linked hulls. When I finally
found the right passageway, the first person I recognized in the distance was
Daniel. He was holding his daughter Sophie high in his outstretched arms,
smiling up at her. The image dispelled all my fears in an instant; I almost
fell to my knees to give thanks.

Then I saw my father. He was seated outside the room, his
head in his hands. I couldnłt see his face, but I didnłt need to. He wasnłt
anxious, or exhausted. He was crushed.

I approached in a haze of last-minute prayers, though I knew
I was asking for the past to be rewritten. Daniel started to greet me as if
nothing was wrong, asking about the tripprobably trying to soften the blowthen
he registered my expression and put a hand on my shoulder.

He said, �Shełs with God now."

I brushed past him and walked into the room. My motherłs
body was lying on the bed, already neatly arranged: arms straightened, eyes
closed. Tears ran down my cheeks, angering me. Where had my love been when it
might have prevented this? When Beatrice might have heeded it?

Daniel followed me into the room, alone. I glanced back
through the doorway and saw Agnes holding Sophie.

�Shełs with God, Martin." He was beaming at me as if something
wonderful had happened.

I said numbly, �She wasnłt Drowned." I was almost certain
that she hadnłt been a believer at all. Shełd remained in the Transitional
church all her lifebut that had long been the way to stay in touch with your
friends when you worked on a boat nine days out of ten.

�I prayed with her, before she lost consciousness. She
accepted Beatrice into her heart."

I stared at him. Nine years ago hełd been certain: you were
Drowned, or you were damned. It was as simple as that. My own conviction had
softened long ago; I couldnłt believe that Beatrice really was so arbitrary and
cruel. But I knew my mother would not only have refused the full-blown ritual;
the whole philosophy would have been as nonsensical to her as the mechanics.

�Did she say that? Did she tell you that?"

Daniel shook his head. �But it was clear." Filled with the
love of Beatrice, he couldnłt stop smiling.

A wave of revulsion passed through me; I wanted to grind his
face into the deck. _He didnłt care what my mother had believed._ Whatever
eased his own pain, whatever put his own doubts to rest, had to be the case. To
accept that she was damnedor even just dead, gone, erasedwas unbearable;
everything else flowed from that. _There was no truth in anything he said,
anything he believed. It was all just an expression of his own needs._

I walked back into the corridor and crouched beside my
father. Without looking at me, he put an arm around me and pressed me against
his side. I could feel the blackness washing over him, the helplessness, the
loss. When I tried to embrace him he just clutched me more tightly, forcing me
to be still. I shuddered a few times, then stopped weeping. I closed my eyes
and let him hold me.

I was determined to stay there beside him, facing everything
he was facing. But after a while, unbidden, the old flame began to glow in the
back of my skull: the old warmth, the old peace, the old certainty. Daniel was
right, my mother was with God. _How could I have doubted that?_ There was no
point asking how it had come about; Beatricełs ways were beyond my
comprehension. But the one thing I knew firsthand was the strength of Her love.

I didnłt move, I didnłt free myself from my fatherłs
desolate embrace. But I was an impostor now, merely praying for his comfort,
interceding from my state of grace. Beatrice had raised me out of the darkness,
and I could no longer share his pain.



5

After my motherłs death, my faith kept ceding ground,
without ever really wavering. Most of the doctrinal content fell away, leaving
behind a core of belief that was a great deal easier to defend. It didnłt
matter if the Scriptures were superstitious nonsense or the Church was full of
fools and hypocrites; Beatrice was still Beatrice, the way the sky was still
blue. Whenever I heard debates between atheists and believers, I found myself
increasingly on the atheistsł sidenot because I accepted their conclusion for
a moment, but because they were so much more honest than their opponents. Maybe
the priests and theologians arguing against them had the same kind of direct,
personal experience of God as I didor maybe not, maybe they just desperately
needed to believe. But they never disclosed the true source of their
conviction; instead, they just made laughable attempts to �prove" Godłs
existence from the historical record, or from biology, astronomy, or
mathematics. Daniel had been right at the age of fifteenyou couldnłt prove any
such thingand listening to these people twist logic as they tried made me
squirm.

I felt guilty about leaving my father working with a hired
hand, and even guiltier when he moved onto Danielłs boat a year later, but I
knew how angry it would have made him if he thought Iłd abandoned my career for
his sake. At times that was the only thing that kept me in Mitar: even when I
honestly wanted nothing more than to throw it all in and go back to hauling
nets, I was afraid my decision would be misinterpreted.

It took me three years to complete my thesis on the
migration of aquatic zooytes in the wake of the ecopoiesis. My original hypothesis,
that freshwater species had replenished the upper ocean, turned out to be
false. Zooytes had no genes as such, just families of enzymes that
re-synthesized each other after cell division, but comparisons of these
heritable molecules showed that, rather than rain bringing new life from above,
an ocean-dwelling species from a much greater depth had moved steadily closer
to the surface, as the Angelsł creations drained oxygen from the water. That
wouldnłt have been much of a surprise, if the same techniques hadnłt also shown
that several species found in river water were even closer relatives of the
surface-dwellers. But those freshwater species werenłt anyonełs ancestors; they
were the newest migrants. Zooytes that had spent a billion years confined to
the depths had suddenly been able to survive (and reproduce, and mutate) closer
to the surface than ever before, and when theyłd stumbled on a mutation that
let them thrive in the presence of oxygen, theyłd finally been in a position to
make use of it. The ecopoiesis might have driven other native organisms into
extinction, but the invasion from Earth had enabled this ancient benthic
species to mount a long overdue invasion of its own. Unwittingly or not, the
Angels had set in motion the sequence of events that had released it from the
ocean to colonize the planet.

So I proved myself wrong, earned my degree, and became
famous amongst a circle of peers so small that we were all famous to each other
anyway. Vast new territories did not open up before me. Anything to do with
native biology was rapidly becoming an academic cul-de-sac; Iłd always
suspected that was how it would be, but I hadnłt fought hard enough to end up
anywhere else.

For the next three years, I clung to the path of least
resistance: assisting Barat with his own research, taking the teaching jobs no
one else wanted. Most of Baratłs other students moved on to better things, and
I found myself increasingly alone in Mitar. But that didnłt matter; I had
Beatrice.

At the age of twenty-five, I could see my future clearly.
While other people decipheredand built uponthe Angelsł legacy, Iłd watch from
a distance, still messing about with samples of seawater from which all Angelic
contaminants had been scrupulously removed.

Finally, when it was almost too late, I made up my mind to
jump ship. Barat had been good to me, but hełd never expected loyalty verging
on martyrdom. At the end of the year a bi-ecological (native and Angelic)
microbiology conference was being held in Tia, possibly the last event of its
kind. I had no new results to present, but it wouldnłt be hard to find a
plausible excuse to attend, and it would be the ideal place to lobby for a new
position. My great zooyte discovery hadnłt been entirely lost on the wider
community of biologists; I could try to rekindle the memory of it. I doubted
therełd be much point offering to sleep with anyone; ethical qualms aside, my
bridge had probably rusted into place.

Then again, maybe Iłd get lucky. Maybe Iłd stumble on a fellow
Drowned Freelander whołd ended up in a position of power, and all Iłd have to
do was promise that my work would be for the greater glory of Beatrice.

* * * *

Tia was a city of ten million people on the east coast. New
towers stood side-by-side with empty structures from the time of the Angels,
giant gutted machines that might have played a role in the ecopoiesis. I was
too old and proud to gawk like a child, but for all my provincial
sophistication I wanted to. These domes and cylinders were twenty times older
than the illustrations tattooed into the ceiling of the monastery back home.
They bore no images of Beatrice; nothing of the Angels did. But why would they?
They predated Her death.

The university, on the outskirts of Tia, was a third the
size of Mitar itself. An underground train ringed the campus; the students I
rode with eyed my unstylish clothes with disbelief. I left my luggage in the
dormitory and headed straight for the conference center. Barat had chosen to
stay behind; maybe he hadnłt wanted to witness the public burial of his field.
That made things easier for me; Iłd be free to hunt for a new career without
rubbing his face in it.

Late additions to the conference program were listed on a
screen by the main entrance. I almost walked straight past the display; Iłd
already decided which talks Iłd be attending. But three steps away, a title Iłd
glimpsed in passing assembled itself in my mindłs eye, and I had to back-track
to be sure I hadnłt imagined it.

Carla Reggia: �Euphoric Effects of _Z/12/80_ Excretions"

I stood there laughing with disbelief. I recognized the
speaker and her co-workers by name, though Iłd never had a chance to meet them.
If this wasnłt a hoax ... what had they done? Dried it, smoked it, and tried
writing that up as research? _Z/12/80_ was one of �my" zooytes, one of the
escapees from the ocean; the air and water of Tia were swarming with it. If its
excretions were euphoric, the whole city would be in a state of bliss.

_I knew, then and there, what theyłd discovered._ I knew it,
long before I admitted it to myself. I went to the talk with my head full of
jokes about neglected culture flasks full of psychotropic breakdown products,
but for two whole days, Iłd been steeling myself for the truth, finding ways in
which it didnłt have to matter.

_Z/12/80_, Carla explained, excreted among its waste
products an amine that was able to bind to receptors in our Angel-crafted
brains. Since it had been shown by other workers (no one recognized me; no one
gave me so much as a glance) that _Z/12/80_ hadnłt existed at the time of the
ecopoiesis, this interaction was almost certainly undesigned, and
unanticipated. �Itłs up to the archaeologists and neurochemists to determine
what role, if any, the arrival of this substance in the environment might have
played in the collapse of early settlement culture. But for the past fifteen to
eighteen thousand years, wełve been swimming in it. Since we still exhibit such
a wide spectrum of moods, wełre probably able to compensate for its presence by
down-regulating the secretion of the endogenous molecule that was designed to
bind to the same receptor. Thatłs just an educated guess, though. Exactly what
the effects might be from individual to individual, across the range of doses
that might be experienced under a variety of conditions, is clearly going to be
a matter of great interest to investigators with appropriate expertise."

I told myself that I felt no disquiet. Beatrice acted on the
world through the laws of nature; Iłd stopped believing in supernatural
miracles long ago. The fact that someone had now identified the way in which
Shełd acted on _me_, that night in the water, changed nothing.

I pressed ahead with my attempts to get recruited. Everyone
at the conference was talking about Carlałs discovery, and when people finally
made the connection with my own work their eyes stopped glazing over halfway
through my spiel. In the next three days, I received seven offersall involving
research into zooyte biochemistry. There was no question, now, of side-stepping
the issue, of escaping into the wider world of Angelic biology. One man even
came right out and said to me: �Youłre a Freelander, and you know that the
ancestors of _Z/12/80_ live in much greater numbers in the ocean. Donłt you
think _oceanic_ exposure is going to be the key to understanding this?" He laughed.
�I mean, you swam in the stuff as a child, didnłt you? And you seem to have
come through unscathed."

�Apparently."

On my last night in Tia, I couldnłt sleep. I stared into the
blackness of the room, watching the gray sparks dance in front of me. (Contaminants
in the aqueous humor? Electrical noise in the retina? Iłd heard the explanation
once, but I could no longer remember it.)

I prayed to Beatrice in the Angelsł tongue; I could still
feel Her presence, as strongly as ever. The effect clearly wasnłt just a matter
of dosage, or trans-cutaneous absorption; merely swimming in the ocean at the
right depth wasnłt enough to make anyone feel Drowned. But in combination with
the stress of oxygen starvation, and all the psychological build-up Daniel had
provided, the jolt of zooyte piss must have driven certain neuroendocrine
subsystems into new territoryor old territory, by a new path. _Peace, joy,
contentment, the feeling of being loved_ werenłt exactly unknown emotions. But
by short-circuiting the brainłs usual practice of summoning those feelings only
on occasions when there was a reason for them, Iłd been �blessed with the love
of Beatrice." Iłd found happiness on demand.

And I still possessed it. That was the eeriest part. Even as
I lay there in the dark, on the verge of reasoning everything Iłd been living
for out of existence, my ability to work the machinery was so ingrained that I
felt as loved, as blessed as ever.

_Maybe Beatrice was offering me another chance, making it
clear that Shełd still forgive this blasphemy and welcome me back._ But why did
I believe that there was anyone there to �forgive me"? You couldnłt reason your
way to God; there was only faith. And I knew, now, that the source of my faith
was a meaningless accident, an unanticipated side-effect of the ecopoiesis.

I still had a choice. I could, still, decide that the love
of Beatrice was immune to all logic, a force beyond understanding, untouched by
evidence of any kind.

_No, I couldnłt._ Iłd been making exceptions for Her for too
long. Everyone lived with double standardsbut Iłd already pushed mine as far
as theyłd go.

I started laughing and weeping at the same time. It was
almost unimaginable: all the millions of people whołd been misled the same way.
All because of the zooytes, and ... what? One Freelander, diving for pleasure,
whołd stumbled on a strange new experience? Then tens of thousands more
repeating it, generation after generationuntil one vulnerable man or woman had
been driven to invest the novelty with meaning. Someone whołd needed so badly
to feel loved and protected that the illusion of a real presence behind the raw
emotion had been impossible to resist. Or whołd desperately wanted to believe
thatin spite of the Angelsł discovery that they, too, were mortaldeath could
still be defeated.

I was lucky: Iłd been born in an era of moderation. I hadnłt
killed in the name of Beatrice. I hadnłt suffered for my faith. I had no doubt
that Iłd been far happier for the last fifteen years than I would have been if
Iłd told Daniel to throw his rope and weights overboard without me.

But that didnłt change the fact that the heart of it all had
been a lie.

* * * *

I woke at dawn, my head pounding, after just a few kilotaułs
sleep. I closed my eyes and searched for Her presence, as I had a thousand
times before. _When I woke in the morning and looked into my heart, She was
there without fail, offering me strength and guidance. When I lay in bed at
night, I feared nothing, because I knew She was watching over me._

There was nothing. She was gone.

I stumbled out of bed, feeling like a murderer, wondering
how Iłd ever live with what Iłd done.



6

I turned down every offer Iłd received at the conference,
and stayed on in Mitar. It took Barat and me two years to establish our own
research group to examine the effects of the zooamine, and nine more for us to
elucidate the full extent of its activity in the brain. Our new recruits all
had solid backgrounds in neurochemistry, and they did better work than I did,
but when Barat retired I found myself the spokesperson for the group.

The initial discovery had been largely ignored outside the
scientific community; for most people, it hardly mattered whether our brain
chemistry matched the Angelsł original design, or had been altered fifteen
thousand years ago by some unexpected contaminant. But when the Mitar zooamine
group began publishing detailed accounts of the biochemistry of religious
experience, the public at large rediscovered the subject with a vengeance.

The university stepped up security, and despite death
threats and a number of unpleasant incidents with stone-throwing protesters, no
one was hurt. We were flooded with requests from broadcastersthough most were
predicated on the notion that the group was morally obliged to �face its
critics", rather than the broadcasters being morally obliged to offer us a
chance to explain our work, calmly and clearly, without being shouted down by
enraged zealots.

I learned to avoid the zealots, but the obscurantists were
harder to dodge. Iłd expected opposition from the Churchesdefending the faith
was their job, after allbut some of the most intellectually bankrupt responses
came from academics in other disciplines. In one televised debate, I was
confronted by a Deep Church priest, a Transitional theologian, a devotee of the
ocean god Marni, and an anthropologist from Tia.

�This discovery has no real bearing on any belief system,"
the anthropologist explained serenely. �All truth is local. Inside every Deep
Church in Ferez, Beatrice _is_ the daughter of God, and wełre the mortal
incarnations of the Angels, who traveled here from Earth. In a coastal village
a few milliradians south, Marni is the supreme creator, and it was She who gave
birth to us, right here. Going one step further and moving from the spiritual
domain to the scientific might appear to ęnegateł certain spiritual truths ...
but equally, moving from the scientific domain to the spiritual demonstrates
the same limitations. We are nothing but the stories we tell ourselves, and no
one story is greater than another." He smiled beneficently, the expression of a
parent only too happy to give all his squabbling children an equal share in
some disputed toy.

I said, �How many cultures do you imagine share your definition
of ętruthł? How many people do you think would be content to worship a God who
consisted of literally nothing but the fact of their belief?" I turned to the
Deep Church priest. �Is that enough for you?"

�Absolutely not!" She glowered at the anthropologist. �While
I have the greatest respect for my brother here," she gestured at the devotee
of Marni, �you canłt draw a line around those people whołve been lucky enough
to be raised in the true faith, and then suggest that _Beatricełs_ infinite
power and love is confined to that group of people ... like some collection of
folk songs!"

The devotee respectfully agreed. Marni had created the most
distant stars, along with the oceans of Covenant. Perhaps some people called
Her by another name, but if everyone on this planet was to die tomorrow, She
would still be Marni: unchanged, undiminished.

The anthropologist responded soothingly, �Of course. But in
context, and with a wider perspective"

�Iłm perfectly happy with a God who resides within us," offered
the Transitional theologian. �It seems ... _immodest_ to expect more. And
instead of fretting uselessly over these ultimate questions, we should confine
ourselves to matters of a suitably human scale."

I turned to him. �So youłre actually indifferent as to
whether an infinitely powerful and loving being created everything around you,
and plans to welcome you into Her arms after death ... or the universe is a
piece of quantum noise that will eventually vanish and erase us all?"

He sighed heavily, as if I was asking him to perform some arduous
physical feat just by responding. �I can summon no enthusiasm for these issues."

Later, the Deep Church priest took me aside and whispered, �Frankly,
wełre all very grateful that youłve debunked that awful cult of the Drowned.
Theyłre a bunch of fundamentalist hicks, and the Church will be better off
without them. But you mustnłt make the mistake of thinking that your work has
anything to do with ordinary, civilized believers!"

* * * *

I stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered on the
beach near the rock pool, to listen to the two old men who were standing
ankle-deep in the milky water. It had taken me four days to get here from
Mitar, but when Iłd heard reports of a zooyte bloom washing up on the remote
north coast, Iłd had to come and see the results for myself. The zooamine group
had actually recruited an anthropologist for such occasionsone who could cope
with such taxing notions as the existence of objective reality, and a biochemical
substrate for human thoughtbut Celine was only with us for part of the year,
and right now she was away doing other research.

�This is an ancient, sacred place!" one man intoned,
spreading his arms to take in the pool. �You need only observe the shape of it
to understand that. It concentrates the energy of the stars, and the sun, and
the ocean."

�The focus of power is there, by the inlet," the other
added, gesturing at a point where the water might have come up to his calves. �Once,
I wandered too close. I was almost lost in the great dream of the ocean, when
my friend here came and rescued me!"

These men werenłt devotees of Marni, or members of any other
formal religion. As far as Iłd been able to tell from old news reports, the
blooms occurred every eight or ten years, and the two had set themselves up as �custodians"
of the pool more than fifty years ago. Some local villagers treated the whole
thing as a joke, but others revered the old men. And for a small fee, tourists
and locals alike could be chanted over, then splashed with the potent brew.
Evaporation would have concentrated the trapped waters of the bloom; for a few
days, before the zooytes ran out of nutrients and died _en masse_ in a cloud of
hydrogen sulphide, the amine would be present in levels as high as in any of
our laboratory cultures back in Mitar.

As I watched people lining up for the ritual, I found myself
trying to downplay the possibility that anyone could be seriously affected by
it. It was broad daylight, no one feared for their life, and the old menłs
pantheistic gobbledygook carried all the gravitas of the patter of streetside
scam merchants. Their marginal sincerity, and the money changing hands, would
be enough to undermine the whole thing. This was a tourist trap, not a
life-altering experience.

When the chanting was done, the first customer knelt at the
edge of the pool. One of the custodians filled a small metal cup with water and
threw it in her face. After a moment, she began weeping with joy. I moved
closer, my stomach tightening. _It was what shełd known was expected of her,
nothing more. She was playing along, not wanting to spoil the funlike the good
sports who pretended to have their thoughts read by a carnival psychic._

Next, the custodians chanted over a young man. He began
swaying giddily even before they touched him with the water; when they did, he
broke into sobs of relief that racked his whole body.

I looked back along the queue. There was a young girl
standing third in line now, looking around apprehensively; she could not have
been more than nine or ten. Her father (I presumed) was standing behind her,
with his hand against her back, as if gently propelling her forward.

I lost all interest in playing anthropologist. I forced my
way through the crowd until I reached the edge of the pool, then turned to
address the people in the queue. �These men are frauds! Therełs nothing
mysterious going on here. I can tell you exactly whatłs in the water: itłs just
a drug, a natural substance given out by creatures that are trapped here when
the waves retreat."

I squatted down and prepared to dip my hand in the pool. One
of the custodians rushed forward and grabbed my wrist. He was an old man, I
could have done what I liked, but some people were already jeering, and I didnłt
want to scuffle with him and start a riot. I backed away from him, then spoke
again.

�Iłve studied this drug for more than ten years, at Mitar University.
Itłs present in water all over the planet. We drink it, we bathe in it, we swim
in it every day. But itłs concentrated here, and if you donłt understand what
youłre doing when you use it, that misunderstanding can harm you!"

The custodian whołd grabbed my wrist started laughing. �The
dream of the ocean is powerful, yes, but we donłt need your advice on that! For
fifty years, my friend and I have studied its lore, until we were strong enough
to _stand_ in the sacred water!" He gestured at his leathery feet; I didnłt
doubt that his circulation had grown poor enough to limit the dose to a
tolerable level.

He stretched out his sinewy arm at me. �So fuck off back to
Mitar, Inlander! Fuck off back to your books and your dead machinery! What
would you know about the sacred mysteries? _What would you know about the
ocean?_"

I said, �I think youłre out of your depth."

I stepped into the pool. He started wailing about my
unpurified body polluting the water, but I brushed past him. The other custodian
came after me, but though my feet were soft after years of wearing shoes, I
ignored the sharp edges of the rocks and kept walking toward the inlet. The
zooamine helped. I could feel the old joy, the old peace, the old �love"; it
made a powerful anesthetic.

I looked back over my shoulder. The second man had stopped
pursuing me; it seemed he honestly feared going any further. I pulled off my
shirt, bunched it up, and threw it onto a rock at the side of the pool. Then I
waded forward, heading straight for the �focus of power."

The water came up to my knees. I could feel my heart pounding,
harder than it had since childhood. People were shouting at me from the edge of
the poolsome outraged by my sacrilege, some apparently concerned for my safety
in the presence of forces beyond my control. Without turning, I called out at
the top of my voice, �There is no ępowerł here! Therełs nothing ęsacred Therełs
nothing here but a drug"

Old habits die hard; I almost prayed first. _Please, Holy Beatrice,
donłt let me regain my faith._

I lay down in the water and let it cover my face. My vision
turned white; I felt like I was leaving my body. The love of Beatrice flooded
into me, and nothing had changed: Her presence was as palpable as ever, as
undeniable as ever. I _knew_ that I was loved, accepted, forgiven.

I waited, staring into the light, almost expecting a voice,
a vision, detailed hallucinations. That had happened to some of the Drowned.
How did anyone ever claw their way back to sanity, after that?

But for me, there was only the emotion itself, overpowering
but unembellished. It didnłt grow monotonous; I could have basked in it for
days. But I understood, now, that it said no more about my place in the world
than the warmth of sunlight on skin. Iłd never mistake it for the touch of a
real hand again.

I climbed to my feet and opened my eyes. Violet afterimages
danced in front of me. It took a few tau for me to catch my breath, and feel
steady on my feet again. Then I turned and started wading back toward the
shore.

The crowd had fallen silent, though whether it was in
disgust or begrudging respect I had no idea.

I said, �Itłs not just here. Itłs not just in the water. Itłs
part of us now; itłs in our blood." I was still half-blind; I couldnłt see
whether anyone was listening. �But as long as you know that, youłre already
free. As long as youłre ready to face the possibility that everything that
makes your spirits soar, everything that lifts you up and fills your heart with
joy, _everything that makes your life worth living_ ... is a lie, is
corruption, is meaninglessthen you can never be enslaved."

They let me walk away unharmed. I turned back to watch as
the line formed again; the girl wasnłt in the queue.

* * * *

I woke with a start, from the same old dream.

_I was lowering my mother into the water from the back of
the boat. Her hands were tied, her feet weighted. She was afraid, but shełd put
her trust in me. �Youłll bring me up safely, wonłt you Martin?"_

_I nodded reassuringly. But once shełd vanished beneath the
waves, I thought: What am I doing? I donłt believe in this shit any more._

_So I took out a knife and started cutting through the rope_

I brought my knees up to my chest, and crouched on the unfamiliar
bed in the darkness. I was in a small town on the railway line, halfway back to
Mitar. Halfway between midnight and dawn.

I dressed, and made my way out of the hostel. The center of
town was deserted, and the sky was thick with stars. Just like home. In Mitar,
everything vanished in a fog of light.

All three of the stars cited by various authorities as the
Earthłs sun were above the horizon. If they werenłt all mistakes, perhaps Iłd
live to see a telescopełs image of the planet itself. But the prospect of
seeking contact with the Angelsif there really was a faction still out there,
somewhereleft me cold. I shouted silently up at the stars: _Your degenerate
offspring donłt need your help! Why should we rejoin you? Wełre going to
surpass you!_

I sat down on the steps at the edge of the square and
covered my face. Bravado didnłt help. Nothing helped. Maybe if Iłd grown up
facing the truth, I would have been stronger. But when I woke in the night,
knowing that my mother was simply dead, that everyone Iłd ever loved would
follow her, that Iłd vanish into the same emptiness myself, it was like being
buried alive. It was like being back in the water, bound and weighted, with the
certain knowledge that there was no one to haul me up.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder. I looked up, startled. It
was a man about my own age. His manner wasnłt threatening; if anything, he
looked slightly wary of me.

He said, �Do you need a roof? I can let you into the Church
if you want." There was a trolley packed with cleaning equipment a short
distance behind him.

I shook my head. �Itłs not that cold." I was too embarrassed
to explain that I had a perfectly good room nearby. �Thanks."

As he was walking away, I called after him, �Do you believe
in God?"

He stopped and stared at me for a while, as if he was trying
to decide if this was a trick questionas if I might have been hired by the
local parishioners to vet him for theological soundness. Or maybe he just
wanted to be diplomatic with anyone desperate enough to be sitting in the town
square in the middle of the night, begging a stranger for reassurance.

He shook his head. �As a child I did. Not anymore. It was a
nice idea ... but it made no sense." He eyed me skeptically, still unsure of my
motives.

I said, �Then isnłt life unbearable?"

He laughed. �Not all the time."

He went back to his trolley, and started wheeling it toward
the Church.

I stayed on the steps, waiting for dawn.

Oracle

1

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began
to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

Hełd woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming
need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions
hełd discovered in his first few daysthe least-worst solutions to the
geometrical problem of his confinementhad been able to dull his sense of
panic. Hełd been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that
felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms
had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved
entirely around his own awareness of his situation.

That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways
to minimise his discomfort, sometimes he couldnłt, but hełd been clinging to
the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him.
That wasnłt true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of
the night, the way he might have ached with grief, or love. Hełd always
cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body
indivisible. But hełd failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body,
they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.

Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was
somewhere deep in the countryside, with nothing to be heard in the middle of
the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay fever, but
in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped from
his face into the bowl of lukewarm oats theyłd given him. He staunched the flow
with the back of his hand, but suffered a moment of shuddering revulsion when
he couldnłt find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean on his
trousers. Soon hełd need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber
pot whenever he asked, but they always waited two or three hours before
removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the fact that it took up space in
the cage was worse.

Towards the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see
him. �How are we today, Prof?" Robert didnłt reply. Since the day Quint had
responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an appropriate
name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the manłs
expense every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his
mind was blank, and in retrospect the whole exercise seemed like an insane
distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points against some
predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.

�Many happy returns," Quint said cheerfully.

Robert took care to betray no surprise. Hełd never lost
track of the days, but hełd stopped thinking in terms of the calendar date; it
simply wasnłt relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own
birthday would have been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be
taken as proof of his deterioration, and imminent surrender.

If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of
fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without looking up. �You know I almost
qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadnłt done my
hip in just before the trials, I might have competed." He tried a
self-deprecating laugh. �I suppose I was never really much of an athlete. But Iłm
only forty-six. Iłm not ready for a wheelchair yet." The words did help: he
could beg this way without breaking down completely, expressing an honest fear
without revealing how much deeper the threat of damage went.

He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he
hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. �I just canłt bear the thought of
being crippled. All Iłm asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my
health."

Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone
of thoughtful sympathy. �Itłs unnatural, isnłt it? Living like this: bent over,
twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you.
Iłm glad you can finally see that."

Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to
sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? Theyłd locked him in this cage, for
all this time ... as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?

He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. �I
donłt suppose you know Franz Kafka?"

�Kafka?" Quint could never hide his voracity for names. �One
of your Commie chums, is he?"

�I very much doubt that he was ever a Marxist."

Quint was disappointed, but prepared to make do with second
best. �One of the other kind, then?"

Robert pretended to be pondering the question. �On balance,
I suspect thatłs not too likely either."

�So why bring his name up?"

�I have a feeling he would have admired your methods, thatłs
all. He was quite the connoisseur."

�Hmm." Quint sounded suspicious, but not entirely
unflattered.

Robert had first set eyes on Quint in February of 1952. His
house had been burgled the week before, and Arthur, a young man hełd been
seeing since Christmas, had confessed to Robert that hełd given an acquaintance
the address. Perhaps the two of them had planned to rob him, and Arthur had
backed out at the last moment. In any case, Robert had gone to the police with
an unlikely story about spotting the culprit in a pub, trying to sell an
electric razor of the same make and model as the one taken from his house. No
one could be charged on such flimsy evidence, so Robert had had no qualms about
the consequences if Arthur had turned out to be lying. Hełd simply hoped to
prompt an investigation that might turn up something more tangible.

The following day, the CID had paid Robert a visit. The man
hełd accused was known to the police, and fingerprints taken on the day of the
burglary matched the prints they had on file. However, at the time Robert
claimed to have seen him in the pub, hełd been in custody already on an
entirely different charge.

The detectives had wanted to know why hełd lied. To spare
himself the embarrassment, Robert had explained, of spelling out the true
source of his information. Why was that embarrassing?

�Iłm involved with the informant."

One detective, Mr Wills, had asked matter-of-factly, �What exactly
does that entail, sir?" And Robertin a burst of frankness, as if honesty
itself was sure to be rewardedhad told him every detail. Hełd known it was
still technically illegal, of course. But then, so was playing football on
Easter Sunday. It could hardly be treated as a serious crime, like burglary.

The police had strung him along for hours, gathering as much
information as they could before disabusing him of this misconception. They
hadnłt charged him immediately; theyłd needed a statement from Arthur first.
But then Quint had materialised the next morning, and spelt out the choices
very starkly. Three years in prison, with hard labour. Or Robert could resume
his war-time workfor just one day a week, as a handsomely paid consultant to
Quintłs branch of the secret serviceand the charges would quietly vanish.

At first, hełd told Quint to let the courts do their worst.
Hełd been angry enough to want to take a stand against the preposterous law,
and whatever his feelings for Arthur, Quint had suggestedgloatingly, as if it
strengthened his casethat the younger, working-class man would be treated far
more leniently than Robert, having been led astray by someone whose duty was to
set an example for the lower orders. Three years in prison was an unsettling
prospect, but it would not have been the end of the world; the Mark I had
changed the way he worked, but he could still function with nothing but a
pencil and paper, if necessary. Even if theyłd had him breaking rocks from dawn
to dusk he probably would have been able to day-dream productively, and for all
Quintłs scaremongering hełd doubted it would come to that.

At some point, though, in the twenty-four hours Quint had given
him to reach a decision, hełd lost his nerve. By granting the spooks their one
day a week, he could avoid all the fuss and disruption of a trial. And though
his work at the timemodelling embryological developmenthad been as
challenging as anything hełd done in his life, he hadnłt been immune to pangs
of nostalgia for the old days, when the fate of whole fleets of battleships had
rested on finding the most efficient way to extract logical contradictions from
a bank of rotating wheels.

The trouble with giving in to extortion was, it proved that
you could be bought. Never mind that the Russians could hardly have offered to
intervene with the Manchester constabulary next time he needed to be rescued.
Never mind that he would scarcely have cared if an enemy agent had threatened
to send such comprehensive evidence to the newspapers that therełd be no
prospect of his patrons saving him again. Hełd lost any chance to proclaim that
what he did in bed with another willing partner was not an issue of national
security; by saying yes to Quint, hełd made it one. By choosing to be corrupted
once, hełd brought the whole torrent of clich�s and paranoia down upon his
head: he was vulnerable to blackmail, an easy target for entrapment, perfidious
by nature. He might as well have posed in flagrante delicto with Guy Burgess on
the steps of the Kremlin.

It wouldnłt have mattered if Quint and his masters had
merely decided that they couldnłt trust him. The problem wassome six years
after recruiting him, with no reason to believe that he had ever breached
security in any waytheyłd convinced themselves that they could neither
continue to employ him, nor safely leave him in peace, until theyłd rid him of
the trait theyłd used to control him in the first place.

Robert went through the painful, complicated process of rearranging
his body so he could look Quint in the eye. �You know, if it was legal therełd
be nothing to worry about, would there? Why donłt you devote some of your
considerable Machiavellian talents to that end? Blackmail a few politicians.
Set up a Royal Commission. It would only take you a couple of years. Then we
could all get on with our real jobs."

Quint blinked at him, more startled than outraged. �You
might as well say that we should legalise treason!"

Robert opened his mouth to reply, then decided not to waste
his breath. Quint wasnłt expressing a moral opinion. He simply meant that a
world in which fewer peoplełs lives were ruled by the constant fear of
discovery was hardly one that a man in his profession would wish to hasten into
existence.

When Robert was alone again, the time dragged. His hay fever
worsened, until he was sneezing and gagging almost continuously; even with
freedom of movement and an endless supply of the softest linen handkerchiefs,
he would have been reduced to abject misery. Gradually, though, he grew more
adept at dealing with the symptoms, delegating the task to some barely
conscious part of himself. By the middle of the afternooncovered in filth,
eyes almost swollen shuthe finally managed to turn his mind back to his work.

For the past four years hełd been immersed in particle
physics. Hełd been following the field on and off since before the war, but the
paper by Yang and Mills in ę54, in which theyłd generalised Maxwellłs equations
for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force, had jolted him into
action.

After several false starts, he believed hełd discovered a
useful way to cast gravity into the same form. In general relativity, if you
carried a four-dimensional velocity vector around a loop that enclosed a curved
region of spacetime, it came back rotateda phenomenon highly reminiscent of the
way more abstract vectors behaved in nuclear physics. In both cases, the
rotations could be treated algebraically, and the traditional way to get a
handle on this was to make use of a set of matrices of complex numbers whose
relationships mimicked the algebra in question. Hermann Weyl had catalogued
most of the possibilities back in the ę20s and ę30s.

In spacetime, there were six distinct ways you could rotate
an object: you could turn it around any of three perpendicular axes in space,
or you could boost its velocity in any of the same three directions. These two
kinds of rotation were complementary, or �dual" to each other, with the
ordinary rotations only affecting coordinates that were untouched by the
corresponding boost, and vice versa. This meant that you could rotate something
around, say, the x-axis, and speed it up in the same direction, without the two
processes interfering.

When Robert had tried applying the Yang-Mills approach to
gravity in the obvious way, hełd floundered. It was only when hełd shifted the
algebra of rotations into a new, strangely skewed guise that the mathematics
had begun to fall into place. Inspired by a trick that particle physicists used
to construct fields with leftor right-handed spin, hełd combined every
rotation with its own dual multiplied by i, the square root of minus one. The
result was a set of rotations in four complex dimensions, rather than the four
real ones of ordinary spacetime, but the relationships between them preserved
the original algebra.

Demanding that these �self-dual" rotations satisfy Einsteinłs
equations turned out to be equivalent to ordinary general relativity, but the
process leading to a quantum-mechanical version of the theory became
dramatically simpler. Robert still had no idea how to interpret this, but as a
purely formal trick it worked spectacularly welland when the mathematics fell
into place like that, it had to mean something.

He spent several hours pondering old results, turning them
over in his mindłs eye, rechecking and reimagining everything in the hope of
forging some new connection. Making no progress, but therełd always been days
like that. It was a triumph merely to spend this much time doing what he would
have done back in the real worldhowever mundane, or even frustrating, the same
activity might have been in its original setting.

By evening, though, the victory began to seem hollow. He
hadnłt lost his wits entirely, but he was frozen, stunted. He might as well
have whiled away the hours reciting the base-32 multiplication table in Baudot
code, just to prove that he still remembered it.

As the room filled with shadows, his powers of concentration
deserted him completely. His hay fever had abated, but he was too tired to
think, and in too much pain to sleep. This wasnłt Russia, they couldnłt hold
him forever; he simply had to wear them down with his patience. But when,
exactly, would they have to let him go? And how much more patient could Quint
be, with no pain, no terror, to erode his determination?

The moon rose, casting a patch of light on the far wall;
hunched over, he couldnłt see it directly, but it silvered the grey at his
feet, and changed his whole sense of the space around him. The cavernous room
mocking his confinement reminded him of nights hełd spent lying awake in the
dormitory at Sherborne. A public school education did have one great advantage:
however miserable you were afterwards, you could always take comfort in the knowledge
that life would never be quite as bad again.

�This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant
spray!" That had been his form-masterłs idea of showing what a civilised man he
was: contempt for that loathsome subject, the stuff of engineering and other
low trades. And as for Robertłs chemistry experiments, like the beautiful
colour-changing iodate reaction hełd learnt from Chrisłs brother

Robert felt a familiar ache in the pit of his stomach. Not
now. I canłt afford this now. But the whole thing swept over him, unwanted,
unbidden. Hełd used to meet Chris in the library on Wednesdays; for months,
that had been the only time they could spend together. Robert had been fifteen
then, Chris a year older. If Chris had been plain, he still would have shone
like a creature from another world. No one else in Sherborne had read Eddington
on relativity, Hardy on mathematics. No one elsełs horizons stretched beyond
rugby, sadism, and the dimly satisfying prospect of reading classics at Oxford
then vanishing into the maw of the civil service.

They had never touched, never kissed. While half the school
had been indulging in passionless sodomyas a rather literal-minded substitute
for the much too difficult task of imagining womenRobert had been too shy even
to declare his feelings. Too shy, and too afraid that they might not be
reciprocated. It hadnłt mattered. To have a friend like Chris had been enough.

In December of 1929, theyłd both sat the exams for Trinity
College, Cambridge. Chris had won a scholarship; Robert hadnłt. Hełd reconciled
himself to their separation, and prepared for one more year at Sherborne
without the one person whołd made it bearable. Chris would be following happily
in the footsteps of Newton; just thinking of that would be some consolation.

Chris never made it to Cambridge. In February, after six
days in agony, hełd died of bovine tuberculosis.

Robert wept silently, angry with himself because he knew
that half his wretchedness was just self-pity, exploiting his grief as a
disguise. He had to stay honest; once every source of unhappiness in his life
melted together and became indistinguishable, hełd be like a cowed animal, with
no sense of the past or the future. Ready to do anything to get out of the
cage.

If he hadnłt yet reached that point, he was close. It would
only take a few more nights like the last one. Drifting off in the hope of a
few minutesł blankness, to find that sleep itself shone a colder light on
everything. Drifting off, then waking with a sense of loss so extreme it was
like suffocation.

A womanłs voice spoke from the darkness in front of him. �Get
off your knees!"

Robert wondered if he was hallucinating. Hełd heard no one
approach across the creaky floorboards.

The voice said nothing more. Robert rearranged his body so
he could look up from the floor. There was a woman hełd never seen before,
standing a few feet away.

Shełd sounded angry, but as he studied her face in the moonlight
through the slits of his swollen eyes, he realised that her anger was directed,
not at him, but at his condition. She gazed at him with an expression of horror
and outrage, as if shełd chanced upon him being held like this in some
respectable neighbourłs basement, rather than an MI6 facility. Maybe she was
one of the staff employed in the upkeep of the house, but had no idea what went
on here? Surely those people were vetted and supervised, though, and threatened
with life imprisonment if they ever set foot outside their prescribed domains.

For one surreal moment, Robert wondered if Quint had sent
her to seduce him. It would not have been the strangest thing theyłd tried. But
she radiated such fierce self assurancesuch a sense of confidence that she
could speak with the authority of her convictions, and expect to be heededthat
he knew she could never have been chosen for the role. No one in Her Majestyłs
government would consider self assurance an attractive quality in a woman.

He said, �Throw me the key, and Iłll show you my Roger Bannister
impression."

She shook her head. �You donłt need a key. Those days are
over."

Robert started with fright. There were no bars between them.
But the cage couldnłt have vanished before his eyes; she must have removed it
while hełd been lost in his reverie. Hełd gone through the whole painful
exercise of turning to face her as if he were still confined, without even
noticing.

Removed it how?

He wiped his eyes, shivering at the dizzying prospect of freedom.
�Who are you?" An agent for the Russians, sent to liberate him from his own
side? Shełd have to be a zealot, then, or strangely naive, to view his torture
with such wide-eyed innocence.

She stepped forward, then reached down and took his hand. �Do
you think you can walk?" Her grip was firm, and her skin was cool and dry. She
was completely unafraid; she might have been a good Samaritan in a public
street helping an old man to his feet after a fallnot an intruder helping a
threat to national security break out of therapeutic detention, at the risk of
being shot on sight.

�Iłm not even sure I can stand." Robert steeled himself;
maybe this woman was a trained assassin, but it would be too much to presume
that if he cried out in pain and brought guards rushing in, she could still
extricate him without raising a sweat. �You havenłt answered my question."

�My namełs Helen." She smiled and hoisted him to his feet,
looking at once like a compassionate child pulling open the jaws of a hunterłs
cruel trap, and a very powerful, very intelligent carnivore contemplating its
own strength. �Iłve come to change everything."

Robert said, �Oh, good."

Robert found that he could hobble; it was painful and undignified,
but at least he didnłt have to be carried. Helen led him through the house;
lights showed from some of the rooms, but there were no voices, no footsteps
save their own, no signs of life at all. When they reached the tradesmenłs
entrance she unbolted the door, revealing a moonlit garden.

�Did you kill everyone?" he whispered. Hełd made far too
much noise to have come this far unmolested. Much as he had reason to despise
his captors, mass murder on his behalf was a lot to take in.

Helen cringed. �What a revolting idea! Itłs hard to believe
sometimes, how uncivilised you are."

�You mean the British?"

�All of you!"

�I must say, your accentłs rather good."

�I watched a lot of cinema," she explained. �Mostly Ealing
comedies. You never know how much that will help, though."

�Quite."

They crossed the garden, heading for a wooden gate in the
hedge. Since murder was strictly for imperialists, Robert could only assume
that shełd managed to drug everyone.

The gate was unlocked. Outside the grounds, a cobbled lane
ran past the hedge, leading into forest. Robert was barefoot, but the stones
werenłt cold, and the slight unevenness of the path was welcome, restoring
circulation to the soles of his feet.

As they walked, he took stock of his situation. He was out
of captivity, thanks entirely to this woman. Sooner or later he was going to
have to confront her agenda.

He said, �Iłm not leaving the country."

Helen murmured assent, as if hełd passed a casual remark
about the weather.

�And Iłm not going to discuss my work with you."

�Fine."

Robert stopped and stared at her. She said, �Put your arm
across my shoulders."

He complied; she was exactly the right height to support him
comfortably. He said, �Youłre not a Soviet agent, are you?"

Helen was amused. �Is that really what you thought?"

�Iłm not all that quick on my feet tonight."

�No." They began walking together. Helen said, �Therełs a
train station about three kilometres away. You can get cleaned up, rest there
until morning, and decide where you want to go."

�Wonłt the station be the first place theyłll look?"

�They wonłt be looking anywhere for a while."

The moon was high above the trees. The two of them could not
have made a more conspicuous couple: a sensibly dressed, quite striking young
woman, supporting a filthy, ragged tramp. If a villager cycled past, the best
they could hope for was being mistaken for an alcoholic father and his martyred
daughter.

Martyred all right: she moved so efficiently, despite the burden,
that any onlooker would assume shełd been doing this for years. Robert tried
altering his gait slightly, subtly changing the timing of his steps to see if
he could make her falter, but Helen adapted instantly. If she knew she was
being tested, though, she kept it to herself.

Finally he said, �What did you do with the cage?"

�I time-reversed it."

Hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Even assuming that
she could do such a thing, it wasnłt at all clear to him how that could have
stopped the bars from scattering light and interacting with his body. It should
merely have turned electrons into positrons, and killed them both in a shower
of gamma rays.

That conjuring trick wasnłt his most pressing concern,
though. �I can only think of three places you might have come from," he said.

Helen nodded, as if shełd put herself in his shoes and catalogued
the possibilities. �Rule out one; the other two are both right."

She was not from an extrasolar planet. Even if her
civilisation possessed some means of viewing Ealing comedies from a distance of
light years, she was far too sensitive to his specific human concerns.

She was from the future, but not his own.

She was from the future of another Everett branch.

He turned to her. �No paradoxes."

She smiled, deciphering his shorthand immediately. �Thatłs
right. Itłs physically impossible to travel into your own past, unless youłve
made exacting preparations to ensure compatible boundary conditions. That can
be achieved, in a controlled laboratory settingbut in the field it would be
like trying to balance ten thousand elephants in an inverted pyramid, while the
bottom one rode a unicycle: excruciatingly difficult, and entirely pointless."

Robert was tongue-tied for several seconds, a horde of questions
battling for access to his vocal chords. �But how do you travel into the past
at all?"

�It will take a while to bring you up to speed completely,
but if you want the short answer: youłve already stumbled on one of the clues.
I read your paper in Physical Review, and itłs correct as far as it goes.
Quantum gravity involves four complex dimensions, but the only classical
solutionsthe only geometries that remain in phase under slight perturbationshave
curvature thatłs either self-dual, or anti-self-dual. Those are the only
stationary points of the action, for the complete Lagrangian. And both
solutions appear, from the inside, to contain only four real dimensions.

�Itłs meaningless to ask which sector wełre in, but we might
as well call it self-dual. In that case, the anti-self-dual solutions have an
arrow of time running backwards compared to ours."

�Why?" As he blurted out the question, Robert wondered if he
sounded like an impatient child to her. But if she suddenly vanished back into
thin air, hełd have far fewer regrets for making a fool of himself this way
than if hełd maintained a fa�ade of sophisticated nonchalance.

Helen said, �Ultimately, thatłs related to spin. And itłs
down to the mass of the neutrino that we can tunnel between sectors. But Iłll
need to draw you some diagrams and equations to explain it all properly."

Robert didnłt press her for more; he had no choice but to
trust that she wouldnłt desert him. He staggered on in silence, a wonderful
ache of anticipation building in his chest. If someone had put this situation
to him hypothetically, he would have piously insisted that hełd prefer to toil
on at his own pace. But despite the satisfaction it had given him on the few
occasions when hełd made genuine discoveries himself, what mattered in the end
was understanding as much as you could, however you could. Better to ransack
the past and the future than go through life in a state of wilful ignorance.

�You said youłve come to change things?"

She nodded. �I canłt predict the future here, of course, but
there are pitfalls in my own past that I can help you avoid. In my twentieth
century, people discovered things too slowly. Everything changed much too
slowly. Between us, I think we can speed things up."

Robert was silent for a while, contemplating the magnitude
of what she was proposing. Then he said, �Itłs a pity you didnłt come sooner.
In this branch, about twenty years ago"

Helen cut him off. �I know. We had the same war. The same
Holocaust, the same Soviet death toll. But wełve yet to be able to avert that,
anywhere. You can never do anything in just one historyeven the most focused
intervention happens across a broad ęribbonł of strands. When we try to reach
back to the ę30s and ę40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a
degree that all the worst horrors are faits accompli. We canłt shoot any
version of Adolf Hitler, because we canłt shrink the ribbon to the point where
none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back. All wełve ever managed are
minor interventions, like sending projectiles back to the Blitz, saving a few
lives by deflecting bombs."

�What, knocking them into the Thames?"

�No, that would have been too risky. We did some modelling,
and the safest thing turned out to be diverting them onto big, empty buildings:
Westminster Abbey, Saint Paulłs Cathedral."

The station came into view ahead of them. Helen said, �What
do you think? Do you want to head back to Manchester?"

Robert hadnłt given the question much thought. Quint could
track him down anywhere, but the more people he had around him, the less
vulnerable hełd be. In his house in Wilmslow hełd be there for the taking.

�I still have rooms at Cambridge," he said tentatively.

�Good idea."

�What are your own plans?"

Helen turned to him. �I thought Iłd stay with you." She
smiled at the expression on his face. �Donłt worry, Iłll give you plenty of
privacy. And if people want to make assumptions, let them. You already have a
scandalous reputation; you might as well see it branch out in new directions."

Robert said wryly, �Iłm afraid it doesnłt quite work that
way. Theyłd throw us out immediately."

Helen snorted. �They could try."

�You may have defeated MI6, but you havenłt dealt with
Cambridge porters." The reality of the situation washed over him anew at the
thought of her in his study, writing out the equations for time travel on the
blackboard. �Why me? I can appreciate that youłd want to make contact with
someone who could understand how you came herebut why not Everett, or Yang, or
Feynman? Compared to Feynman, Iłm a dilettante."

Helen said, �Maybe. But you have an equally practical bent,
and youłll learn fast enough."

There had to be more to it than that: thousands of people
would have been capable of absorbing her lessons just as rapidly. �The physics
youłve hinted atin your past, did I discover all that?"

�No. Your Physical Review paper helped me track you down
here, but in my own history that was never published." There was a flicker of
disquiet in her eyes, as if she had far greater disappointments in store on
that subject.

Robert didnłt care much either way; if anything, the less
his alter ego had achieved, the less hełd be troubled by jealousy.

�Then what was it, that made you choose me?"

�You really havenłt guessed?" Helen took his free hand and
held the fingers to her face; it was a tender gesture, but much more like a
daughterłs than a loverłs. �Itłs a warm night. No onełs skin should be this
cold."

Robert gazed into her dark eyes, as playful as any humanłs,
as serious, as proud. Given the chance, perhaps any decent person would have
plucked him from Quintłs grasp. But only one kind would feel a special
obligation, as if they were repaying an ancient debt.

He said, �Youłre a machine."

2

John Hamilton, Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English
at Magdalene College, Cambridge, read the last letter in the morningłs pile of
fan mail with a growing sense of satisfaction.

The letter was from a young American, a twelve-year-old girl
in Boston. It opened in the usual way, declaring how much pleasure his books
had given her, before going on to list her favourite scenes and characters. As
ever, Jack was delighted that the stories had touched someone deeply enough to
prompt them to respond this way. But it was the final paragraph that was by far
the most gratifying:

However much other children might tease me, or grown-ups too
when Iłm older, I will NEVER, EVER stop believing in the Kingdom of Nescia.
Sarah stopped believing, and she was locked out of the Kingdom forever. At
first that made me cry, and I couldnłt sleep all night because I was afraid I
might stop believing myself one day. But I understand now that itłs good to be
afraid, because it will help me keep people from changing my mind. And if youłre
not willing to believe in magic lands, of course you canłt enter them. Therełs
nothing even Belvedere himself can do to save you, then.

Jack refilled and lit his pipe, then reread the letter. This
was his vindication: the proof that through his books he could touch a young
mind, and plant the seed of faith in fertile ground. It made all the scorn of
his jealous, stuck-up colleagues fade into insignificance. Children understood
the power of stories, the reality of myth, the need to believe in something
beyond the dismal grey farce of the material world.

It wasnłt a truth that could be revealed the �adult" way:
through scholarship, or reason. Least of all through philosophy, as Elizabeth
Anscombe had shown him on that awful night at the Socratic Club. A devout
Christian herself, Anscombe had nonetheless taken all the arguments against
materialism from his popular book, Signs and Wonders, and trampled them into
the ground. It had been an unfair match from the start: Anscombe was a
professional philosopher, steeped in the work of everyone from Aquinas to
Wittgenstein; Jack knew the history of ideas in mediaeval Europe intimately,
but hełd lost interest in modern philosophy once it had been invaded by
fashionable positivists. And Signs and Wonders had never been intended as a
scholarly work; it had been good enough to pass muster with a sympathetic lay
readership, but trying to defend his admittedly rough-and-ready mixture of
common sense and useful shortcuts to faith against Anscombełs merciless
analysis had made him feel like a country yokel stammering in front of a
bishop.

Ten years later, he still burned with resentment at the
humiliation shełd put him through, but he was grateful for the lesson shełd
taught him. His earlier books, and his radio talks, had not been a complete
waste of timebut the harpyłs triumph had shown him just how pitiful human
reason was when it came to the great questions. Hełd begun working on the
stories of Nescia years before, but it was only when the dust had settled on
his most painful defeat that hełd finally recognised his true calling.

He removed his pipe, stood, and turned to face Oxford. �Kiss
my arse, Elizabeth!" he growled happily, waving the letter at her. This was a
wonderful omen. It was going to be a very good day.

There was a knock at the door of his study.

�Come."

It was his brother, William. Jack was puzzledhe hadnłt even
realised Willie was in townbut he nodded a greeting and motioned at the couch
opposite his desk.

Willie sat, his face flushed from the stairs, frowning.
After a moment he said, �This chap Stoney."

�Hmm?" Jack was only half listening as he sorted papers on
his desk. He knew from long experience that Willie would take forever to get to
the point.

�Did some kind of hush-hush work during the war, apparently."

�Who did?"

�Robert Stoney. Mathematician. Used to be up at Manchester,
but hełs a Fellow of Kings, and now hełs back in Cambridge. Did some kind of
secret war work. Same thing as Malcolm Muggeridge, apparently. No onełs allowed
to say what."

Jack looked up, amused. Hełd heard rumours about Muggeridge,
but they all revolved around the business of analysing intercepted German radio
messages. What conceivable use would a mathematician have been, for that?
Sharpening pencils for the intelligence analysts, presumably.

�What about him, Willie?" Jack asked patiently.

Willie continued reluctantly, as if he was confessing to something
mildly immoral. �I paid him a visit yesterday. Place called the Cavendish. Old
army friend of mine has a brother who works there. Got the whole tour."

�I know the Cavendish. Whatłs there to see?"

�Hełs doing things, Jack. Impossible things."

�Impossible?"

�Looking inside people. Putting it on a screen, like a television."

Jack sighed. �Taking X-rays?"

Willie snapped back angrily, �Iłm not a fool; I know what an
X-ray looks like. This is different. You can see the blood flow. You can watch
your heart beating. You can follow a sensation through the nerves from ...
fingertip to brain. He says, soon hełll be able to watch a thought in motion."

�Nonsense." Jack scowled. �So hełs invented some gadget,
some fancy kind of X-ray machine. What are you so agitated about?"

Willie shook his head gravely. �Therełs more. Thatłs just
the tip of the iceberg. Hełs only been back in Cambridge a year, and already
the place is overflowing with ... wonders." He used the word begrudgingly, as
if he had no choice, but was afraid of conveying more approval than he
intended.

Jack was beginning to feel a distinct sense of unease.

�What exactly is it you want me to do?" he asked.

Willie replied plainly, �Go and see for yourself. Go and see
what hełs up to."

The Cavendish Laboratory was a mid-Victorian building, designed
to resemble something considerably older and grander. It housed the entire
Department of Physics, complete with lecture theatres; the place was swarming
with noisy undergraduates. Jack had had no trouble arranging a tour: hełd
simply telephoned Stoney and expressed his curiosity, and no more substantial
reason had been required.

Stoney had been allocated three adjoining rooms at the back
of the building, and the �spin resonance imager" occupied most of the first.
Jack obligingly placed his arm between the coils, then almost jerked it out in
fright when the strange, transected view of his muscles and veins appeared on
the picture tube. He wondered if it could be some kind of hoax, but he clenched
his fist slowly and watched the image do the same, then made several
unpredictable movements which it mimicked equally well.

�I can show you individual blood cells, if you like," Stoney
offered cheerfully.

Jack shook his head; his current, unmagnified flaying was
quite enough to take in.

Stoney hesitated, then added awkwardly, �You might want to
talk to your doctor at some point. Itłs just that, your bone densityłs rather"
He pointed to a chart on the screen beside the image. �Well, itłs quite a bit
below the normal range."

Jack withdrew his arm. Hełd already been diagnosed with osteoporosis,
and hełd welcomed the news: it meant that hełd taken a small part of Joycełs
illnessthe weakness in her bonesinto his own body. God was allowing him to
suffer a little in her stead.

If Joyce were to step between these coils, what might that reveal?
But therełd be nothing to add to her diagnosis. Besides, if he kept up his
prayers, and kept up both their spirits, in time her remission would blossom
from an uncertain reprieve into a fully-fledged cure.

He said, �How does this work?"

�In a strong magnetic field, some of the atomic nuclei and
electrons in your body are free to align themselves in various ways with the
field." Stoney must have seen Jackłs eyes beginning to glaze over; he quickly
changed tack. �Think of it as being like setting a whole lot of spinning tops
whirling, as vigorously as possible, then listening carefully as they slow down
and tip over. For the atoms in your body, thatłs enough to give some clues as
to what kind of molecule, and what kind of tissue, theyłre in. The machine
listens to atoms in different places by changing the way it combines all the
signals from billions of tiny antennae. Itłs like a whispering gallery where we
can play with the time that signals take to travel from different places,
moving the focus back and forth through any part of your body, thousands of
times a second."

Jack pondered this explanation. Though it sounded complicated,
in principle it wasnłt that much stranger than X-rays.

�The physics itself is old hat," Stoney continued, �but for
imaging, you need a very strong magnetic field, and you need to make sense of
all the data youłve gathered. Nevill Mott made the superconducting alloys for
the magnets. And I managed to persuade Rosalind Franklin from Birkbeck to
collaborate with us, to help perfect the fabrication process for the computing
circuits. We cross-link lots of little Y-shaped DNA fragments, then selectively
coat them with metal; Rosalind worked out a way to use X-ray crystallography
for quality control. We paid her back with a purpose-built computer that will
let her solve hydrated protein structures in real time, once she gets her hands
on a bright enough X-ray source." He held up a small, unprepossessing object,
rimmed with protruding gold wires. �Each logic gate is roughly a hundred
�ngstroms cubed, and we grow them in three-dimensional arrays. Thatłs a
million, million, million switches in the palm of my hand."

Jack didnłt know how to respond to this claim. Even when he
couldnłt quite follow the man there was something mesmerising about his
ramblings, like a cross between William Blake and nursery talk.

�If computers donłt excite you, wełre doing all kinds of
other things with DNA." Stoney ushered him into the next room, which was full
of glassware, and seedlings in pots beneath strip lights. Two assistants seated
at a bench were toiling over microscopes; another was dispensing fluids into
test tubes with a device that looked like an overgrown eye-dropper.

�There are a dozen new species of rice, corn, and wheat
here. They all have at least double the protein and mineral content of existing
crops, and each one uses a different biochemical repertoire to protect itself
against insects and fungi. Farmers have to get away from monocultures; it
leaves them too vulnerable to disease, and too dependent on chemical
pesticides."

Jack said, �Youłve bred these? All these new varieties, in a
matter of months?"

�No, no! Instead of hunting down the heritable traits we
needed in the wild, and struggling for years to produce cross-breeds bearing
all of them, we designed every trait from scratch. Then we manufactured DNA
that would make the tools the plants need, and inserted it into their germ
cells."

Jack demanded angrily, �Who are you to say what a plant
needs?"

Stoney shook his head innocently. �I took my advice from
agricultural scientists, who took their advice from farmers. They know what
pests and blights theyłre up against. Food crops are as artificial as Pekinese.
Nature didnłt hand them to us on a plate, and if theyłre not working as well as
we need them to, nature isnłt going to fix them for us."

Jack glowered at him, but said nothing. He was beginning to
understand why Willie had sent him here. The man came across as an enthusiastic
tinkerer, but there was a breath-taking arrogance lurking behind the boyish
exterior.

Stoney explained a collaboration hełd brokered between scientists
in Cairo, Bogot�, London and Calcutta, to develop vaccines for polio, smallpox,
malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza and leprosy. Some were
the first of their kind; others were intended as replacements for existing
vaccines. �Itłs important that we create antigens without culturing the
pathogens in animal cells that might themselves harbour viruses. The teams are
all looking at variants on a simple, cheap technique that involves putting
antigen genes into harmless bacteria that will double as delivery vehicles and
adjuvants, then freeze-drying them into spores that can survive tropical heat
without refrigeration."

Jack was slightly mollified; this all sounded highly
admirable. What business Stoney had instructing doctors on vaccines was another
question. Presumably his jargon made sense to them, but when exactly had this
mathematician acquired the training to make even the most modest suggestions on
the topic?

�Youłre having a remarkably productive year," he observed.

Stoney smiled. �The muse comes and goes for all of us. But Iłm
really just the catalyst in most of this. Iłve been lucky enough to find some
peoplehere in Cambridge, and further afieldwhołve been willing to chance
their arm on some wild ideas. Theyłve done the real work." He gestured towards
the next room. �My own pet projects are through here."

The third room was full of electronic gadgets, wired up to
picture tubes displaying both phosphorescent words and images resembling
engineering blueprints come to life. In the middle of one bench, incongruously,
sat a large cage containing several hamsters.

Stoney fiddled with one of the gadgets, and a face like a stylised
drawing of a mask appeared on an adjacent screen. The mask looked around the
room, then said, �Good morning, Robert. Good morning, Professor Hamilton."

Jack said, �You had someone record those words?"

The mask replied, �No, Robert showed me photographs of all
the teaching staff at Cambridge. If I see anyone I know from the photographs, I
greet them." The face was crudely rendered, but the hollow eyes seemed to meet
Jackłs. Stoney explained, �It has no idea what itłs saying, of course. Itłs
just an exercise in face and voice recognition."

Jack responded stiffly, �Of course."

Stoney motioned to Jack to approach and examine the hamster
cage. He obliged him. There were two adult animals, presumably a breeding pair.
Two pink young were suckling from the mother, who reclined in a bed of straw.

�Look closely," Stoney urged him. Jack peered into the nest,
then cried out an obscenity and backed away.

One of the young was exactly what it seemed. The other was a
machine, wrapped in ersatz skin, with a nozzle clamped to the warm teat.

�Thatłs the most monstrous thing Iłve ever seen!" Jackłs
whole body was trembling. �What possible reason could you have to do that?"

Stoney laughed and made a reassuring gesture, as if his
guest was a nervous child recoiling from a harmless toy. �Itłs not hurting her!
And the point is to discover what it takes for the mother to accept it. To ęreproduce
onełs kindł means having some set of parameters as to what that is. Scent, and
some aspects of appearance, are important cues in this case, but through trial
and error Iłve also pinned down a set of behaviours that lets the simulacrum
pass through every stage of the life cycle. An acceptable child, an acceptable
sibling, an acceptable mate."

Jack stared at him, nauseated. �These animals fuck your machines?"

Stoney was apologetic. �Yes, but hamsters will fuck
anything. Iłll really have to shift to a more discerning species, in order to
test that properly."

Jack struggled to regain his composure. �What on Earth possessed
you, to do this?"

�In the long run," Stoney said mildly, �I believe this is
something wełre going to need to understand far better than we do at present.
Now that we can map the structures of the brain in fine detail, and match its
raw complexity with our computers, itłs only a matter of a decade or so before
we build machines that think.

�That in itself will be a vast endeavour, but I want to
ensure that itłs not stillborn from the start. Therełs not much point creating
the most marvellous children in history, only to find that some awful mammalian
instinct drives us to strangle them at birth."

Jack sat in his study drinking whisky. Hełd telephoned Joyce
after dinner, and theyłd chatted for a while, but it wasnłt the same as being
with her. The weekends never came soon enough, and by Tuesday or Wednesday any
sense of reassurance hełd gained from seeing her had slipped away entirely.

It was almost midnight now. After speaking to Joyce, hełd
spent three more hours on the telephone, finding out what he could about
Stoney. Milking his connections, such as they were; Jack had only been at
Cambridge for five years, so he was still very much an outsider. Not that hełd
ever been admitted into any inner circles back at Oxford: hełd always belonged
to a small, quiet group of dissenters against the tide of fashion. Whatever
else might be said about the Tiddlywinks, theyłd never had their hands on the
levers of academic power.

A year ago, while on sabbatical in Germany, Stoney had resigned
suddenly from a position hełd held at Manchester for a decade. Hełd returned to
Cambridge, despite having no official posting to take up. Hełd started
collaborating informally with various people at the Cavendish, until the head
of the place, Mott, had invented a job description for him, and given him a
modest salary, the three rooms Jack had seen, and some students to assist him.

Stoneyłs colleagues were uniformly amazed by his spate of
successful inventions. Though none of his gadgets were based on entirely new
science, his skill at seeing straight to the heart of existing theories and
plucking some practical consequence from them was unprecedented. Jack had
expected some jealous back-stabbing, but no one seemed to have a bad word to
say about Stoney. He was willing to turn his scientific Midas touch to the
service of anyone who approached him, and it sounded to Jack as if every
would-be skeptic or enemy had been bought off with some rewarding insight into
their own field.

Stoneyłs personal life was rather murkier. Half of Jackłs informants
were convinced that the man was a confirmed pansy, but others spoke of a
beautiful, mysterious woman named Helen, with whom he was plainly on intimate
terms.

Jack emptied his glass and stared out across the courtyard.
Was it pride, to wonder if he might have received some kind of prophetic
vision? Fifteen years earlier, when hełd written The Broken Planet, hełd
imagined that hełd merely been satirising the hubris of modern science. His
portrait of the evil forces behind the sardonically named Laboratory Overseeing
Various Experiments had been intended as a deadly serious metaphor, but hełd
never expected to find himself wondering if real fallen angels were whispering
secrets in the ears of a Cambridge don.

How many times, though, had he told his readers that the devilłs
greatest victory had been convincing the world that he did not exist? The devil
was not a metaphor, a mere symbol of human weakness: he was a real, scheming
presence, acting in time, acting in the world, as much as God Himself.

And hadnłt Faustusłs damnation been sealed by the most beautiful
woman of all time: Helen of Troy?

Jackłs skin crawled. Hełd once written a humorous newspaper
column called �Letters from a Demon," in which a Senior Tempter offered advice
to a less experienced colleague on the best means to lead the faithful astray.
Even that had been an exhausting, almost corrupting experience; adopting the
necessary point of view, however whimsically, had made him feel that he was
withering inside. The thought that a cross between the Faustbuch and The Broken
Planet might be coming to life around him was too terrifying to contemplate. He
was no hero out of his own fictionnot even a mild-mannered Cedric Duffy, let
alone a modern Pendragon. And he did not believe that Merlin would rise from
the woods to bring chaos to that hubristic Tower of Babel, the Cavendish
Laboratory.

Nevertheless, if he was the only person in England who suspected
Stoneyłs true source of inspiration, who else would act?

Jack poured himself another glass. There was nothing to be
gained by procrastinating. He would not be able to rest until he knew what he
was facing: a vain, foolish overgrown boy who was having a run of good luckor
a vain, foolish overgrown boy who had sold his soul and imperilled all
humanity.

�A Satanist? Youłre accusing me of being a Satanist?"

Stoney tugged angrily at his dressing gown; hełd been in bed
when Jack had pounded on the door. Given the hour, it had been remarkably civil
of him to accept a visitor at all, and he appeared so genuinely affronted now
that Jack was almost prepared to apologise and slink away. He said, �I had to
ask you"

�You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist," Stoney muttered.

�Doubly?"

�Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of
Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained,
guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side." He held up his hand, as if
he believed hełd anticipated the only possible objection to this remark, and
wished to spare Jack the trouble of wasting his breath by uttering it. �I know,
some people claim itłs all really about some pre-Christian deity: Mercury, or
Panguff like that. But assuming that wełre not talking about some complicated
mislabelling of objects of worship, I really canłt think of anything more
insulting. Youłre comparing me to someone like ... Huysmans, who was basically
just a very dim Catholic."

Stoney folded his arms and settled back on the couch,
waiting for Jackłs response.

Jackłs head was thick from the whisky; he wasnłt at all sure
how to take this. It was the kind of smart-arsed undergraduate drivel he might
have expected from any smug atheistbut then, short of a confession, exactly
what kind of reply would have constituted evidence of guilt? If youłd sold your
soul to the devil, what lie would you tell in place of the truth? Had he
seriously believed that Stoney would claim to be a devout churchgoer, as if
that were the best possible answer to put Jack off the scent?

He had to concentrate on things hełd seen with his own eyes,
facts that could not be denied.

�Youłre plotting to overthrow nature, bending the world to
the will of man."

Stoney sighed. �Not at all. More refined technology will
help us tread more lightly. We have to cut back on pollution and pesticides as
rapidly as possible. Or do you want to live in a world where all the animals
are born as hermaphrodites, and half the Pacific islands disappear in storms?"

�Donłt try telling me that youłre some kind of guardian of
the animal kingdom. You want to replace us all with machines!"

�Does every Zulu or Tibetan who gives birth to a child, and
wants the best for it, threaten you in the same way?"

Jack bristled. �Iłm not a racist. A Zulu or Tibetan has a
soul."

Stoney groaned and put his head in his hands. �Itłs half
past one in the morning! Canłt we have this debate some other time?"

Someone banged on the door. Stoney looked up, disbelieving. �What
is this? Grand Central Station?"

He crossed to the door and opened it. A dishevelled,
unshaven man pushed his way into the room. �Quint? What a pleasant"

The intruder grabbed Stoney and slammed him against the
wall. Jack exhaled with surprise. Quint turned bloodshot eyes on him.

�Who the fuck are you?"

�John Hamilton. Who the fuck are you?"

�Never you mind. Just stay put." He jerked Stoneyłs arm up
behind his back with one hand, while grinding his face into the wall with the
other. �Youłre mine now, you piece of shit. No onełs going to protect you this
time."

Stoney addressed Jack through a mouth squashed against the
masonry. �Dith ith Pether Quinth, my own perthonal thpook. I did make a
Fauthtian bargain. But with thtrictly temporal"

�Shut up!" Quint pulled a gun from his jacket and held it to
Stoneyłs head.

Jack said, �Steady on."

�Just how far do your connections go?" Quint screamed. �Iłve
had memos disappear, sources clam upand now my superiors are treating me like
some kind of traitor! Well, donłt worry: when Iłm through with you, Iłll have
the names of the entire network." He turned to address Jack again. �And donłt
you think youłre going anywhere."

Stoney said, �Leave him out of dith. Hełth at Magdalene. You
mutht know by now: all the thpieth are at Trinity."

Jack was shaken by the sight of Quint waving his gun around,
but the implications of this drama came as something of a relief. Stoneyłs
ideas must have had their genesis in some secret war-time research project. He
hadnłt made a deal with the devil after all, but hełd broken the Official
Secrets Act, and now he was paying the price.

Stoney flexed his body and knocked Quint backwards. Quint
staggered, but didnłt fall; he raised his arm menacingly, but there was no gun
in his hand. Jack looked around to see where it had fallen, but he couldnłt
spot it anywhere. Stoney landed a kick squarely in Quintłs testicles; barefoot,
but Quint wailed with pain. A second kick sent him sprawling.

Stoney called out, �Luke? Luke! Would you come and give me a
hand?"

A solidly built man with tattooed forearms emerged from Stoneyłs
bedroom, yawning and tugging his braces into place. At the sight of Quint, he
groaned. �Not again!"

Stoney said, �Iłm sorry."

Luke shrugged stoically. The two of them managed to grab
hold of Quint, then they dragged him struggling out the door. Jack waited a few
seconds, then searched the floor for the gun. But it wasnłt anywhere in sight,
and it hadnłt slid under the furniture; none of the crevices where it might
have ended up were so dark that it would have been lost in shadow. It was not
in the room at all.

Jack went to the window and watched the three men cross the
courtyard, half expecting to witness an assassination. But Stoney and his lover
merely lifted Quint into the air between them, and tossed him into a shallow,
rather slimy-looking pond.

Jack spent the ensuing days in a state of turmoil. He wasnłt
ready to confide in anyone until he could frame his suspicions clearly, and the
events in Stoneyłs rooms were difficult to interpret unambiguously. He couldnłt
state with absolute certainty that Quintłs gun had vanished before his eyes.
But surely the fact that Stoney was walking free proved that he was receiving
supernatural protection? And Quint himself, confused and demoralised, had certainly
had the appearance of a man whołd been demonically confounded at every turn.

If this was true, though, Stoney must have bought more with
his soul than immunity from worldly authority. The knowledge itself had to be
Satanic in origin, as the legend of Faustus described it. Tollers had been
right, in his great essay �Mythopoesis": myths were remnants of manłs
pre-lapsarian capacity to apprehend, directly, the great truths of the world.
Why else would they resonate in the imagination, and survive from generation to
generation?

By Friday, a sense of urgency gripped him. He couldnłt take
his confusion back to Potterłs Barn, back to Joyce and the boys. This had to be
resolved, if only in his own mind, before he returned to his family.

With Wagner on the gramophone, he sat and meditated on the
challenge he was facing. Stoney had to be thwarted, but how? Jack had always
said that the Church of Englandapparently so quaint and harmless, a Church of
cake stalls and kindly spinsterswas like a fearsome army in the eyes of Satan.
But even if his master was quaking in Hell, it would take more than a few stern
words from a bicycling vicar to force Stoney to abandon his obscene plans.

But Stoneyłs intentions, in themselves, didnłt matter. Hełd
been granted the power to dazzle and seduce, but not to force his will upon the
populace. What mattered was how his plans were viewed by others. And the way to
stop him was to open peoplełs eyes to the true emptiness of his apparent
cornucopia.

The more he thought and prayed about it, the more certain
Jack became that hełd discerned the task required of him. No denunciation from
the pulpits would suffice; people wouldnłt turn down the fruits of Stoneyłs
damnation on the mere say-so of the Church. Why would anyone reject such
lustrous gifts, without a carefully reasoned argument?

Jack had been humiliated once, defeated once, trying to
expose the barrenness of materialism. But might that not have been a form of
preparation? Hełd been badly mauled by Anscombe, but shełd made an infinitely
gentler enemy than the one he now confronted. He had suffered from her tauntsbut
what was suffering, if not the chisel God used to shape his children into their
true selves?

His role was clear, now. He would find Stoneyłs intellectual
Achilles heel, and expose it to the world.

He would debate him.

3

Robert gazed at the blackboard for a full minute, then
started laughing with delight. �Thatłs so beautiful!"

�Isnłt it?" Helen put down the chalk and joined him on the
couch. �Any more symmetry, and nothing would happen: the universe would be full
of crystalline blankness. Any less, and it would all be uncorrelated noise."

Over the months, in a series of tutorials, Helen had led him
through a small part of the century of physics that had separated them at their
first meeting, down to the purely algebraic structures that lay beneath
spacetime and matter. Mathematics catalogued everything that was not
self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics was an island of
structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

Robert sat and mentally reviewed everything hełd learnt,
trying to apprehend as much as he could in a single image. As he did, a part of
him waited fearfully for a sense of disappointment, a sense of anticlimax. He
might never see more deeply into the nature of the world. In this direction, at
least, there was nothing more to be discovered.

But anticlimax was impossible. To become jaded with this was
impossible. However familiar he became with the algebra of the universe, it
would never grow less marvellous.

Finally he asked, �Are there other islands?" Not merely
other histories, sharing the same underlying basis, but other realities entirely.

�I suspect so," Helen replied. �People have mapped some possibilities.
I donłt know how that could ever be confirmed, though."

Robert shook his head, sated. �I wonłt even think about
that. I need to come down to Earth for a while." He stretched his arms and
leant back, still grinning.

Helen said, �Wherełs Luke today? He usually shows up by now,
to drag you out into the sunshine."

The question wiped the smile from Robertłs face. �Apparently
I make poor company. Being insufficiently fanatical about darts and football."

�Hełs left you?" Helen reached over and squeezed his hand
sympathetically. A little mockingly, too.

Robert was annoyed; she never said anything, but he always
felt that she was judging him. �You think I should grow up, donłt you? Find
someone more like myself. Some kind of soulmate." Hełd meant the word to sound
sardonic, but it emerged rather differently.

�Itłs your life," she said.

A year before, that would have been a laughable claim, but
it was almost the truth now. There was a de facto moratorium on prosecutions,
while the recently acquired genetic and neurological evidence was being
assessed by a parliamentary subcommittee. Robert had helped plant the seeds of
the campaign, but hełd played no real part in it; other people had taken up the
cause. In a matter of months, it was possible that Quintłs cage would be
smashed, at least for everyone in Britain.

The prospect filled him with a kind of vertigo. He might
have broken the laws at every opportunity, but they had still moulded him. The
cage might not have left him crippled, but hełd be lying to himself if he
denied that hełd been stunted.

He said, �Is that what happened, in your past? I ended up in
some ... lifelong partnership?" As he spoke the words, his mouth went dry, and
he was suddenly afraid that the answer would be yes. With Chris. The life hełd
missed out on was a life of happiness with Chris.

�No."

�Then ... what?" he pleaded. �What did I do? How did I live?"
He caught himself, suddenly self-conscious, but added, �You canłt blame me for
being curious."

Helen said gently, �You donłt want to know what you canłt
change. All of that is part of your own causal past now, as much as it is of
mine."

�If itłs part of my own history," Robert countered, �donłt I
deserve to know it? This man wasnłt me, but he brought you to me."

Helen considered this. �You accept that he was someone else?
Not someone whose actions youłre responsible for?"

�Of course."

She said, �There was a trial, in 1952. For ęGross Indecency
contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Amendment Act of 1885.ł He wasnłt
imprisoned, but the court ordered hormone treatments."

�Hormone treatments?" Robert laughed. �Whattestosterone, to
make him more of a man?"

�No, oestrogen. Which in men reduces the sex drive. There
are side-effects, of course. Gynaecomorphism, among other things."

Robert felt physically sick. Theyłd chemically castrated
him, with drugs that had made him sprout breasts. Of all the bizarre abuse to
which hełd been subjected, nothing had been as horrifying as that.

Helen continued, �The treatment lasted six months, and the effects
were all temporary. But two years later, he took his own life. It was never
clear exactly why."

Robert absorbed this in silence. He didnłt want to know anything
more.

After a while, he said, �How do you bear it? Knowing that in
some branch or other, every possible form of humiliation is being inflicted on
someone?"

Helen said, �I donłt bear it. I change it. Thatłs why Iłm
here."

Robert bowed his head. �I know. And Iłm grateful that our histories
collided. But ... how many histories donłt?" He struggled to find an example,
though it was almost too painful to contemplate; since their first
conversation, it was a topic hełd deliberately pushed to the back of his mind. �Therełs
not just an unchangeable Auschwitz in each of our pasts, there are an
astronomical number of othersalong with an astronomical number of things that
are even worse."

Helen said bluntly, �Thatłs not true."

�What?" Robert looked up at her, startled.

She walked to the blackboard and erased it. �Auschwitz has
happened, for both of us, and no one Iłm aware of has ever prevented itbut
that doesnłt mean that nobody stops it, anywhere." She began sketching a
network of fine lines on the blackboard. �You and I are having this
conversation in countless microhistoriessequences of events where various
different things happen with subatomic particles throughout the universebut
thatłs irrelevant to us, we canłt tell those strands apart, so we might as well
treat them all as one history." She pressed the chalk down hard to make a thick
streak that covered everything shełd drawn. �The quantum decoherence people
call this ęcoarse grainingł. Summing over all these indistinguishable details
is what gives rise to classical physics in the first place.

�Now, ęthe two of usł would have first met in many perceivably
different coarse-grained historiesand furthermore, youłve since diverged by
making different choices, and experiencing different external possibilities,
after those events." She sketched two intersecting ribbons of coarse-grained
histories, and then showed each history diverging further.

�World War II and the Holocaust certainly happened in both
of our pastsbut thatłs no proof that the total is so vast that it might as
well be infinite. Remember, what stops us successfully intervening is the fact
that wełre reaching back to a point where some of the parallel interventions
start to bite their own tail. So when we fail, it canłt be counted twice: itłs
just confirming what we already know."

Robert protested, �But what about all the versions of ę30s Europe
that donłt happen to lie in either your past or mine? Just because we have no
direct evidence for a Holocaust in those branches, that hardly makes it
unlikely."

Helen said, �Not unlikely per se, without intervention. But
not fixed in stone either. Wełll keep trying, refining the technology, until we
can reach branches where therełs no overlap with our own past in the ę30s. And
there must be other, separate ribbons of intervention that happen in histories
we can never even know about."

Robert was elated. Hełd imagined himself clinging to a rock
of improbable good fortune in an infinite sea of sufferingstruggling to
pretend, for the sake of his own sanity, that the rock was all there was. But
what lay around him was not inevitably worse; it was merely unknown. In time,
he might even play a part in ensuring that every last tragedy was not repeated
across billions of worlds.

He reexamined the diagram. �Hang on. Intervention doesnłt
end divergence, though, does it? You reached us, a year ago, but in at least
some of the histories spreading out from that moment, wonłt we still have
suffered all kinds of disasters, and reacted in all kinds of self-defeating
ways?"

�Yes," Helen conceded, �but fewer than you might think. If
you merely listed every sequence of events that superficially appeared to have
a non-zero probability, youłd end up with a staggering catalogue of absurdist
tragedies. But when you calculate everything more carefully, and take account
of Planck-scale effects, it turns out to be nowhere near as bad. There are no
coarse-grained histories where boulders assemble themselves out of dust and
rain from the sky, or everyone in London or Madras goes mad and slaughters
their children. Most macroscopic systems end up being quite robustpeople
included. Across histories, the range of natural disasters, human stupidity,
and sheer bad luck isnłt overwhelmingly greater than the range youłre aware of
from this history alone."

Robert laughed. �And thatłs not bad enough?"

�Oh, it is. But thatłs the best thing about the form Iłve
taken."

�Iłm sorry?"

Helen tipped her head and regarded him with an expression of
disappointment. �You know, youłre still not as quick on your feet as Iłd
expected."

Robertłs face burned, but then he realised what hełd missed,
and his resentment vanished.

�You donłt diverge? Your hardware is designed to end the
process? Your environment, your surroundings, will still split you into
different historiesbut on a coarse-grained level, you donłt contribute to the
process yourself?"

�Thatłs right."

Robert was speechless. Even after a year, she could still
toss him a hand grenade like this.

Helen said, �I canłt help living in many worlds; thatłs
beyond my control. But I do know that Iłm one person. Faced with a choice that
puts me on a knife-edge, I know I wonłt split and take every path."

Robert hugged himself, suddenly cold. �Like I do. Like I
have. Like all of us poor creatures of flesh."

Helen came and sat beside him. �Even thatłs not irrevocable.
Once youłve taken this formif thatłs what you chooseyou can meet your other
selves, reverse some of the scatter. Give some a chance to undo what theyłve
done."

This time, Robert grasped her meaning at once. �Gather
myself together? Make myself whole?"

Helen shrugged. �If itłs what you want. If you see it that
way."

He stared back at her, disoriented. Touching the bedrock of
physics was one thing, but this possibility was too much to take in.

Someone knocked on the study door. The two of them exchanged
wary glances, but it wasnłt Quint, back for more punishment. It was a porter
bearing a telegram.

When the man had left, Robert opened the envelope.

�Bad news?" Helen asked.

He shook his head. �Not a death in the family, if thatłs
what you meant. Itłs from John Hamilton. Hełs challenging me to a debate. On
the topic ęCan A Machine Think?ł"

�What, at some university function?"

�No. On the BBC. Four weeks from tomorrow." He looked up. �Do
you think I should do it?"

�Radio or television?"

Robert reread the message. �Television."

Helen smiled. �Definitely. Iłll give you some tips."

�On the subject?"

�No! That would be cheating." She eyed him appraisingly. �You
can start by throwing out your electric razor. Get rid of the permanent five ołclock
shadow."

Robert was hurt. �Some people find that quite attractive."

Helen replied firmly, �Trust me on this."

The BBC sent a car to take Robert down to London. Helen sat
beside him in the back seat.

�Are you nervous?" she asked.

�Nothing that an hour of throwing up wonłt cure."

Hamilton had suggested a live broadcast, �to keep things
interesting," and the producer had agreed. Robert had never been on television;
hełd taken part in a couple of radio discussions on the future of computing,
back when the Mark I had first come into use, but even those had been taped.

Hamiltonłs choice of topic had surprised him at first, but
in retrospect it seemed quite shrewd. A debate on the proposition that �Modern
Science is the Devilłs Work" would have brought howls of laughter from all but
the most pious viewers, whereas the purely metaphorical claim that �Modern
Science is a Faustian Pact" would have had the entire audience nodding sagely
in agreement, while carrying no implications whatsoever. If you werenłt going
to take the whole dire fairy tale literally, everything was �a Faustian Pact"
in some sufficiently watered-down sense: everything had a potential downside,
and this was as pointless to assert as it was easy to demonstrate.

Robert had met considerable incredulity, though, when hełd
explained to journalists where his own research was leading. To date, the press
had treated him as a kind of eccentric British Edison, churning out inventions
of indisputable utility, and no one seemed to find it at all surprising or
alarming that he was also, frankly, a bit of a loon. But Hamilton would have a
chance to exploit, and reshape, that perception. If Robert insisted on
defending his goal of creating machine intelligence, not as an amusing hobby
that might have been chosen by a public relations firm to make him appear
endearingly daft, but as both the ultimate vindication of materialist science
and the logical endpoint of most of his lifełs work, Hamilton could use a
victory tonight to cast doubt on everything Robert had done, and everything he
symbolised. By asking, not at all rhetorically, �Where will this all end?", he
was inviting Robert to step forward and hang himself with the answer.

The traffic was heavy for a Sunday evening, and they arrived
at the Shepherdłs Bush studios with only fifteen minutes until the broadcast.
Hamilton had been collected by a separate car, from his family home near
Oxford. As they crossed the studio Robert spotted him, conversing intensely
with a dark-haired young man.

He whispered to Helen, �Do you know who that is, with Hamilton?"

She followed his gaze, then smiled cryptically. Robert said,
�What? Do you recognise him from somewhere?"

�Yes, but Iłll tell you later."

As the make-up woman applied powder, Helen ran through her
long list of rules again. �Donłt stare into the camera, or youłll look like youłre
peddling soap powder. But donłt avert your eyes. You donłt want to look shifty."

The make-up woman whispered to Robert, �Everyonełs an expert."

�Annoying, isnłt it?" he confided.

Michael Polanyi, an academic philosopher who was well-known
to the public after presenting a series of radio talks, had agreed to moderate
the debate. Polanyi popped into the make-up room, accompanied by the producer;
they chatted with Robert for a couple of minutes, setting him at ease and
reminding him of the procedure theyłd be following.

Theyłd only just left him when the floor manager appeared. �We
need you in the studio now, please, Professor." Robert followed her, and Helen
pursued him part of the way. �Breathe slowly and deeply," she urged him.

�As if youłd know," he snapped.

Robert shook hands with Hamilton then took his seat on one
side of the podium. Hamiltonłs young adviser had retreated into the shadows;
Robert glanced back to see Helen watching from a similar position. It was like
a duel: they both had seconds. The floor manager pointed out the studio
monitor, and as Robert watched it was switched between the feeds from two
cameras: a wide shot of the whole set, and a closer view of the podium, including
the small blackboard on a stand beside it. Hełd once asked Helen whether
television had progressed to far greater levels of sophistication in her branch
of the future, once the pioneering days were left behind, but the question had
left her uncharacteristically tongue-tied.

The floor manager retreated behind the cameras, called for silence,
then counted down from ten, mouthing the final numbers.

The broadcast began with an introduction from Polanyi: concise,
witty, and non-partisan. Then Hamilton stepped up to the podium. Robert watched
him directly while the wide-angle view was being transmitted, so as not to
appear rude or distracted. He only turned to the monitor when he was no longer
visible himself.

�Can a machine think?" Hamilton began. �My intuition tells
me: no. My heart tells me: no. Iłm sure that most of you feel the same way. But
thatłs not enough, is it? In this day and age, we arenłt allowed to rely on our
hearts for anything. We need something scientific. We need some kind of proof.

�Some years ago, I took part in a debate at Oxford
University. The issue then was not whether machines might behave like people,
but whether people themselves might be mere machines. Materialists, you see,
claim that we are all just a collection of purposeless atoms, colliding at
random. Everything we do, everything we feel, everything we say, comes down to
some sequence of events that might as well be the spinning of cogs, or the
opening and closing of electrical relays.

�To me, this was self-evidently false. What point could
there be, I argued, in even conversing with a materialist? By his own
admission, the words that came out of his mouth would be the result of nothing
but a mindless, mechanical process! By his own theory, he could have no reason
to think that those words would be the truth! Only believers in a transcendent
human soul could claim any interest in the truth."

Hamilton nodded slowly, a penitentłs gesture. �I was wrong,
and I was put in my place. This might be self-evident to me, and it might be
self-evident to you, but itłs certainly not what philosophers call an ęanalytical
truthł: itłs not actually a nonsense, a contradiction in terms, to believe that
we are mere machines. There might, there just might, be some reason why the
words that emerge from a materialistłs mouth are truthful, despite their
origins lying entirely in unthinking matter.

�There might." Hamilton smiled wistfully. �I had to concede
that possibility, because I only had my instinct, my gut feeling, to tell me
otherwise.

�But the reason I only had my instinct to guide me was
because Iłd failed to learn of an event that had taken place many years before.
A discovery made in 1930, by an Austrian mathematician named Kurt G�del."

Robert felt a shiver of excitement run down his spine. Hełd
been afraid that the whole contest would degenerate into theology, with
Hamilton invoking Aquinas all nightor Aristotle, at best. But it looked as if
his mysterious adviser had dragged him into the twentieth century, and they
were going to have a chance to debate the real issues after all.

�What is it that we know Professor Stoneyłs computers can
do, and do well?" Hamilton continued. �Arithmetic! In a fraction of a second,
they can add up a million numbers. Once wełve told them, very precisely, what
calculations to perform, theyłll complete them in the blink of an eyeeven if
those calculations would take you or me a lifetime.

�But do these machines understand what it is theyłre doing?
Professor Stoney says, ęNot yet. Not right now. Give them time. Rome wasnłt
built in a day.ł" Hamilton nodded thoughtfully. �Perhaps thatłs fair. His
computers are only a few years old. Theyłre just babies. Why should they
understand anything, so soon?

�But letłs stop and think about this a bit more carefully. A
computer, as it stands today, is simply a machine that does arithmetic, and
Professor Stoney isnłt proposing that theyłre going to sprout new kinds of
brains all on their own. Nor is he proposing giving them anything really new.
He can already let them look at the world with television cameras, turning the pictures
into a stream of numbers describing the brightness of different points on the
screen ... on which the computer can then perform arithmetic. He can already
let them speak to us with a special kind of loudspeaker, to which the computer
feeds a stream of numbers to describe how loud the sound should be ... a stream
of numbers produced by more arithmetic.

�So the world can come into the computer, as numbers, and
words can emerge, as numbers too. All Professor Stoney hopes to add to his
computers is a ęclevererł way to do the arithmetic that takes the first set of
numbers and churns out the second. Itłs that ęclever arithmeticł, he tells us,
that will make these machines think."

Hamilton folded his arms and paused for a moment. �What are
we to make of this? Can doing arithmetic, and nothing more, be enough to let a
machine understand anything? My instinct certainly tells me no, but who am I
that you should trust my instinct?

�So, letłs narrow down the question of understanding, and to
be scrupulously fair, letłs put it in the most favourable light possible for
Professor Stoney. If therełs one thing a computer ought to be able to
understandas well as us, if not betteritłs arithmetic itself. If a computer
could think at all, it would surely be able to grasp the nature of its own best
talent.

�The question, then, comes down to this: can you describe
all of arithmetic, using nothing but arithmetic? Thirty years agolong before
Professor Stoney and his computers came alongProfessor G�del asked himself
exactly that question.

�Now, you might be wondering how anyone could even begin to
describe the rules of arithmetic, using nothing but arithmetic itself."
Hamilton turned to the blackboard, picked up the chalk, and wrote two lines:

If x+z = y+z then x = y

�This is an important rule, but itłs written in symbols, not
numbers, because it has to be true for every number, every x, y and z. But
Professor G�del had a clever idea: why not use a code, like spies use, where
every symbol is assigned a number?" Hamilton wrote:

The code for �a" is 1.

The code for �b" is 2.

�And so on. You can have a code for every letter of the alphabet,
and for all the other symbols needed for arithmetic: plus signs, equals signs,
that kind of thing. Telegrams are sent this way every day, with a code called
the Baudot code, so therełs really nothing strange or sinister about it.

�All the rules of arithmetic that we learnt at school can be
written with a carefully chosen set of symbols, which can then be translated
into numbers. Every question as to what does or does not follow from those
rules can then be seen anew, as a question about numbers. If this line follows
from this one," Hamilton indicated the two lines of the cancellation rule, �we
can see it in the relationship between their code numbers. We can judge each
inference, and declare it valid or not, purely by doing arithmetic.

�So, given any proposition at all about arithmeticsuch as
the claim that ęthere are infinitely many prime numbersłwe can restate the
notion that we have a proof for that claim in terms of code numbers. If the
code number for our claim is x, we can say ęThere is a number p, ending with
the code number x, that passes our test for being the code number of a valid
proof.ł"

Hamilton took a visible breath.

�In 1930, Professor G�del used this scheme to do something
rather ingenious." He wrote on the blackboard:

There DOES NOT EXIST a number p meeting the following
condition:

p is the code number of a valid proof of this claim.

�Here is a claim about arithmetic, about numbers. It has to
be either true or false. So letłs start by supposing that it happens to be
true. Then there is no number p that is the code number for a proof of this
claim. So this is a true statement about arithmetic, but it canłt be proved
merely by doing arithmetic!"

Hamilton smiled. �If you donłt catch on immediately, donłt
worry; when I first heard this argument from a young friend of mine, it took a
while for the meaning to sink in. But remember: the only hope a computer has
for understanding anything is by doing arithmetic, and wełve just found a
statement that cannot be proved with mere arithmetic.

�Is this statement really true, though? We mustnłt jump to
conclusions, we mustnłt damn the machines too hastily. Suppose this claim is
false! Since it claims there is no number p that is the code number of its own
proof, to be false there would have to be such a number, after all. And that
number would encode the ęproofł of an acknowledged falsehood!"

Hamilton spread his arms triumphantly. �You and I, like every
schoolboy, know that you canłt prove a falsehood from sound premisesand if the
premises of arithmetic arenłt sound, what is? So we know, as a matter of
certainty, that this statement is true.

�Professor G�del was the first to see this, but with a little
help and perseverance, any educated person can follow in his footsteps. A
machine could never do that. We might divulge to a machine our own knowledge of
this fact, offering it as something to be taken on trust, but the machine could
neither stumble on this truth for itself, nor truly comprehend it when we
offered it as a gift.

�You and I understand arithmetic, in a way that no
electronic calculator ever will. What hope has a machine, then, of moving
beyond its own most favourable milieu and comprehending any wider truth?

�None at all, ladies and gentlemen. Though this detour into
mathematics might have seemed arcane to you, it has served a very down-to-Earth
purpose. It has provedbeyond refutation by even the most ardent materialist or
the most pedantic philosopherwhat we common folk knew all along: no machine
will ever think."

Hamilton took his seat. For a moment, Robert was simply exhilarated;
coached or not, Hamilton had grasped the essential features of the
incompleteness proof, and presented them to a lay audience. What might have
been a night of shadow-boxingwith no blows connecting, and nothing for the
audience to judge but two solo performances in separate arenashad turned into
a genuine clash of ideas.

As Polanyi introduced him and he walked to the podium, Robert
realised that his usual shyness and self-consciousness had evaporated. He was
filled with an altogether different kind of tension: he sensed more acutely
than ever what was at stake.

When he reached the podium, he adopted the posture of someone
about to begin a prepared speech, but then he caught himself, as if hełd
forgotten something. �Bear with me for a moment." He walked around to the far
side of the blackboard and quickly wrote a few words on it, upside-down. Then
he resumed his place.

�Can a machine think? Professor Hamilton would like us to believe
that hełs settled the issue once and for all, by coming up with a statement
that we know is true, but a particular machineprogrammed to explore the
theorems of arithmetic in a certain rigid waywould never be able to produce.
Well ... we all have our limitations." He flipped the blackboard over to reveal
what hełd written on the opposite side:

If Robert Stoney speaks these words, he will NOT be telling
the truth.

He waited a few beats, then continued.

�What Iłd like to explore, though, is not so much a question
of limitations, as of opportunities. How exactly is it that wełve all ended up
with this mysterious ability to know that G�delłs statement is true? Where does
this advantage, this great insight, come from? From our souls? From some
immaterial entity that no machine could ever possess? Is that the only possible
source, the only conceivable explanation? Or might it come from something a
little less ethereal?

�As Professor Hamilton explained, we believe G�delłs statement
is true because we trust the rules of arithmetic not to lead us into
contradictions and falsehoods. But where does that trust come from? How does it
arise?"

Robert turned the blackboard back to Hamiltonłs side, and pointed
to the cancellation rule. �If x plus z equals y plus z, then x equals y. Why is
this so reasonable? We might not learn to put it quite like this until wełre in
our teens, but if you showed a young child two boxeswithout revealing their
contentsadded an equal number of shells, or stones, or pieces of fruit to
both, and then let the child look inside to see that each box now contained the
same number of items, it wouldnłt take any formal education for the child to
understand that the two boxes must have held the same number of things to begin
with.

�The child knows, we all know, how a certain kind of object
behaves. Our lives are steeped in direct experience of whole numbers: whole
numbers of coins, stamps, pebbles, birds, cats, sheep, buses. If I tried to
persuade a six-year-old that I could put three stones in a box, remove one of
them, and be left with four ... hełd simply laugh at me. Why? Itłs not merely
that hełs sure to have taken one thing away from three to get two, on many
prior occasions. Even a child understands that some things that appear reliable
will eventually fail: a toy that works perfectly, day after day, for a month or
a year, can still break. But not arithmetic, not taking one from three. He canłt
even picture that failing. Once youłve lived in the world, once youłve seen how
it works, the failure of arithmetic becomes unimaginable.

�Professor Hamilton suggests that this is down to our souls.
But what would he say about a child reared in a world of water and mist, never
in the company of more than one person at a time, never taught to count on his
fingers and toes. I doubt that such a child would possess the same certainty
that you and I have, as to the impossibility of arithmetic ever leading him
astray. To banish whole numbers entirely from his world would require very
strange surroundings, and a level of deprivation amounting to cruelty, but
would that be enough to rob a child of his soul?

�A computer, programmed to pursue arithmetic as Professor
Hamilton has described, is subject to far more deprivation than that child. If
Iłd been raised with my hands and feet tied, my head in a sack, and someone
shouting orders at me, I doubt that Iłd have much grasp of realityand Iłd
still be better prepared for the task than such a computer. Itłs a great mercy
that a machine treated that way wouldnłt be able to think: if it could, the
shackles wełd placed upon it would be criminally oppressive.

�But thatłs hardly the fault of the computer, or a
revelation of some irreparable flaw in its nature. If we want to judge the potential
of our machines with any degree of honesty, we have to play fair with them, not
saddle them with restrictions that wełd never dream of imposing on ourselves.
There really is no point comparing an eagle with a spanner, or a gazelle with a
washing machine: itłs our jets that fly and our cars that run, albeit in quite
different ways than any animal.

�Thought is sure to be far harder to achieve than those
other skills, and to do so we might need to mimic the natural world far more
closely. But I believe that once a machine is endowed with facilities
resembling the inborn tools for learning that we all have as our birthright,
and is set free to learn the way a child learns, through experience,
observation, trial and error, hunches and failuresinstead of being handed a
list of instructions that it has no choice but to obeywe will finally be in a
position to compare like with like.

�When that happens, and we can meet and talk and argue with
these machinesabout arithmetic, or any other topictherełll be no need to take
the word of Professor G�del, or Professor Hamilton, or myself, for anything. Wełll
invite them down to the local pub, and interrogate them in person. And if we
play fair with them, wełll use the same experience and judgment we use with any
friend, or guest, or stranger, to decide for ourselves whether or not they can
think."

The BBC put on a lavish assortment of wine and cheese in a
small room off the studio. Robert ended up in a heated argument with Polanyi,
who revealed himself to be firmly on the negative side, while Helen flirted
shamelessly with Hamiltonłs young friend, who turned out to have a PhD in
algebraic geometry from Cambridge; he must have completed the degree just
before Robert had come back from Manchester. After exchanging some polite
formalities with Hamilton, Robert kept his distance, sensing that any further
contact would not be welcome.

An hour later, though, after getting lost in the maze of
corridors on his way back from the toilets, Robert came across Hamilton sitting
alone in the studio, weeping.

He almost backed away in silence, but Hamilton looked up and
saw him. With their eyes locked, it was impossible to retreat.

Robert said, �Itłs your wife?" Hełd heard that shełd been seriously
ill, but the gossip had included a miraculous recovery. Some friend of the
family had lain hands on her a year ago, and shełd gone into remission.

Hamilton said, �Shełs dying."

Robert approached and sat beside him. �From what?"

�Breast cancer. Itłs spread throughout her body. Into her
bones, into her lungs, into her liver." He sobbed again, a helpless spasm, then
caught himself angrily. �Suffering is the chisel God uses to shape us. What
kind of idiot comes up with a line like that?"

Robert said, �Iłll talk to a friend of mine, an oncologist
at Guyłs Hospital. Hełs doing a trial of a new genetic treatment."

Hamilton stared at him. �One of your miracle cures?"

�No, no. I mean, only very indirectly."

Hamilton said angrily, �She wonłt take your poison."

Robert almost snapped back: She wonłt? Or you wonłt let her?
But it was an unfair question. In some marriages, the lines blurred. It was not
for him to judge the way the two of them faced this together.

�They go away in order to be with us in a new way, even
closer than before." Hamilton spoke the words like a defiant incantation, a
declaration of faith that would ward off temptation, whether or not he entirely
believed it.

Robert was silent for a while, then he said, �I lost someone
close to me, when I was a boy. And I thought the same thing. I thought he was
still with me, for a long time afterwards. Guiding me. Encouraging me." It was
hard to get the words out; he hadnłt spoken about this to anyone for almost
thirty years. �I dreamed up a whole theory to explain it, in which ęsoulsł used
quantum uncertainty to control the body during life, and communicate with the
living after death, without breaking any laws of physics. The kind of thing
every science-minded seventeen-year-old probably stumbles on, and takes
seriously for a couple of weeks, before realising how nonsensical it is. But I
had a good reason not to see the flaws, so I clung to it for almost two years.
Because I missed him so much, it took me that long to understand what I was
doing, how I was deceiving myself."

Hamilton said pointedly, �If youłd not tried to explain it,
you might never have lost him. He might still be with you now."

Robert thought about this. �Iłm glad hełs not, though. It
wouldnłt be fair on either of us."

Hamilton shuddered. �Then you canłt have loved him very
much, can you?" He put his head in his arms. �Just fuck off, now, will you."

Robert said, �What exactly would it take, to prove to you
that Iłm not in league with the devil?"

Hamilton turned red eyes on him and announced triumphantly, �Nothing
will do that! I saw what happened to Quintłs gun!"

Robert sighed. �That was a conjuring trick. Stage magic, not
black magic."

�Oh yes? Show me how itłs done, then. Teach me how to do it,
so I can impress my friends."

�Itłs rather technical. It would take all night."

Hamilton laughed humourlessly. �You canłt deceive me. I saw
through you from the start."

�Do you think X-rays are Satanic? Penicillin?"

�Donłt treat me like a fool. Therełs no comparison."

�Why not? Everything Iłve helped develop is part of the same
continuum. Iłve read some of your writing on mediaeval culture, and youłre
always berating modern commentators for presenting it as unsophisticated. No
one really thought the Earth was flat. No one really treated every novelty as
witchcraft. So why view any of my work any differently than a
fourteenth-century man would view twentieth-century medicine?"

Hamilton replied, �If a fourteenth-century man was suddenly
faced with twentieth-century medicine, donłt you think hełd be entitled to
wonder how it had been revealed to his contemporaries?"

Robert shifted uneasily on his chair. Helen hadnłt sworn him
to secrecy, but hełd agreed with her view: it was better to wait, to spread the
knowledge that would ground an understanding of what had happened, before
revealing any details of the contact between branches.

But this manłs wife was dying, needlessly. And Robert was
tired of keeping secrets. Some wars required it, but others were better won
with honesty.

He said, �I know you hate H.G. Wells. But what if he was
right, about one little thing?"

Robert told him everything, glossing over the technicalities
but leaving out nothing substantial. Hamilton listened without interrupting,
gripped by a kind of unwilling fascination. His expression shifted from hostile
to incredulous, but there were also hints of begrudging amazement, as if he
could at least appreciate some of the beauty and complexity of the picture
Robert was painting.

But when Robert had finished, Hamilton said merely, �Youłre
a grand liar, Stoney. But what else should I expect, from the King of Lies?"

Robert was in a sombre mood on the drive back to Cambridge.
The encounter with Hamilton had depressed him, and the question of whołd swayed
the nation in the debate seemed remote and abstract in comparison.

Helen had taken a house in the suburbs, rather than inviting
scandal by cohabiting with him, though her frequent visits to his rooms seemed
to have had almost the same effect. Robert walked her to the door.

�I think it went well, donłt you?" she said.

�I suppose so."

�Iłm leaving tonight," she added casually. �This is goodbye."

�What?" Robert was staggered. �Everythingłs still up in the
air! I still need you!"

She shook her head. �You have all the tools you need, all
the clues. And plenty of local allies. Therełs nothing truly urgent I could
tell you, now, that you couldnłt find out just as quickly on your own."

Robert pleaded with her, but her mind was made up. The
driver beeped the horn; Robert gestured to him impatiently.

�You know, my breathłs frosting visibly," he said, �and youłre
producing nothing. You really ought to be more careful."

She laughed. �Itłs a bit late to worry about that."

�Where will you go? Back home? Or off to twist another
branch?"

�Another branch. But therełs something Iłm planning to do on
the way."

�Whatłs that?"

�Do you remember once, you wrote about an Oracle? A machine
that could solve the halting problem?"

�Of course." Given a device that could tell you in advance
whether a given computer program would halt, or go on running forever, youłd be
able to prove or disprove any theorem whatsoever about the integers: the
Goldbach conjecture, Fermatłs Last Theorem, anything. Youłd simply show this �Oracle"
a program that would loop through all the integers, testing every possible set
of values and only halting if it came to a set that violated the conjecture.
Youłd never need to run the program itself; the Oraclełs verdict on whether or
not it halted would be enough.

Such a device might or might not be possible, but Robert had
proved more than twenty years before that no ordinary computer, however
ingeniously programmed, would suffice. If program H could always tell you in a
finite time whether or not program X would halt, you could tack on a small
addition to H to create program Z, which perversely and deliberately went into
an infinite loop whenever it examined a program that halted. If Z examined
itself, it would either halt eventually, or run forever. But either possibility
contradicted the alleged powers of program H: if Z actually ran forever, it
would be because H had claimed that it wouldnłt, and vice versa. Program H
could not exist.

�Time travel," Helen said, �gives me a chance to become an
Oracle. Therełs a way to exploit the inability to change your own past, a way
to squeeze an infinite number of timelike pathsnone of them closed, but some
of them arbitrarily near to itinto a finite physical system. Once you do that,
you can solve the halting problem."

�How?" Robertłs mind was racing. �And once youłve done that ...
what about higher cardinalities? An Oracle for Oracles, able to test
conjectures about the real numbers?"

Helen smiled enigmatically. �The first problem should only
take you forty or fifty years to solve. As for the rest," she pulled away from
him, moving into the darkness of the hallway, �what makes you think I know the
answer myself?" She blew him a kiss, then vanished from sight.

Robert took a step towards her, but the hallway was empty.

He walked back to the car, sad and exalted, his heart
pounding.

The driver asked wearily, �Where to now, sir?"

Robert said, �Further up, and further in."

4

The night after the funeral, Jack paced the house until
three a.m. When would it be bearable? When? Shełd shown more strength and
courage, dying, than he felt within himself right now. But shełd share it with
him, in the weeks to come. Shełd share it with them all.

In bed, in the darkness, he tried to sense her presence
around him. But it was forced, it was premature. It was one thing to have faith
that she was watching over him, but quite another to expect to be spared every
trace of grief, every trace of pain.

He waited for sleep. He needed to get some rest before dawn,
or how would he face her children in the morning?

Gradually, he became aware of someone standing in the darkness
at the foot of the bed. As he examined and reexamined the shadows, he formed a
clear image of the apparitionłs face.

It was his own. Younger, happier, surer of himself.

Jack sat up. �What do you want?"

�I want you to come with me." The figure approached; Jack recoiled,
and it halted.

�Come with you, where?" Jack demanded.

�To a place where shełs waiting."

Jack shook his head. �No. I donłt believe you. She said shełd
come for me herself, when it was time. She said shełd guide me."

�She didnłt understand, then," the apparition insisted
gently. �She didnłt know I could fetch you myself. Do you think Iłd send her in
my place? Do you think Iłd shirk the task?"

Jack searched the smiling, supplicatory face. �Who are you?"
His own soul, in Heaven, remade? Was this a gift God offered everyone? To meet,
before death, the very thing you would becomeif you so chose? So that even
this would be an act of free will?

The apparition said, �Stoney persuaded me to let his friend
treat Joyce. We lived on, together. More than a century has passed. And now we
want you to join us."

Jack choked with horror. �No! This is a trick! Youłre the Devil!"

The thing replied mildly, �There is no Devil. And no God, either.
Just people. But I promise you: people with the powers of gods are kinder than
any god we ever imagined."

Jack covered his face. �Leave me be." He whispered fervent
prayers, and waited. It was a test, a moment of vulnerability, but God wouldnłt
leave him naked like this, face-to-face with the Enemy, for longer than he could
endure.

He uncovered his face. The thing was still with him.

It said, �Do you remember, when your faith came to you? The
sense of a shield around you melting away, like armour youłd worn to keep God
at bay?"

�Yes." Jack acknowledged the truth defiantly; he wasnłt frightened
that this abomination could see into his past, into his heart.

�That took strength: to admit that you needed God. But it
takes the same kind of strength, again, to understand that some needs can never
be met. I canłt promise you Heaven. We have no disease, we have no war, we have
no poverty. But we have to find our own love, our own goodness. There is no
final word of comfort. We only have each other."

Jack didnłt reply; this blasphemous fantasy wasnłt even
worth challenging. He said, �I know youłre lying. Do you really imagine that Iłd
leave the boys alone here?"

�Theyłd go back to America, back to their father. How many
years do you think youłd have with them, if you stay? Theyłve already lost
their mother. It would be easier for them now, a single clean break."

Jack shouted angrily, �Get out of my house!"

The thing came closer, and sat on the bed. It put a hand on
his shoulder. Jack sobbed, �Help me!" But he didnłt know whose aid he was
invoking any more.

�Do you remember the scene in The Seat of Oak? When the
Harpy traps everyone in her cave underground, and tries to convince them that
there is no Nescia? Only this drab underworld is real, she tells them.
Everything else they think theyłve seen was just make-believe." Jackłs own young
face smiled nostalgically. �And we had dear old Shrugweight reply: he didnłt
think much of this so-called ęreal worldł of hers. And even if she was right,
since four little children could make up a better world, hełd rather go on
pretending that their imaginary one was real.

�But we had it all upside down! The real world is richer,
and stranger, and more beautiful than anything ever imagined. Milton, Dante,
John the Divine are the ones who trapped you in a drab, grey underworld. Thatłs
where you are now. But if you give me your hand, I can pull you out."

Jackłs chest was bursting. He couldnłt lose his faith. Hełd
kept it through worse than this. Hełd kept it through every torture and
indignity God had inflicted on his wifełs frail body. No one could take it from
him now. He crooned to himself, �In my time of trouble, He will find me."

The cool hand tightened its grip on his shoulder. �You can
be with her, now. Just say the word, and you will become a part of me. I will
take you inside me, and you will see through my eyes, and we will travel back
to the world where she still lives."

Jack wept openly. �Leave me in peace! Just leave me to mourn
her!"

The thing nodded sadly. �If thatłs what you want."

�I do! Go!"

�When Iłm sure."

Suddenly, Jack thought back to the long rant Stoney had delivered
in the studio. Every choice went every way, Stoney had claimed. No decision
could ever be final.

�Now I know youłre lying!" he shouted triumphantly. �If you
believed everything Stoney told you, how could my choice ever mean a thing? I
would always say yes to you, and I would always say no! It would all be the
same!"

The apparition replied solemnly, �While Iłm here with you,
touching you, you canłt be divided. Your choice will count."

Jack wiped his eyes, and gazed into its face. It seemed to believe
every word it was speaking. What if this truly was his metaphysical twin,
speaking as honestly as he could, and not merely the Devil in a mask? Perhaps
there was a grain of truth in Stoneyłs awful vision; perhaps this was another
version of himself, a living person who honestly believed that the two of them
shared a history.

Then it was a visitor sent by God, to humble him. To teach
him compassion towards Stoney. To show Jack that he too, with a little less
faith, and a little more pride, might have been damned forever.

Jack stretched out a hand and touched the face of this poor
lost soul. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

He said, �Iłve made my choice. Now leave me."

Authorłs note: where the lives of the fictional characters
of this story parallel those of real historical figures, Iłve drawn on biographies
by Andrew Hodges and A.N. Wilson. The self-dual formulation of general
relativity was discovered by Abhay Ashtekar in 1986, and has since led to
ground-breaking developments in quantum gravity, but the implications drawn
from it here are fanciful.

Orphanogenesis

Konishi polis, Earth

23 387 025 000 000 CST

15 May 2975, 11:03:17.154 UT

T

he conceptory was non-sentient software, as ancient as
Konishi polis itself. Its main purpose was to enable the citizens of the polis
to create offspring: a child of one parent, or two, or twentyformed partly in
their own image, partly according to their wishes, and partly by chance.
Sporadically, though, every teratau or so, the conceptory created a citizen
with no parents at all.

In Konishi, every home-born citizen was grown from a mind
seed, a string of instruction codes like a digital genome. The first mind seeds
had been translated from DNA nine centuries before, when the polis founders had
invented the Shaper programming language to recreate the essential processes of
neuroembryology in software. But any such translation was necessarily
imperfect, glossing over the biochemical details in favour of broad, functional
equivalence, and the full diversity of the flesher genome could not be brought
through intact. Starting from a diminished trait pool, with the old DNA-based
maps rendered obsolete, it was crucial for the conceptory to chart the
consequences of new variations to the mind seed. To eschew all change would be
to risk stagnation; to embrace it recklessly would be to endanger the sanity of
every child.

The Konishi mind seed was divided into a billion fields:
short segments, six bits long, each containing a simple instruction code. Sequences
of a few dozen instructions comprised shapers: the basic subprograms employed
during psychogenesis. The effects of untried mutations on fifteen million
interacting shapers could rarely be predicted in advance; in most cases, the
only reliable method would have been to perform every computation that the
altered seed itself would have performed ... which was no different from going
ahead and growing the seed, creating the mind, predicting nothing.

The conceptoryłs accumulated knowledge of its craft took the
form of a collection of annotated maps of the Konishi mind seed. The
highest-level maps were elaborate, multi-dimensional structures, dwarfing the
seed itself by orders of magnitude. But there was one simple map which the
citizens of Konishi had used to gauge the conceptoryłs progress over the
centuries; it showed the billion fields as lines of latitude, and the
sixty-four possible instruction codes as meridians. Any individual seed could
be thought of as a path which zig-zagged down the map from top to bottom,
singling out an instruction code for every field along the way.

Where it was known that only one code could lead to successful
psychogenesis, every route on the map converged on a lone island or a narrow
isthmus, ochre against ocean blue. These infrastructure fields built the basic
mental architecture every citizen had in common, shaping both the mindłs
overarching design and the fine details of vital subsystems.

Elsewhere, the map recorded a spread of possibilities: a
broad landmass, or a scattered archipelago. Trait fields offered a selection of
codes, each with a known effect on the mindłs detailed structure, with
variations ranging from polar extremes of innate temperament or aesthetics down
to minute differences in neural architecture less significant than the creases
on a flesherłs palm. They appeared in shades of green as wildly contrasting or
as flatly indistinguishable as the traits themselves.

The remaining fieldswhere no changes to the seed had yet
been tested, and no predictions could be madewere classified as indeterminate.
Here, the one tried code, the known landmark, was shown as grey against white:
a mountain peak protruding through a band of clouds which concealed everything
to the east or west of it. No more detail could be resolved from afar; whatever
lay beneath the clouds could only be discovered firsthand.

Whenever the conceptory created an orphan, it set all the benignly
mutable trait fields to valid codes chosen at random, since there were no
parents to mimic or please. Then it selected a thousand indeterminate fields,
and treated them in much the same fashion: throwing a thousand quantum dice to
choose a random path through terra incognita. Every orphan was an explorer,
sent to map uncharted territory.

And every orphan was the uncharted territory itself.

T

he conceptory placed the new orphan seed in the middle of
the wombłs memory, a single strand of information suspended in a vacuum of
zeros. The seed meant nothing to itself; alone, it might as well have been the
last stream of Morse, fleeing through the void past a distant star. But the
womb was a virtual machine designed to execute the seedłs instructions, and a
dozen more layers of software led down to the polis itself, a lattice of
flickering molecular switches. A sequence of bits, a string of passive data,
could do nothing, change nothingbut in the womb, the seedłs meaning fell into
perfect alignment with all the immutable rules of all the levels beneath it.
Like a punched card fed into a Jacquard loom, it ceased to be an abstract
message and became a part of the machine.

When the womb read the seed, the seedłs first shaper caused
the space around it to be filled with a simple pattern of data: a single,
frozen numerical wave train, sculpted across the emptiness like a billion
perfect ranks of sand dunes. This distinguished each point from its immediate
neighbours further up or down the same slopebut each crest was still identical
to every other crest, each trough the same as every other trough. The wombłs
memory was arranged as a space with three dimensions, and the numbers stored at
each point implied a fourth. So these dunes were four-dimensional.

A second wave was addedrunning askew to the first, modulated
with a slow steady risecarving each ridge into a series of ascending mounds.
Then a third, and a fourth, each successive wave enriching the pattern,
complicating and fracturing its symmetries: defining directions, building up
gradients, establishing a hierarchy of scales.

The fortieth wave ploughed through an abstract topography
bearing no trace of the crystalline regularity of its origins, with ridges and
furrows as convoluted as the whorls of a fingerprint. Not every point had been
rendered uniquebut enough structure had been created to act as the framework
for everything to come. So the seed gave instructions for a hundred copies of
itself to be scattered across the freshly calibrated landscape.

In the second iteration, the womb read all of the replicated
seedsand at first, the instructions they issued were the same, everywhere.
Then, one instruction called for the point where each seed was being read to
jump forward along the bit string to the next field adjacent to a certain
pattern in the surrounding data: a sequence of ridges with a certain shape,
distinctive but not unique. Since each seed was embedded in different terrain,
each local version of this landmark was situated differently, and the womb
began reading instructions from a different part of every seed. The seeds
themselves were all still identical, but each one could now unleash a different
set of shapers on the space around it, preparing the foundations for a
different specialised region of the psychoblast, the embryonic mind.

The technique was an ancient one: a budding flowerłs nondescript
stem cells followed a self-laid pattern of chemical cues to differentiate into
sepals or petals, stamens or carpels; an insect pupa doused itself with a
protein gradient which triggered, at different doses, the different cascades of
gene activity needed to sculpt abdomen, thorax or head. Konishiłs digital
version skimmed off the essence of the process: divide up space by marking it
distinctively, then let the local markings inflect the unwinding of all further
instructions, switching specialised subprograms on and offsubprograms which in
turn would repeat the whole cycle on ever finer scales, gradually transforming
the first rough-hewn structures into miracles of filigreed precision.

By the eighth iteration, the wombłs memory contained a hundred
trillion copies of the mind seed; no more would be required. Most continued to
carve new detail into the landscape around thembut some gave up on shapers
altogether, and started running shriekers: brief loops of instructions which
fed streams of pulses into the primitive networks which had grown up between
the seeds. The tracks of these networks were just the highest ridges the
shapers had built, and the pulses were tiny arrowheads, one and two steps
higher. The shapers had worked in four dimensions, so the networks themselves were
three-dimensional. The womb breathed life into these conventions, making the
pulses race along the tracks like a quadrillion cars shuttling between the
trillion junctions of a ten-thousand-tiered monorail.

Some shriekers sent out metronomic bit-streams; others produced
pseudo-random stutters. The pulses flowed through the mazes of construction
where the networks were still being formedwhere almost every track was still
connected to every other, because no decision to prune had yet been made. Woken
by the traffic, new shapers started up and began to disassemble the excess
junctions, preserving only those where a sufficient number of pulses were
arriving simultaneouslychoosing, out of all the countless alternatives,
pathways which could operate in synchrony. There were dead ends in the
networks-in-progress, toobut if they were travelled often enough, other
shapers noticed, and constructed extensions. It didnłt matter that these first
streams of data were meaningless; any kind of signal was enough to help whittle
the lowest-level machinery of thought into existence.

In many polises, new citizens werenłt grown at all; they
were assembled directly from generic subsystems. But the Konishi method
provided a certain quasi-biological robustness, a certain seamlessness. Systems
grown together, interacting even as they were being formed, resolved most kinds
of potential mismatch themselves, with no need for an external mind-builder to
fine-tune all the finished components to ensure that they didnłt clash.

Amidst all this organic plasticity and compromise, though,
the infrastructure fields could still stake out territory for a few standardised
subsystems, identical from citizen to citizen. Two of these were channels for
incoming dataone for gestalt, and one for linear, the two primary modalities
of all Konishi citizens, distant descendants of vision and hearing. By the
orphanłs two-hundredth iteration, the channels themselves were fully formed,
but the inner structures to which they fed their data, the networks for classifying
and making sense of it, were still undeveloped, still unrehearsed.

Konishi polis itself was buried two hundred metres beneath
the Siberian tundra, but via fibre and satellite links the input channels could
bring in data from any forum in the Coalition of Polises, from probes orbiting
every planet and moon in the solar system, from drones wandering the forests
and oceans of Earth, from ten million kinds of scape or abstract sensorium. The
first problem of perception was learning how to choose from this
superabundance.

In the orphan psychoblast, the half-formed navigator wired
to the controls of the input channels began issuing a stream of requests for
information. The first few thousand requests yielded nothing but a monotonous
stream of error codes; they were incorrectly formed, or referred to
non-existent sources of data. But every psychoblast was innately biased towards
finding the polis library (if not, it would have taken millennia) and the
navigator kept trying until it hit on a valid address, and data flooded through
the channels: a gestalt image of a lion, accompanied by the linear word for the
animal.

The navigator instantly abandoned trial and error and went
into a spasm of repetition, summoning the same frozen image of the lion again
and again. This continued until even the crudest of its embryonic
change-discriminators finally stopped firing, and it drifted back towards
experimentation.

Gradually, a half-sensible compromise evolved between the
orphanłs two kinds of proto-curiosity: the drive to seek out novelty, and the
drive to seek out recurring patterns. It browsed the library, learning how to
bring in streams of connected informationsequential images of recorded motion,
and then more abstract chains of cross-referencesunderstanding nothing, but
wired to reinforce its own behaviour when it struck the right balance between
coherence and change.

Images and sounds, symbols and equations, flooded through
the orphanłs classifying networks, leaving behind, not the fine detailsnot the
spacesuited figure standing on grey-and-white rock against a pitch black sky;
not the calm, naked figure disintegrating beneath a grey swarm of nanomachinesbut
an imprint of the simplest regularities, the most common associations. The
networks discovered the circle/sphere: in images of the sun and planets, in
iris and pupil, in fallen fruit, in a thousand different artworks, artifacts,
and mathematical diagrams. They discovered the linear word for �person", and
bound it tentatively both to the regularities which defined the gestalt icon
for �citizen", and to the features they found in common among the many images
of fleshers and gleisner robots.

By the five-hundredth iteration, the categories extracted
from the libraryłs data had given rise to a horde of tiny sub-systems in the
input-classifying networks: ten thousand word-traps and image-traps, all poised
and waiting to be sprung; ten thousand pattern-recognising monomaniacs staring
into the information stream, constantly alert for their own special targets.

These traps began to form connections with each other, using
them at first just to share their judgments, to sway each otherłs decisions. If
the trap for the image of a lion was triggered, then the traps for its linear
name, for the kind of sounds other lions had been heard to make, for common
features seen in their behaviour (licking cubs, pursuing antelope) all became
hypersensitive. Sometimes the incoming data triggered a whole cluster of linked
traps all at once, strengthening their mutual connections, but sometimes there
was time for over-eager associate traps to start firing prematurely. The lion
shape has been recognisedand though the word �lion" has not yet been detected,
the �lion" word-trap is tentatively firing ... and so are the traps for
cub-licking and antelope-chasing.

The orphan had begun to anticipate, to hold expectations.

By the thousandth iteration, the connections between the
traps had developed into an elaborate network in its own right, and new
structures had arisen in this networksymbolswhich could be triggered by each
other as easily as by any data from the input channels. The lion image-trap, on
its own, had merely been a template held up to the world to be declared a match
or a mismatcha verdict without implications. The lion symbol could encode an unlimited
web of implicationsand that web could be tapped at any time, whether or not a
lion was visible.

Mere recognition was giving way to the first faint hints of
meaning.

The infrastructure fields had built the orphan standard
output channels for linear and gestalt, but as yet the matching navigator,
needed to address outgoing data to some specific destination in Konishi or
beyond, remained inactive. By the two-thousandth iteration, symbols began to
jostle for access to the output channels, regardless. They used their trapsł
templates to parrot the sound or image which each had learnt to recogniseand
it didnłt matter if they uttered the linear words �lion", �cub", �antelope"
into a void, because the input and output channels were wired together, on the
inside.

The orphan began to hear itself think.

Not the whole pandemonium; it couldnłt give voiceor even
gestaltto everything at once. Out of the myriad associations every scene from
the library evoked, only a few symbols at a time could gain control of the
nascent language production networks. And though birds were wheeling in the
sky, and the grass was waving, and a cloud of dust and insects was rising up in
the animalsł wakeand more, much more ... the symbols which won out before the
whole scene vanished were:

�Lion chasing antelope."

Startled, the navigator cut off the flood of external data.
The linear words cycled from channel to channel, distinct against the silence;
the gestalt images summoned up the essence of the chase again and again, an
idealised reconstruction shorn of all forgotten details.

Then the memory faded to black, and the navigator reached
out to the library again.

The orphanłs thoughts themselves never shrank to a single orderly
progressionrather, symbols fired in ever richer and more elaborate cascadesbut
positive feedback sharpened the focus, and the mind resonated with its own
strongest ideas. The orphan had learnt to single out one or two threads from
the symbolsł endless thousand-strand argument. It had learnt to narrate its own
experience.

The orphan was almost half a megatau old, now. It had a vocabulary
of ten thousand words, a short-term memory, expectations stretching several tau
into the future, and a simple stream of consciousness. But it still had no idea
that there was such a thing in the world as itself.

T

he conceptory mapped the developing mind after every iteration,
scrupulously tracing the effects of the randomised indeterminate fields. A
sentient observer of the same information might have visualised a thousand
delicate interlocking fractals, like tangled, feathery, zero-gee crystals,
sending out ever-finer branches to crisscross the womb as the fields were read
and acted upon, and their influence diffused from network to network. The
conceptory didnłt visualise anything; it just processed the data, and reached
its conclusions.

So far, the mutations appeared to have caused no harm. Every
individual structure in the orphanłs mind was functioning broadly as expected,
and the traffic with the library, and other sampled data streams, showed no
signs of incipient global pathologies.

If a psychoblast was found to be damaged, there was nothing
in principle to stop the conceptory from reaching into the womb and repairing
every last malformed structure, but the consequences could be as unpredictable
as the consequences of growing the seed in the first place. Localised �surgery"
sometimes introduced incompatibilities with the rest of the psychoblast, while
alterations widespread and thorough enough to guarantee success could be
self-defeating, effectively obliterating the original psychoblast and replacing
it with an assembly of parts cloned from past healthy ones.

But there were risks, too, in doing nothing. Once a
psychoblast became self-aware, it was granted citizenship, and intervention
without consent became impossible. This was not a matter of mere custom or law;
the principle was built into the deepest level of the polis. A citizen who
spiralled down into insanity could spend teratau in a state of confusion and
pain, with a mind too damaged to authorise help, or even to choose extinction.
That was the price of autonomy: an inalienable right to madness and suffering,
inseparable from the right to solitude and peace.

So the citizens of Konishi had programmed the conceptory to
err on the side of caution. It continued to observe the orphan closely, ready
to terminate psychogenesis at the first sign of dysfunction.

N

ot long after the five-thousandth iteration, the orphanłs
output navigator began to fireand a tug-of-war began. The output navigator was
wired to seek feedback, to address itself to someone or something that showed a
response. But the input navigator had long since grown accustomed to confining
itself to the polis library, a habit which had been powerfully rewarded. Both
navigators were wired with a drive to bring each other into alignment, to
connect to the same address, enabling the citizen to listen and speak in the
same placea useful conversational skill. But it meant that the orphanłs
chatter of speech and icons flowed straight back to the library, which
completely ignored it.

Faced with this absolute indifference, the output navigator
sent repressor signals into the change-discriminator networks, undermining the
attraction of the libraryłs mesmerising show, bullying the input navigator out
of its rut. Dancing a weird chaotic lockstep, the two navigators began hopping
from scape to scape, polis to polis, planet to planet. Looking for someone to
talk to.

They caught a thousand random glimpses of the physical world
along the way: a radar image of a dust storm sweeping across the sea of dunes
ringing the north polar ice cap of Mars; the faint infrared plume of a small
comet disintegrating in the atmosphere of Uranusan event that had taken place
decades before, but lingered in the satellitełs discriminating memory. They
even chanced upon a realtime feed from a drone weaving its way across the East
African savanna towards a pride of lions, but unlike the libraryłs flowing
images this vision seemed intractably frozen, and after a few tau they moved
on.

When the orphan stumbled on the address for a Konishi forum,
it saw a square paved with smooth rhombuses of mineral blues and greys,
arranged in a pattern dense with elusive regularities but never quite repeating
itself. A fountain sprayed liquid silver towards a cloud-streaked, burnt-orange
sky; as each stream broke apart into mirrored droplets half-way up its arc, the
shiny globules deformed into tiny winged piglets which flew around the
fountain, braiding each othersł flight paths and grunting cheerfully before
diving back into the pool. Stone cloisters ringed the square, the inner side of
the walkway a series of broad arches and elaborately decorated colonnades. Some
of the arches had been given unusual twistsEschered or Kleined, skewed through
invisible extra dimensions.

The orphan had seen similar structures in the library, and
knew the linear words for most of them; the scape itself was so unremarkable
that the orphan said nothing about it at all. And the orphan had viewed
thousands of scenes of moving, talking citizens, but it was acutely aware of a
difference here, though it could not yet grasp clearly what it was. The gestalt
images themselves mostly reminded it of icons it had seen before, or the stylised
fleshers it had seen in representational art: far more diverse, and far more
mercurial, than real fleshers could ever be. Their form was constrained not by
physiology or physics, but only by the conventions of gestaltthe need to
proclaim, beneath all inflections and subtleties, one primary meaning: I am a
citizen.

The orphan addressed the forum: �People."

The linear conversations between the citizens were public,
but muteddegraded in proportion to distance in the scapeand the orphan heard
only an unchanging murmur.

It tried again. �People!"

The icon of the nearest citizena dazzling multihued form
like a stained-glass statue, about two delta highturned to face the orphan. An
innate structure in the input navigator rotated the orphanłs angle of view straight
towards the icon. The output navigator, driven to follow it, made the orphanłs
own iconnow a crude, unconscious parody of the citizenłsturn the same way.

The citizen glinted blue and gold. Vis translucent face
smiled, and ve said, �Hello, orphan."

A response, at last! The output navigatorłs feedback
detector shut off its scream of boredom, damping down the restlessness which
had powered the search. It flooded the mind with signals to repress any system
which might intervene and drag it away from this precious find.

The orphan parroted: �Hello, orphan."

The citizen smiled again�Yes, hello"then turned back to
vis friends.

�People! Hello!"

Nothing happened.

�Citizens! People!"

The group ignored the orphan. The feedback detector backtracked
on its satisfaction rating, making the navigators restless again. Not restless
enough to abandon the forum, but enough to move within it.

The orphan darted from place to place, crying out: �People!
Hello!" It moved without momentum or inertia, gravity or friction, merely
tweaking the least significant bits of the input navigatorłs requests for data,
which the scape interpreted as the position and angle of the orphanłs
point-of-view. The matching bits from the output navigator determined where and
how the orphanłs speech and icon were merged into the scape.

The navigators learnt to move close enough to the citizens
to be easily heard. Some responded�Hello, orphan"before turning away. The
orphan echoed their icons back at them: simplified or intricate, rococo or
spartan, mock-biological, mock-artifactual, forms outlined with helices of
luminous smoke, or filled with vivid hissing serpents, decorated with blazing
fractal encrustations, or draped in textureless blackbut always the same
biped, the same ape-shape, as constant beneath the riot of variation as the
letter A in a hundred mad monksł illuminated manuscripts.

Gradually, the orphanłs input-classifying networks began to
grasp the difference between the citizens in the forum and all the icons it had
seen in the library. As well as the image, each icon here exuded a non-visual
gestalt taga quality like a distinctive odour for a flesher, though more
localised, and much richer in possibilities. The orphan could make no sense of
this new form of data, but now its infotropea late-developing structure which
had grown as a second level over the simpler novelty and pattern detectorsbegan
to respond to the deficit in understanding. It picked up the tenuous hint of a
regularityevery citizenłs icon, here, comes with a unique and unvarying tagand
expressed its dissatisfaction. The orphan hadnłt previously bothered echoing
the tag, but now, spurred on by the infotrope, it approached a group of three
citizens and began to mimic one of them, tag and all. The reward was immediate.

The citizen exclaimed angrily, �Donłt do that, idiot!"

�Hello!"

�No one will believe you if you claim to be meleast of all
me. Understand? Now go away!" This citizen had metallic, pewter-grey skin. Ve
flashed vis tag on and off for emphasis; the orphan did the same.

�No!" The citizen was now sending out a second tag,
alongside the original. �See? I challenge youand you canłt respond. So why
bother lying?"

�Hello!"

�Go away!"

The orphan was riveted; this was the most attention it had
ever received.

�Hello, citizen!"

The pewter face sagged, almost melting with exaggerated weariness.
�Donłt you know who you are? Donłt you know your own signature?"

Another citizen said calmly, �It must be the new orphanstill
in the womb. Your newest co-politan, Inoshiro. You ought to welcome it."

This citizen was covered in short, golden-brown fur. The orphan
said, �Lion." It tried mimicking the new citizenand suddenly all three of them
were laughing.

The third citizen said, �It wants to be you now, Gabriel."

The first, pewter-skinned citizen said, �If it doesnłt know
its own name, we should call it ęidiot.ł"

�Donłt be cruel. I could show you memories, little
part-sibling." The third citizenłs icon was a featureless black silhouette.

�Now it wants to be Blanca."

The orphan started mimicking each citizen in turn. The three
responded by chanting strange linear sounds which meant nothing�Inoshiro!
Gabriel! Blanca! Inoshiro! Gabriel! Blanca!"just as the orphan sent out the
gestalt images and tags.

Short-term pattern recognisers seized on the connection, and
the orphan joined in the linear chantand continued it for a while, when the
others fell silent. But after a few repetitions the pattern grew stale.

The pewter-skinned citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and
said, �Iłm Inoshiro."

The golden-furred citizen clasped vis hand to vis chest and
said, �Iłm Gabriel."

The black-silhouetted citizen gave vis hand a thin white
outline to keep it from vanishing as ve moved it in front of vis trunk, and
said, �Iłm Blanca."

The orphan mimicked each citizen once, speaking the linear
word theyłd spoken, aping their hand gesture. Symbols had formed for all three
of them, binding their icons, complete with tags, and the linear words togethereven
though the tags and the linear words still connected to nothing else.

The citizen whose icon had made them all chant �Inoshiro"
said, �So far so good. But how does it get a name of its own?"

The one with its tag bound to �Blanca" said, �Orphans name
themselves."

The orphan echoed, �Orphans name themselves."

The citizen bound to �Gabriel" pointed to the one bound to �Inoshiro",
and said, �Ve is?" The citizen bound to �Blanca" said �Inoshiro."

Then the citizen bound to �Inoshiro" pointed back at ver and
said �Ve is?" This time, the citizen bound to �Blanca" replied, �Blanca." The
orphan joined in, pointing where the others pointed, guided by innate systems
which helped make sense of the scapełs geometry, and completing the pattern
easily even when no one else did.

Then the golden-furred citizen pointed at the orphan, and
said: �Ve is?"

The input navigator spun the orphanłs angle of view, trying
to see what the citizen was pointing at. When it found nothing behind the
orphan, it moved its point of view backwards, closer to the golden-furred
citizenmomentarily breaking step with the output navigator.

Suddenly, the orphan saw the icon it was projecting itselfa
crude amalgam of the three citizensł icons, all black fur and yellow metalnot
just as the usual faint mental image from the cross-connected channels, but as
a vivid scape-object beside the other three.

This was what the golden-furred citizen bound to �Gabriel"
was pointing at.

The infotrope went wild. It couldnłt complete the unfinished
regularityit couldnłt answer the gamełs question for this strange fourth
citizenbut the hole in the pattern needed to be filled.

The orphan watched the fourth citizen change shape and colour,
out there in the scape ... changes perfectly mirroring its own random
fidgeting: sometimes mimicking one of the other three citizens, sometimes
simply playing with the possibilities of gestalt. This mesmerised the
regularity detectors for a while, but it only made the infotrope more restless.

The infotrope combined and recombined all the factors at
hand, and set a short-term goal: making the pewter-skinned �Inoshiro" icon
change, the way the fourth citizenłs icon was changing. This triggered a faint
anticipatory firing of the relevant symbols, a mental image of the desired
event. But though the image of a wiggling, pulsating citizen-icon easily won
control of the gestalt output channel, it wasnłt the �Inoshiro" icon that
changedjust the fourth citizenłs icon, as before.

The input navigator drifted of its own accord back into the
same location as the output navigator, and the fourth citizen abruptly
vanished. The infotrope pushed the navigators apart again; the fourth citizen
reappeared.

The �Inoshiro" citizen said, �Whatłs it doing?" The �Blanca"
citizen replied, �Just watch, and be patient. You might learn something."

A new symbol was already forming, a representation of the
strange fourth citizenthe only one whose icon seemed bound by a mutual
attraction to the orphanłs viewpoint in the scape, and the only one whose
actions the orphan could anticipate and control with such ease. So were all
four citizens the same kind of thinglike all lions, all antelope, all circles ...
or not? The connections between the symbols remained tentative.

The �Inoshiro" citizen said, �Iłm bored! Let someone else baby-sit
it!" Ve danced around the grouptaking turns imitating the �Blanca" and �Gabriel"
icons, and reverting to vis original form. �Whatłs my name? I donłt know! Whatłs
my signature? I donłt have one! Iłm an orphan! Iłm an orphan! I donłt even know
how I look!"

When the orphan perceived the �Inoshiro" citizen taking on
the icons of the other two, it almost abandoned its whole classification scheme
in confusion. The �Inoshiro" citizen was behaving more like the fourth citizen,
nowthough vis actions still didnłt coincide with the orphanłs intentions.

The orphanłs symbol for the fourth citizen kept track of
that citizenłs appearance and location in the scape, but it was also beginning
to distil the essence of the orphanłs own mental images and short-term goals,
creating a summary of all the aspects of the orphanłs state of mind which
seemed to have some connection to the fourth citizenłs behaviour. Few symbols
possessed sharply defined boundaries, though; most were as permeable and promiscuous
as plasmid-swapping bacteria. The symbol for the �Inoshiro" citizen copied some
of the state-of-mind structures from the symbol for the fourth citizen, and
began trying them out for itself.

At first, the ability to represent highly summarised �mental
imagesł and �goalsł was no help at allbecause it was still linked to the
orphanłs state of mind. The �Inoshiro" symbolłs blindly cloned machinery kept
predicting that the �Inoshiro" citizen would behave according to the orphanłs
own plans ... and that never happened. In the face of this repeated failure,
the links soon witheredand the tiny, crude model-of-a-mind left inside the �Inoshiro"
symbol was set free to find the �Inoshiro" state-of-mind that best matched the
citizenłs actual behaviour.

The symbol tried out different connections, different
theories, hunting for the one that made most sense ... and the orphan suddenly
grasped the fact that the �Inoshiro" citizen had been imitating the fourth
citizen.

The infotrope seized on this revelationand tried to make
the fourth citizen mimic the �Inoshiro" citizen back.

The fourth citizen proclaimed, �Iłm an orphan! Iłm an
orphan! I donłt even know how I look!"

The �Gabriel" citizen pointed at the fourth citizen and
said, �Ve is an orphan!" The �Inoshiro" citizen agreed wearily, �Ve is an
orphan. But why does ve have to be this slow!"

Inspireddriven by the infotropethe orphan tried playing
the �Ve is?" game again, this time using the response �an orphan" for the
fourth citizen. The others confirmed the choice, and soon the words were bound
to the symbol for the fourth citizen.

W

hen the orphanłs three friends left the scape, the fourth
citizen remained. But the fourth citizen had exhausted vis ability to offer
interesting surprises, so after pestering some of the other citizens to no
avail, the orphan returned to the library.

The input navigator had learnt the simplest indexing scheme
used by the library, and when the infotrope hunted for ways to tie up the loose
ends in the patterns half-formed in the scape, it succeeded in driving the
input navigator to locations in the library which referred to the four citizensł
mysterious linear words: Inoshiro, Gabriel, Blanca, and Orphan. There were
streams of data indexed by each of these words, though none seemed to connect
to the citizens themselves. The orphan saw so many images of fleshers, often
with wings, associated with the word �Gabriel" that it built a whole symbol out
of the regularities it found, but the new symbol barely overlapped with that of
the golden-furred citizen.

The orphan drifted away from its infotrope-driven search
many times; old addresses in the library, etched in memory, tugged at the input
navigator. Once, viewing a scene of a grimy flesher child holding up an empty
wooden bowl, the orphan grew bored and veered back towards more familiar
territory. Halfway there, it came across a scene of an adult flesher crouching
beside a bewildered lion cub and lifting it into vis arms.

A lioness lay on the ground behind them, motionless and bloody.
The flesher stroked the head of the cub. �Poor little Yatima."

Something in the scene transfixed the orphan. It whispered
to the library, �Yatima. Yatima." It had never heard the word before, but the
sound of it resonated deeply.

The lion cub mewed. The flesher crooned, �My poor little orphan."

T

he orphan moved between the library and the scape with the
orange sky and the flying-pig fountain. Sometimes its three friends were there,
or other citizens would play with it for a while; sometimes there was only the
fourth citizen.

The fourth citizen rarely appeared the same from visit to visitve
tended to resemble the most striking image the orphan had seen in the library
in the preceding few kilotaubut ve was still easy to identify: ve was the one
who only became visible when the two navigators moved apart. Every time the
orphan arrived in the scape, it stepped back from itself and checked out the
fourth citizen. Sometimes it adjusted the icon, bringing it closer to a
specific memory, or fine-tuning it according to the aesthetic preferences of
the input classifying networksbiases first carved out by a few dozen trait
fields, then deepened or silted-up by the subsequent data stream. Sometimes the
orphan mimicked the flesher it had seen picking up the lion cub: tall and
slender, with deep black skin and brown eyes, dressed in a purple robe.

And once, when the citizen bound to �Inoshiro" said with
mock sorrow, �Poor little orphan, you still donłt have a name," the orphan
remembered the scene, and responded, �Poor little Yatima."

The golden-furred citizen said, �I think it does now."

From then on, they all called the fourth citizen �Yatima."
They said it so many times, making such a fuss about it, that the orphan soon
bound it to the symbol as strongly as �Orphan."

The orphan watched the citizen bound to �Inoshiro" chanting
triumphantly at the fourth citizen: �Yatima! Yatima! Ha ha ha! Iłve got five
parents, and five part-siblings, and Iłll always be older than you!"

The orphan made the fourth citizen respond, �Inoshiro! Inoshiro!
Ha ha ha!"

But it couldnłt think what to say next.

B

lanca said, �The gleisners are trimming an asteroidright
now, in realtime. Do you want to come see? Inoshirołs there, Gabrielłs there.
Just follow me!"

Blancałs icon put out a strange new tag, and then abruptly vanished.
The forum was almost empty; there were a few regulars near the fountain, who
the orphan knew would be unresponsive, and there was the fourth citizen, as
always.

Blanca reappeared. �What is it? You donłt know how to follow
me, or you donłt want to come?" The orphanłs language analysis networks had
begun fine-tuning the universal grammar they encoded, rapidly homing in on the
conventions of linear. Words were becoming more than isolated triggers for
symbols, each with a single, fixed meaning; the subtleties of order, context
and inflection were beginning to modulate the symbolsł cascades of interpretation.
This was a request to know what the fourth citizen wanted.

�Play with me!" The orphan had learnt to call the fourth
citizen �I" or �me" rather than �Yatima", but that was just grammar, not self-awareness.

�I want to watch the trimming, Yatima."

�No! Play with me!" The orphan weaved around ver excitedly,
projecting fragments of recent memories: Blanca creating shared scape objectsspinning
numbered blocks, and brightly coloured bouncing ballsand teaching the orphan
how to interact with them.

�Okay, okay! Herełs a new game. I just hope youłre a fast
learner."

Blanca emitted another extra tagthe same general flavour as
before, though not identicalthen vanished again ... only to reappear immediately,
a few hundred delta away across the scape. The orphan spotted ver easily, and
followed at once.

Blanca jumped again. And again. Each time, ve sent out the
new flavour of tag, with a slight variation, before vanishing. Just as the
orphan was starting to find the game dull, Blanca began to stay out of the
scape for a fraction of a tau before reappearingand the orphan spent the time
trying to guess where vełd materialise next, hoping to get to the chosen spot
first.

There seemed to be no pattern to it, though; Blancałs solid
shadow jumped around the forum at random, anywhere from the cloisters to the
fountain, and the orphanłs guesses all failed. It was frustrating ... but
Blancałs games had usually turned out to possess some kind of subtle order in
the past, so the infotrope persisted, combining and recombining existing
pattern detectors into new coalitions, hunting for a way to make sense of the
problem.

The tags! When the infotrope compared the memory of the raw
gestalt data for the tags Blanca was sending with the address the innate
geometry networks computed when the orphan caught sight of ver a moment later,
parts of the two sequences matched up, almost precisely. Again and again. The
infotrope bound the two sources of information togetherrecognising them as two
means of learning the same thingand the orphan began jumping across the scape
without waiting to see where Blanca reappeared.

The first time, their icons overlapped, and the orphan had
to back away before it saw that Blanca really was there, confirming the success
the infotrope had already brashly claimed. The second time, the orphan
instinctively compensated, varying the tag address slightly to keep from
colliding, as it had learnt to do when pursuing Blanca by sight. The third
time, the orphan beat ver to the destination.

�I win!"

�Well done, Yatima! You followed me!"

�I followed you!"

�Shall we go and see the trimming now? With Inoshiro and
Gabriel?"

�Gabriel!"

�Iłll take that as a yes."

Blanca jumped, the orphan followedand the cloistered square
dissolved into a billion stars.

The orphan examined the strange new scape. Between them, the
stars shone in almost every frequency from kilometre-long radio waves to
high-energy gamma rays. The �colour space" of gestalt could be extended
indefinitely, and the orphan had chanced on a few astronomical images in the
library which employed a similar palette, but most terrestrial scenes and most
scapes never went beyond infrared and ultraviolet. Even the satellite views of
planetary surfaces seemed drab and muted in comparison; the planets were too
cold to blaze across the spectrum like this. There were hints of subtle order
in the riot of colourseries of emission and absorption lines, smooth contours
of thermal radiationbut the infotrope, dazzled, gave in to the overload and
simply let the data flow through it; analysis would have to wait for a thousand
more clues. The stars were geometrically featurelesspointlike, distant, their
scape addresses impossible to computebut the orphan had a fleeting mental
image of the act of moving towards them, and imagined, for an instant, the
possibility of seeing them up close.

The orphan spotted a cluster of citizens nearby, and once it
shifted its attention from the backdrop of stars it began to notice dozens of
small groups scattered around the scape. Some of their icons reflected the
ambient radiation, but most were simply visible by decree, making no pretence
of interacting with the starlight.

Inoshiro said, �Why did you have to bring that along?"

As the orphan turned towards ver, it caught sight of a star
far brighter than all the rest, much smaller than the familiar sight in the
Earthłs sky, but unfiltered by the usual blanket of gases and dust.

�The sun?"

Gabriel said, �Yes, thatłs the sun." The golden-furred citizen
floated beside Blanca, who was visible as sharply as ever, darker even than the
cool thin background radiation between the stars.

Inoshiro whined, �Why did you bring Yatima? Itłs too young!
It wonłt understand anything!"

Blanca said, �Just ignore ver, Yatima."

Yatima! Yatima! The orphan knew exactly where Yatima was,
and what ve looked like, without any need to part the navigators and check. The
fourth citizenłs icon had stabilised as the tall flesher in the purple robe whołd
adopted the lion cub, in the library.

Inoshiro addressed the orphan. �Donłt worry Yatima, Iłll try
to explain it to you. If the gleisners didnłt trim this asteroid, then in three
hundred thousand yearsten thousand teratautherełd be a chance it might hit
the Earth. And the sooner they trim it, the less energy it takes. But they
couldnłt do it before, because the equations are chaotic, so they couldnłt
model the approach well enough until now."

The orphan understood none of this. �Blanca wanted me to see
the trimming! But I wanted to play a new game!"

Inoshiro laughed. �So what did ve do? Kidnap you?"

�I followed ver and ve jumped and jumped ... and I followed
ver!" The orphan made a few short jumps around the three of them, trying to
illustrate the point, though it didnłt really convey the business of leaping
right out of one scape into another.

Inoshiro said, �Ssh. Here it comes."

The orphan followed vis gaze to an irregular lump of rock in
the distancelit by the sun, one half in deep shadowmoving swiftly and
steadily towards the loose assembly of citizens. The scape software decorated
the asteroidłs image with gestalt tags packed with information about its
chemical composition, its mass, its spin, its orbital parameters; the orphan
recognised some of these flavours from the library, but it had no real grasp
yet of what they meant.

�One slip of the laser, and the fleshers die in pain!"
Inoshirołs pewter eyes gleamed.

Blanca said dryly, �And just three hundred millennia to try
again."

Inoshiro turned to the orphan and added reassuringly, �But
wełd be all right. Even if it wiped out Konishi on Earth, wełre backed-up all
over the solar system."

The asteroid was close enough now for the orphan to compute
its scape address and its size. It was still some hundred times more distant
than the farthest citizen, but it was approaching rapidly. The waiting
spectators were arranged in a roughly spherical shell, about ten times as large
as the asteroid itselfand the orphan could see at once that if it maintained
its trajectory, the asteroid would pass right through the centre of that
imaginary sphere.

Everyone was watching the rock intently. The orphan wondered
what kind of game this was; a generic symbol had formed which encompassed all
the strangers in the scape, as well as the orphanłs three friends, and this
symbol had inherited the fourth citizenłs property of holding beliefs about
objects which had proved so useful for predicting its behaviour. Maybe people
were waiting to see if the rock would suddenly jump at random, like Blanca had
jumped? The orphan believed they were mistaken; the rock was not a citizen, it
wouldnłt play games with them.

The orphan wanted everyone to know about the rockłs simple
trajectory. It checked its extrapolation one more time, but nothing had
changed; the bearing and speed were as constant as ever. The orphan lacked the
words to explain this to the crowd ... but maybe they could learn things by
watching the fourth citizen, the way the fourth citizen had learnt things from
Blanca.

The orphan jumped across the scape, straight into the path
of the asteroid. A quarter of the sky became pocked and grey, an irregular
hillock on the sunward side casting a band of deep shadow across the
approaching face. For an instant, the orphan was too startled to movemesmerised
by the scale, and the speed, and the awkward, purposeless grandeur of the thingthen
it matched velocities with the rock, and led it back towards the crowd.

People began shouting excitedly, their words immune to the
fictitious vacuum but degraded with distance by the scape, scrambled into a
pulsating roar. The orphan turned away from the asteroid, and saw the nearest
citizens waving and gesticulating.

The fourth citizenłs symbol, plugged directly into the
orphanłs mind, had already concluded that the fourth citizen was tracing out
the asteroidłs path in order to change what the other citizens thought. So the
orphanłs model of the fourth citizen had acquired the property of having
beliefs about what other citizens believed ... and the symbols for Inoshiro,
Blanca, Gabriel, and the crowd itself, snatched at this innovation to try it
out for themselves.

As the orphan plunged into the spherical arena, it could
hear people laughing and cheering. Everyone was watching the fourth citizen,
though the orphan was finally beginning to suspect that no one had really
needed to be shown the trajectory. As it looked back to check that the rock was
still on course, a point on the hillock began to glow with intense infraredand
then erupted with light a thousand times brighter than the sunlit rock around
it, and a thermal spectrum hotter than the sun itself.

The orphan froze, letting the asteroid draw closer. A plume
of incandescent vapour was streaming out of a crater in the hillock; the image
was rich with new gestalt tags, all of them incomprehensible, but the infotrope
burned a promise into the orphanłs mind: I will learn to understand them.

The orphan kept checking the scape addresses of the
reference points it had been following, and it found a microscopic change in
the asteroidłs direction. The flash of lightand this tiny shift in coursewere
what everyone had been waiting to see? The fourth citizen had been wrong about
what they knew, what they thought, what they wanted ... and now they knew that?
The implications rebounded between the symbols, models of minds mirroring models
of minds, as the network hunted for sense and stability.

Before the asteroid could coincide with the fourth citizenłs
icon, the orphan jumped back to its friends.

Inoshiro was furious. �What did you do that for? You ruined
everything! You baby!"

Blanca asked gently, �What did you see, Yatima?"

�The rock jumped a little. But I wanted people to think ...
it wouldnłt."

�Idiot! Youłre always showing off!"

Gabriel said, �Yatima? Why does Inoshiro think you flew with
the asteroid?"

The orphan hesitated. �I donłt know what Inoshiro thinks."

The symbols for the four citizens shifted into a
configuration theyłd tried a thousand times before: the fourth citizen, Yatima,
set apart from the rest, singled out as uniquethis time, as the only one whose
thoughts the orphan could know with certainty. And as the symbol network hunted
for better ways to express this knowledge, circuitous connections began to
tighten, redundant links began to dissolve.

There was no difference between the model of Yatimałs
beliefs about the other citizens, buried inside the symbol for Yatima ... and
the models of the other citizens themselves, inside their respective symbols.
The network finally recognised this, and began to discard the unnecessary
intermediate stages. The model for Yatimałs beliefs became the whole, wider
network of the orphanłs symbolic knowledge.

And the model of Yatimałs beliefs about Yatimałs mind became
the whole model of Yatimałs mind: not a tiny duplicate, or a crude summary,
just a tight bundle of connections looping back out to the thing itself.

The orphanłs stream of consciousness surged through the new
connections, momentarily unstable with feedback: I think that Yatima thinks
that I think that Yatima thinks ...

Then the symbol network identified the last redundancies,
cut a few internal links, and the infinite regress collapsed into a simple,
stable resonance:

I am thinking

I am thinking that I know what Iłm thinking.

Yatima said, �I know what Iłm thinking."

Inoshiro replied airily, �What makes you think anyone cares?"

For the five-thousand-and-twenty-third time, the conceptory
checked the architecture of the orphanłs mind against the polisłs definition of
self-awareness.

Every criterion was now satisfied.

The conceptory reached into the part of itself which ran the
womb, and halted it, halting the orphan. It modified the machinery of the womb
slightly, allowing it to run independently, allowing it to be reprogrammed from
within. Then it constructed a signature for the new citizentwo unique
megadigit numbers, one private, one publicand embedded them in the orphanłs
cypherclerk, a small structure which had lain dormant, waiting for these keys.
It sent a copy of the public signature out into the polis, to be catalogued, to
be counted.

Finally, the conceptory passed the virtual machine which had
once been the womb into the hands of the polis operating system, surrendering
all power over its contents. Cutting it loose, like a cradle set adrift in a
stream. It was now the new citizenłs exoself: its shell, its non-sentient
carapace. The citizen was free to reprogram it at will, but the polis would
permit no other software to touch it. The cradle was unsinkable, except from
within.

Inoshiro said, �Stop it! Who are you pretending to be now?"

Yatima didnłt need to part the navigators; ve knew vis icon
hadnłt changed appearance, but was now sending out a gestalt tag. It was the
kind vełd noticed the citizens broadcasting the first time vełd visited the
flying-pig scape.

Blanca sent Yatima a different kind of tag; it contained a
random number encoded via the public half of Yatimałs signature. Before Yatima
could even wonder about the meaning of the tag, vis cypherclerk responded to
the challenge automatically: decoding Blancałs message, re-encrypting it via
Blancałs own public signature, and echoing it back as a third kind of tag.
Claim of identity. Challenge. Response.

Blanca said, �Welcome to Konishi, Citizen Yatima." Ve turned
to Inoshiro, who repeated Blancałs challenge then muttered sullenly, �Welcome,
Yatima."

Gabriel said, �And Welcome to the Coalition of Polises."

Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemusedoblivious to the
ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw
vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon ... but even
as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of
question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is
thinking this? Who is seeing these stars, and these citizens? Who is wondering
about these thoughts, and these sights?

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering
hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the
rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together,
like skin.

Who is thinking this?

I am.

Our Lady of Chernobyl

We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for
surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon earth.

The envoy of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, describing the Church
of the Divine Wisdom in Constantinople, 987.

It is the rustiest old barn in heathendom.

S.L. Clemens, ditto, 1867.

* * * *

Luciano Masini had the haunted demeanor and puffy complexion
of an insomniac. Iłd picked him as a man whołd begun to ask himself, around two
a.m. nightly, if his twenty-year-old wife really had found the lover of her
dreams in an industrialist three times her age-however witty, however erudite,
however wealthy. I hadnłt followed his career in any detail, but his most
famous move had been to buy the entire superconducting cables division of
Pirelli, when the parent company was dismembered in ę09. He was impeccably
dressed in a gray silk suit, the cut precisely old-fashioned enough to be
stylish, and he looked like hełd once been strikingly handsome. A perfect
candidate, I decided, for vain self-delusion and belated second thoughts.

I was wrong. What he said was: �I want you to locate a package
for me."

�A package?" I did my best to sound fascinated-although if
adultery was stultifying, lost property was worse. �Missingen route from-?"

�Z�rich."

�To Milan?"

�Of course!" Masini almost flinched, as if the idea that he
might have been shipping his precious cargo elsewhere, intentionally, caused
him physical pain.

I said carefully, �Nothing is ever really lost. You might
find that a strongly-worded letter from your lawyers to the courier is enough
to work miracles."

Masini smiled humorlessly. �I donłt think so. The courier is
dead."

Afternoon light filled the room; the window faced east, away
from the sun, but the sky itself was dazzling. I suffered a moment of strange
clarity, a compelling sense of having just shaken off a lingering drowsiness,
as if Iłd begun the conversation half asleep and only now fully woken. Masini
let the copper orrery on the wall behind me beat twice, each tick a soft,
complicated meshing of a thousand tiny gears. Then he said, �She was found in a
hotel room in Vienna, three days ago. Shełd been shot in the head at close
range. And no, she was not meant to take any such detour."

�What was in the package?"

�A small icon." He indicated a height of some thirty centimeters.
�An eighteenth-century depiction of the Madonna. Originally from the Ukraine."

�The Ukraine? Do you know how it came to be in Z�rich?" Iłd
heard that the Ukrainian government had recently launched a renewed campaign to
persuade certain countries to get serious about the return of stolen artwork.
Crateloads had been smuggled out during the turmoil and corruption of the
eighties and nineties.

�It was part of the estate of a well-known collector, a man
with an impeccable reputation. My own art dealer examined all the paperwork,
the bills of sale, the export licenses, before giving his blessing to the deal."

�Paperwork can be forged."

Masini struggled visibly to control his impatience. �Anything
can beforged . What do you want me to say? I have no reason to suspect that
this was stolen property. Iłm not a criminal, Signor Fabrizio."

�Iłm not suggesting that you are. So ... money and goods
changed hands in Z�rich? The icon was yours when it was stolen?"

�Yes."

�May I ask how much you paid for it?"

�Five million Swiss francs."

I let that pass without comment, although for a moment I wondered
if Iłd heard correctly. I was no expert, but I did know that Orthodox icons
were usually painted by anonymous artists, and were intended to be as far from
unique as individual copies of the Bible. There were exceptions, of course-a
few treasured, definitive examples of each type-but they were a great deal
older thaneighteenth-century . However fine the craftsmanship, however
well-preserved, five million sounded far too high.

I said, �Surely you insured-?"

�Of course! And in a year or two, I may even get my money
back. But Iłd much prefer to have the icon. Thatłs why I purchased it in the
first place."

�And your insurers will agree. Theyłll be doing their best
to find it." If another investigator had a head start on me, I didnłt want to
waste my time-least of all if Iłd be competing against a Swiss insurance firm
on their home ground.

Masini fixed his bloodshot eyes on me. �Theirbest is not
good enough! Yes, theyłll want to save themselves the money, and theyłll treat
this potential loss with great seriousness ... like the accountants they are.
And the Austrian police will try very hard to find the murderer, no doubt.
Neither are moved by any sense of urgency. Neither would be greatly troubled if
nothing were resolved for months. Or years."

If Iłd been wrong about Masiniłs nocturnal visions of
adultery, Iłd been right about one thing: there was a passion, an obsession,
driving him which ran as deep as jealousy, as deep as pride, as deep as sex. He
leaned forward across the desk, restraining himself from seizing my shirtfront,
but commanding and imploring me with as much arrogance and pathos as if he had.

�Two weeks! Iłll give you two weeks-and you can name your
fee! Deliver the icon to me within a fortnight ... and everything I have is
yours for the asking!"

* * * *

I treated Masiniłs extravagant offer with as much
seriousness as it deserved, but I accepted the case. There were worse ways to
spend a fortnight, I decided, than consulting with informants on the fringes of
the black market over long lunches in restaurants fit for connoisseurs of fine
art.

The obvious starting point, though, was the courier. Her
name was Gianna De Angelis: twenty-seven years old, five years in the business,
with a spotless reputation; according to the regulatory authorities, not a
single complaint had ever been lodged against her, by customer or employer. Shełd
been working for a small Milanese firm with an equally good record: this was
their first loss, in twenty years, of either merchandise or personnel.

I spoke to two of her colleagues; they gave me the barest
facts, but wouldnłt be drawn into speculation. The transaction had taken place
in a Z�rich bank vault, then De Angelis had taken a taxi straight to the
airport. Shełd phoned head office to say that all was well, less than five
minutes before she was due to board the flight home. The plane had left on
time, but she hadnłt been on it. Shełd bought a ticket from Tyrolean
Airlines-using her own credit card-and flown straight to Vienna, carrying the
attach� case containing the icon as hand luggage. Six hours later, she was
dead.

I tracked down her fianc�, a TV sound technician, to the
apartment theyłd shared. He was red-eyed, unshaven, hung-over. Still in shock,
or I doubt he would have let me through the door. I offered my condolences,
helped him finish a bottle of wine, then gently inquired whether Gianna had
received any unusual phone calls, made plans to spend extravagant sums of
money, or had appeared uncharacteristically nervous or excited in recent weeks.
I had to cut the interview short when he began trying to crack my skull open
with the empty bottle.

I returned to the office and began trawling the databases,
from the official public records right down to the patchwork collections of
mailing lists and crudely collated electronic debris purveyed by assorted
cyberpimps. One system, operating out of Tokyo, could search the worldłs
digitized newspapers, and key frames from TV news reports, looking for a
matching face-whether or not the subjectłs name was mentioned in the caption or
commentary. I found a near-twin walking arm-in-arm with a gangster outside a
Buenos Aires courthouse in 2007, and another weeping in the wreckage of a
village in the Philippines, her family killed in a typhoon, in 2010, but there
were no genuine sightings. A text-based search of local media yielded exactly
two entries; shełd only made it into the papers at birth and at death.

So far as I could discover, her financial position had been
perfectly sound. No one had any kind of dirt on her, and there wasnłt the
faintest whiff of an association with organized crime. The icon would have been
far from the most valuable item shełd ever laid her hands on-and I still
thought Masini had paid a vastly inflated price for it. Artwork-anonymous or
not-wasnłt exactly the most liquid of assets. So why had she sold out, on this
particular job, when there must have been a hundred opportunities which had
been far more tempting?

Maybe she hadnłt been trying to sell the icon in Vienna.
Maybe shełd been coerced into going there. I couldnłt imagine anyone �kidnapping"
her in the middle of the airport, marching her over to the ticket office,
through the security scanners and onto the plane. Shełd been armed, highly
trained, and carrying all the electronics she could possibly need to summon
immediate assistance. But even if she hadnłt had an X-ray-transparent gun
pointed at her heart every step of the way, maybe a more subtle threat had compelled
her.

As dusk fell on the first day of my allotted fourteen, I
paced the office irritably, already feeling pessimistic. De Angelisłs image
smiled coolly on the terminal; her grieving loverłs wine tasted sour in my
throat. This woman was dead,that was the crime ... and I was being paid to hunt
for a faded piece of kitsch. If I found the killers it would be incidental. And
the truth was, I was hoping I wouldnłt.

I opened the blinds and looked down toward the city center.
Flea-sized specks scurried across the Piazza del Duomo, the cathedralłs forest
of mad Gothic pinnacles towering above them. I rarely noticed the cathedral; it
was just another part of the expensive view (like the Alps, visible from the
reception room) ... and the view was just part of the whole high-class image
which enabled me to charge twenty times as much for my services as any
back-alley operator. Now I blinked at the sight of it as if it were an
hallucination, it seemed so alien, so out of place beside the gleaming dark
ceramic buildings of twenty-first century Milan. Statues of saints, or angels,
or gargoyles-I couldnłt remember, and at this distance, I couldnłt really tell
them apart-stood atop every pinnacle, like a thousand demented stylites. The
whole roof was encrusted with pink-tinged marble, dizzyingly, surreally ornate,
looking in places like lacework, and in places like barbed wire. Good atheist
or not, Iłd been inside once or twice, though I struggled to remember when and
why; some unavoidable ceremonial occasion. In any case, Iłd grown up with the
sight of it; it should have been a familiar landmark, nothing more. But at that
moment, the whole structure seemed utterly foreign, utterly strange; it was as
if the mountains to the north had shed their snow and greenery and topsoil and
revealed themselves to be giant artifacts, pyramids from Central America,
relics of a vanished civilization.

I closed the blinds, and wiped the dead courierłs face from
my computer screen.

Then I bought myself a ticket to Z�rich.

* * * *

The databases had had plenty to say about Rolf Hengartner.
Hełd worked in electronic publishing, making deals on some ethereal plane where
Europełs biggest software providers carved up the market to their mutual
satisfaction. I imagined him skiing, snow and water, with Ministers of Culture
and satellite magnates ... although probably not in the last few years, in his
seventies, with acute lymphoma. Hełd started out in film finance, orchestrating
the funding of multinational co-productions; one of the photographs of him in
the reception room to what was now his assistantłs office showed him raising a
clenched fist beside a still-young Depardieu at an anti-Hollywood demonstration
in Paris twenty years before.

Max Reif, his assistant, had been appointed executor of the
estate. Iłd downloaded the latest overpricedSchweitzerdeutsch software for my
notepad, in the hope that it would guide me through the interview without too
many blunders, but Reif insisted on speaking Italian, and turned out to be
perfectly fluent.

Hengartnerłs wife had died before him, but he was survived
by three children and ten grandchildren. Reif had been instructed to sell all
of the art, since none of the family had ever shown much interest in the
collection.

�What was his passion? Orthodox icons?"

�Not at all. Herr Hengartner was eclectic, but the icon was
a complete surprise to me. Something of an anomaly. He owned some French Gothic
and Italian Renaissance works with religious themes, but he certainly didnłt
specialize in the Madonna, let alone the Eastern tradition."

Reif showed me a photograph of the icon in the glossy brochure
which had been put together for the auction; Masini had mislaid his copy of the
catalog, so this was my first chance to see exactly what I was searching for. I
read the Italian section in the pentalingual commentary on the facing page:

A stunning example of the icon known as the Vladimir Mother
of God, probably the most ancient variation of the icons of �loving-kindness"
(Greekeleousa, Russianumileniye). It depicts the Virgin holding the Child, His
face pressed tenderly to His Motherłs cheek, in a powerful symbol of both
divine and human compassion for all of creation. According to tradition, this
icon derives from a painting by the Evangelist Luke. The surviving exemplar,
from which the type takes its name, was brought to Kiev from Constantinople in
the 12th century, and is now in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. It has been
described as the greatest holy treasure of the Russian nation.

Artist unknown. Ukrainian, early 18th century. Cyprus panel,
293 x 204 mm, egg tempera on linen, exquisitely decorated with beaten silver.

The reserve price was listed as eighty thousand Swiss
francs. Less than a fiftieth what Masini had paid for it.

The esthetic attraction of the piece was lost on me; it wasnłt
exactly a Caravaggio. The colors were drab, the execution was
crude-deliberately two-dimensional-and even the silver was badly tarnished. The
paintwork itself appeared to be in reasonable condition; for a moment I thought
there was a hairline crack across the full width of the icon, but on closer
inspection it looked more like a flaw in the reproduction: a scratch on the
printing plate, or some photographic intermediate.

Of course, this wasnłt meant to be �high art" in the Western
tradition. No expression of the artistłs ego, no indulgent idiosyncrasies of
style. It was-presumably-a faithful copy of the Byzantine original, intended to
play a specific role in the practice of the Orthodox religion, and I was in no
position to judge its value in that context. But I had trouble imagining either
Rolf Hengartner or Luciano Masini as secret converts to the Eastern church. So
was it purely a matter of a good investment? Was this nothing but an
eighteenth-century baseball card, to them? If Masiniłs only interest was
financial, though, why had he paid so much more than the market value? And why
was he so desperate to get it back?

I said, �Can you tell me who bid for the icon, besides
Signor Masini?"

�The usual dealers, the usual brokers. Iłm afraid I couldnłt
tell you on whose behalf they were acting."

�But you did monitor the bidding?" A number of potential
buyers, or their agents, had visited Z�rich to view the collection in
person-Masini among them-but the auction itself had taken place by phone line
and computer.

�Of course."

�Was there a consensus for a price close to Masiniłs final
bid? Or was he forced up to it by just one of those anonymous rivals?"

Reif stiffened, and I suddenly realized what that must have
sounded like. I said, �I certainly didnłt mean to imply"

�At leastthree other bidders," he said icily, �were within a
few hundred thousand francs of Signor Masini all the way. Iłm sure hełll
confirm that, if you take the trouble to ask him." He hesitated, then added
less defensively, �Obviously the reserve price was set far too low. But Herr
Hengartner anticipated that the auction house would undervalue this item."

That threw me. �I thought you didnłt know about the icon
until after his death. If youłd discussed its value with him"

�I didnłt. But Herr Hengartner left a note beside it in the
safe."

He hesitated, as if debating with himself whether or not I deserved
to be privy to the great manłs insights. I didnłt dare plead with him, let
alone insist; I just waited in silence for him to continue. It canłt have been
more than ten or fifteen seconds, but I swear I broke out in a sweat.

Reif smiled, and put me out of my misery. �The note
said:Prepare to be surprised. �

* * * *

In the early evening I left my hotel room and wandered
through the city center. Iłd never had reason to visit Z�rich before,
but-language aside-it was already beginning to feel just like home. The same
fast food chains had colonized the city. The electronic billboards displayed
the same advertisements. The glass fronts of the VR parlours glowed with
surreal images from the very same games, and the twelve-year-olds inside had
all succumbed to the same unfortunate Texan fashions. Even the smell of the
place was exactly like Milan on a Saturday night: french fries, popcorn, Reeboks
and Coke.

Had Ukrainian secret service agents killed De Angelis to get
the icon back? Was this the flip-side of all the diplomatic efforts to recover
stolen artwork?That seemed unlikely. If there were the slightest grounds for
the return of the icon, then dragging the matter through the courts would have
meant far better publicity for the cause. Slaughtering foreign citizens could
play havoc with international aid ... and the Ukraine was in the middle of
negotiating an upgrading of its trade relationship with Europe. I couldnłt
believe that any government would risk so much for a single work of art, in a
country full of more-or-less interchangeable copies of the very same piece. It
wasnłt as if Hengartner had got his hands on the 12th century original.

Who, then?Another collector, another obsessive hoarder, whom
Masini had outbid? Someone, perhaps, unlike Hengartner, who already owned
several other baseball cards, and wanted a complete set? Maybe Masiniłs
insurance firm had the connections and clout needed to find out who the true
bidders at the auction had been; I certainly didnłt. A rival collector wasnłt
the only possibility; one of the bidders could have been a dealer who was so impressed
by the price the icon fetched that he or she decided it was worth acquiring by
other means.

The air was growing cold faster than Iłd expected; I decided
to return to the hotel. Iłd been walking along the west bank of the Limmat River,
down toward the lake; I started to cross back over at the first bridge I came
to, then I paused midway to get my bearings. There were cathedrals either side
of me, facing each other across the river; unimposing structures compared to
Milanłs giant Nosferatu Castle, but I felt a-ridiculous-frisson of unease, as
if the pair of them had conspired to ambush me.

MySchweitzerdeutsch package came with free maps and tour
guides; I hit the WHERE AM I? button, and the GPS unit in the notepad passed
its coordinates to the software, which proceeded to demystify my surroundings.
The two buildings in question were the Grossmunster (which looked like a
fortress, with two brutal towers side by side, not quite facing the riverłs
east bank) and the Fraumunster (once an abbey, with a single slender spire).
Both dated from the 13th century, although modifications of one kind or another
had continued almost to the present. Stained glass windows by, respectively,
Giacometti and Chagall. And Ulrich Zwingli had launched the Swiss Reformation
from the pulpit of the Grossmunster in 1523.

I was staring at one of the birthplaces of a sect which had
endured for five hundred years-and it was far stranger than standing in the
shadow of the most ancient Roman temple. To say:Christianity has shaped the
physical and cultural landscape of Europe for two thousand years, as
relentlessly as any glacier, as mercilessly as any clash of tectonic plates, is
to state the fatuously obvious. But if Iłd spent my whole life surrounded by
the evidence, it was only now-now that the legacy of those millennia was
beginning to seem increasingly bizarre to me-that I had any real sense of what
it meant. Arcane theological disputes between people as alien to me as the
ancient Egyptians had transformed the entire continent-along with a thousand
purely political and economic forces, for sure-but nevertheless, modulating the
development of almost every human activity, from architecture to music, from
commerce to warfare, at one level or another.

And there was no reason to believe that the process had
halted. Just because the Alps were no longer rising didnłt mean geology had
come to an end.

�Do you wish to know more?" the tour guide asked me.

�Not unless you can tell me the word for a pathological fear
of cathedrals."

It hesitated, then replied with impeccable fuzzy logic, �There
are cathedrals across the length and breadth of Europe. Which particular
cathedrals did you have in mind?"

* * * *

De Angelisłs colleagues had provided me with the name of the
taxi company shełd used for her trip from the bank to the airport-the last
thing shełd paid for with her business credit card. Iłd spoken to the manager
of the company by phone from Milan, and there was a message from her when I
arrived back at the hotel, with the name of the driver for the journey in
question. Far from the last person whołd seen De Angelis alive-but possibly the
last before shełd been persuaded, by whatever means, to take the icon to
Vienna. He was due to report for work at the depot that evening at nine. I ate
quickly, then set out into the cold again. The only taxis outside the hotel
were from a rival company. I went on foot.

I found Phan Anh Tuan drinking coffee in a corner of the garage.
After a brief exchange in German, he asked me if Iłd prefer to speak French,
and I gratefully switched. He told me hełd been an engineering student in East
Berlin when the wall came down. �I always meant to find a way to finish my
degree and go home. I got sidetracked, somehow." He gazed out at the dark icy
street, bemused.

I put a photo of De Angelis on the table in front of him; he
looked long and hard. �No, Iłm sorry. I didnłt take this woman anywhere."

I hadnłt been optimistic; still, it would have been nice to
have gleaned some small clue about her state of mind; had she been humming �Wełre
in the Money" all the way to the airport, or what?

I said, �You must have a hundred customers a day. Thanks for
trying." I started to take the photo back; he caught my hand.

�Iłm not telling you I must have forgotten her. Iłm telling
you Iłm sure Iłve never seen her before."

I said, �Last Monday. Two twelve pm. Intercontinental Bank
to the airport. The dispatcherłs records show"

He was frowning. �Monday? No. I had engine trouble. I was
out of service for almost an hour. Until nearly three."

�Are you sure?"

He fetched a handwritten log book from his vehicle, and
showed me the entry.

I said, �Why would the dispatcher get it wrong?"

He shrugged. �It must have been a software glitch. A
computer takes the calls, allocates them ... itłs all fully automated. We flick
a switch on the radio when wełre unavailable-and I canłt have forgotten to do
that, because I kept the radio on all the time I was working on the car, and no
fares came through to me."

�Could someone else have accepted a job from the dispatcher,
pretending to be you?"

He laughed. �Intentionally? No. Not without changing the ID
number of their radio."

�And how hard would that be? Would you need a forged chip,
with a duplicate serial number?"

�No. But it would mean pulling the radio out, opening it up,
and resetting thirty-two DIP switches. Why would anyone bother?" Then I saw it
click in his eyes.

I said, �Do you know of anyone here having a radio stolen recently?
The two-way, not the music?"

He nodded sadly. �Both. Someone had both stolen. About a
month ago."

* * * *

I returned in the morning and confirmed with some of the
other drivers most of what Phan had told me. There was no easy way of proving
that he hadnłt lied about the engine trouble and driven De Angelis himself, but
I couldnłt see why he would have invented an �alibi" when there was no need for
one-when he could have said �Yes, I drove her, she hardly spoke a word" and no
one would have had the slightest reason to doubt him.

So: someone had gone to a lot of trouble to be alone in a
fake taxi with De Angelis ... and then theyłd let her walk into the airport and
phone home. To delay the moment when head office would realize that something
had gone wrong, presumably-but why had she gone along with that?What had the
driver said to her, in those few minutes, to make her so cooperative? Was it a
threat to her family, her lover? Or a bribe, large enough to convince her to
make up her mind on the spot? And then she hadnłt bothered to cover her trail,
because she knew therełd be no way to do so convincingly? Shełd accepted the
fact that her guilt would be obvious, and that shełd have to become a fugitive?

That sounded like one hell of a bribe. So how could she have
been so naive as to think that anyone would actually pay it?

Outside the Intercontinental Bank, I took her photo from my
wallet and held it up toward the armored-glass revolving doors, trying to
imagine the scene.The taxi arrives, she climbs in, they pull out into the
traffic. The driver says: Nice weather wełre having. By the way, I know what
youłve got in the attach� case. Come to Vienna with me and Iłll make you rich.

She stared back at me accusingly. I said, �All right, De Angelis,
Iłm sorry. I donłt believe you were that stupid."

I gazed at the laser-printed image. Something nagged at
me.Digital radios with driver IDs? For some reason, that had surprised me. It
shouldnłt have. Perhaps movie scenes of taxi drivers and police communicating
in incomprehensible squawks still lingered in my subconscious, still shaped my
expectations on some level-in spite of the kind of technology I used myself
every day. The word �auction" still conjured up scenes of a man or woman with a
hammer, shouting out bids in a crowded room-though Iłd never witnessed anything
remotely like that, except in the movies. In real life, everything was
computerized, everything was digital. This �photograph" was digital. Chemical
film had started disappearing from the shops when I was fourteen or fifteen
years old-and even in my childhood, it was strictly an amateur medium; most
commercial photographers had been using CCD arrays for almost twenty years.

So why did there appear to be a fine scratch across the photograph
of the icon?The few hundred copies of the auction catalog would have been
produced without using a single analog intermediate; everything would have gone
from digital camera, to computer, to laser printer. The glossy end-product was
the one anachronism-and a less conservative auction house would have offered an
on-line version, or an interactive CD.

Reif had let me keep the catalog; back in my hotel room, I inspected
it again. The �scratch" definitely wasnłt a crack in the paintwork; it cut
right across the image, a perfectly straight, white line of uniform thickness,
crossing from paint to raised silverwork without the slightest deviation.

A glitch in the camerałs electronics? Surely the
photographer would have noticed that, and tried again. And even if the flaw had
been spotted too late for a retake, one keystroke on any decent image-processing
package would have removed it instantly.

I tried to phone Reif; it took almost an hour to get through
to him. I said, �Can you tell me the name of the graphic designers who produced
the auction catalog?"

He stared at me as if Iłd called him in the middle of sex to
ask whołd murdered Elvis. �Why do you need to know that?"

�I just want to ask their photographer"

�Their photographer?"

�Yes. Or whoever it was who photographed the items in the
collection."

�It wasnłt necessary to have the collection photographed.
Herr Hengartner already had photographs of everything, for insurance purposes.
He left a disk with the image files, and detailed instructions for the layout
of the catalog. He knew that he was dying. He had everything organized,
everything prepared. Does that answer your question? Does that satisfy your
curiosity?"

Not quite.I steeled myself, and grovelled: Could I have a
copy of the original image file? I was seeking advice from an art historian in
Moscow, and the best color fax of the catalog wouldnłt do justice to the icon.
Reif begrudgingly had an assistant locate the data and transmit it to me.

The line, the �scratch", was there in the file.

Hengartner-whołd treasured this icon in secret, and whołd
somehow known that it would fetch an extraordinary price-had left behind an
image of it with a small but unmistakable flaw, and made sure that it was seen
by every prospective buyer.

That had to mean something, but I had no idea what.

* * * *

A list of the dates when Lombardy had fallen in and out of
Austrian hands, committed to memory when I was sixteen years old, just about
exhausted my knowledge of the Habsburg empire. Which should hardly have
mattered in 2013, but I felt disconcertingly ill-prepared all the same.

In my hotel room, I unpacked my bags, then looked out warily
across the rooftops of Vienna. I could see Saint Stephenłs cathedral in the
distance; the southern tower, almost detached from the main hall, was topped
with a spire like a filigreed radio antenna. The roof of the hall was decorated
with richly colored tiles, forming an eye-catching zig-zag pattern of chevrons
and diamonds-as if someone had draped a giant Mongolian rug over the building
to keep it warm. But then, anything less exotic would have been a
disappointment.

De Angelis had died in the same hotel (in the room directly
above me, with much the same view). Booked in under her own name. Paying with
her own plastic, when she could have used anonymous cash.Did that prove that
shełd had nothing to be ashamed of-that shełd been threatened, not bribed?

I spent half the morning trying to persuade the hotel
manager that the local police wouldnłt lock him up for allowing me to speak to
his staff about the murder; the whole idea seemed to strike him as akin to
treason. �If a Viennese citizen died in Milan," I argued patiently, �wouldnłt
you expect an accredited Austrian investigator to receive every courtesy there?"

�We would send a delegation of police to liaise with the Milanese
authorities, not a private detective acting alone."

I was getting nowhere, so I backed off. Besides, I had an appointment
to keep.

My long-awaited expense-account lunch with a black-marketeer
turned out to be in a health food restaurant. Back in Milan, Iłd paid several
million lira to a net-based �introduction agency" to put me in touch with �Anton."
He was much younger than Iłd expected; he looked about twenty, and he radiated
the kind of self-assurance Iłd only come across before in wealthy adolescent
drug dealers. I managed to avoid using my atrocious German, yet again; Anton
spoke CNN English, with an accent that I took to be Hungarian.

I handed him the auction catalog, open at the relevant page;
he glanced at the picture of the icon. �Oh yeah. The Vladimir. I could get you
another one, exactly like this. Ten thousand US dollars."

�I donłt want a forged replica." Attractive as the idea was,
Masini would never have fallen for it. �Or even a similar contemporary piece. I
want to know who asked forthis . Who spread the word that it was going to
change hands in Z�rich, and that theyłd pay to have it brought east."

I had to make a conscious effort not to look down to see
where hełd placed his feet. Before hełd arrived, Iłd discreetly dropped a pinch
of silica microspheres onto the floor beneath the table. Each one contained a
tiny accelerometer-an array of springy silicon beams a few microns across,
fabricated on the same chip as a simple, low-power microprocessor. If just one,
out of the fifty thousand Iłd scattered, still adhered to his shoes the next
time we met, Iłd be able to interrogate it in infrared and learn exactly where
hełd been. Or exactly where he kept this pair of shoes when he changed into
another.

Anton said, �Icons move west." He made it sound like a law
of nature. �Through Prague or Budapest, to Vienna, Salzburg, Munich. Thatłs the
way everythingłs set up."

�For five million Swiss francs, donłt you think someone
might have made the effort to switch from their traditional lines of supply?"

He scowled. �Five million!I donłt believe that. What makes
this worth five million?"

�Youłre the expert. You tell me."

He glared at me as if he suspected that I was mocking him,
then looked down at the catalog again. This time he even read the commentary.
He said cautiously, �Maybe itłs older than the auctioneers thought. If itłs
really, say, fifteenth century, the price could almost make sense. Maybe your
client guessed the true age ... and so did someone else." He sighed. �It will
be expensive finding out who, though. People will be very reluctant to talk."

I said, �You know where Iłm staying. Once you find someone
who needs persuading, let me know."

He nodded sullenly, as if hełd seriously hoped I might have
handed over a large wad of cash for miscellaneous bribes. I almost asked him
about the �scratch"Could it be some kind of coded message to the cognoscenti
that the icon is older than it seems?-but I didnłt want to make a fool of
myself. Hełd seen it, and said nothing; perhaps it was just a meaningless
computer glitch after all.

When Iłd paid the bill, he stood up to depart, then bent
down toward me and said quietly, �If you mention what Iłm doing, to anyone, Iłll
have you killed."

I kept a straight face, and replied, �Vice versa."

When he was gone, I tried to laugh.Stupid, swaggering child.
I couldnłt quite get the right sound out, though. I didnłt imagine hełd be too
happy if he found out what hełd trodden in. I took out my notepad, consulted
the appointments diary, then let my right arm hang beside me for a second,
dousing the floor with a fry-your-brains code to the remaining microspheres.

Then I took the picture of De Angelis from my wallet and
held it in front of me on the table.

I said, �Am I in any danger? What do you think?"

She stared back at me, not quite smiling. The expression in
her eyes might have been amusement, or it might have been concern. Not
indifference; I was sure of that. But she didnłt seem prepared to start
dispensing predictions or advice.

* * * *

Just as I was psyching myself up to tackle the hotel manager
again, the relevant bureaucrat in the city government finally agreed to fax the
hotel a pro forma statement acknowledging that my license was recognized
throughout the jurisdiction. That seemed to satisfy the manager, though it said
no more than the documents Iłd already shown him.

The clerk at the check-in desk barely remembered De Angelis;
he couldnłt say if shełd been cheerful or nervous, friendly or terse. Shełd
carried her own luggage; a porter remembered seeing her with the attach� case,
and an overnight bag. (Shełd spent the night in Z�rich before collecting the
icon.) She hadnłt used room service, or any of the hotel restaurants.

The cleaner whołd found the body had been born in Turin, according
to his supervisor. I wasnłt sure if that was going to be a help or a hindrance.
When I tracked him down in a basement storeroom, he said stubbornly, in German,
�I told the police everything. Why are you bothering me? Go and ask them, if
you want to know the facts."

He turned his back on me. He seemed to be stock-taking
carpet shampoo and disinfectant, but he made it look like a matter of urgency.

I said, �It must have been a shock for you. Someone so
young. An eighty-year-old guest dying in her sleep ... youłd probably take it
in your stride. But Gianna was twenty-seven. A tragedy." He tensed up at the
sound of her name; I could see his shoulders tighten.Six days later? A woman hełd
never even met?

I said, �You didnłt see her any time before, did you? You
didnłt talk to her?"

�No."

I didnłt believe him. The manager was a small-minded cretin;
fraternising was probably strictly forbidden. This guy was in his twenties,
good looking, spoke the same language. What had he done? Flirted with her
harmlessly in a corridor for thirty seconds? And now he was afraid hełd lose
his job if he admitted it?

�No one else will find out, if you tell me what she said.
You have my word. Itłs not like the cops, nothing has to be official. All I
want to do is help lock up the fuckers who killed her."

He put down the bar-code scanner and turned to face me. �I
just asked her where she was from. What she was doing in town."

Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It had taken me so
long to get even this close to her, I couldnłt quite believe it was happening.

�How did she react?"

�She was polite. Friendly. She seemed nervous, though. Distracted."

�And what did she say?"

�She said she was from Milan."

�What else?"

�When I asked her why she was in Vienna, she said she was
playing chaperone."

�What?"

�She said she wasnłt staying long. And she was only here to
play chaperone. To an older lady."

* * * *

Chaperone?I lay awake half the night, trying to make sense
of that. Did it imply that she hadnłt given up custodianship of the icon? That
she was still guarding it when she died? That she considered it to be Luciano
Masiniłs property, and still fully intended to deliver it to him, right to the
end?

What had the �taxi driver" said to her? Bring the icon to
Vienna for a day? No need to let it out of your sight? We donłt want to steal
it ... we just want to borrow it? To pray to it one last time before it
vanishes into another western bank vault? But what was so special aboutthis
copy of the Vladimir Mother of God that made it worth so much trouble? The same
thing that made it worth five million Swiss francs to Masini, possibly-but
what?

And why had De Angelis blown her job, and risked imprisonment,
to go along with the scheme? Even if shełd been blind to the obvious fact that
it was all a set-up, what could they have offered her in exchange for flushing
her career and reputation down the drain?

Iłd only been asleep ten or twenty minutes when I was woken
by someone pounding on the door of my room. By the time Iłd staggered out of
bed and pulled on my trousers, the police had grown impatient and let
themselves in with a pass key. It wasnłt quite two a.m.

There were four of them, two in uniform. One waved a photograph
in front of my face. I squinted at it.

�Did you speak to this man? Yesterday?"

It was Anton. I nodded. If they didnłt already know the
answer, they wouldnłt have asked the question.

�Will you come with us, please?"

�Why?"

�Because your friend is dead."

They showed me the body, so I could confirm that it really
was the same man. Hełd been shot in the chest and dumped near the canal. Not in
it; maybe the killers had been disturbed. In the morgue, the corpse was
definitely shoeless, but it would have been worth sending out the microspheresł
code, just in case-the things could end up in the strangest places (nostrils,
for a start). But before I could think of a plausible excuse to take the notepad
from my pocket, theyłd pulled the sheet back over his head and led me away for
questioning.

The police had found my name and number in �Antonłs" notepad
(if they knew his real name, they were keeping it to themselves ... along with
several other things I would have liked to have known, such as whether or not
the ballistics matched the bullet used on De Angelis). I recounted the whole
conversation in the restaurant, but left out the (illegal) microspheres; theyłd
find them soon enough, and I had nothing to gain by volunteering a confession.

I was treated with appropriate disdain, but not even
verbally abused, really-a five star rating; Iłd had ribs broken in Seveso, and
a testicle crushed in Marseille. At half past four, I was free to leave.

Crossing from the interview room to the elevator, I passed
half a dozen small offices; they were separated by partitions, but not fully
enclosed. On one desk was a cardboard box, full of items of clothing in plastic
bags.

I walked past, then stopped just out of sight. There was a
man and a woman in the office, neither of whom Iłd seen before, talking and
making notes.

I walked back and poked my head into the office. I said, �Excuse
me ... could you tell me ... please-?" I spoke German with the worst accent I
could manage; I had a head start, it must have been dire. They stared at me,
appalled. Visibly struggling for words, I pulled out my notepad and hit a few
keys, fumbling with the phrasebook software, walking deeper into the office. I
thought I saw a pair of shoes out of the corner of my eye, but I couldnłt be
certain. �Could you tell me please where I could find the nearest public
convenience?"

The man said, �Get out of here before I kick your head in."

I backed out, smiling uncertainly. �Grazie, signore!Dankesch�n!
�

There was a surveillance camera in the elevator; I didnłt
even glance at the notepad. Ditto for the foyer. Out on the street, I finally
looked down.

I had the data from two hundred and seven microspheres. The
software was already busy reconstructing Antonłs trail.

I was on the verge of shouting for joy when it occurred to
me that I might have been better off if I hadnłt been able to follow him.

* * * *

The first place hełd gone from the restaurant looked like
home; no one answered the door, but I could glimpse posters of several of the
continentłs most pretentious rock bands through the windows. If not his own,
maybe a friendłs place, or a girlfriendłs. I sat in an open air caf� across the
street, sketching the visible outline of the apartment, guessing at walls and
furniture, playing back the trace for the hours hełd spent there, then
modifying my guesses, trying again.

The waiter looked over my shoulder at the multiple exposure
of stick figures filling the screen. �Are you a choreographer?"

�Yes."

�How exciting! Whatłs the name of the dance?"

�ęMaking Phone Calls And Waiting Impatiently.ł Its anhommage
to my two idols and mentors, Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch." The waiter was
impressed.

After three hours, and no sign of life, I moved on. Anton
had stopped by at another apartment, briefly. This one was occupied by a thin
blond woman in her late teens.

I said, �Iłm a friend of Antonłs. Do you know where I could
find him?"

Shełd been crying. �I donłt know anyone by that name." She
slammed the door. I stood in the hallway for a moment, wondering:Did I kill
him? Did someone detect the spheres, and put a bullet in his heart because of
them? But if theyłd found them, they would have destroyed them; there would
have been no trail to follow.

Hełd only visited one more location before taking a car trip
to the canal, lying very still. It turned out to be a detached two-story house
in an upmarket district. I didnłt ring the doorbell. There was no convenient
observation post, so I did a single walk-by. The curtains were drawn, no
vehicles were parked nearby.

A few blocks away, I sat on a bench in a small park and
started phoning databases. The house had been leased just three days before; I
had no trouble finding out about the owner-a corporate lawyer with property all
over the city-but I couldnłt get hold of the new tenantłs name.

Vienna had a centralized utilities map, to keep people from
digging into underground power cables and phone lines by accident. Phone lines
were useless to me; no one who made the slightest effort could be bugged that
way anymore. But the house had natural gas; easier to swim through than water,
and much less noisy.

I bought a shovel, boots, gloves, a pair of white overalls,
and a safety helmet. I captured an image of the gas company logo from its telephone
directory entry, and jet-sprayed it onto the helmet; from a distance, it looked
quite authentic. I summoned up all the bravado I had left, and returned to the
street-beyond sight of the house, but as close to it as I dared. I shifted a
few paving slabs out of the way, then started digging. It was early afternoon;
there was light traffic, but very few pedestrians. An old man peeked out at me
from a window of the nearest house. I resisted the urge to wave to him; it
wouldnłt have rung true.

I reached the gas main, climbed down into the hole, and
pressed a small package against the PVC; it extruded a hollow needle which
melted the plastic chemically, maintaining the seal as it penetrated the walls
of the pipe. Someone passed by on the footpath, walking two large slobbering
dogs; I didnłt look up.

The control box chimed softly, signaling success. I refilled
the hole, replaced the paving slabs, and returned to the hotel for some sleep.

* * * *

Iłd left a narrow fiber-optic cable leading from the buried
control box to the unpaved ground around a nearby tree, the end just a few
millimeters beneath the soil. The next morning, I collected all the stored
data, then went back to the hotel to sift through it.

Several hundred bugs had made it into the housełs gas pipes
and back to the control box, several times-eavesdropping in hour-long
overlapping shifts, then returning to disgorge the results. The individual
sound tracks were often abysmal, but by processing all of them together, the
software could usually come up with intelligible speech.

There were five voices, three male, two female. All used
French, though I wouldnłt have sworn it was everyonełs native tongue.

I pieced things together slowly. They didnłt have the
icon-theyłd been hired to find it, by someone called Katulski. Apparently theyłd
paid Anton to keep an ear to the ground, but hełd come back to them asking for
more money, in exchange for not switching his loyalty to me. The trouble was,
he really had nothing tangible to offer ... and theyłd just had a tip-off from
another source. References to his murder were oblique, but maybe hełd tried to
blackmail them in some way when theyłd told him he was no longer needed. One
thing was absolutely clear, though: they were taking turns watching an
apartment on the other side of the city, where they believed the man whołd
killed De Angelis would eventually show up.

I hired a car and followed two of them when they set out to
relieve the watch. Theyłd rented a room across the street from their target;
with my IR binoculars I could see where they were aiming theirs. The place
under observation looked empty; all I could make out through the tatty curtains
was peeling paint.

I called the police from a public phone; the synthesized
voice of my notepad spoke for me. I left an anonymous message for the cop whołd
interrogated me, giving the code which would unlock the data in the
microspheres. Forensic would have found them almost immediately, but extracting
the information by brute-force microscopy would have taken days.

Then I waited.

Five hours later, around three a.m., the two men Iłd
followed left in a hurry, without replacements. I took out my photo of De
Angelis and inspected it in the moonlight. I still donłt understand what it was
about her that held me in her sway; she was either a thief, or a fool. Possibly
both. And whatever she was, it had killed her.

I said, �Donłt just stand there smirking like you know all
the answers. How about wishing me luck?"

* * * *

The building was ancient, and in bad repair. I had no trouble
picking the lock on the front door, and though the stairs creaked all the way
to the top floor, I encountered no one.

There was a tell-tale pattern of electric fields detectable
through the door of apartment 712; it looked like it was wired-up with ten
different kinds of alarm. I picked the lock of the neighboring apartment. There
was an access hatch in the ceiling-fortuitously right above the sofa. Someone
below moaned in their sleep as I pulled my legs up and closed the hatch. My
heart was pounding from adrenaline and claustrophobia, burglary in a foreign
city, fear, anticipation. I played a torch-beam around; mice went scurrying.

The corresponding hatch in 712 was guarded just like the
door. I moved to another part of the ceiling, lifted away the thermal insulation,
then cut a hole in the plaster and lowered myself into the room.

I donłt know what Iłd expected to find. A shrine covered
with icons and votive candles? Occult paraphernalia and a stack of dusty
volumes on the teachings of Slavonic mystics?

There was nothing in the room but a bed, a chair, and a VR
rig-plugged into the phone socket. Vienna had kept up with the times; even this
dilapidated apartment had the latest high-bandwidth ISDN.

I glanced down at the street; there was no one in sight. I
put my ear to the door; if anyone was ascending the stairs, they were far
quieter than Iłd been.

I slipped the helmet over my head.

The simulation was a building, larger than anything Iłd ever
seen, stretching out around me like a stadium, like a colosseum. In the
distance-perhaps two hundred meters away-were giant marble columns topped with
arches, holding up a balcony with an ornate metal railing, and another set of
columns, supporting another balcony ... and so on, to six tiers. The floor was
tile, or parquetry, with delicate angular braids outlining a complex hexagonal
pattern in red and gold. I looked up-and, dazzled, threw my arms in front of my
face (to no effect). The hall of this impossible cathedral was topped with a
massive dome, the scale defying calculation. Sunlight poured in through dozens
of arched windows around the base. Above, covering the dome, was a figurative
mosaic, the colors exquisite beyond belief. My eyes watered from the
brightness; as I blinked away the tears, I could begin to make out the scene. A
haloed woman stretched out her hand

Someone pressed a gun barrel to my throat.

I froze, waiting for my captor to speak. After a few
seconds, I said in German, �I wish someone would teach me to move that quietly."

A young male voice replied, in heavily accented English: �ęHe
who possesses the truth of the word of Jesus can hear even its silence.ł Saint
Ignatius of Antioch." Then he must have reached over to the rig control box and
turned down the volume-Iłd planned to do that myself, but it had seemed
redundant-because I suddenly realized that Iłd been listening to a blanket of
white noise.

He said, �Do you like what wełre building? It was inspired
by the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople-Justinianłs Church of the Divine
Wisdom-but itłs not a slavish copy. The new architecture has no need to make
concessions to gross matter. The original in Istanbul is a museum, now-and of
course it was used as a mosque for five centuries before that. But therełs no
prospect of either fate befalling this holy place."

�No."

�Youłre working for Luciano Masini, arenłt you?"

I couldnłt think of a plausible lie which would make me any
more popular. �Thatłs right."

�Let me show you something."

I stood rigid, prepared, hoping he was about to take the
helmet off me. I felt him moving, through the gun barrel ... then I realized
that he was slipping on the rigłs data glove.

He pointed his hand, and moved my viewpoint; blindly for
him, which impressed me. I seemed to slide across the cathedral floor straight
toward the sanctuary, which was separated from the nave by a massive, gilded
latticework screen, covered in hundreds of icons. From a distance, the screen
glinted opulently, the subjects of the paintings impossible to discern, the
colored panels making up a weirdly beautiful abstract mosaic.

As I drew closer, though, the effect was overwhelming.

The images were all executed in the same �crude"
two-dimensional style which Iłd derided in Masiniłs missing baseball card-but
here, togetheren masse , they seemed a thousand times more expressive than any
overblown Renaissance masterpiece. It was not just the fact that the colors had
been �restored" to a richness no physical pigment had ever possessed: reds and
blues like luminous velvet, silver like white-hot steel. The simple, stylized
human geometry of the figures-the angle of a head bowed in suffering, the
strange dispassionate entreaty of eyes raised to heaven-seemed to constitute a
whole language of emotions, with a clarity and precision which cut through
every barrier to comprehension. It was like writing before Babel, like
telepathy, like music.

Or maybe the gun at my throat was helping to broaden my esthetic
sensibilities. Nothing like a good dose of endogenous opiates to throw open the
doors of perception.

My captor pointed my eyes at an empty space between two of
the icons.

�This is where Our Lady of Chernobyl belongs."

�Chernobyl? Thatłs where it was painted?"

�Masini didnłt tell you anything, did he?"

�Didnłt tell me what? That the icon was really fifteenth century?"

�Not fifteenth.Twentieth. 1986."

My mind was racing, but I said nothing.

He recounted the whole story in matter-of-fact tones, as if
hełd been there in person. �One of the founders of the True Church was a worker
at the number four reactor. When the accident happened, he received a lethal
dose within hours. But he didnłt die straight away. It was two weeks later,
when he truly understood the scale of the tragedy-when he realized that it wasnłt
just hundreds of volunteers, firemen and soldiers, whołd die in agony in the
months to follow ... buttens of thousands of people dying in years to come;
land and water contaminated for decades; sickness for generations-that Our Lady
came to him in a vision, and She told him what to do.

�He was to paint Her as the Vladimir Mother of God-copying
every detail, respecting the tradition. But in truth, he would be the
instrument for the creation of a new icon-and She would sanctify it, pouring
into it all of Her Sonłs compassion for the suffering which had taken place,
His rejoicing in the courage and self-sacrifice His people had shown, and His
will to share the burden of the grief and pain that was yet to come.

�She told him to mix some spilt fuel into the pigments he
used, and when it was completed to hide it away until it could take its
rightful place on the iconostasis of the One True Church."

I closed my eyes, and saw a scene from a TV documentary:
celluloid movie footage taken just after the accident, the image covered with
ghostly flashes and trails. Particle tracks recorded in the emulsion; radiation
damage to the film itself.That was what Hengartnerłs �scratch" had meantwhether
it was a real effect which appeared when he photographed the icon with a modern
camera, or just a stylized addition created by computer. It was a message to
any prospective buyer who knew how to read the code: This is not what the
commentary says. This is a rarity, a brand new icon, an original.Our Lady of
Chernobyl. Ukrainian, 1986.

I said, �Iłm surprised anyone ever got it onto a plane."

�The radiation is barely detectable, now; most of the
hottest fission products decayed years ago. Still ... you wouldnłt want to kiss
it. And maybe it killed that superstitious old man a little sooner than he
would have died otherwise."

Superstitious?"Hengartner ... thought it would cure his cancer?"

�Why else would he have bought it? It was stolen in ę93, and
it disappeared for a long time, but there were always rumors circulating about
itsmiraculous powers ." His tone was contemptuous. �I donłt know what religion
that old fart believed in.Homeopathy , maybe. A dose of what ailed him, to put
it right again. The best whole-body scanners can pick up the smallest trace of
strontium-90, and date it to the accident; if Chernobyl caused his cancer, he
would have known it. But your own boss, I imagine, is just an old fashioned
Mariolater, who thinks he can save his granddaughterłs life if he burns all his
money at a shrine to the Virgin."

Maybe he thought he was goading me; I didnłt give a shit
what Masini believed, but a surge of careless anger ran through me. �And the
courier?What about her? Was she just another dumb, superstitious peasant to
you?"

He was silent for a while; I felt him change hands on the
gun. I knew where he was now, precisely; with my eyes closed, I could see him
in front of me.

�My brother told her there was a boy from Kiev, dying from
leukaemia in Vienna, who wanted a chance to pray to Our Lady of Chernobyl." All
of the contempt had gone out of his voice, now. And all of the pompous
scriptural certainty. �Masini had told her about his granddaughter; she knew
how obsessed he was, she knew hełd never part with the icon willingly, not even
for a couple of hours. So she agreed to take it to Vienna. To deliver it a day
late. She didnłt believe it would cure anyone. I donłt think she believed in
God at all. But my brother convinced her that the boy had the right to pray to
the icon ... to take some comfort from doing that. Even if he didnłt have five
million Swiss francs."

I threw a punch, the hardest Iłd thrown in my life. It
connected with flesh and bone, jarring my whole body like an electric shock.
For a moment I was so dazed that I didnłt know whether or not hełd squeezed the
trigger and blown half my face away. I staggered, and pushed the helmet off, icy
sweat dripping from my face. He was lying on the floor, shuddering with pain,
still holding the gun. I stepped forward and trod on his wrist, then bent down
and took the weapon, easily. He was fourteen or fifteen years old, long-limbed
but very emaciated, and bald. I kicked him in the ribs, viciously.

�And you played the pious little cancer victim, did you?"

�Yes." He was weeping, but whether it was from pain or remorse,
I couldnłt tell.

I kicked him again. �And then you killed her? To get your
hands on the fucking Virgin of Chernobyl who doesnłt even work any fucking
miracles?"

�I didnłt kill her!" He was bawling like an infant. �My
brother killed her, and now hełs dead. He didnłt mean to, but he panicked, and
he killed her, and now hełs dead too."

His brother was dead?"Anton?"

�He went to tell Katulskiłs goons about you." He got the
words out between sobs. �He thought theyłd keep you busy ... and he thought,
maybe if they were fighting it out with you, we might have a chance to get the
icon out of the city."

I should have guessed. What better way to hunt for a stolen
icon, than to traffic in them yourself? And what better way to keep track of
your rivals than to pretend to be their informant?

�So where is it now?"

He didnłt reply. I slipped the gun into my back pocket, then
bent down and picked him up under the arms. He must have weighed about thirty
kilos, at the most. Maybe he really was dying of leukaemia; at the time, I didnłt
much care. I slammed him against the wall, let him fall, then picked him up and
did it again. Blood streamed out of his nose; he started choking and
spluttering. I lifted him for a third time, then paused to inspect my
handiwork. I realized Iłd broken his jaw when Iłd hit him, and probably one of
my fingers.

He said, �Youłre nothing. Nothing. A blip in history. Time
will swallow up the secular age-and all the mad, blasphemous cults and
superstitions-like a mote in a sandstorm. Only the True Church will endure." He
was smiling bloodily, but he didnłt sound smug, or triumphant. He was just
stating an opinion.

The gun must have reached body temperature in the pocket of
my jeans; when he pressed the barrel to the back of my head, at first I mistook
it for his thumb. I stared into his eyes, trying to read his intentions, but
all I could see was desperation. In the end, he was just a child alone in a
foreign city, overwhelmed by disasters.

He slid the barrel around my head, until it was aimed at my
temple. I closed my eyes, clutching at him involuntarily. I said, �Please"

He took the gun away. I opened my eyes just in time to see
him blow his brains out.

* * * *

All I wanted to do was curl up on the floor and sleep, and
then wake to find that it had all been a dream. Some mechanical instinct kept
me moving, though. I washed off as much of the blood as I could. I listened for
signs that the neighbors had woken. The gun was an illegal Swedish weapon with
an integral silencer, the round itself had made a barely audible hiss, but I
wasnłt sure how loudly Iłd been shouting.

Iłd been wearing gloves from the start, of course. The
ballistics would confirm suicide. But the hole in the ceiling and the broken
jaw and the bruised ribs would have to be explained, and the chances were Iłd
shed hair and skin all over the room. Eventually, there would have to be a
trial. And I would have to go to prison.

I was almost ready to call the police. I was too tired to
think of fleeing, too sickened by what Iłd done. I hadnłt literally killed the
boy-just beaten him, and terrorized him. I was still angry with him, even then;
he was partly to blame for De Angelisłs death. At least as much as I was to
blame for his.

And then the mechanical part of me said:Anton was his brother.
They might have met, the day he was killed-at Antonłs place, or the apartment
with the thin blond girl. Trodden the same floor for a while. Wiped their feet
on the same doormat. And since that time, he might have moved the icon from one
hiding place to another.

I took out my notepad, knelt at the feet of the corpse, and
sent out the code.

Three spheres responded.

* * * *

I found it just before dawn, buried under rubble in a
half-demolished building on the outskirts of the city. It was still in the
attach� case, but all the locks and alarms had been disabled. I opened the
case, and stared at the thing itself for a while. It looked like the catalog
photograph. Drab and ugly.

I wanted to snap it in two. I wanted to light a bonfire and
burn it. Three people were dead, because of it.

But it wasnłt that simple.

I sat on the rubble with my head in my hands. I couldnłt pretend
that I didnłt know what the icon meant to its rightful owners. Iłd seen the
church they were building, the place where it belonged. Iłd heard the
story-however apocryphal-of its creation. And if talk of divine compassion for
the dead of Chernobyl being channelled into a radioactive Christmas card was
meaningless, ludicrous bullshit to me ... that wasnłt the point. De Angelis had
believed none of it-but shełd still blown her job, shełd still gone to Vienna
of her own free will. And I could dream of a perfect, secular, rational world
all I liked ... but I still had to live, and act, in the real one.

I was sure I could get the icon to Masini before I was
arrested. He wasnłt likely to hand over all his worldly goods, as promised, but
Iłd probably be able to extract several billion lira from him-before the kid
died, and his gratitude faded. Enough to buy myself some very good lawyers.
Good enough, perhaps, to keep me out of prison.

Or I could do what De Angelis should have done, when it came
to the crunch-instead of defending Masiniłs fucking property rights to the
death.

I returned to the apartment. Iłd switched off all the alarms
before leaving, I could enter through the door this time. I put on the VR
helmet and glove, and wrote an invisible message with my fingertip in the empty
space on the iconostasis.

Then I pulled out the phone plug, breaking the connection,
and went looking for a place to hide until nightfall.

* * * *

We met just before midnight, outside the fairground to the
cityłs north-east, within sight of the Ferris wheel. Another frightened,
expendable child, putting on a brave front. I might have been the cops. I might
have been anyone.

When I handed over the attach� case, he opened it and
glanced inside, then looked up at me as if I was some kind of holy apparition.

I said, �What will you do with it?"

�Extract the true icon from the physical representation. And
then destroy it."

I almost replied:You should have stolen Hengartnerłs image
file instead, and saved everyone a lot of trouble. But I didnłt have the heart.

He pressed a multilingual pamphlet into my hands. I read it
on my way to the subway. It spelt out the theological differences between the
True Church and the various national versions of Orthodoxy. Apparently it all
came down to the question of the incarnation; God had been made information,
not flesh, and anyone whołd missed that important distinction needed to be set
right as soon as possible. It went on to explain how the True Church would
unify the Eastern Orthodox-and eventually the entire Christian-world, while
eradicating superstitions, apocalyptic cults, virulent nationalism, and
atheistic materialism. It didnłt say anything, one way or the other, about
anti-semitism, or the bombing of mosques.

The letters decayed on the page, minutes after Iłd read
them. Triggered by exhaled carbon dioxide? These people had appropriated the
methods of some strange gurus indeed.

I took out my photo of De Angelis.

�Is this what you wanted of me? Are you satisfied?"

She didnłt reply. I tore up the image and let the pieces
flutter to the ground.

I didnłt take the subway. I needed the cold air to clear my
head. So I walked back into the city, making my way between the ruins of the
incomprehensible past, and the heralds of the unimaginable future.

??

??

??

??

The Planck Dive

Gisela was contemplating the advantages of being crushedalmost
certainly to death, albeit as slowly as possiblewhen the messenger appeared in
her homescape. She noted its presence but instructed it to wait, a sleek golden
courier with winged sandals stretching out a hand impatiently, frozen in
mid-stride twenty delta away.

The scape was currently an expanse of yellow dunes beneath a
pale blue sky, neither too stark nor too distracting. Gisela, reclining on the
cool sand, was intent on a giant, scruffy triangle hovering at an incline over
the dunes, each edge resembling a loose bundle of straw. The triangle was a
collection of Feynman diagrams, showing just a few of the many ways a particle
could move between three events in spacetime. A quantum particle could not be
pinned down to any one path, but it could be treated as a sum of localised
components, each following a different trajectory and taking part in a
different set of interactions along the way.

In �empty" spacetime, interactions with virtual particles
caused each componentłs phase to rotate constantly, like the hand of a clock.
But the time measured by any kind of clock travelling between two events in
flat spacetime was greatest when the route taken was a straight lineany
detours caused time dilation, shortening the tripand so a plot of phase shift
versus detour size also reached its peak for a straight line. Since this peak
was smooth and flat, a group of nearly straight paths clustered around it all
had similar phase shifts, and these paths allowed many more components to
arrive in phase with each other, reinforcing each other, than any equivalent
group on the slopes. Three straight lines, glowing red through the centre of
each �bundle of straw", illustrated the result: the classical paths, the paths
of highest probability, were straight lines.

In the presence of matter, all the same processes became
slightly skewed. Gisela added a couple of nanograms of lead to the modela few
trillion atoms, their world lines running vertically through the centre of the
triangle, sprouting their own thicket of virtual particles. Atoms were neutral
in charge and colour, but their individual electrons and quarks still scattered
virtual photons and gluons. Every kind of matter interfered with some part of
the virtual swarm, and the initial disturbance spread out through spacetime by
scattering virtual particles itself, rapidly obliterating any difference
between the effect of a tonne of rock or a tonne of neutrinos, growing weaker
with distance according to a roughly inverse square law. With the rain of
virtual particlesand the phase shifts they createdvarying from place to
place, the paths of highest probability ceased obeying the geometry of flat
spacetime. The luminous red triangle of most-probable trajectories was now visibly
curved.

The key idea dated back to Sakharov: gravity was nothing but
the residue of the imperfect cancellation of other forces; squeeze the quantum
vacuum hard enough and Einsteinłs equations fell out. But since Einstein, every
theory of gravity was also a theory of time. Relativity demanded that a
free-falling particlełs rotating phase agree with every other clock that
travelled the same path, and once gravitational time dilation was linked to
changes in virtual particle density, every measure of timefrom the half-life
of a radioisotopełs decay (stimulated by vacuum fluctuations) to the
vibrational modes of a sliver of quartz (ultimately due to the same phase
effects as those giving rise to classical paths)could be reinterpreted as a
count of interactions with virtual particles.

It was this line of reasoning that had led Kumara century after
Sakharov, building on work by Penrose, Smolin and Rovellito devise a model of
spacetime as a quantum sum of every possible network of particle world lines,
with classical �time" arising from the number of intersections along a given
strand of the net. This model had been an unqualified success, surviving
theoretical scrutiny and experimental tests for centuries. But it had never
been validated at the smallest length scales, accessible only at absurdly high
energies, and it made no attempt to explain the basic structure of the nets, or
the rules that governed them. Gisela wanted to know where those details came
from. She wanted to understand the universe at its deepest level, to touch the
beauty and simplicity that lay beneath it all.

That was why she was taking the Planck Dive.

The messenger caught her eye again. It was radiating tags
indicating that it represented Cartanłs mayor: non-sentient software that dealt
with the maintenance of good relations with other polises, observing formal
niceties and smoothing away minor points of conflict in those cases where no
real citizen-to-citizen connections existed. Since Cartan had been in orbit
around Chandrasekhar, ninety-seven light years from Earth, for almost three
centuriesand was currently even further from all the other spacefaring polisesGisela
was at a loss to imagine what urgent diplomatic tasks the mayor could be
engaged in, let alone why it would want to consult her.

She sent the messenger an activation tag. Deferring to the
scapełs aesthetic of continuity, it sprinted across the dunes, coming to a halt
in front of her in a cloud of fine dust. �Wełre in the process of receiving two
visitors from Earth."

Gisela was astonished. �Earth? Which polis?"

�Athena. The first one has just arrived; the second will be
in transit for another ninety minutes."

Gisela had never heard of Athena, but ninety minutes per person
sounded ominous. Everything meaningful about an individual citizen could be
packed into less than an exabyte, and sent as a gamma-ray burst a few
milliseconds long. If you wanted to simulate an entire flesher bodycell by
cell, redundant viscera and allthat was a harmless enough eccentricity, but
lugging the microscopic details of your �very own" small intestine ninety-seven
light years was just being precious.

�What do you know about Athena? In brief."

�It was founded in 2312, with a charter expressing the goal
of ęregaining the lost flesher virtues.ł In public fora, its citizens have
shown little interest in exopolitan realityother than flesher history and
artformsbut they do participate in some contemporary interpolis cultural
activities."

�So why have these two come here?" Gisela laughed. �If theyłre
refugees from boredom, surely they could have sought asylum a little closer to
home?"

The mayor took her literally. �They havenłt adopted Cartan citizenship;
theyłve entered the polis with only visitor privileges. In their transmission
preamble they stated that their purpose in coming was to witness the Planck
Dive."

�Witnessnot take part in?"

�Thatłs what they said."

They could have witnessed as much from home as any
non-participant here in Cartan. The Dive team had been broadcasting everythingstudies,
schematics, simulations, technical arguments, metaphysical debatesfrom the
moment the idea had coalesced out of little more than jokes and thought
experiments, a few years after theyłd gone into orbit around the black hole.
But at least Gisela now knew why the mayor had picked on her; shełd volunteered
to respond to any requests for information about the Dive that couldnłt be
answered automatically from public sources. No one seemed to have found their
reports to be lacking a single worthwhile detail, though, until now.

�So the first onełs suspended?"

�No. She woke as soon as she arrived."

That seemed even stranger than their excess baggage. If you
were travelling with someone, why not delay activation until your companion
caught up? Or better yet, package yourselves as interleaved bits?

�But shełs still in the arrival lounge?"

�Yes."

Gisela hesitated. �Shouldnłt I wait until the other onełs
all here? So I can greet them together?"

�No." The mayor seemed confident on this point. Gisela
wished interpolis protocol allowed non-sentient software to play host; she felt
woefully ill-prepared for the role, herself. But if she started consulting
people, seeking advice, and looking into Athenałs culture in depth, the visitors
would probably have toured Cartan and gone home before she was ready for them.

She steeled herself, and jumped.

The last person whołd whimsically redesigned the arrival
lounge had made it a wooden pier surrounded by grey, windswept ocean. The first
of the two visitors was still standing patiently at the end of the pier, which
was just as well; it was unbounded in the other direction, and walking a few
kilodelta to no avail might have been a bit dispiriting. Her fellow traveller,
still in transit, was represented by a motionless placeholder. Both icons were
highly anatomical-realist, clothed but clearly male and female, the unfrozen
female much younger-looking. Giselałs own icon was more stylised, and her
surface, whether �skin" or �clothing"either could gain a tactile sense if she
wishedwas textured with diffuse reflection rules not quite matching the
optical properties of any real substance.

�Welcome to Cartan. Iłm Gisela." She stretched out her hand,
and the visitor stepped forward and shook itthough it was possible that she
perceived and executed an entirely different act, cross-translated through
gestural interlingua.

�Iłm Cordelia. This is my father, Prospero. Wełve come all
the way from Earth." She seemed slightly dazed, a response Gisela found entirely
reasonable. Back in Athena, whatever elaborate metaphoric action theyłd used to
instruct the communications software to halt them, append suitable explanatory
headers and checksums, then turn the whole package bit-by-bit into a stream of
modulated gamma rays, it could never have fully prepared them for the fact that
in a subjective instant theyłd be stepping ninety-seven years into the future,
and ninety-seven light years from home.

�Youłre here to observe the Planck Dive?" Gisela chose to betray
no hint of puzzlement; it would have been pointlessly cruel to drive home the
fact that they could have seen everything from Athena. Even if you fetishised
realtime data over lightspeed transmissions, it could hardly be worth slipping
one-hundred-and-ninety-four years out of synch with your fellow citizens.

Cordelia nodded shyly, and glanced at the statue beside her.
�My father, really ... �

Meaning what? It was all his idea? Gisela smiled encouragingly,
hoping for clarification, but none was forthcoming. Shełd been wondering why a
Prospero had named his daughter Cordelia, but now it struck her as only prudentif
you had to succumb to a Shakespearean names fad at allnot to put anyone from
the same play together in one family.

�Would you like to look around? While youłre waiting for
him?"

Cordelia stared at her feet, as if the question was
profoundly embarrassing.

�Itłs up to you." Gisela laughed. �I have no idea what constitutes
the polite treatment of half-delivered relatives." It was unlikely that
Cordelia did, either; citizens of Athena clearly didnłt make a habit of
crossing interstellar distances, and the connections on Earth all had so much
bandwidth that the issue would never arise. �But if it was me in transit, I
wouldnłt mind at all."

Cordelia hesitated. �Could I see the black hole, please?"

�Of course." Chandrasekhar possessed no blazing accretion
diskit was six billion years old, and had long ago swept the region clean of
gas and dustbut it certainly left the imprint of its presence on the ordinary
starlight around it. �Iłll give you the short tour, and wełll be back long
before your fatherłs awake." Gisela examined the bearded icon; with his gaze
fixed on the horizon and his arms at his sides, he appeared to be on the verge
of bursting into song. �Assuming hełs not running on partial data already. I
could have sworn I saw those eyes move."

Cordelia smiled slightly, then looked up and said solemnly, �Thatłs
not how we were packaged."

Gisela sent her an address tag. �Then hełll be none the
wiser. Follow me."

They stood on a circular platform in empty space. Gisela had
inflected the scapełs address to give the platform �artificial gravity"a
uniform one gee, regardless of their motionand a transparent dome full of air
at standard temperature and pressure. Presumably all Athena citizens were set
up to ignore any scape parameters that might cause them discomfort, but it
still seemed like a good idea to err on the side of caution. The platform
itself was a compromise, five delta wideoffering some protection from vertigo,
but small enough to let its occupants see some forty degrees below �horizontal."

Gisela pointed. �There it is: Chandrasekhar. Twelve solar
masses. Seventeen thousand kilometres away. It might take you a moment to spot
it; it looks about the same as the new moon from Earth." Shełd chosen their
coordinates and velocity carefully; as she spoke, a bright star split in two,
then flared for a moment into a small, perfect ring as it passed directly
behind the hole. �Apart from gravitational lensing, of course."

Cordelia smiled, obviously delighted. �Is this a real view?"

�Partly. Itłs based on all the images wełve received so far
from a whole swarm of probesbut there are still viewpoints that have never
been covered, and need to be interpolated. That includes the fact that wełre
almost certainly moving with a different velocity than any probe that passed
through the same locationso wełre seeing things differently, with different
Doppler shifts and aberration."

Cordelia absorbed this with no sign of disappointment. �Can
we go closer?"

�As close as you like."

Gisela sent control tags to the platform, and they spiralled
in. For a while it looked as if therełd be nothing more to see; the featureless
black disk ahead of them grew steadily larger, but it clearly wasnłt going to
blossom with any kind of detail. Gradually though, a congested halo of lensed
images began to form around it, and you didnłt need the flash of an Einstein
ring to see that light was behaving strangely.

�How far away are we now?"

�About thirty-four M." Cordelia looked uncertain. Gisela added,
�Six hundred kilometresbut if you convert mass into distance in the natural
way, thatłs thirty-four times Chandrasekharłs mass. Itłs a useful convention;
if a hole has no charge or angular momentum, its mass sets the scale for all
the geometry: the event horizon is always at two M, light forms circular orbits
at three M, and so on." She conjured up a spacetime map of the region outside
the hole, and instructed the scape to record the platformłs world line on it. �Actual
distances travelled depend on the path you take, but if you think of the hole
as being surrounded by spherical shells on which the tidal force is constantsomething
tangible you can measure on the spotyou can give them each a radius of
curvature without caring about the details of how you might travel all the way
to their centre." With one spatial dimension omitted to make room for time, the
shells became circles, and their histories on the map were shown as concentric
translucent cylinders.

As the disk itself grew, the distortion around it spread
faster. By ten M, Chandrasekhar was less than sixty degrees wide, but even
constellations in the opposite half of the sky were visibly crowded together,
as incoming light rays were bent into more radial paths. The gravitational blue
shift, uniform across the sky, was strong enough now to give the stars a savage
glintnot so much icy, as blue-hot. On the map, the light cones dotted along
their world linestructures like stylised conical hour-glasses, made up of all
the light rays passing through a given point at a given momentwere beginning
to tilt towards the hole. Light cones marked the boundaries of physically
possible motion; to cross your own light cone would be to outrace light.

Gisela created a pair of binoculars and offered them to Cordelia.
�Try looking at the halo."

Cordelia obliged her. �Ah! Where did all those stars come
from?"

�Lensing lets you see the stars behind the hole, but it
doesnłt stop there. Light that grazes the three-M shell orbits part-way around
the hole before flying off in a new directionand therełs no limit to how far
it can swing around, if it grazes the shell close enough." On the map, Gisela
sketched half a dozen light rays approaching the hole from various angles;
after wrapping themselves in barberłs-pole helices at slightly different
distances from the three-M cylinder, they all headed off in almost the same
direction. �If you look into the light that escapes from those orbits, you see
an image of the whole sky, compressed into a narrow ring. And at the inner edge
of that ring, therełs a smaller ring, and so oneach made up of light thatłs
orbited the hole one more time."

Cordelia pondered this for a moment. �But it canłt go on
forever, can it? Wonłt diffraction effects blur the pattern, eventually?"

Gisela nodded, hiding her surprise. �Yeah. But I canłt show
you that here. This scape doesnłt run to that level of detail!"

They paused at the three-M shell itself. The sky here was perfectly
bisected: one hemisphere in absolute darkness, the other packed with vivid blue
stars. Along the border, the halo arched over the dome like an impossibly
geometricised Milky Way. Shortly after Cartanłs arrival, Gisela had created an
hommage to Escher based on this view, tiling the half-sky with interlocking
constellations that repeated at the edge in ever-smaller copies. With the binoculars
on 1000 X, they could see a kind of silhouette of the platform itself �in the
distance": a band of darkness blocking a tiny part of the halo in every
direction.

Then they continued towards the event horizonoblivious to
both tidal forces and the thrust they would have needed to maintain such a
leisurely pace in reality.

The stars were now all brightest at ultraviolet frequencies,
but Gisela had arranged for the dome to filter out everything but light from
the flesher visible spectrum, in case Cordeliałs simulated skin took
descriptions of radiation too literally. As the entire erstwhile celestial
sphere shrank to a small disk, Chandrasekhar seemed to wrap itself around themand
this optical illusion had teeth. If theyłd fired off a beam of light away from
the hole, but failed to aim it at that tiny blue window, it would have bent
right around like the path of a tossed rock and dived back into the hole. No material
object could do better; the choice of escape routes was growing narrower.
Gisela felt a frisson of claustrophobia; soon shełd be doing this for real.

They paused again to hoverimplausiblyjust above the horizon,
with the only illumination a pin-prick of heavily blue-shifted radio waves
behind them. On the map, their future light cone led almost entirely into the
hole, with just the tiniest sliver protruding from the two-M cylinder. Gisela
said, �Shall we go through?"

Cordeliałs face was etched in violet. �How?"

�Pure simulation. As authentic as possible ... but not so
authentic that wełll be trapped, I promise."

Cordelia spread her arms, closed her eyes, and mimed falling
backwards into the hole. Gisela instructed the platform to cross the horizon.

The speck of sky blinked out, then began to expand again, rapidly.
Gisela was slowing down time a millionfold; in reality they would have reached
the singularity in a fraction of a millisecond.

Cordelia said, �Can we stop here?"

�You mean freeze time?"

�No, just hover."

�Wełre doing that already. Wełre not moving." Gisela suspended
the scapełs evolution. �Iłve halted time; I think thatłs what you wanted."

Cordelia seemed about to dispute this, but then she gestured
at the now-frozen circle of stars. �Outside, the blue shift was the same right
across the sky ... but now the stars at the edge are much bluer. I donłt
understand."

Gisela said, �In a way itłs nothing new; if wełd let
ourselves free-fall towards the hole, we would have been moving fast enough to
see a whole range of Doppler shifts superimposed on the gravitational blue
shift, long before we crossed the horizon. You know the starbow effect?"

�Yes." Cordelia examined the sky again, and Gisela could almost
see her testing the explanation, imagining how a blue-shifted starbow should
look. �But that only makes sense if wełre movingand you said we werenłt."

�Wełre not, by one perfectly good definition. But itłs not
the definition that applied outside." Gisela highlighted a vertical section of their
world line, where theyłd hovered on the three-M shell. �Outside the event
horizongiven a powerful enough engineyou can always stay fixed on a shell of
constant tidal force. So it makes sense to choose that as a definition of being
ęmotionlessłmaking time on this map strictly vertical. But inside the hole,
that becomes completely incompatible with experience; your light cone tilts so
far that your world line must cut through the shells. And the simplest new
definition of being ęmotionlessł is to burrow straight through the shellsthe
complete opposite of trying to cling to themand to make ęmap timeł strictly
horizontal, pointing towards the centre of the hole." She highlighted a section
of their now-horizontal world line.

Cordeliałs expression of puzzlement began to give way to astonishment.
�So when the light cones tip over far enough ... the definitions of ęspaceł and
ętimeł have to tip with them?"

�Yes! The centre of the hole lies in our future, now. We wonłt
hit the singularity face-first, wełll hit it future-firstjust like hitting the
Big Crunch. And the direction on this platform that used to point towards the
singularity is now facing ędownł on the mapinto what seems from the outside to
be the holełs past, but is really a vast stretch of space. There are billions
of light years laid out in front of usthe entire history of the holełs
interior, converted into spaceand itłs expanding as we approach the
singularity. The only catch is, elbow room and head room are in short supply.
Not to mention time."

Cordelia stared at the map, entranced. �So the inside of the
hole isnłt a sphere at all? Itłs a spherical shell in two directions, with the
shellłs history converted into space as the third ... making the whole thing
the surface of a hypercylinder? A hypercylinder thatłs increasing in length,
while its radius shrinks." Suddenly her face lit up. �And the blue shift is
like the blue shift when the universe starts contracting?" She turned to the
frozen sky. �Except this space is only shrinking in two directionsso the more
the angle of the starlight favours those directions, the more itłs
blue-shifted?"

�Thatłs right." Gisela was no longer surprised by Cordeliałs
rapid uptake; the mystery was how she could have failed to learn everything
there was to know about black holes, long ago. With unfettered access to a
half-decent library and rudimentary tutoring software, she would have filled in
the gaps in no time. But if her father had dragged her all the way to Cartan
just to witness the Planck Dive, how could he have stood by and allowed Athenałs
culture to impede her education? It made no sense.

Cordelia raised the binoculars and looked sideways, around
the hole. �Why canłt I see us?"

�Good question." Gisela drew a light ray on the map, aimed
sideways, leaving the platform just after theyłd crossed the horizon. �At the
three-M shell, a ray like this would have followed a helix in spacetime, coming
back to our world line after one revolution. But here, the helix has been
flipped over and squeezed into a spiraland at best, it only has time to travel
half-way around the hole before it hits the singularity. None of the light wełve
emitted since crossing the horizon can make it back to us.

�Thatłs assuming a perfectly symmetrical Schwarzschild black
hole, which is what wełre simulating. And an ancient hole like Chandrasekhar
probably has settled down to a fair approximation of the Schwarzschild
geometry. But close to the singularity, even infalling starlight would be
blue-shifted enough to disrupt it, and anything more massivelike us, if we
really were herewould cause chaotic changes even sooner." She instructed the
scape to switch to Belinsky-Khalatnikov-Lifshitz geometry, then restarted time.
The stars began to shimmer with distortion, as if seen through a turbulent
atmosphere, then the sky itself seemed to boil, red shifts and blue shifts
sweeping across it in churning waves. �If we were embodied, and strong enough
to survive the tidal forces, wełd feel them oscillating wildly as we passed
through regions collapsing and expanding in different directions." She modified
the spacetime map accordingly, and enlarged it for a better view. Close to the
singularity, the once-regular cylinders of constant tidal force now
disintegrated into a random froth of ever finer, ever more distorted bubbles.

Cordelia examined the map with an expression of consternation.
�How are you going to do any kind of computation in an environment like that?"

�Wełre not. This is chaosbut chaotic systems are highly susceptible
to manipulation. You know Tiplerian theology? The doctrine that we should try
to reshape the universe to allow infinite computation to take place before the
Big Crunch?"

�Yes."

Gisela spread her arms to take in all of Chandrasekhar. �Reshaping
a black hole is easier. With a closed universe, all you can do is rearrange
whatłs already there; with a black hole, you can pour new matter and radiation
in from all directions. By doing that, wełre hoping to steer the geometry into
a more orderly collapsenot the Schwarzschild version, but one that lets light
circumnavigate the space inside the hole many times. Cartan Null will be made
of counter-rotating beams of light, modulated with pulses like beads on a
string. As they pass through each other, the pulses will interact; theyłll be
blue-shifted to energies high enough for pair-production, and eventually even
high enough for gravitational effects. Those beams will be our memory, and
their interactions will drive all our computationwith luck, down almost to the
Planck scale: ten-to-the-minus-thirty-five metres."

Cordelia contemplated this in silence, then asked
hesitantly, �But how much computation will you be able to do?"

�In total?" Gisela shrugged. �That depends on details of the
structure of spacetime at the Planck scaledetails we wonłt know until wełre
inside. There are some models that would allow us to do the whole Tiplerian
thing in miniature: infinite computation. But most give a range of finite
answers, some large, some small."

Cordelia was beginning to look positively gloomy. Surely shełd
known about the Diversł fate all along?

Gisela said, �You do realise wełre sending in clones? No onełs
moving their sole version into Cartan Null!"

�I know." Cordelia averted her eyes. �But once you are the
clone ... wonłt you be afraid of dying?"

Gisela was touched. �Only slightly. And not at all, at the
end. While therełs still a slender chance of infinite computationor even some
exotic discovery that might allow us to escapewełll hang on to fear of death.
It should help motivate us to examine all the options! But if and when itłs
clear that dying is inevitable, wełll switch off the old instinctive response,
and just accept it."

Cordelia nodded politely, but she didnłt seem at all
convinced. If youłd been raised in a polis that celebrated �the lost flesher virtues",
this probably sounded like cheating at best, and self-mutilation at worst.

�Can we go back now, please? My father will be awake soon."

�Of course." Gisela wanted to say something to this strange,
solemn child to put her mind at ease, but she had no idea where to begin. So
they jumped out of the scape togetherout of their fictitious light conesabandoning
the simulation before it was forced to admit that it was offering neither the
chance of new knowledge, nor the possibility of death.

When Prospero woke, Gisela introduced herself and asked what
he wished to see. She suggested a schematic of Cartan Null; it didnłt seem
tactful to mention that Cordelia had already toured Chandrasekhar, but offering
him a scape that neither had seen seemed like a diplomatic way of side-stepping
the issue.

Prospero smiled at her indulgently. �Iłm sure your Falling
City is ingeniously designed, but thatłs of no interest to me. Iłm here to
scrutinise your motives, not your machines."

�Our motives?" Gisela wondered if therełd been a translation
error. �Wełre curious about the structure of spacetime. Why else would someone
dive into a black hole?"

Prosperołs smile broadened. �Thatłs what Iłm here to determine.
Therełs a wide range of choices besides the Pandora myth: Prometheus, Quixote,
the Grail of course ... perhaps even Orpheus. Do you hope to rescue the dead?"

�Rescue the dead?" Gisela was dumbfounded. �Oh, you mean
Tiplerian resurrection? No, we have no plans for that at all. Even if we
obtained infinite computing power, which is unlikely, wełd have far too little
information to recreate any specific dead fleshers. As for resurrecting
everyone by brute force, simulating every possible conscious being ... therełd
be no sure way to screen out in advance simulations that would experience
extreme sufferingand statistically, theyłre likely to outnumber the rest by
about ten thousand to one. So the whole thing would be grossly unethical."

�We shall see." Prospero waved her objections away. �Whatłs
important is that I meet all of Charonłs passengers as soon as possible."

�Charonłs ... ? You mean the Dive team?"

Prospero shook his head with an anguished expression, as if
hełd been misunderstood, but he said, �Yes, assemble your ęDive team.ł Let me
speak to them all. I can see how badly Iłm needed here!"

Gisela was more bewildered than ever. �Needed? Youłre welcome
here, of course ... but in what way are you needed?"

Cordelia reached over and tugged at her fatherłs arm. �Can
we wait in the castle? Iłm so tired." She wouldnłt look Gisela in the eye.

�Of course, my darling!" Prospero leant down and kissed her
forehead. He pulled a rolled-up parchment out of his robe and tossed it into
the air. It unfurled into a doorway, hovering above the ocean beside the pier,
leading into a sunlit scape. Gisela could see vast, overgrown gardens, stone
buildings, winged horses in the air. It was a good thing theyłd compressed
their accommodation more efficiently than their bodies, or they would have tied
up the gamma ray link for about a decade.

Cordelia stepped through the doorway, holding Prosperołs
hand, trying to pull him through. Trying, Gisela finally realised, to shut him
up before he could embarrass her further.

Without success. With one foot still on the pier, Prospero
turned to Gisela. �Why am I needed? Iłm here to be your Homer, your Virgil,
your Dante, your Dickens! Iłm here to extract the mythic essence of this
glorious, tragic endeavour! Iłm here to grant you a gift infinitely greater
than the immortality you seek!"

Gisela didnłt bother pointing out, yet again, that she had
every expectation of a much shorter life inside the hole than out. �Whatłs
that?"

�Iłm here to make you legendary!" Prospero stepped off the
pier, and the doorway contracted behind him.

Gisela stared out across the ocean, unseeing for a moment,
then sat down slowly and let her feet dangle in the icy water.

Certain things were beginning to make sense.

�Be nice," Gisela pleaded. �For Cordeliałs sake."

Timon feigned wounded puzzlement. �What makes you think I
wonłt be nice? Iłm always nice." He morphed briefly from his usual angular iconall
rib-like frames and jointed rodsinto a button-eyed teddy bear.

Gisela groaned softly. �Listen. If Iłm rightif shełs
thinking of migrating to Cartanit will be the hardest decision shełs ever had
to make. If she could just walk away from Athena, she would have done it by nowinstead
of going to all the trouble of making her father believe that it was his idea
to come here."

�What makes you so sure it wasnłt?"

�Prospero has no interest in reality; the only way he could
have heard of the Dive would be Cordelia bringing it to his attention. She must
have chosen Cartan because itłs far enough from Earth to make a clean breakand
the Dive gave her the excuse she needed, a fit subject for her fatherłs ętalentsł
to dangle in front of him. But until shełs ready to tell him that shełs not
going back, we mustnłt alienate him. We mustnłt make things harder for her than
they already are."

Timon rolled his eyes into his anodised skull. �All right! Iłll
play along! I suppose there is a chance you might be reading her correctly. But
if youłre mistaken ... �

Prospero chose that moment to make his entrance, robes billowing,
daughter in tow. They were in a scape created for the occasion, to Prosperołs
specifications: a room shaped like two truncated square pyramids joined at
their bases, panelled in white, with a twenty-M view of Chandrasekhar through a
trapezoidal window. Gisela had never seen this style before; Timon had
christened it �Athenian Astrokitsch."

The five members of the Dive team were seated around a
semi-circular table. Prospero stood before them while Gisela made the
introductions: Sachio, Tiet, Vikram, Timon. Shełd spoken to them all, making
the case for Cordelia, but Timonłs half-hearted concession was the closest
thing shełd received to a guarantee. Cordelia shrank into a corner of the room,
eyes downcast.

Prospero began soberly. �For nigh on a thousand years, we,
the descendants of the flesh, have lived our lives wrapped in dreams of heroic
deeds long past. But we have dreamed in vain of a new Odyssey to inspire us,
new heroes to stand beside the old, new ways to retell the eternal myths. Three
more days, and your journey would have been wasted, lost to us forever." He smiled
proudly. �But I have arrived in time to pluck your tale from the very jaws of
gravity!"

Tiet said, �Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information
about the Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library."
Tietłs icon was like a supple jewelled statue carved from ebony.

Prospero waved a hand dismissively. �A stream of technical
jargon. In Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves."

Tiet raised an eyebrow. �If your vocabulary is impoverished,
augment itdonłt expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of
classical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city-state?"

�No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage"

�Theyłre terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of
space, and a brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the
Dive, which are applicable to every quartic femtometre of spacetime."

Prospero replied, a little stiffly, �Be that as it may, in
Athena we prefer poetry to equations. And I have come to honour your journey in
language that will resonate down the corridors of the imagination for
millennia."

Sachio said, �So you believe youłre better qualified to
portray the Dive than the participants?" Sachio appeared as an owl, perched
inside the head of a flesher-shaped wrought-iron cage full of starlings.

�I am a narratologist."

�You have some kind of specialised training?"

Prospero nodded proudly. �Though in truth, it is a vocation.
When ancient fleshers gathered around their campfires, I was the one telling
stories long into the night, of how the gods fought among themselves, and even
mortal warriors were raised up into the sky to make the constellations."

Timon replied, deadpan, �And I was the one sitting opposite,
telling you what a load of drivel you were spouting." Gisela was about to turn
on him, to excoriate him for breaking his promise, when she realised that hełd
spoken to her alone, routing the data outside the scape. She shot him a
poisonous glance.

Sachiołs owl blinked with puzzlement. �But you find the Dive
itself incomprehensible. So how are you suited to explain it to others?"

Prospero shook his head. �I have come to create enigmas, not
explanations. I have come to shape the story of your descent into a form that
will live on long after your libraries have turned to dust."

�Shape it how?" Vikram was as anatomically correct as a Da
Vinci sketch, when he chose to be, but he lacked the tell-tale signs of a
physiological simulation: no sweat, no dead skin, no shed hair. �You mean
change things?"

�To extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient
to a deeper truth."

Timon said, �I think that was a yes."

Vikram frowned amiably. �So what exactly will you change?"
He spread his arms, and stretched them to encompass his fellow team members. �If
wełre to be improved upon, do tell us how."

Prospero said cautiously, �Five is a poor number, for a
start. Seven, perhaps, or twelve."

�Whew." Vikram grinned. �Shadowy extras only; no onełs for
the chop."

�And the name of your vessel ... �

�Cartan Null? Whatłs wrong with that? Cartan was a great
flesher mathematician, who clarified the meaning and consequences of Einsteinłs
work. ęNullł because itłs built of null geodesics: the paths followed by light
rays."

�Posterity," Prospero declared, �will like it better as ęThe
Falling Cityłits essence unencumbered by your infelicitous words."

Tiet said coolly, �We named this polis after �lie Cartan.
Its clone inside Chandrasekhar will be named after �lie Cartan. If youłre
unwilling to respect that, you might as well head back to Athena right now,
because no one here is going to offer you the slightest cooperation."

Prospero glanced at the others, possibly looking for some evidence
of dissent. Gisela had mixed feelings; Prosperołs mythopoeic babble would not
outlive the truth in the libraries, whatever he imagined, so in a sense it
hardly mattered what it contained. But if they didnłt draw the line somewhere,
she could imagine his presence rapidly becoming unbearable.

He said, �Very well. Cartan Null. I am an artisan as well as
an artist; I can work with imperfect clay."

As the meeting broke up, Timon cornered Gisela. Before he
could start complaining, she said, �If you think three more days of that is too
awful to contemplate, imagine what itłs like for Cordelia."

Timon shook his head. �Iłll keep my word. But now that Iłve
seen what shełs up against ... I really donłt think shełs going to make it. If
shełs been wrapped in propaganda about the golden age of fleshers all her life,
how can you expect her to see through it? A polis like Athena forms a closed
trapped memetic surface: concentrate enough Prosperos in one place, and therełs
no escape."

Gisela eyed him balefully. �Shełs here, isnłt she? Donłt try
telling me that shełs bound to Athena forever, just because she was created
there. Nothingłs as simple as that. Even black holes emit Hawking radiation."

�Hawking radiation carries no information. Itłs thermal
noise; you canłt tunnel out with it." Timon swept two fingers along a diagonal
line, the gesture for �QED."

Gisela said, �Itłs only a metaphor, you idiot, not an isomorphism.
If you canłt tell the difference, maybe you should fuck off to Athena yourself."

Timon mimed pulling his hand back from something biting it,
and vanished.

Gisela looked around the empty scape, angry with herself for
losing her temper. Through the window, Chandrasekhar was calmly proceeding to
crush spacetime out of existence, as it had for the past six billion years.

She said, �And youłd better not be right."

Fifty hours before the Dive, Vikram instructed the probes in
the lowest orbits to begin pouring nanomachines through the event horizon.
Gisela and Cordelia joined him in the control scape, a vast hall full of maps
and gadgets for manipulating the hardware scattered around Chandrasekhar.
Prospero was off interrogating Timon, an ordeal Vikram had just been through
himself. �Oedipal urges" and �womb/vagina symbolism" had figured prominently,
though Vikram had cheerfully informed Prospero that as far as he knew, no one
in Cartan had ever shown much interest in either organ. Gisela found herself
wondering precisely how Cordelia had been created; slavish simulations of
flesher childbirth didnłt bear thinking about.

The nanomachines comprised only a trickle of matter, a few
tonnes per second. Deep inside the hole, though, theyłd measure the curvature
around themobserving both starlight and signals from the nanomachines
following behindthen modify their own collective mass distribution in such a
way as to steer the holełs future geometry closer to the target. Every
deviation from free fall meant jettisoning molecular fragments and sacrificing
chemical energy, but before theyłd entirely ripped themselves apart theyłd give
birth to photonic machines tailored to do the same thing on a smaller scale.

It was impossible to know whether or not any of this was working
as planned, but a map in the scape showed the desired result. Vikram sketched
in two counter-rotating bundles of light rays. �We canłt avoid having space
collapsing in two directions and expanding in the thirdunless we poured in so
much matter that it collapsed in all three, which would be even worse. But itłs
possible to keep changing the direction of expansion, flipping it ninety degrees
again and again, evening things out. That allows light to execute a series of
complete orbitseach taking about one hundredth the time of the previous oneand
it also means there are periods of contraction across the beams, which
counteract the de-focusing effects of the periods of expansion."

The two bundles of rays oscillated between circular and elliptical
cross-sections as the curvature stretched and squeezed them. Cordelia created a
magnifying glass and followed them �in": forwards in time, towards the
singularity. She said, �If the orbital periods form a geometric series, therełs
no limit to the number of orbits you could fit in before the singularity. And
the wavelength is blue-shifted in proportion to the size of the orbit, so
diffraction effects never take over. So whatłs there to stop you doing infinite
computation?"

Vikram replied cautiously, �For a start, once colliding
photons start creating particle-antiparticle pairs, therełll be a range of energies
for each species of particle when it will be travelling so much slower than
lightspeed that the pulses will begin to smear. We think wełve shaped and
spaced the pulses in such a way that all the data will survive, but it would
only take one unknown massive particle to turn the whole stream into gibberish."

Cordelia looked up at him with a hopeful expression. �What
if there are no unknown particles?"

Vikram shrugged. �In Kumarłs model, time is quantised, so
the frequency of the beams canłt keep rising without limit. And most of the
alternative theories also imply that the whole setup will fail eventually, for
one reason or another. I only hope it fails slowly enough for us to understand
why, before wełre incapable of understanding anything." He laughed. �Donłt look
so mournful! It will be like ... the death of one branch of a tree. And maybe
wełll gain some knowledge for a while that we could never even glimpse, outside
the hole."

�But you wonłt be able to do anything with it," Cordelia protested.
�Or tell anyone."

�Ah, technology and fame." Vikram blew a raspberry. �Listen,
if my Dive clone dies learning nothing, hełll still die happy, knowing that I
continued outside. And if he learns everything Iłm hoping hełll learn ... hełll
be too ecstatic to go on living." Vikram composed his face into a picture of
exaggerated earnestness, deflating his own hyperbole, and Cordelia actually
smiled. Gisela had been beginning to wonder if morbid grief over the fate of
the Divers would be enough to put her off Cartan altogether.

Cordelia said, �What would make it worthwhile, then? Whatłs
the most you could hope for?"

Vikram sketched a Feynman diagram in the air between them. �If
you take spacetime for granted, rotational symmetry plus quantum mechanics
gives you a set of rules for dealing with a particlełs spin. Penrose turned
this inside out, and showed that the whole concept of ęthe angle between two
directionsł can be created from scratch in a network of world lines, so long as
they obey those spin rules. Suppose a system of particles with a certain total
spin throws an electron to another system, and in the process the first systemłs
spin decreases. If you knew the angle between the two spin vectors, you could
calculate the probability that the second spin was increased rather than
decreased ... but if the concept of łangleł doesnłt even exist yet, you can
work backwards and define it from the probability you get by looking at all the
networks for which the second spin is increased.

�Kumar and others extended this idea to cover more abstract
symmetries. From a list of rules about what constitutes a valid network, and
how to assign a phase to each one, we can now derive all known physics. But I
want to know if therełs a deeper explanation for those rules. Are spin and the
other quantum numbers truly elementary, or are they the product of something
more fundamental? And when networks reinforce or cancel each other according to
the phase difference between them, is that something basic we just have to
accept, or is there hidden machinery beneath the mathematics?"

Timon appeared in the scape, and drew Gisela aside. �Iłve committed
a small infractionand knowing you, youłll find out anyway. So this is a
confession in the hope of leniency."

�What have you done?"

Timon regarded her nervously. �Prospero was rambling on
about flesher culture as the route to all knowledge." He morphed into a perfect
imitation, and replayed Prosperołs voice: �ęThe key to astronomy lies in the
study of the great Egyptian astrologers, and the heart of mathematics is
revealed in the rituals of the Pythagorean mystics ... ę�

Gisela put her face in her hands; she would have been
hard-pressed not to respond herself. �And you said?"

�I told him that if he was ever embodied in a space-suit,
floating among the stars, he ought to try sneezing on the face plate to improve
the view."

Gisela cracked up laughing. Timon asked hopefully, �Does
that mean Iłm forgiven?"

�No. How did he take it?"

�Hard to tell." Timon frowned. �Iłm not sure that hełs
capable of grasping insults. It would require imagining that someone could
believe that hełs less than essential to the future of civilisation."

Gisela said sternly, �Two more days. Try harder."

�Try harder yourself. Itłs your turn now."

�What?"

�Prospero wants to see you." Timon grinned with malicious
pleasure. �Time to have your own mythic essence extracted."

Gisela glanced towards Cordelia; she was talking animatedly
with Vikram. Athena, and Prospero, had suffocated her; it was only away from
both that she came to life. The decision to migrate was hers alone, but Gisela
would never forgive herself if she did anything to diminish the opportunity.

Timon said, �Be nice."

The Dive team had decided against any parting of the clones;
their frozen snapshots would be incorporated into the blueprint for Cartan Null
without ever being run outside Chandrasekhar. When Gisela had told Prospero
this, hełd been appalled, but hełd cheered up almost immediately; it left him
all the more room to invent some ritual farewell for the travellers, without
being distracted by the truth.

The whole team did gather in the control scape, though, along
with Prospero and Cordelia, and a few dozen friends. Gisela stood apart from
the crowd as Vikram counted down to the deadline. On �ten", she instructed her
exoself to clone her. On �nine", she sent the snapshot to the address being
broadcast by an icon for the Cartan Null filea stylised set of
counter-rotating light beamshovering in the middle of the scape. When the tag
came back confirming the transaction, she felt a surge of loss; the Dive was no
longer part of her own linear future, even if she thought of the clone as a
component of her extended self.

Vikram shouted exuberantly, �Three! Two! One!" He picked up
the Cartan Null icon and tossed it into a map of the spacetime around
Chandrasekhar. This triggered a gamma-ray burst from the polis to a probe with
an eight-M orbit; there, the data was coded into nanomachines designed to
recreate it in active, photonic formand those nanomachines joined the stream
cascading into the hole.

On the map, the falling icon veered into a �motionless"
vertical world line as it approached the two-M shell. Successive slices of
constant time in the static frame outside the hole never crossed the horizon,
they merely clung to it; by one definition, the nanomachines would take forever
to enter Chandrasekhar.

By another definition, the Dive was over. In their own
frame, the nanomachines would have taken less than one-and-a-half milliseconds
to fall from the probe to the horizon, and not much longer to reach the point
where Cartan Null was launched. And however much subjective time the Divers had
experienced, however much computing had been done along the way, the entire
region of space containing Cartan Null would have been crushed into the
singularity a few microseconds later.

�If the Divers tunnelled out of the hole, therełd be a
paradox, wouldnłt there?" Gisela turned; she hadnłt noticed Cordelia behind
her. �Whenever they emerged, they wouldnłt have fallen in yetso they could
swoop down and grab the nanomachines, preventing their own births." The idea
seemed to disturb her.

Gisela said, �Only if they tunnelled out close to the
horizon. If they appeared further awaysay here in Cartan, right nowtheyłd
already be too late. The nanomachines have had too much of a head start; the
fact that theyłre almost standing still in our reference frame doesnłt make
them an easy target if youłre actually chasing after them. Even at lightspeed,
nothing could catch them from here."

Cordelia appeared to take heart from this. �So escape isnłt
impossible?"

�Well ... � Gisela thought of listing some of the other
hurdles, but then she began to wonder if the question was about something else
entirely. �No. Itłs not impossible."

Cordelia gave her a conspiratorial smile. �Good."

Prospero cried out, �Gather round! Gather round now and hear
The Ballad of Cartan Null!" He created a podium, rising beneath his feet. Timon
sidled up to Gisela and whispered, �If this involves a lute, Iłm sending my
senses elsewhere."

It didnłt; the blank verse was delivered without musical accompaniment.
The content, though, was even worse than Gisela had feared. Prospero had
ignored everything she and the others had told him. In his version of events, �Charonłs
passengers" entered �gravityłs abyss" for reasons hełd invented out of thin
air: to escape, respectively, a failed romance/vengeance for an unspeakable
crime/the ennui of longevity; to resurrect a lost flesher ancestor; to seek
contact with �the gods." The universal questions the Divers had actually hoped
to answerthe structure of spacetime at the Planck scale, the underpinnings of
quantum mechanicsdidnłt rate a mention.

Gisela glanced at Timon, but he seemed to be taking the news
that his sole version had just fled into Chandrasekhar to avoid punishment for
an unnamed atrocity extremely well; there was disbelief on his face, but no
anger. He said softly, �This man lives in Hell. Mucous on the face plate is all
hełll ever see."

The audience stood in silence as Prospero began to �describe"
the Dive itself. Timon stared at the floor with a bemused smile. Tiet wore an
expression of detached boredom. Vikram kept peeking at a display behind him, to
see if the faint gravitational radiation emitted by the inflowing nanomachines
was still conforming to his predictions.

It was Sachio who finally lost control and interjected angrily,
�Cartan Null is some ghostly image of a scape, full of ghostly icons, floating
through the vacuum, down into the hole?"

Prospero seemed more startled than outraged by the interruption.
�It is a city of light. Translucent, ethereal ... �

The owl in Sachiołs skull puffed its feathers out. �No
photon state would look like that. What you describe could never exist, and
even if it could it would never be conscious." Sachio had worked for decades on
the problem of giving Cartan Null the freedom to process data without
disrupting the geometry around it.

Prospero spread his arms in a conciliatory gesture. �An archetypal
quest narrative must be kept simple. To burden it with technicalities"

Sachio inclined his head briefly, fingertips to forehead,
downloading information from the polis library. �Do you have any idea what
archetypal narratives are?"

�Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who
can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious"

Sachio cut him off impatiently. �Theyłre the product of a
few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or
subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually
degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were
only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they
were. If all of antiquityłs greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier,
they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by
now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What
youłve created is not only devoid of truth, itłs devoid of aesthetic merit."

Prospero was stunned. He looked around the room expectantly,
as if waiting for someone to speak up in defence of the Ballad.

No one made a sound.

This was it: the end of diplomacy. Gisela spoke privately to
Cordelia, whispering urgently: �Stay in Cartan! No one can force you to leave!"

Cordelia turned to her with an expression of open astonishment.
�But I thought" She fell silent, reassessing something, hiding her surprise.

Then she said, �I canłt stay."

�Why not? What is there to stop you? You canłt stay buried
in Athena" Gisela caught herself; whatever bizarre hold the place had on her,
disparaging it wouldnłt help.

Prospero was muttering in disbelief now, �Ingratitude! Base
ingratitude!" Cordelia regarded him with forlorn affection. �Hełs not ready."
She faced Gisela, and spoke plainly. �Athena wonłt last forever. Polises like
that form and decay; there are too many real possibilities for people to cling
to one arbitrary sanctified culture, century after century. But hełs not
prepared for the transition; he doesnłt even realise itłs coming. I canłt
abandon him to that. Hełs going to need someone to help him through." She
smiled suddenly, mischievously. �But Iłve cut two centuries off the waiting
time. If nothing else, the trip did that."

Gisela was speechless for a moment, shamed by the strength
of this childłs love. Then she sent Cordelia a stream of tags. �These are
references to the best libraries on Earth. Youłll get the real stuff there, not
some watered-down version of flesher physics."

Prospero was shrinking the podium, descending to ground level.
�Cordelia! Come to me now. Wełre leaving these barbarians to the obscurity they
deserve!"

For all that she admired Cordeliałs loyalty, Gisela was
still saddened by her choice. She said numbly, �You belong in Cartan. It should
have been possible. We should have been able to find a way."

Cordelia shook her head: no failure, no regrets. �Donłt
worry about me. Iłve survived Athena so far; I think I can see it through to
the end. Everything youłve shown me, everything Iłve done here, will help." She
squeezed Giselałs hand. �Thank you."

She joined her father. Prospero created a doorway, opening
up onto a yellow brick road through the stars. He stepped through, and Cordelia
followed him.

Vikram turned away from the gravitational wave trace and
asked mildly, �All right, you can own up now: who threw in the additional
exabyte?"

�Freeeeee-dom!" Cordelia bounded across Cartan Nullłs control
scape, a long platform floating in a tunnel of colour-coded Feynman diagrams,
streaming through the darkness like the trails of a billion colliding and
disintegrating sparks.

Giselałs first instinct was to corner her and shout in her
face: Kill yourself now! End this now! A brief side-branch, cut short before
there was time for personality divergence, hardly counted as a real life and a
real death. It would be a forgotten dream, nothing more.

That analysis didnłt hold up, though. From the instant shełd
become conscious, this Cordelia had been an entirely separate person: the one
whołd left Athena forever, the one whołd escaped. Her extended self had
invested far too much in this clone to treat it as a mistake and cut its
losses. Beyond anything it hoped for itself, the clone knew exactly what its
existence meant for the original. To betray that, even if it could never be
found out, would be unthinkable.

Tiet said sharply, �You didnłt raise her hopes, did you?"

Gisela thought back over their conversations. �I donłt think
so. She must know therełs almost no chance of survival."

Vikram looked troubled. �I might have put our own case too
strongly. She might believe the same discoveries will be enough for herbut Iłm
not sure they will."

Timon sighed impatiently. �Shełs here. Thatłs irreversible;
therełs no point agonising about it. All we can do is give her the chance to
make what she can of the experience."

A horrifying thought struck Gisela. �The extra data hasnłt
overburdened us, has it? Ruled out access to the full computational domain?"
Cordelia had compressed herself down to a far leaner program than the version
shełd sent from Earth, but it was still an unexpected load.

Sachio made a sound of indignation. �How badly do you think
I did my job? I knew someone would bring in more than theyłd promised; I left a
hundredfold safety margin. One stowaway changes nothing."

Timon touched Giselałs arm. �Look." Cordelia had finally
slowed down enough to start examining her surroundings. The primary beams, the
infrastructure for all their computation, had already been blue-shifted to hard
gamma rays, and the colliding photons were creating pairs of relativistic
electrons and positrons. In addition, a range of experimental beams with
shorter wavelengths probed the physics of length scales ten thousand times
smallerphysics that would apply to the primary beams about a subjective hour
later. Cordelia found the window with the main results from these beams. She
turned and called out, �Lots of mesons full of top and bottom quarks ahead, but
nothing unexpected!"

�Good!" Gisela felt the knot of guilt and anxiety inside her
begin to unwind. Cordelia had chosen the Dive freely, just like the rest of
them. The fact that it had been a hard decision for her to make was no reason
to assume that shełd regret it.

Timon said, �Well, you were right. I was wrong. She
certainly tunnelled out of Athena."

�Yeah. So much for your theory of closed trapped memetic
surfaces." Gisela laughed. �Pity it was just a metaphor, though."

�Why? I thought youłd be overjoyed that she made it."

�I am. Itłs just a shame that it says nothing at all about
our own chances of escape."

Each orbit gave them thirty minutes of subjective time,
while the true length and time scales of Cartan Null shrank a hundredfold.
Sachio and Tiet scrutinised the functioning of the polis, checking and
rechecking the integrity of the �hardware" as new species of particles entered
the pulse trains. Timon reviewed various methods for shunting information into
new modes, if the opportunity arose. Gisela struggled to bring Cordelia up to
speed, and Vikram, whose main work had been the nanomachines, helped her.

The shortest-wavelength beams were still recapitulating the
results of old particle accelerator experiments; the three of them pored over
the data together. Gisela summarised as best she could. �Charge and the other
quantum numbers generate a kind of angle between world lines in the networks,
just like spin does, but in this case they act like angles in five-dimensional
space. At low energies what you see are three separate subspaces, for
electromagnetism and the weak and strong forces."

�Why?"

�An accident in the early universe with Higgs bosons. Let me
draw a picture ... �

There was no time to go into all the subtleties of particle
physics, but many of the issues that were crucial outside Chandrasekhar were
becoming academic for Cartan Null anyway. Broken symmetries were being restored
as they spoke, with increasing kinetic energy diluting differences in rest mass
into insignificance. The polis was rapidly mutating into a hybrid of every
possible particle type; what governed their future would not be the theory of
any one force, but the nature of quantum mechanics itself.

�What lies behind the frequency and wavelength of a
particle?" Vikram sketched a snapshot of a wave packet on a spacetime diagram. �In
its own reference frame, an electronłs phase rotates at a constant rate: about
once every ten-to-the-minus-twenty seconds. If itłs moving, we see that rate
slowed down by time dilation, but thatłs not the whole picture." He drew a set
of components fanning out at different velocities from a single point on the
wave, then marked off successive points where the phase came full circle for
each one. The locus of these points formed a set of hyperbolic wavefronts in
spacetime, like a stack of conical bowlspacked more tightly, in both time and
space, where the componentsł velocity was greater. �The spacing of the original
wave is only reproduced by components with just the right velocity; they trace
out identical copies of the wave at later times, all neatly superimposed. Components
with the wrong velocity scramble the phase, so their copies all cancel out." He
repeated the entire construction for a hundred points along the wave, and it
propagated neatly into the future. �In curved spacetime, the whole process
becomes distortedbut given the right symmetries, the shape of the wave can be
preserved while the wavelength shrinks and the frequency rises." Vikram warped
the diagram to demonstrate. �Our own situation."

Cordelia took this all in, scribbling calculations,
cross-checking everything to her own satisfaction. �Okay. So why does that have
to break down? Why canłt we just keep being blue-shifted?"

Vikram zoomed in on the diagram. �All phase shifts
ultimately come from interactionsintersections of one world line with another.
In the Kumar model, every network of world lines has a finite weave. At each
intersection, therełs a tiny phase shift that makes time jump by about
ten-to-the-minus-forty-three seconds ... and itłs meaningless to talk about
either a smaller phase shift, or a shorter time scale. So if you try to
blue-shift a wave indefinitely, eventually you reach a point where the whole
system no longer has the resolution to keep reproducing it." As the wave packet
spiralled in, it began to take on a smeared, jagged approximation of its former
shape. Then it disintegrated into unrecognisable noise.

Cordelia examined the diagram carefully, tracing individual
components through the final stages of the process. Finally she said, �How long
before we see evidence of this? Assuming the modelłs correct?"

Vikram didnłt reply; he seemed to be having second thoughts
about the wisdom of the whole demonstration. Gisela said, �In about two hours
we should be able to detect quantised phase in the experimental beams. And then
wełll have another hour or so before" Vikram glanced meaningfully at herprivately,
but Cordelia must have guessed why the sentence trailed off, because she turned
on him.

�What do you think Iłm going to do?" she demanded indignantly.
�Collapse into hysterics at the first glimmering of mortality?"

Vikram looked stung. Gisela said, �Be fair. Wełve only known
you three days. We donłt know what to expect."

�No." Cordelia gazed up at the stylised image of the beam
that encoded them, swarming now with everything from photons to the heaviest
mesons. �But Iłm not going to ruin the Dive for you. If Iłd wanted to brood
about death, I would have stayed home and read bad flesher poetry." She smiled.
�Baudelaire can screw himself. Iłm here for the physics."

Everyone gathered round a single window as the moment of
truth for the Kumar model approached. The data it displayed came from what was
essentially a two-slit interference experiment, complicated by the need to
perform it without anything resembling solid matter. A sinusoidal pattern
showed the numbers of particles detected across a region where an electron beam
recombined with itself after travelling two different paths; since there were
only a finite number of detection sites, and each count had to be an integer,
the pattern was already �quantised", but the analysis software took this into
account, and the numbers were large enough for the image to appear smooth. At a
certain wavelength, any genuine Planck scale effects would rise above these
artifacts, and once they appeared theyłd only grow stronger.

The software said, �Found something!" and zoomed in to show
a slight staircasing of the curve. At first it was so subtle that Gisela had to
take the programłs word that it wasnłt merely showing them the usual,
unavoidable jagging. Then the tiny steps visibly broadened, from two horizontal
pixels to three. Sets of three adjacent detection sites, which moments ago had
been registering different particle counts, were now returning identical
results. The whole apparatus had shrunk to the point where the electrons couldnłt
tell that the path lengths involved were different.

Gisela felt a rush of pure delight, then an aftertaste of
fear. They were reaching down to brush their fingertips across the weave of the
vacuum. It was a triumph that theyłd survived this far, but their descent was
almost certainly unstoppable.

The steps grew wider; the image zoomed out to show more of
the curve. Vikram and Tiet cried out simultaneously, a moment before the
analysis software satisfied itself with rigorous statistical tests. Vikram
repeated softly, �Thatłs wrong." Tiet nodded, and spoke to the software. �Show
us a single wavełs phase structure." The display changed to a linear staircase.
It was impossible to measure the changing phase of a single wave directly, but
assuming that the two versions of the beam were undergoing identical changes,
this was the progression implied by the interference pattern.

Tiet said, �This is not in agreement with the Kumar model.
The phase is quantised, but the steps arenłt equalor even random, like the
Santini model. Theyłre structured across the wave, in cycles. Narrower,
broader, narrower again ... �

Silence descended. Gisela gazed at the pattern and struggled
to concentrate, elated that theyłd found something unexpected, terrified that
they might fail to make sense of it. Why wouldnłt the phase shift come in equal
units? This cyclic pattern was a violation of symmetry, allowing you to pick
the phase with the smallest quantum step as a kind of fixed reference pointan
idea that quantum mechanics had always declared to be as meaningless as singling
out one direction in empty space.

But the rotational symmetry of space wasnłt perfect: in
small enough networks, the usual guarantee that all directions would look the
same no longer held up. Was that the answer? The angles the two beams had to
take to reach the detector were themselves quantised, and that effect was
superimposed on the phase?

No. The scale was all wrong. The experiment was still taking
place over too large a region.

Vikram shouted with joy, and did a backwards somersault. �There
are world lines crossing between the nets! Thatłs what creates phase!" Without
another word, he began furiously sketching diagrams in the air, launching
software, running simulations. Within minutes, he was almost hidden behind
displays and gadgets.

One window showed a simulation of the interference pattern,
a perfect fit to the data. Gisela felt a stab of jealousy: shełd been so close,
she should have been first. Then she began to examine more of the results, and
the feeling evaporated. This was elegant, this was beautiful, this was right.
It didnłt matter whołd discovered it.

Cordelia was looking dazed, left behind. Vikram ducked out
from the clutter hełd created, leaving the rest of them to try to make sense of
it. He took Cordeliałs hands and they waltzed across the scape together. �The
central mystery of quantum mechanics has always been: why canłt you just count
the ways things can happen? Why do you have to assign each alternative a phase,
so they can cancel as well as reinforce each other? We knew the rules for doing
it, we knew the consequencesbut we had no idea what phases were, or where they
came from." He stopped dancing, and conjured up a stack of Feynman diagrams,
five alternatives for the same process, layered one on top of the other. �Theyłre
created the same way as every other relationship: common links to a larger
network." He added a few hundred virtual particles, crisscrossing between the
once-separate diagrams. �Itłs like spin. If the networks have created
directions in space that make two particlesł spins parallel, when they combine
theyłll simply add together. If theyłre anti-parallel, in opposing directions,
theyłll cancel. Phase is the same, but it acts like an angle in two dimensions,
and it works with every quantum number together: spin, charge, colour,
everythingif two components are perfectly out-of-phase, they vanish completely."

Gisela watched as Cordelia reached into the layered diagram,
followed the paths of two components, and began to understand. They hadnłt
discovered any deeper structure to the individual quantum numbers, as theyłd
hoped they might, but theyłd learnt that a single vast network of world lines
could account for everything the universe built from those indivisible threads.

Was this enough for her? Her original, struggling for sanity
back in Athena, might take comfort from the hope that the Dive clone had
witnessed a breakthrough like thisbut as death approached, would it all turn
to ashes for the witness? Gisela felt a pang of doubt herself, though shełd
talked it through with Timon and the others for centuries. Did everything she
felt at this moment lose all meaning, just because there was no chance to carry
the experience back to the wider world? She couldnłt deny that it would have
been better to know that she could reconnect with her other selves, tell all
her distant family and friends what shełd learnt, follow through the
implications for millennia.

But the whole universe faced the same fate. Time was quantised;
there was no prospect of infinite computation before the Big Crunch, for
anyone. If everything that ended was void, the Dive had merely spared them the
prolonged false hope of immortality. If every moment stood alone, complete in
itself, then nothing could rob them of their happiness.

The truth, of course, lay somewhere in between.

Timon approached her, grinning with delight. �What are you
pondering here by yourself?"

She took his hand. �Small networks."

Cordelia said to Vikram, �Now that you know precisely what
phase is, and how it determines probabilities ... is there any way we could use
the experimental beams to manipulate the probabilities for the geometry ahead
of us? Twist back the light cones just enough to keep us skirting the Planck
region? Spiral back up around the singularity for a few billion years, until
the Big Crunch comes, or the hole evaporates from Hawking radiation?"

Vikram looked stunned for a moment, then he began launching
software. Sachio and Tiet came and helped him, searching for computational
shortcuts. Gisela looked on, light-headed, hardly daring to hope. To examine
every possibility might take more time than they had, but then Tiet found a way
to test whole classes of networks in a single calculation, and the process sped
up a thousandfold.

Vikram announced the result sadly. �No. Itłs not possible."

Cordelia smiled. �Thatłs all right. I was just curious."

Reasons To Be Cheerful

1

In September 2004, not long after my twelfth birthday, I entered
a state of almost constant happiness. It never occurred to me to ask why.
Though school included the usual quota of tedious lessons, I was doing well enough
academically to be able to escape into daydreams whenever it suited me. At
home, I was free to read books and web pages about molecular biology and
particle physics, quaternions and galactic evolution, and to write my own
Byzantine computer games and convoluted abstract animations. And though I was a
skinny, uncoordinated child, and every elaborate, pointless organized sport
left me comatose with boredom, I was comfortable enough with my body on my own
terms. Whenever I ranand I ran everywhereit felt good.

I had food, shelter, safety, loving parents, encouragement,
stimulation. Why shouldnłt I have been happy? And though I canłt have entirely
forgotten how oppressive and monotonous classwork and schoolyard politics could
be, or how easily my usual bouts of enthusiasm were derailed by the most
trivial problems, when things were actually going well for me I wasnłt in the
habit of counting down the days until it all turned sour. Happiness always
brought with it the belief that it would last, and though I must have seen this
optimistic forecast disproved a thousand times before, I wasnłt old and cynical
enough to be surprised when it finally showed signs of coming true.

When I started vomiting repeatedly, Dr Ash, our GP, gave me
a course of antibiotics and a week off school. I doubt it was a great shock to
my parents when this unscheduled holiday seemed to cheer me up rather more than
any mere bacterium could bring me down, and if they were puzzled that I didnłt
even bother feigning misery, it would have been redundant for me to moan
constantly about my aching stomach when I was throwing up authentically three
or four times a day.

The antibiotics made no difference. I began losing my
balance, stumbling when I walked. Back in Dr Ashłs surgery, I squinted at the
eye chart. She sent me to a neurologist at Westmead Hospital, who ordered an
immediate MRI scan. Later the same day, I was admitted as an in-patient. My
parents learned the diagnosis straight away, but it took me three more days to
make them spit out the whole truth.

I had a tumor, a medulloblastoma, blocking one of the
fluid-filled ventricles in my brain, raising the pressure in my skull. Medulloblastomas
were potentially fatal, though with surgery followed by aggressive radiation
treatment and chemotherapy, two out of three patients diagnosed at this stage
lived five more years.

I pictured myself on a railway bridge riddled with rotten
sleepers, with no choice but to keep moving, trusting my weight to each suspect
plank in turn. I understood the danger ahead, very clearly ... and yet I felt
no real panic, no real fear. The closest thing to terror I could summon up was
an almost exhilarating rush of vertigo, as if I was facing nothing more than an
audaciously harrowing fairground ride.

There was a reason for this.

The pressure in my skull explained most of my symptoms, but
tests on my cerebrospinal fluid had also revealed a greatly elevated level of a
substance called Leu-enkephalinan endorphin, a neuropeptide which bound to
some of the same receptors as opiates like morphine and heroin. Somewhere along
the road to malignancy, the same mutant transcription factor that had switched
on the genes enabling the tumor cells to divide unchecked had apparently also
switched on the genes needed to produce Leu-enkephalin.

This was a freakish accident, not a routine side-effect. I
didnłt know much about endorphins then, but my parents repeated what the
neurologist had told them, and later I looked it all up. Leu-enkephalin wasnłt
an analgesic, to be secreted in emergencies when pain threatened survival, and
it had no stupefying narcotic effects to immobilize a creature while injuries
healed. Rather, it was the primary means of signaling happiness, released
whenever behavior or circumstances warranted pleasure. Countless other brain
activities modulated that simple message, creating an almost limitless palette
of positive emotions, and the binding of Leu-enkephalin to its target neurons
was just the first link in a long chain of events mediated by other
neurotransmitters. But for all these subtleties, I could attest to one simple,
unambiguous fact: Leu-enkephalin made you feel good.

My parents broke down as they told me the news, and I was
the one who comforted them, beaming placidly like a beatific little child
martyr from some tear-jerking oncological mini-series. It wasnłt a matter of
hidden reserves of strength or maturity; I was physically incapable of feeling
bad about my fate. And because the effects of the Leu-enkephalin were so
specific, I could gaze unflinchingly at the truth in a way that would not have
been possible if Iłd been doped up to the eyeballs with crude pharmaceutical
opiates. I was clear-headed but emotionally indomitable, positively radiant
with courage.

* * * *

I had a ventricular shunt installed, a slender tube inserted
deep into my skull to relieve the pressure, pending the more invasive and risky
procedure of removing the primary tumor; that operation was scheduled for the
end of the week. Dr Maitland, the oncologist, had explained in detail how my
treatment would proceed, and warned me of the danger and discomfort I faced in
the months ahead. Now I was strapped in for the ride and ready to go.

Once the shock wore off, though, my un-blissed-out parents
decided that they had no intention of sitting back and accepting mere
two-to-one odds that Iłd make it to adulthood. They phoned around Sydney, then
further afield, hunting for second opinions.

My mother found a private hospital on the Gold Coastthe only
Australian franchise of the Nevada-based �Health Palace" chainwhere the
oncology unit was offering a new treatment for medulloblastomas. A genetically
engineered herpes virus introduced into the cerebrospinal fluid would infect
only the replicating tumor cells, and then a powerful cytotoxic drug, activated
only by the virus, would kill the infected cells. The treatment had an 80
percent five-year survival rate, without the risks of surgery. I looked up the
cost myself, in the hospitalłs web brochure. They were offering a package deal:
three monthsł meals and accommodation, all pathology and radiology services,
and all pharmaceuticals, for sixty thousand dollars.

My father was an electrician, working on building sites. My
mother was a sales assistant in a department store. I was their only child, so
we were far from poverty-stricken, but they must have taken out a second
mortgage to raise the fee, saddling themselves with a further fifteen or twenty
yearsł debt. The two survival rates were not that different, and I heard Dr
Maitland warn them that the figures couldnłt really be compared, because the
viral treatment was so new. They would have been perfectly justified in taking
her advice and sticking to the traditional regime.

Maybe my enkephalin sainthood spurred them on somehow. Maybe
they wouldnłt have made such a great sacrifice if Iłd been my usual sullen and
difficult self, or even if Iłd been nakedly terrified rather than
preternaturally brave. Iłll never know for sureand either way, it wouldnłt
make me think any less of them. But just because the molecule wasnłt saturating
their skulls, thatłs no reason to expect them to have been immune to its
influence.

On the flight north, I held my fatherłs hand all the way. Wełd
always been a little distant, a little mutually disappointed in each other. I
knew he would have preferred a tougher, more athletic, more extroverted son,
while to me hełd always seemed lazily conformist, with a world view built on
unexamined platitudes and slogans. But on that trip, with barely a word
exchanged, I could feel his disappointment being transmuted into a kind of
fierce, protective, defiant love, and I grew ashamed of my own lack of respect
for him. I let the Leu-enkephalin convince me that, once this was over,
everything between us would change for the better.

* * * *

From the street, the Gold Coast Health Palace could have
passed for one more high-rise beach front hoteland even from the inside, it
wasnłt much different from the hotels Iłd seen in video fiction. I had a room
to myself, with a television wider than the bed, complete with network computer
and cable modem. If the aim was to distract me, it worked. After a week of
tests, they hooked a drip into my ventricular shunt and infused first the
virus, and then three days later, the drug.

The tumor began shrinking almost immediately; they showed me
the scans. My parents seemed happy but dazed, as if theyłd never quite trusted
a place where millionaire property developers came for scrotal tucks to do much
more than relieve them of their money and offer first-class double-talk while I
continued to decline. But the tumor kept on shrinking, and when it hesitated
for two days in a row the oncologist swiftly repeated the whole procedure, and
then the tendrils and blobs on the MRI screen grew skinnier and fainter even
more rapidly than before.

I had every reason to feel unconditional joy now, but when I
suffered a growing sense of unease instead I assumed it was just Leu-enkephalin
withdrawal. It was even possible that the tumor had been releasing such a high
dose of the stuff that literally nothing could have made me feel betterif Iłd
been lofted to the pinnacle of happiness, therełd be nowhere left to go but
down. But in that case, any chink of darkness in my sunny disposition could only
confirm the good news of the scans.

One morning I woke from a nightmaremy first in monthswith
visions of the tumor as a clawed parasite thrashing around inside my skull. I
could still hear the click of carapace on bone, like the rattle of a scorpion
trapped in a jam jar. I was terrified, drenched in sweat ... liberated. My fear
soon gave way to a white-hot rage: the thing had drugged me into compliance,
but now I was free to stand up to it, to bellow obscenities inside my head, to
exorcize the demon with self-righteous anger.

I did feel slightly cheated by the sense of anticlimax that
came from chasing my already-fleeing nemesis downhill, and I couldnłt entirely
ignore the fact that imagining my anger to be driving out the cancer was a
complete reversal of true cause and effecta bit like watching a forklift shift
a boulder from my chest, then pretending to have moved it myself by a mighty
act of inhalation. But I made what sense I could of my belated emotions, and
left it at that.

Six weeks after I was admitted, all my scans were clear, and
my blood, CSF and lymphatic fluid were free of the signature proteins of
metastasizing cells. But there was still a risk that a few resistant tumor
cells remained, so they gave me a short, sharp course of entirely different
drugs, no longer linked to the herpes infection. I had a testicular biopsy
firstunder local anesthetic, more embarrassing than painfuland a sample of
bone marrow taken from my hip, so my potential for sperm production and my
supply of new blood cells could both be restored if the drugs wiped them out at
the source. I lost hair and stomach lining, temporarily, and I vomited more
often, and far more wretchedly, than when Iłd first been diagnosed. But when I
started to emit self-pitying noises, one of the nurses steelily explained that
children half my age put up with the same treatment for months.

These conventional drugs alone could never have cured me,
but as a mopping-up operation they greatly diminished the chance of a relapse.
I discovered a beautiful word: apoptosiscellular suicide, programmed deathand
repeated it to myself, over and over. I ended up almost relishing the nausea
and fatigue; the more miserable I felt, the easier it was to imagine the fate
of the tumor cells, membranes popping and shriveling like balloons as the drugs
commanded them to take their own lives. Die in pain, zombie scum! Maybe Iłd
write a game about it, or even a whole series, culminating in the spectacular
Chemotherapy III: Battle for the Brain. Iłd be rich and famous, I could pay
back my parents, and life would be as perfect in reality as the tumor had
merely made it seem to be.

* * * *

I was discharged early in December, free of any trace of disease.
My parents were wary and jubilant in turn, as if slowly casting off the fear
that any premature optimism would be punished. The side-effects of the
chemotherapy were gone; my hair was growing back, except for a tiny bald patch
where the shunt had been, and I had no trouble keeping down food. There was no
point returning to school now, two weeks before the yearłs end, so my summer
holidays began immediately. The whole class sent me a tacky, insincere,
teacher-orchestrated get-well email, but my friends visited me at home, only
slightly embarrassed and intimidated, to welcome me back from the brink of
death.

So why did I feel so bad? Why did the sight of the clear
blue sky through the window when I opened my eyes every morningwith the
freedom to sleep-in as long as I chose, with my father or mother home all day
treating me like royalty, but keeping their distance and letting me sit
unnagged at the computer screen for sixteen hours if I wantedwhy did that
first glimpse of daylight make me want to bury my face in the pillow, clench my
teeth and whisper: �I should have died. I should have died."?

Nothing gave me the slightest pleasure. Nothingnot my favorite
netzines or web sites, not the njari music Iłd once reveled in, not the
richest, the sweetest, the saltiest junk food that was mine now for the asking.
I couldnłt bring myself to read a whole page of any book, I couldnłt write ten
lines of code. I couldnłt look my real-world friends in the eye, or face the
thought of going online.

Everything I did, everything I imagined, was tainted with an
overwhelming sense of dread and shame. The only image I could summon up for comparison
was from a documentary about Auschwitz that Iłd seen at school. It had opened
with a long tracking shot, a newsreel camera advancing relentlessly toward the
gates of the camp, and Iłd watched that scene with my spirits sinking, already
knowing full well what had happened inside. I wasnłt delusional; I didnłt
believe for a moment that there was some source of unspeakable evil lurking
behind every bright surface around me. But when I woke and saw the sky, I felt
the kind of sick foreboding that would only have made sense if Iłd been staring
at the gates of Auschwitz.

Maybe I was afraid that the tumor would grow back, but not
that afraid. The swift victory of the virus in the first round should have
counted for much more, and on one level I did think of myself as lucky, and
suitably grateful. But I could no more rejoice in my escape, now, than I could
have felt suicidally bad at the height of my enkephalin bliss.

My parents began to worry, and dragged me along to a psychologist
for �recovery counseling." The whole idea seemed as tainted as everything else,
but I lacked the energy for resistance. Dr Bright and I �explored the
possibility" that I was subconsciously choosing to feel miserable because Iłd
learned to associate happiness with the risk of death, and I secretly feared
that recreating the tumorłs main symptom could resurrect the thing itself. Part
of me scorned this facile explanation, but part of me seized on it, hoping that
if I owned up to such subterranean mental gymnastics it would drag the whole
process into the light of day, where its flawed logic would become untenable.
But the sadness and disgust that everything induced in mebirdsong, the pattern
of our bathroom tiles, the smell of toast, the shape of my own handsonly
increased.

I wondered if the high levels of Leu-enkephalin from the
tumor might have caused my neurons to reduce their population of the
corresponding receptors, or if Iłd become �Leu-enkephalin-tolerant" the way a
heroin addict became opiate-tolerant, through the production of a natural
regulatory molecule that blocked the receptors. When I mentioned these ideas to
my father, he insisted that I discuss them with Dr Bright, who feigned intense
interest but did nothing to show that hełd taken me seriously. He kept telling
my parents that everything I was feeling was a perfectly normal reaction to the
trauma Iłd been through, and that all I really needed was time, and patience,
and understanding.

* * * *

I was bundled off to high school at the start of the new
year, but when I did nothing but sit and stare at my desk for a week, arrangements
were made for me to study online. At home, I did manage to work my way slowly
through the curriculum, in the stretches of zombie-like numbness that came
between the bouts of sheer, paralyzing unhappiness. In the same periods of
relative clarity, I kept thinking about the possible causes of my affliction. I
searched the biomedical literature and found a study of the effects of high
doses of Leu-enkephalin in cats, but it seemed to show that any tolerance would
be short-lived.

Then, one afternoon in Marchstaring at an electron micrograph
of a tumor cell infected with herpes virus, when I should have been studying
dead explorersI finally came up with a theory that made sense. The virus
needed special proteins to let it dock with the cells it infected, enabling it
to stick to them long enough to use other tools to penetrate the cell membrane.
But if it had acquired a copy of the Leu-enkephalin gene from the tumorłs own
copious RNA transcripts, it might have gained the ability to cling, not just to
replicating tumor cells, but to every neuron in my brain with a Leu-enkephalin
receptor.

And then the cytotoxic drug, activated only in infected
cells, would have come along and killed them all.

Deprived of any input, the pathways those dead neurons normally
stimulated were withering away. Every part of my brain able to feel pleasure
was dying. And though at times I could, still, simply feel nothing, mood was a
shifting balance of forces. With nothing to counteract it, the slightest
flicker of depression could now win every tug-of-war, unopposed.

I didnłt say a word to my parents; I couldnłt bear to tell
them that the battle theyłd fought to give me the best possible chance of
survival might now be crippling me. I tried to contact the oncologist whołd
treated me on the Gold Coast, but my phone calls floundered in a Muzak-filled
moat of automated screening, and my email was ignored. I managed to see Dr Ash
alone, and she listened politely to my theory, but she declined to refer me to
a neurologist when my only symptoms were psychological: blood and urine tests
showed none of the standard markers for clinical depression.

The windows of clarity grew shorter. I found myself spending
more and more of each day in bed, staring out across the darkened room. My
despair was so monotonous, and so utterly disconnected from anything real, that
to some degree it was blunted by its own absurdity: no one I loved had just
been slaughtered, the cancer had almost certainly been defeated, and I could
still grasp the difference between what I was feeling and the unarguable logic
of real grief, or real fear.

But I had no way of casting off the gloom and feeling what I
wanted to feel. My only freedom came down to a choice between hunting for
reasons to justify my sadnessdeluding myself that it was my own, perfectly
natural response to some contrived litany of misfortunesor disowning it as
something alien, imposed from without, trapping me inside an emotional shell as
useless and unresponsive as a paralyzed body.

My father never accused me of weakness and ingratitude; he
just silently withdrew from my life. My mother kept trying to get through to
me, to comfort or provoke me, but it reached the point where I could barely
squeeze her hand in reply. I wasnłt literally paralyzed or blind, speechless or
feeble-minded. But all the brightly lit worlds Iłd once inhabitedphysical and
virtual, real and imaginary, intellectual and emotionalhad become invisible,
and impenetrable. Buried in fog. Buried in shit. Buried in ashes.

By the time I was admitted to a neurological ward, the dead
regions of my brain were clearly visible on an MRI scan. But it was unlikely
that anything could have halted the process even if it had been diagnosed
sooner.

And it was certain that no one had the power to reach into
my skull and restore the machinery of happiness.

2

The alarm woke me at ten, but it took me another three hours
to summon up the energy to move. I threw off the sheet and sat on the side of
the bed, muttering half-hearted obscenities, trying to get past the inescapable
conclusion that I shouldnłt have bothered. Whatever pinnacles of achievement I
scaled today (managing not only to go shopping, but to buy something other than
a frozen meal) and whatever monumental good fortune befell me (the insurance
company depositing my allowance before the rent was due) Iłd wake up tomorrow
feeling exactly the same.

Nothing helps, nothing changes. Four words said it all. But
Iłd accepted that long ago; there was nothing left to be disappointed about.
And I had no reason to sit here lamenting the bleeding obvious for the
thousandth time.

Right?

Fuck it. Just keep moving.

I swallowed my �morning" medication, the six capsules Iłd
put out on the bedside table the night before, then went into the bathroom and
urinated a bright yellow stream consisting mainly of the last dosełs
metabolites. No antidepressant in the world could send me to Prozac Heaven, but
this shit kept my dopamine and serotonin levels high enough to rescue me from
total catatoniafrom liquid food, bedpans and sponge baths.

I splashed water on my face, trying to think of an excuse to
leave the flat when the freezer was still half full. Staying in all day,
unwashed and unshaven, did make me feel worse: slimy and lethargic, like some
pale parasitic leech. But it could still take a week or more for the pressure
of disgust to grow strong enough to move me.

I stared into the mirror. Lack of appetite more than made up
for lack of exerciseI was as immune to carbohydrate comfort as I was to runnerłs
highand I could count my ribs beneath the loose skin of my chest. I was 30
years old, and I looked like a wasted old man. I pressed my forehead against
the cool glass, obeying some vestigial instinct which suggested that there
might be a scrap of pleasure to be extracted from the sensation. There wasnłt.

In the kitchen, I saw the light on the phone: there was a message
waiting. I walked back into the bathroom and sat on the floor, trying to
convince myself that it didnłt have to be bad news. No one had to be dead. And
my parents couldnłt break up twice.

I approached the phone and waved the display on. There was a
thumbnail image of a severe-looking middle-aged woman, no one I recognized. The
senderłs name was Dr Z. Durrani, Department of Biomedical Engineering,
University of Cape Town. The subject line read: �New Techniques in Prosthetic
Reconstructive Neuroplasty." That made a change; most people skimmed the
reports on my clinical condition so carelessly that they assumed I was mildly
retarded. I felt a refreshing absence of disgust, the closest I could come to
respect, for Dr Durrani. But no amount of diligence on her part could save the
cure itself from being a mirage.

Health Palacełs no-fault settlement provided me with a
living allowance equal to the minimum wage, plus reimbursement of approved
medical costs; I had no astronomical lump sum to spend as I saw fit. However,
any treatment likely to render me financially self-sufficient could be paid for
in full, at the discretion of the insurance company. The value of such a cure
to Global Assurancethe total remaining cost of supporting me until deathwas
constantly falling, but then so was medical research funding, worldwide. Word
of my case had got around.

Most of the treatments Iłd been offered so far had involved
novel pharmaceuticals. Drugs had freed me from institutional care, but
expecting them to turn me into a happy little wage-earner was like hoping for
an ointment that made amputated limbs grow back. From Global Assurancełs
perspective, though, shelling out for anything more sophisticated meant
gambling with a much greater suma prospect that no doubt sent my case manager
scrambling for his actuarial database. There was no point indulging in rash expenditure
decisions when there was still a good chance that Iłd suicide in my forties.
Cheap fixes were always worth a try, even if they were long shots, but any
proposal radical enough to stand a real chance of working was guaranteed to
fail the risk/cost analysis.

I knelt by the screen with my head in my hands. I could
erase the message unseen, sparing myself the frustration of knowing exactly
what Iłd be missing out on ... but then, not knowing would be just as bad. I
tapped the PLAY button and looked away; meeting the gaze of even a recorded
face gave me a feeling of intense shame. I understood why: the neural circuitry
needed to register positive non-verbal messages was long gone, but the pathways
that warned of responses like rejection and hostility had not merely remained
intact, theyłd grown skewed and hypersensitive enough to fill the void with a
strong negative signal, whatever the reality.

I listened as carefully as I could while Dr Durrani
explained her work with stroke patients. Tissue-cultured neural grafts were the
current standard treatment, but shełd been injecting an elaborately tailored
polymer foam into the damaged region instead. The foam released growth factors
that attracted axons and dendrites from surrounding neurons, and the polymer
itself was designed to function as a network of electrochemical switches. Via
microprocessors scattered throughout the foam, the initially amorphous network
was programmed first to reproduce generically the actions of the lost neurons,
then fine-tuned for compatibility with the individual recipient.

Dr Durrani listed her triumphs: sight restored, speech
restored, movement, continence, musical ability. My own deficitmeasured in
neurons lost, or synapses, or raw cubic centimeterslay beyond the range of all
the chasms shełd bridged to date. But that only made it more of a challenge.

I waited almost stoically for the one small catch, in six or
seven figures. The voice from the screen said, �If you can meet your own travel
expenses and the cost of a three-week hospital stay, my research grant will
cover the treatment itself."

I replayed these words a dozen times, trying to find a less
favorable interpretationone task I was usually good at. When I failed, I
steeled myself and emailed Durraniłs assistant in Cape Town, asking for clarification.

There was no misunderstanding. For the cost of a yearłs
supply of the drugs that barely kept me conscious, I was being offered a chance
to be whole again for the rest of my life.

* * * *

Organizing a trip to South Africa was completely beyond me,
but once Global Assurance recognized the opportunity it was facing, machinery
on two continents swung into action on my behalf. All I had to do was fight
down the urge to call everything off. The thought of being hospitalized, of
being powerless again, was disturbing enough, but contemplating the potential
of the neural prosthesis itself was like staring down the calendar at a secular
Judgment Day. On 7 March 2023, Iłd either be admitted into an infinitely
larger, infinitely richer, infinitely better world ... or Iłd prove to be
damaged beyond repair. And in a way, even the final death of hope was a far
less terrifying prospect than the alternative; it was so much closer to where I
was already, so much easier to imagine. The only vision of happiness I could
summon up was myself as a child, running joyfully, dissolving into
sunlightwhich was all very sweet and evocative, but a little short on
practical details. If Iłd wanted to be a sunbeam, I could have cut my wrists
anytime. I wanted a job, I wanted a family, I wanted ordinary love and modest
ambitionsbecause I knew these were the things Iłd been denied. But I could no
more imagine what it would be like, finally, to attain them, than I could
picture daily life in 26-dimensional space.

I didnłt sleep at all before the dawn flight out of Sydney.
I was escorted to the airport by a psychiatric nurse, but spared the indignity
of a minder sitting beside me all the way to Cape Town. I spent my waking
moments on the flight fighting paranoia, resisting the temptation to invent
reasons for all the sadness and anxiety coursing through my skull. No one on
the plane was staring at me disdainfully. The Durrani technique was not going
to turn out to be a hoax. I succeeded in crushing these �explanatory" delusions
... but as ever, it remained beyond my power to alter my feelings, or even to
draw a clear line between my purely pathological unhappiness, and the perfectly
reasonable anxiety that anyone would feel on the verge of radical brain
surgery.

Wouldnłt it be bliss, not to have to fight to tell the
difference all the time? Forget happiness; even a future full of abject misery
would be a triumph, so long as I knew that it was always for a reason.

* * * *

Luke De Vries, one of Durraniłs postdoctoral students, met
me at the airport. He looked about 25, and radiated the kind of self-assurance
I had to struggle not to misread as contempt. I felt trapped and helpless
immediately; hełd arranged everything, it was like stepping on to a conveyor
belt. But I knew that if Iłd been left to do anything for myself the whole
process would have ground to a halt.

It was after midnight when we reached the hospital in the suburbs
of Cape Town. Crossing the car park, the insect sounds were wrong, the air
smelled indefinably alien, the constellations looked like clever forgeries. I
sagged to my knees as we approached the entrance.

�Hey!" De Vries stopped and helped me up. I was shaking with
fear, and then shame too, at the spectacle I was making of myself.

�This violates my Avoidance Therapy."

�Avoidance Therapy?"

�Avoid hospitals at all costs."

De Vries laughed, though if he wasnłt merely humoring me I
had no way of telling. Recognizing the fact that youłd elicited genuine
laughter was a pleasure, so those pathways were all dead.

He said, �We had to carry the last subject in on a
stretcher. She left about as steady on her feet as you are."

�That bad?"

�Her artificial hip was playing up. Not our fault."

We walked up the steps and into the brightly lit foyer.

* * * *

The next morningMonday, 6 March, the day before the operationI
met most of the surgical team whołd perform the first, purely mechanical, part
of the procedure: scraping clean the useless cavities left behind by dead
neurons, prising open with tiny balloons any voids that had been squeezed shut,
and then pumping the whole oddly-shaped totality full of Durraniłs foam. Apart
from the existing hole in my skull from the shunt 18 years before, theyłd
probably have to drill two more.

A nurse shaved my head and glued five reference markers to
the exposed skin, then I spent the afternoon being scanned. The final,
three-dimensional image of all the dead space in my brain looked like a
spelunkerłs map, a sequence of linked caves complete with rock falls and
collapsed tunnels.

Durrani herself came to see me that evening. �While youłre
still under anesthetic," she explained, �the foam will harden, and the first
connections will be made with the surrounding tissue. Then the microprocessors
will instruct the polymer to form the network wełve chosen to serve as a
starting point."

I had to force myself to speak; every question I
askedhowever politely phrased, however lucid and relevantfelt as painful and
degrading as if I was standing before her naked asking her to wipe shit out of
my hair. �How did you find a network to use? Did you scan a volunteer?" Was I
going to start my new life as a clone of Luke De Vriesinheriting his tastes,
his ambitions, his emotions?

�No, no. Therełs an international database of healthy neural
structures20,000 cadavers who died without brain injury. More detailed than
tomography; they froze the brains in liquid nitrogen, sliced them up with a
diamond-tipped microtome, then stained and electron-micrographed the slices."

My mind balked at the number of exabytes she was casually
invoking; Iłd lost touch with computing completely. �So youłll use some kind of
composite from the database? Youłll give me a selection of typical structures,
taken from different people?"

Durrani seemed about to let that pass as near enough, but
she was clearly a stickler for detail, and she hadnłt insulted my intelligence
yet. �Not quite. It will be more like a multiple exposure than a composite. Wełve
used about 4,000 records from the databaseall the males in their twenties or
thirtiesand wherever someone has neuron A wired to neuron B, and someone else
has neuron A wired to neuron C ... youłll have connections to both B and C. So
youłll start out with a network that in theory could be pared down to any one
of the 4,000 individual versions used to construct itbut in fact, youłll pare
it down to your own unique version instead."

That sounded better than being an emotional clone or a Frankenstein
collage; Iłd be a roughly hewn sculpture, with features yet to be refined. But

�Pare it down how? How will I go from being potentially anyone,
to being ... ?" What? My 12-year-old self, resurrected? Or the 30-year-old I
should have been, conjured into existence as a remix of these 4,000 dead
strangers? I trailed off; Iłd lost what little faith Iłd had that I was talking
sense.

Durrani seemed to grow slightly uneasy, herselfwhatever my
judgment was worth on that. She said, �There should be parts of your brain,
still intact, which bear some record of whatłs been lost. Memories of formative
experiences, memories of the things that used to give you pleasure, fragments
of innate structures that survived the virus. The prosthesis will be driven
automatically toward a state thatłs compatible with everything else in your
brainit will find itself interacting with all these other systems, and the
connections that work best in that context will be reinforced." She thought for
a moment. �Imagine a kind of artificial limb, imperfectly formed to start with,
that adjusts itself as you use it: stretching when it fails to grasp what you
reach for, shrinking when it bumps something unexpectedly ... until it takes on
precisely the size and shape of the phantom limb implied by your movements.
Which itself is nothing but an image of the lost flesh and blood."

That was an appealing metaphor, though it was hard to
believe that my faded memories contained enough information to reconstruct
their phantom author in every detailthat the whole jigsaw of who Iłd been, and
might have become, could be filled in from a few hints along the edges and the
jumbled-up pieces of 4,000 other portraits of happiness. But the subject was
making at least one of us uncomfortable, so I didnłt press the point.

I managed to ask a final question. �What will it be like,
before any of this happens? When I wake up from the anesthetic and all the
connections are still intact?"

Durrani confessed, �Thatłs one thing Iłll have no way of knowing,
until you tell me yourself."

* * * *

Someone repeated my name, reassuringly but insistently. I
woke a little more. My neck, my legs, my back were all aching, and my stomach
was tense with nausea.

But the bed was warm, and the sheets were soft. It was good
just to be lying there.

�Itłs Wednesday afternoon. The operation went well."

I opened my eyes. Durrani and four of her students were gathered
at the foot of the bed. I stared at her, astonished: the face Iłd once thought
of as �severe" and �forbidding" was ... riveting, magnetic. I could have
watched her for hours. But then I glanced at Luke De Vries, who was standing
beside her. He was just as extraordinary. I turned one by one to the other
three students. Everyone was equally mesmerizing; I didnłt know where to look.

�How are you feeling?"

I was lost for words. These peoplełs faces were loaded with
so much significance, so many sources of fascination, that I had no way of
singling out any one factor: they all appeared wise, ecstatic, beautiful,
reflective, attentive, compassionate, tranquil, vibrant ... a white noise of
qualities, all positive, but ultimately incoherent.

But as I shifted my gaze compulsively from face to face,
struggling to make sense of them, their meanings finally began to crystallizelike
words coming into focus, though my sight had never been blurred.

I asked Durrani, �Are you smiling?"

�Slightly." She hesitated. �There are standard tests,
standard images for this, but ... please, describe my expression. Tell me what
Iłm thinking."

I answered unselfconsciously, as if shełd asked me to read
an eye chart. �Youłre ... curious? Youłre listening carefully. Youłre
interested, and youłre ... hoping that something good will happen. And youłre
smiling because you think it will. Or because you canłt quite believe that it
already has."

She nodded, smiling more decisively. �Good."

I didnłt add that I now found her stunningly, almost
painfully, beautiful. But it was the same for everyone in the room, male and
female: the haze of contradictory moods that Iłd read into their faces had
cleared, but it had left behind a heart-stopping radiance. I found this
slightly alarmingit was too indiscriminate, too intensethough in a way it
seemed almost as natural a response as the dazzling of a dark-adapted eye. And
after 18 years of seeing nothing but ugliness in every human face, I wasnłt
ready to complain about the presence of five people who looked like angels.

Durrani asked, �Are you hungry?"

I had to think about that. �Yes."

One of the students fetched a prepared meal, much the same
as the lunch Iłd eaten on Monday: salad, a bread roll, cheese. I picked up the
roll and took a bite. The texture was perfectly familiar, the flavor unchanged.
Two days before, Iłd chewed and swallowed the same thing with the usual mild
disgust that all food induced in me.

Hot tears rolled down my cheeks. I wasnłt in ecstasy; the
experience was as strange and painful as drinking from a fountain with lips so
parched that the skin had turned to salt and dried blood.

As painful, and as compelling. When Iłd emptied the plate, I
asked for another. Eating was good, eating was right, eating was necessary.
After the third plate, Durrani said firmly, �Thatłs enough." I was shaking with
the need for more; she was still supernaturally beautiful, but I screamed at
her, outraged.

She took my arms, held me still. �This is going to be hard
for you. Therełll be surges like this, swings in all directions, until the
network settles down. You have to try to stay calm, try to stay reflective. The
prosthesis makes more things possible than youłre used to ... but youłre still
in control."

I gritted my teeth and looked away. At her touch Iłd
suffered an immediate, agonizing erection.

I said, �Thatłs right. Iłm in control."

* * * *

In the days that followed, my experiences with the
prosthesis became much less raw, much less violent. I could almost picture the
sharpest, most ill-fitting edges of the network beingmetaphoricallyworn
smooth by use. To eat, to sleep, to be with people remained intensely
pleasurable, but it was more like an impossibly rosy-hued dream of childhood
than the result of someone poking my brain with a high voltage wire.

Of course, the prosthesis wasnłt sending signals into my
brain in order to make my brain feel pleasure. The prosthesis itself was the
part of me that was feeling all the pleasurehowever seamlessly that process
was integrated with everything else: perception, language, cognition ... the
rest of me. Dwelling on this was unsettling at first, but on reflection no more
so than the thought experiment of staining blue all the corresponding organic
regions in a healthy brain, and declaring, �They feel all the pleasure, not
you!"

I was put through a battery of psychological testsmost of
which Iłd sat through many times before, as part of my annual insurance
assessmentsas Durraniłs team attempted to quantify their success. Maybe a
stroke patientłs fine control of a formerly paralyzed hand was easier to
measure objectively, but I must have leaped from bottom to top of every
numerical scale for positive affect. And far from being a source of irritation,
these tests gave me my first opportunity to use the prosthesis in new arenasto
be happy in ways I could barely remember experiencing before. As well as being
required to interpret mundanely rendered scenes of domestic situationswhat has
just happened between this child, this woman, and this man; who is feeling good
and who is feeling bad?I was shown breathtaking images of great works of art,
from complex allegorical and narrative paintings to elegant minimalist essays
in geometry. As well as listening to snatches of everyday speech, and even
unadorned cries of joy and pain, I was played samples of music and song from
every tradition, every epoch, every style.

That was when I finally realized that something was wrong.

Jacob Tsela was playing the audio files and noting my responses.
Hełd been deadpan for most of the session, carefully avoiding any risk of
corrupting the data by betraying his own opinions. But after hełd played a
heavenly fragment of European classical music, and Iłd rated it 20 out of 20, I
caught a flicker of dismay on his face.

�What? You didnłt like it?"

Tsela smiled opaquely. �It doesnłt matter what I like. Thatłs
not what wełre measuring."

�Iłve rated it already, you canłt influence my score." I
regarded him imploringly; I was desperate for communication of any kind. �Iłve
been dead to the world for 18 years. I donłt even know who the composer was."

He hesitated. �J.S. Bach. And I agree with you: itłs
sublime." He reached for the touchscreen and continued the experiment.

So what had he been dismayed about? I knew the answer immediately;
Iłd been an idiot not to notice before, but Iłd been too absorbed in the music
itself.

I hadnłt scored any piece lower than 18. And it had been the
same with the visual arts. From my 4,000 virtual donors Iłd inherited, not the
lowest common denominator, but the widest possible tasteand in ten days, I
still hadnłt imposed any constraints, any preferences, of my own.

All art was sublime to me, and all music. Every kind of food
was delicious. Everyone I laid eyes on was a vision of perfection.

Maybe I was just soaking up pleasure wherever I could get
it, after my long drought, but it was only a matter of time before I grew
sated, and became as discriminating, as focused, as particular, as everyone
else.

�Should I still be like this? Omnivorous?" I blurted out the
question, starting with a tone of mild curiosity, ending with an edge of panic.

Tsela halted the sample hełd been playinga chant that might
have been Albanian, Moroccan, or Mongolian for all I knew, but which made hair
rise on the back of my neck, and sent my spirits soaring. Just like everything
else had.

He was silent for a while, weighing up competing
obligations. Then he sighed and said, �Youłd better talk to Durrani."

* * * *

Durrani showed me a bar graph on the wallscreen in her
office: the number of artificial synapses that had changed state within the
prosthesisnew connections formed, existing ones broken, weakened or
strengthenedfor each of the past ten days. The embedded microprocessors kept
track of such things, and an antenna waved over my skull each morning collected
the data.

Day one had been dramatic, as the prosthesis adapted to its
environment; the 4,000 contributing networks might all have been perfectly
stable in their ownersł skulls, but the Everyman version Iłd been given had
never been wired up to anyonełs brain before.

Day two had seen about half as much activity, day three
about a tenth.

From day four on, though, therełd been nothing but background
noise. My episodic memories, however pleasurable, were apparently being stored
elsewheresince I certainly wasnłt suffering from amnesiabut after the initial
burst of activity, the circuitry for defining what pleasure was had undergone
no change, no refinement at all.

�If any trends emerge in the next few days, we should be
able to amplify them, push them forwardlike toppling an unstable building,
once itłs showing signs of falling in a certain direction." Durrani didnłt
sound hopeful. Too much time had passed already, and the network wasnłt even
teetering.

I said, �What about genetic factors? Canłt you read my genome,
and narrow things down from that?"

She shook her head. �At least 2,000 genes play a role in
neural development. Itłs not like matching a blood group or a tissue type;
everyone in the database would have more or less the same small proportion of
those genes in common with you. Of course, some people must have been closer to
you in temperament than othersbut we have no way of identifying them
genetically."

�I see."

Durrani said carefully, �We could shut the prosthesis down
completely, if thatłs what you want. Therełd be no need for surgerywełd just
turn it off, and youłd be back where you started."

I stared at her luminous face. How could I go back? Whatever
the tests and the bar graphs said ... how could this be failure? However much
useless beauty I was drowning in, I wasnłt as screwed-up as Iłd been with a
head full of Leu-enkephalin. I was still capable of fear, anxiety, sorrow; the
tests had revealed universal shadows, common to all the donors. Hating Bach or
Chuck Berry, Chagall or Paul Klee was beyond me, but Iłd reacted as sanely as
anyone to images of disease, starvation, death.

And I was not oblivious to my own fate, the way Iłd been oblivious
to the cancer.

But what was my fate, if I kept using the prosthesis? Universal
happiness, universal shadows ... half the human race dictating my emotions? In
all the years Iłd spent in darkness, if Iłd held fast to anything, hadnłt it
been the possibility that I carried a kind of seed within me: a version of
myself that might grow into a living person again, given the chance? And hadnłt
that hope now proved false? Iłd been offered the stuff of which selves were
madeand though Iłd tested it all, and admired it all, Iłd claimed none of it
as my own. All the joy Iłd felt in the last ten days had been meaningless. I
was just a dead husk, blowing around in other peoplesł sunlight.

I said, �I think you should do that. Switch it off."

Durrani held up her hand. �Wait. If youłre willing, there is
one other thing we could try. Iłve been discussing it with our ethics
committee, and Luke has begun preliminary work on the software ... but in the
end, it will be your decision."

�To do what?"

�The network can be pushed in any direction. We know how to
intervene to do thatto break the symmetry, to make some things a greater
source of pleasure than others. Just because it hasnłt happened spontaneously,
that doesnłt mean it canłt be achieved by other means."

I laughed, suddenly light-headed. �So if I say the word ...
your ethics committee will choose the music I like, and my favorite foods, and
my new vocation? Theyłll decide who I become?" Would that be so bad? Having
died, myself, long ago, to grant life now to a whole new person? To donate, not
just a lung or a kidney, but my entire body, irrelevant memories and all, to an
arbitrarily constructedbut fully functioningde novo human being?

Durrani was scandalized. �No! Wełd never dream of doing
that! But we could program the microprocessors to let you control the networkłs
refinement. We could give you the power to choose for yourself, consciously and
deliberately, the things that make you happy."

* * * *

De Vries said, �Try to picture the control."

I closed my eyes. He said, �Bad idea. If you get into the
habit, it will limit your access."

�Right." I stared into space. Something glorious by
Beethoven was playing on the labłs sound system; it was difficult to concentrate.
I struggled to visualize the stylized, cherry-red, horizontal slider control
that De Vries had constructed, line by line, inside my head five minutes
before. Suddenly it was more than a vague memory: it was superimposed over the
room again, as clear as any real object, at the bottom of my visual field.

�Iłve got it." The button was hovering around 19.

De Vries glanced at a display, hidden from me. �Good. Now
try to lower the rating."

I laughed weakly. Roll over Beethoven. �How? How can you try
to like something less?"

�You donłt. Just try to move the button to the left.
Visualize the movement. The softwarełs monitoring your visual cortex, tracking
any fleeting imaginary perceptions. Fool yourself into seeing the button
movingand the image will oblige."

It did. I kept losing control briefly, as if the thing was
sticking, but I managed to maneuver it down to 10 before stopping to assess the
effect.

�Fuck."

�I take it itłs working?"

I nodded stupidly. The music was still ... pleasant ... but
the spell was broken completely. It was like listening to an electrifying piece
of rhetoric, then realizing half-way through that the speaker didnłt believe a
word of itleaving the original poetry and eloquence untouched, but robbing it
of all its real force.

I felt sweat break out on my forehead. When Durrani had explained
it, the whole scheme had sounded too bizarre to be real. And since Iłd already failed
to assert myself over the prosthesisdespite billions of direct neural
connections, and countless opportunities for the remnants of my identity to
interact with the thing and shape it in my own imageIłd feared that when the
time came to make a choice, Iłd be paralyzed by indecision.

But I knew, beyond doubt, that I should not have been in a
state of rapture over a piece of classical music that Iłd either never heard
before, orsince apparently it was famous, and ubiquitoussat through once or
twice by accident, entirely unmoved.

And now, in a matter of seconds, Iłd hacked that false
response away.

There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect
myself. Iłd just have to do it consciously, every step of the way.

De Vries, tinkering with his keyboard, said cheerfully, �Iłll
color-code virtual gadgets for all the major systems in the prosthesis. With a
few daysł practice itłll all be second nature. Just remember that some
experiences will engage two or three systems at once ... so if youłre making
love to music that youłd prefer not to find so distracting, make sure you turn
down the red control, not the blue." He looked up and saw my face. �Hey, donłt
worry. You can always turn it up again later if you make a mistake. Or if you
change your mind."

3

It was nine p.m. in Sydney when the plane touched down. Nine
ołclock on a Saturday night. I took a train into the city center, intending to
catch the connecting one home, but when I saw the crowds alighting at Town Hall
station I put my suitcase in a locker and followed them up on to the street.

Iłd been in the city a few times since the virus, but never
at night. I felt like Iłd come home after half a lifetime in another country,
after solitary confinement in a foreign gaol. Everything was disorienting, one
way or another. I felt a kind of giddy d�ją vu at the sight of buildings that
seemed to have been faithfully preserved, but still werenłt quite as I
remembered them, and a sense of hollowness each time I turned a corner to find
that some private landmark, some shop or sign I remembered from childhood, had
vanished.

I stood outside a pub, close enough to feel my eardrums
throb to the beat of the music. I could see people inside, laughing and
dancing, sloshing armfuls of drinks around, faces glowing with alcohol and
companionship. Some alive with the possibility of violence, others with the
promise of sex.

I could step right into this picture myself, now. The ash
that had buried the world was gone; I was free to walk wherever I pleased. And
I could almost feel the dead cousins of these revellersreborn now as harmonics
of the network, resonating to the music and the sight of their
soul-matesclamoring in my skull, begging me to carry them all the way to the
land of the living.

I took a few steps forward, then something in the corner of
my vision distracted me. In the alley beside the pub, a boy of 10 or 12 sat
crouched against the wall, lowering his face into a plastic bag. After a few
inhalations he looked up, dead eyes shining, smiling as blissfully as any
orchestra conductor.

I backed away.

Someone touched my shoulder. I spun around and saw a man
beaming at me. �Jesus loves you, brother! Your search is over!" He thrust a
pamphlet into my hand. I gazed into his face, and his condition was transparent
to me: hełd stumbled on a way to produce Leu-enkephalin at willbut he didnłt
know it, so hełd reasoned that some divine wellspring of happiness was
responsible. I felt my chest tighten with horror and pity. At least Iłd known
about my tumor. And even the fucked-up kid in the alley understood that he was
just sniffing glue.

And the people in the pub? Did they know what they were
doing? Music, companionship, alcohol, sex ... where did the border lie? When
did justifiable happiness turn into something as empty, as pathological, as it
was for this man?

I stumbled away, and headed back toward the station. All
around me, people were laughing and shouting, holding hands, kissing ... and I
watched them as if they were flayed anatomical figures, revealing a thousand
interlocking muscles working together with effortless precision. Buried inside
me, the machinery of happiness recognized itself, again and again.

I had no doubt, now, that Durrani really had packed every
last shred of the human capacity for joy into my skull. But to claim any part
of it, Iłd have to swallow the factmore deeply than the tumor had ever forced
me to swallow itthat happiness itself meant nothing. Life without it was
unbearable, but as an end in itself, it was not enough. I was free to choose
its causesand to be happy with my choicesbut whatever I felt once Iłd
bootstrapped my new self into existence, the possibility would remain that all
my choices had been wrong.

* * * *

Global Assurance had given me until the end of the year to
get my act together. If my annual psychological assessment showed that Durraniłs
treatment had been successfulwhether or not I actually had a jobIłd be thrown
to the even less tender mercies of the privatized remnants of social security.
So I stumbled around in the light, trying to find my bearings.

On my first day back I woke at dawn. I sat down at the phone
and started digging. My old net workspace had been archived; at current rates
it was only costing about ten cents a year in storage fees, and I still had
$36.20 credit in my account. The whole bizarre informational fossil had passed
intact from company to company through four takeovers and mergers. Working
through an assortment of tools to decode the obsolete data formats, I dragged
fragments of my past life into the present and examined them, until it became
too painful to go on.

The next day I spent twelve hours cleaning the flat,
scrubbing every cornerlistening to my old njari downloads, stopping only to
eat, ravenously. And though I could have refined my taste in food back to that
of a 12-year-old salt-junky, I made the choicethoroughly un-masochistic, and
more pragmatic than virtuousto crave nothing more toxic than fruit.

In the following weeks I put on weight with gratifying
speed, though when I stared at myself in the mirror, or used morphing software
running on the phone, I realized that I could be happy with almost any kind of
body. The database must have included people with a vast range of ideal
self-images, or whołd died perfectly content with their actual appearances.

Again, I chose pragmatism. I had a lot of catching up to do,
and I didnłt want to die at 55 from a heart attack if I could avoid it. There
was no point fixating on the unattainable or the absurd, though, so after
morphing myself to obesity, and rating it zero, I did the same for the
Schwarzenegger look. I chose a lean, wiry bodywell within the realms of
possibility, according to the softwareand assigned it 16 out of 20. Then I
started running.

I took it slowly at first, and though I clung to the image
of myself as a child, darting effortlessly from street to street, I was careful
never to crank up the joy of motion high enough to mask injuries. When I limped
into a chemist looking for liniment, I found they were selling something called
prostaglandin modulators, anti-inflammatory compounds that allegedly minimized
damage without shutting down any vital repair processes. I was skeptical, but
the stuff did seem to help; the first month was still painful, but I was
neither crippled by natural swelling, nor rendered so oblivious to danger signs
that I tore a muscle.

And once my heart and lungs and calves were dragged screaming
out of their atrophied state, it was good. I ran for an hour every morning,
weaving around the local back streets, and on Sunday afternoons I
circumnavigated the city itself. I didnłt push myself to attain ever faster
times; I had no athletic ambitions whatsoever. I just wanted to exercise my
freedom.

Soon the act of running melted into a kind of seamless
whole. I could revel in the thudding of my heart and the feeling of my limbs in
motion, or I could let those details recede into a buzz of satisfaction and
just watch the scenery, as if from a train. And having reclaimed my body, I
began to reclaim the suburbs, one by one. From the slivers of forest clinging
to the Lane Cove river to the eternal ugliness of Parramatta Road, I
crisscrossed Sydney like a mad surveyor, wrapping the landscape with invisible
geodesics then drawing it into my skull. I pounded across the bridges at Gladesville
and Iron Cove, Pyrmont, Meadowbank, and the Harbor itself, daring the planks to
give way beneath my feet.

I suffered moments of doubt. I wasnłt drunk on endorphinsI
wasnłt pushing myself that hardbut it still felt too good to be true. Was this
glue-sniffing? Maybe ten thousand generations of my ancestors had been rewarded
with the same kind of pleasure for pursuing game, fleeing danger, and mapping
their territory for the sake of survival, but to me it was all just a glorious
pastime.

Still, I wasnłt deceiving myself, and I wasnłt hurting
anyone. I plucked those two rules from the core of the dead child inside me,
and kept on running.

* * * *

Thirty was an interesting age to go through puberty. The
virus hadnłt literally castrated me, but having eliminated pleasure from sexual
imagery, genital stimulation, and orgasmand having partly wrecked the hormonal
regulatory pathways reaching down from the hypothalamusit had left me with
nothing worth describing as sexual function. My body disposed of semen in
sporadic joyless spasmsand without the normal lubricants secreted by the prostate
during arousal, every unwanted ejaculation tore at the urethral lining.

When all of this changed, it hit hardeven in my state of
relative sexual decrepitude. Compared to wet dreams of broken glass,
masturbation was wonderful beyond belief, and I found myself unwilling to
intervene with the controls to tone it down. But I neednłt have worried that it
would rob me of interest in the real thing; I kept finding myself staring
openly at people on the street, in shops and on trains, until by a combination
of willpower, sheer terror, and prosthetic adjustment I managed to kick the
habit.

The network had rendered me bisexual, and though I quickly
ramped my level of desire down considerably from that of the databasełs most
priapic contributors, when it came to choosing to be straight or gay,
everything turned to quicksand. The network was not some kind of
population-weighted average; if it had been, Durraniłs original hope that my
own surviving neural architecture could hold sway would have been dashed
whenever the vote was stacked against it. So I was not just 10 or 15 per cent
gay; the two possibilities were present with equal force, and the thought of eliminating
either felt as alarming, as disfiguring, as if Iłd lived with both for decades.

But was that just the prosthesis defending itself, or was it
partly my own response? I had no idea. Iłd been a thoroughly asexual
12-year-old, even before the virus; Iłd always assumed that I was straight, and
Iłd certainly found some girls attractive, but therełd been no moonstruck
stares or furtive groping to back up that purely esthetic opinion. I looked up
the latest research, but all the genetic claims I recalled from various
headlines had since been discreditedso even if my sexuality had been
determined from birth, there was no blood test that could tell me, now, what it
would have become. I even tracked down my pre-treatment MRI scans, but they
lacked the resolution to provide a direct, neuroanatomical answer.

I didnłt want to be bisexual. I was too old to experiment
like a teenager; I wanted certainty, I wanted solid foundations. I wanted to be
monogamousand even if monogamy was rarely an effortless state for anyone, that
was no reason to lumber myself with unnecessary obstacles. So who should I
slaughter? I knew which choice would make things easier ... but if everything
came down to a question of which of the 4,000 donors could carry me along the
path of least resistance, whose life would I be living?

Maybe it was all a moot point. I was a 30-year-old virgin
with a history of mental illness, no money, no prospects, no social skillsand
I could always crank up the satisfaction level of my only current option, and
let everything else recede into fantasy. I wasnłt deceiving myself, I wasnłt
hurting anyone. It was within my power to want nothing more.

* * * *

Iłd noticed the bookshop, tucked away in a back street in
Leichhardt, many times before. But one Sunday in June, when I jogged past and
saw a copy of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil in the front window, I
had to stop and laugh.

I was drenched in sweat from the winter humidity, so I didnłt
go in and buy the book. But I peered in through the display toward the counter,
and spotted a HELP WANTED sign.

Looking for unskilled work had seemed futile; the total unemployment
rate was 15 per cent, the youth rate three times higher, so Iłd assumed therełd
always be a thousand other applicants for every job: younger, cheaper,
stronger, and certifiably sane. But though Iłd resumed my on-line education, I
was getting not so much nowhere, fast as everywhere, slowly. All the fields of
knowledge that had gripped me as a child had expanded a hundredfold, and while
the prosthesis granted me limitless energy and enthusiasm, there was still too
much ground for anyone to cover in a lifetime. I knew Iłd have to sacrifice 90
per cent of my interests if I was ever going to choose a career, but I still
hadnłt been able to wield the knife.

I returned to the bookshop on Monday, walking up from Petersham
station. Iłd fine-tuned my confidence for the occasion, but it rose
spontaneously when I heard that therełd been no other applicants. The owner was
in his 60s, and hełd just done his back in; he wanted someone to lug boxes
around, and take the counter when he was otherwise occupied. I told him the
truth: Iłd been neurologically damaged by a childhood illness, and Iłd only
recently recovered.

He hired me on the spot, for a monthłs trial. The starting
wage was exactly what Global Assurance were paying me, but if I was taken on
permanently Iłd get slightly more.

The work wasnłt hard, and the owner didnłt mind me reading
in the back room when I had nothing to do. In a way, I was in heaventen
thousand books, and no access feesbut sometimes I felt the terror of
dissolution returning. I read voraciously, and on one level I could make clear
judgments: I could pick the clumsy writers from the skilled, the honest from
the fakers, the platitudinous from the inspired. But the prosthesis still
wanted me to enjoy everything, to embrace everything, to diffuse out across the
dusty shelves until I was no one at all, a ghost in the Library of Babel.

* * * *

She walked into the bookshop two minutes after opening time,
on the first day of spring. Watching her browse, I tried to think clearly
through the consequences of what I was about to do. For weeks Iłd been on the
counter five hours a day, and with all that human contact Iłd been hoping for
... something. Not wild, reciprocated love at first sight, just the tiniest
flicker of mutual interest, the slightest piece of evidence that I could
actually desire one human being more than all the rest.

It hadnłt happened. Some customers had flirted mildly, but I
could see that it was nothing special, just their own kind of politenessand Iłd
felt nothing more in response than if theyłd been unusually, formally,
courteous. And though I might have agreed with any bystander as to who was
conventionally good-looking, who was animated or mysterious, witty or charming,
who glowed with youth or radiated worldliness ... I just didnłt care. The 4,000
had all loved very different people, and the envelope that stretched between
their far-flung characteristics encompassed the entire species. That was never
going to change, until I did something to break the symmetry myself.

So for the past week, Iłd dragged all the relevant systems
in the prosthesis down to 3 or 4. People had become scarcely more interesting
to watch than pieces of wood. Now, alone in the shop with this randomly chosen
stranger, I slowly turned the controls up. I had to fight against positive
feedback; the higher the settings, the more I wanted to increase them, but Iłd
set limits in advance, and I stuck to them.

By the time shełd chosen two books and approached the counter,
I was feeling half defiantly triumphant, half sick with shame. Iłd struck a
pure note with the network at last; what I felt at the sight of this woman rang
true. And if everything Iłd done to achieve it was calculated, artificial,
bizarre and abhorrent ... Iłd had no other way.

I was smiling as she bought the books, and she smiled back
warmly. No wedding or engagement ringbut Iłd promised myself that I wouldnłt
try anything, no matter what. This was just the first step: to notice someone,
to make someone stand out from the crowd. I could ask out the tenth, the
hundredth woman who bore some passing resemblance to her.

I said, �Would you like to meet for a coffee sometime?"

She looked surprised, but not affronted. Indecisive, but at
least slightly pleased to have been asked. And I thought I was prepared for
this slip of the tongue to lead nowhere, but then something in the ruins of me
sent a shaft of pain through my chest as I watched her make up her mind. If a
fraction of that had shown on my face, she probably would have rushed me to the
nearest vet to be put down.

She said, �That would be nice. Iłm Julia, by the way."

�Iłm Mark." We shook hands.

�When do you finish work?"

�Tonight? Nine ołclock."

�Ah."

I said, �How about lunch? When do you have lunch?"

�One." She hesitated. �Therełs that place just down the road
... next to the hardware store?"

�That would be great."

Julia smiled. �Then Iłll meet you there. About ten past. OK?"

I nodded. She turned and walked out. I stared after her,
dazed, terrified, elated. I thought: This is simple. Anyone in the world can do
it. Itłs like breathing.

I started hyperventilating. I was an emotionally retarded teenager,
and shełd discover that in five minutes flat. Or, worse, discover the 4,000
grown men in my head offering advice.

I went into the toilet to throw up.

* * * *

Julia told me that she managed a dress shop a few blocks
away. �Youłre new at the bookshop, arenłt you?"

�Yes."

�So what were you doing before that?"

�I was unemployed. For a long time."

�How long?"

�Since I was a student."

She grimaced. �Itłs criminal, isnłt it? Well, Iłm doing my
bit. Iłm job-sharing, half-time only."

�Really? How are you finding it?"

�Itłs wonderful. I mean, Iłm lucky, the positionłs well
enough paid that I can get by on half a salary." She laughed. �Most people
assume I must be raising a family. As if thatłs the only possible reason."

�You just like to have the time?"

�Yes. Timełs important. I hate being rushed."

We had lunch again two days later, and then twice again the
next week. She talked about the shop, a trip shełd made to South America, a
sister recovering from breast cancer. I almost mentioned my own long-vanquished
tumor, but apart from fears about where that might lead, it would have sounded
too much like a plea for sympathy. At home, I sat riveted to the phonenot
waiting for a call, but watching news broadcasts, to be sure Iłd have something
to talk about besides myself. Whołs your favorite singer/author/artist/actor? I
have no idea.

Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she
was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be
safe. Why? Because Iłd chosen her. But ... why had I felt compelled to choose
anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had
in common was the fact that theyłd desired, and cared about, one person above
all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and
protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination
of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions
had the same ancestry as everyone elsełs; what more could I ask?

But how could I pretend that I felt anything real for Julia,
when I could shift a few buttons in my head, anytime, and make those feelings
vanish? Even if what I felt was strong enough to keep me from wanting to touch
that dial ...

Some days I thought: it must be like this for everyone.
People make a decision, half-shaped by chance, to get to know someone;
everything starts from there. Some nights I sat awake for hours, wondering if I
was turning myself into a pathetic slave, or a dangerous obsessive. Could
anything I discovered about Julia drive me away, now that Iłd chosen her? Or
even trigger the slightest disapproval? And if, when, she decided to break
things off, how would I take it?

We went out to dinner, then shared a taxi home. I kissed her
goodnight on her doorstep. Back in my flat, I flipped through sex manuals on
the net, wondering how I could ever hope to conceal my complete lack of
experience. Everything looked anatomically impossible; Iłd need six years of
gymnastics training just to achieve the missionary position. Iłd refused to
masturbate since Iłd met her; to fantasize about her, to imagine her without
consent, seemed outrageous, unforgivable. After I gave in, I lay awake until
dawn trying to comprehend the trap Iłd dug for myself, and trying to understand
why I didnłt want to be free.

* * * *

Julia bent down and kissed me, sweatily. �That was a nice
idea." She climbed off me and flopped onto the bed.

Iłd spent the last ten minutes riding the blue control,
trying to keep myself from coming without losing my erection. Iłd heard of
computer games involving exactly the same thing. Now I turned up the indigo for
a stronger glow of intimacyand when I looked into her eyes, I knew that she
could see the effect on me. She brushed my cheek with her hand. �Youłre a sweet
man. Did you know that?"

I said, �I have to tell you something." Sweet? Iłm a puppet,
Iłm a robot, Iłm a freak.

�What?"

I couldnłt speak. She seemed amused, then she kissed me. �I
know youłre gay. Thatłs all right; I donłt mind."

�Iłm not gay." Anymore? �Though I might have been."

Julia frowned. �Gay, bisexual ... I donłt care. Honestly."

I wouldnłt have to manipulate my responses much longer; the
prosthesis was being shaped by all of this, and in a few weeks Iłd be able to
leave it to its own devices. Then Iłd feel, as naturally as anyone, all the
things I was now having to choose.

I said, �When I was twelve, I had cancer."

I told her everything. I watched her face, and saw horror,
then growing doubt. �You donłt believe me?"

She replied haltingly, �You sound so matter-of-fact.
Eighteen years? How can you just say, ęI lost eighteen yearsł?"

�How do you want me to say it? Iłm not trying to make you
pity me. I just want you to understand."

When I came to the day I met her, my stomach tightened with
fear, but I kept on talking. After a few seconds I saw tears in her eyes, and I
felt like Iłd been knifed.

�Iłm sorry. I didnłt mean to hurt you." I didnłt know
whether to try to hold her, or to leave right then. I kept my eyes fixed on
her, but the room swam.

She smiled. �What are you sorry about? You chose me. I chose
you. It could have been different for both of us. But it wasnłt." She reached
down under the sheet and took my hand. �It wasnłt."

* * * *

Julia had Saturdays off, but I had to start work at eight.
She kissed me goodbye sleepily when I left at six; I walked all the way home,
weightless.

I must have grinned inanely at everyone who came into the
shop, but I hardly saw them. I was picturing the future. I hadnłt spoken to
either of my parents for nine years, they didnłt even know about the Durrani
treatment. But now it seemed possible to repair anything. I could go to them
now and say: This is your son, back from the dead. You did save my life, all
those years ago.

There was a message on the phone from Julia when I arrived
home. I resisted viewing it until Iłd started things cooking on the stove;
there was something perversely pleasurable about forcing myself to wait,
imagining her face and her voice in anticipation.

I hit the PLAY button. Her face wasnłt quite as Iłd pictured
it.

I kept missing things and stopping to rewind. Isolated phrases
stuck in my mind. Too strange. Too sick. No onełs fault. My explanation hadnłt
really sunk in the night before. But now shełd had time to think about it, and
she wasnłt prepared to carry on a relationship with 4,000 dead men.

I sat on the floor, trying to decide what to feel: the wave
of pain crashing over me, or something better, by choice. I knew I could summon
up the controls of the prosthesis and make myself happyhappy because I was �free"
again, happy because I was better off without her ... happy because Julia was
better off without me. Or even just happy because happiness meant nothing, and
all I had to do to attain it was flood my brain with Leu-enkephalin.

I sat there wiping tears and mucus off my face while the vegetables
burned. The smell made me think of cauterization, sealing off a wound.

I let things run their course, I didnłt touch the
controlsbut just knowing that I could have changed everything. And I realized
then that, even if I went to Luke De Vries and said: Iłm cured now, take the software
away, I donłt want the power to choose anymore ... Iłd never be able to forget
where everything I felt had come from.

* * * *

My father came to the flat yesterday. We didnłt talk much,
but he hasnłt remarried yet, and he made a joke about us going nightclub-hopping
together.

At least I hope it was a joke.

Watching him, I thought: hełs there inside my head, and my
mother too, and ten million ancestors, human, proto-human, remote beyond
imagining. What difference did 4,000 more make? Everyone had to carve a life
out of the same legacy: half universal, half particular; half sharpened by
relentless natural selection, half softened by the freedom of chance. Iłd just
had to face the details a little more starkly.

And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between
meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the
best way to cling to that narrow zone was to see clearly what lay on either
side.

When my father was leaving, he looked out from the balcony
across the crowded suburb, down toward the Parramatta river, where a storm
drain was discharging a visible plume of oil, street litter, and garden run-off
into the water.

He asked dubiously, �You happy with this area?"

I said, �I like it here."

Riding the Crocodile

1

In their ten-thousand, three hundred and ninth year of
marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating death. They had known love,
raised children, and witnessed the flourishing generations of their offspring.
They had travelled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. They
had educated themselves many times over, proved theorems, and acquired and
abandoned artistic sensibilities and skills. They had not lived in every
conceivable manner, far from it, but what room would there be for the multitude
if each individual tried to exhaust the permutations of existence? There were
some experiences, they agreed, that everyone should try, and others that only a
handful of people in all of time need bother with. They had no wish to give up
their idiosyncrasies, no wish to uproot their personalities from the niches
they had settled in long ago, let alone start cranking mechanically through
some tedious enumeration of all the other people they might have been. They had
been themselves, and for that they had done, more or less, enough.

Before dying, though, they wanted to attempt something grand
and audacious. It was not that their lives were incomplete, in need of some
final flourish of affirmation. If some unlikely calamity had robbed them of the
chance to orchestrate this finale, the closest of their friends would never
have remarked upon, let alone mourned, its absence. There was no aesthetic
compulsion to be satisfied, no aching existential void to be filled.
Nevertheless, it was what they both wanted, and once they had acknowledged this
to each other their hearts were set on it.

Choosing the project was not a great burden; that task
required nothing but patience. They knew theyłd recognise it when it came to
them. Every night before sleeping, Jasim would ask Leila, �Did you see it yet?"

�No. Did you?"

�Not yet."

Sometimes Leila would dream that shełd found it in her
dreams, but the transcripts proved otherwise. Sometimes Jasim felt sure that it
was lurking just below the surface of his thoughts, but when he dived down to
check it was nothing but a trick of the light.

Years passed. They occupied themselves with simple pleasures:
gardening, swimming in the surf, talking with their friends, catching up with
their descendants. They had grown skilled at finding pastimes that could bear
repetition. Still, were it not for the nameless adventure that awaited them
they would have thrown a pair of dice each evening and agreed that two sixes
would end it all.

One night, Leila stood alone in the garden, watching the
sky. From their home world, Najib, they had travelled only to the nearest stars
with inhabited worlds, each time losing just a few decades to the journey. They
had chosen those limits so as not to alienate themselves from friends and
family, and it had never felt like much of a constraint. True, the civilisation
of the Amalgam wrapped the galaxy, and a committed traveller could spend two
hundred thousand years circling back home, but what was to be gained by such an
overblown odyssey? The dozen worlds of their neighbourhood held enough variety
for any traveller, and whether more distant realms were filled with fresh
novelties or endless repetition hardly seemed to matter. To have a goal, a
destination, would be one thing, but to drown in the sheer plenitude of worlds
for its own sake seemed utterly pointless.

A destination? Leila overlaid the sky with information, most
of it by necessity millennia out of date. There were worlds with spectacular
views of nebulas and star clusters, views that could be guaranteed still to be
in existence if they travelled to see them, but would taking in such sights
firsthand be so much better than immersion in the flawless images already
available in Najibłs library? To blink away ten thousand years just to wake
beneath a cloud of green and violet gas, however lovely, seemed like a terrible
anticlimax.

The stars tingled with self-aggrandisement, plaintively
tugging at her attention. The architecture here, the rivers, the festivals!
Even if these tourist attractions could survive the millennia, even if some
were literally unique, there was nothing that struck her as a fitting prelude
to death. If she and Jasim had formed some whimsical attachment, centuries
before, to a world on the other side of the galaxy rumoured to hold great
beauty or interest, and if they had talked long enough about chasing it down
when they had nothing better to do, then keeping that promise might have been
worth it, even if the journey led them to a world in ruins. They had no such
cherished destination, though, and it was too late to cultivate one now.

Leilałs gaze followed a thinning in the advertising, taking
her to the bulge of stars surrounding the galaxyłs centre. The disk of the
Milky Way belonged to the Amalgam, whose various ancestral species had
effectively merged into a single civilisation, but the central bulge was
inhabited by beings who had declined to do so much as communicate with those
around them. All attempts to send probes into the bulgelet alone the kind of
engineering spores needed to create the infrastructure for travelhad been
gently but firmly rebuffed, with the intruders swatted straight back out again.
The Aloof had maintained their silence and isolation since before the Amalgam
itself had even existed.

The latest news on this subject was twenty thousand years
old, but the status quo had held for close to a million years. If she and Jasim
travelled to the innermost edge of the Amalgamłs domain, the chances were
exceptionally good that the Aloof would not have changed their ways in the
meantime. In fact, it would be no disappointment at all if the Aloof had
suddenly thrown open their borders: that unheralded thaw would itself be an
extraordinary thing to witness. If the challenge remained, though, all the
better.

She called Jasim to the garden and pointed out the richness
of stars, unadorned with potted histories.

�We go where?" he asked.

�As close to the Aloof as wełre able."

�And do what?"

�Try to observe them," she said. �Try to learn something
about them. Try to make contact, in whatever way we can."

�You donłt think thatłs been tried before?"

�A million times. Not so much lately, though. Maybe while
the interest on our side has ebbed, theyłve been changing, growing more
receptive."

�Or maybe not." Jasim smiled. He had appeared a little stunned
by her proposal at first, but the idea seemed to be growing on him. �Itłs a
hard, hard problem to throw ourselves against. But itłs not futile. Not quite."
He wrapped her hands in his. �Letłs see how we feel in the morning."

In the morning, they were both convinced. They would camp at
the gates of these elusive strangers, and try to rouse them from their
indifference.

They summoned the family from every corner of Najib. There
were some grandchildren and more distant descendants who had settled in other
star systems, decades away at lightspeed, but they chose not to wait to call
them home for this final farewell.

Two hundred people crowded the physical house and garden,
while two hundred more confined themselves to the virtual wing. There was talk
and food and music, like any other celebration, and Leila tried to undercut any
edge of solemnity that she felt creeping in. As the night wore on, though, each
time she kissed a child or grandchild, each time she embraced an old friend,
she thought: this could be the last time, ever. There had to be a last time,
she couldnłt face ten thousand more years, but a part of her spat and struggled
like a cornered animal at the thought of each warm touch fading to nothing.

As dawn approached, the party shifted entirely into the
acorporeal. People took on fancy dress from myth or xenology, or just joked and
played with their illusory bodies. It was all very calm and gentle, nothing
like the surreal excesses she remembered from her youth, but Leila still felt a
tinge of vertigo. When her son Khalid made his ears grow and spin, this amiable
silliness carried a hard message: the machinery of the house had ripped her
mind from her body, as seamlessly as ever, but this time she would never be
returning to the same flesh.

Sunrise brought the first of the goodbyes. Leila forced
herself to release each proffered hand, to unwrap her arms from around each
non-existent body. She whispered to Jasim, �Are you going mad, too?"

�Of course."

Gradually the crowd thinned out. The wing grew quiet. Leila
found herself pacing from room to room, as if she might yet chance upon someone
whołd stayed behind, then she remembered urging the last of them to go, her
children and friends tearfully retreating down the hall. She skirted
inconsolable sadness, then lifted herself above it and went looking for Jasim.

He was waiting for her outside their room.

�Are you ready to sleep?" he asked her gently.

She said, �For an eon."

2

Leila woke in the same bed as shełd lain down in. Jasim was
still sleeping beside her. The window showed dawn, but it was not the usual
view of the cliffs and the ocean.

Leila had the house brief her. After twenty thousand yearstravelling
more or less at lightspeed, pausing only for a microsecond or two at various
way-stations to be cleaned up and amplifiedthe package of information bearing
the two of them had arrived safely at Nazdeek-be-Beegane. This world was not
crowded, and it had been tweaked to render it compatible with a range of
metabolic styles. The house had negotiated a site where they could live
embodied in comfort if they wished.

Jasim stirred and opened his eyes. �Good morning. How are
you feeling?"

�Older."

�Really?"

Leila paused to consider this seriously. �No. Not even
slightly. How about you?"

�Iłm fine. Iłm just wondering whatłs out there." He raised
himself up to peer through the window. The house had been instantiated on a
wide, empty plain, covered with low stalks of green and yellow vegetation. They
could eat these plants, and the house had already started a spice garden while
they slept. He stretched his shoulders. �Letłs go and make breakfast."

They went downstairs, stepping into freshly minted bodies,
then out into the garden. The air was still, the sun already warm. The house
had tools prepared to help them with the harvest. It was the nature of travel
that they had come empty-handed, and they had no relatives here, no fifteenth
cousins, no friends of friends. It was the nature of the Amalgam that they were
welcome nonetheless, and the machines that supervised this world on behalf of
its inhabitants had done their best to provide for them.

�So this is the afterlife," Jasim mused, scything the yellow
stalks. �Very rustic."

�Speak for yourself," Leila retorted. �Iłm not dead yet."
She put down her own scythe and bent to pluck one of the plants out by its
roots.

The meal they made was filling but bland. Leila resisted the
urge to tweak her perceptions of it; she preferred to face the challenge of
working out decent recipes, which would make a useful counterpoint to the more
daunting task theyłd come here to attempt.

They spent the rest of the day just tramping around,
exploring their immediate surroundings. The house had tapped into a nearby
stream for water, and sunlight, stored, would provide all the power they needed.
From some hills about an hourłs walk away they could see into a field with
another building, but they decided to wait a little longer before introducing
themselves to their neighbours. The air had a slightly odd smell, due to the
range of components needed to support other metabolic styles, but it wasnłt too
intrusive.

The onset of night took them by surprise. Even before the
sun had set a smattering of stars began appearing in the east, and for a moment
Leila thought that these white specks against the fading blue were some kind of
exotic atmospheric phenomenon, perhaps small clouds forming in the stratosphere
as the temperature dropped. When it became clear what was happening, she
beckoned to Jasim to sit beside her on the bank of the stream and watch the
stars of the bulge come out.

Theyłd come at a time when Nazdeek lay between its sun and
the galactic centre. At dusk one half of the Aloofłs dazzling territory
stretched from the eastern horizon to the zenith, with the starsł slow march
westward against a darkening sky only revealing more of their splendour.

�You think that was to die for?" Jasim joked as they walked
back to the house.

�We could end this now, if youłre feeling unambitious."

He squeezed her hand. �If this takes ten thousand years, Iłm
ready."

It was a mild night, they could have slept outdoors, but the
spectacle was too distracting. They stayed downstairs, in the physical wing.
Leila watched the strange thicket of shadows cast by the furniture sliding
across the walls. These neighbours never sleep, she thought. When we come
knocking, theyłll ask what took us so long.

3

Hundreds of observatories circled Nazdeek, built then abandoned
by others whołd come on the same quest. When Leila saw the band of pristine
space junk mapped out before herorbits scrupulously maintained and swept clean
by robot sentinels for eonsshe felt as if shełd found the graves of their
predecessors, stretching out in the field behind the house as far as the eye
could see.

Nazdeek was prepared to offer them the resources to loft
another package of instruments into the vacuum if they wished, but many of the
abandoned observatories were perfectly functional, and most had been left in a
compliant state, willing to take instructions from anyone.

Leila and Jasim sat in their living room and woke machine after
machine from millennia of hibernation. Some, it turned out, had not been
sleeping at all, but had been carrying on systematic observations, accumulating
data long after their owners had lost interest.

In the crowded stellar precincts of the bulge, disruptive
gravitational effects made planet formation rarer than it was in the disk, and
orbits less stable. Nevertheless, planets had been found. A few thousand could
be tracked from Nazdeek, and one observatory had been monitoring their
atmospheric spectra for the last twelve millennia. In all of those worlds for
all of those years, there were no signs of atmospheric composition departing
from plausible, purely geochemical models. That meant no wild life, and no
crude industries. It didnłt prove that these worlds were uninhabited, but it suggested
either that the Aloof went to great lengths to avoid leaving chemical
fingerprints, or they lived in an entirely different fashion to any of the
civilisations that had formed the Amalgam.

Of the eleven forms of biochemistry that had been found scattered
around the galactic disk, all had given rise eventually to hundreds of species
with general intelligence. Of the multitude of civilisations that had emerged
from those roots, all contained cultures that had granted themselves the
flexibility of living as software, but they also all contained cultures that
persisted with corporeal existence. Leila would never have willingly given up
either mode, herself, but while it was easy to imagine a subculture doing so,
for a whole species it seemed extraordinary. In a sense, the intertwined
civilisation of the Amalgam owed its existence to the fact that there was as
much cultural variation within every species as there was between one species
and another. In that explosion of diversity, overlapping interests were
inevitable.

If the Aloof were the exception, and their material culture
had shrunk to nothing but a few discreet processorseach with the energy needs
of a gnat, scattered throughout a trillion cubic light years of dust and
blazing starsthen finding them would be impossible.

Of course, that worst-case scenario couldnłt quite be true.
The sole reason the Aloof were assumed to exist at all was the fact that some
component of their material culture was tossing back every probe that was sent
into the bulge. However discreet that machinery was, it certainly couldnłt be
sparse: given that it had managed to track, intercept and reverse the
trajectories of billions of individual probes that had been sent in along
thousands of different routes, relativistic constraints on the information flow
implied that the Aloof had some kind of presence at more or less every star at
the edge of the bulge.

Leila and Jasim had Nazdeek brief them on the most recent attempts
to enter the bulge, but even after forty thousand years the basic facts hadnłt
changed. There was no crisply delineated barrier marking the Aloofłs territory,
but at some point within a border region about fifty light years wide, every
single probe that was sent in ceased to function. The signals from those
carrying in-flight beacons or transmitters went dead without warning. A century
or so later, they would appear again at almost the same point, travelling in
the opposite direction: back to where theyłd come from. Those that were
retrieved and examined were found to be unharmed, but their data logs contained
nothing from the missing decades.

Jasim said, �The Aloof could be dead and gone. They built
the perfect fence, but now itłs outlasted them. Itłs just guarding their ruins."

Leila rejected this emphatically. �No civilisation thatłs
spread to more than one star system has ever vanished completely. Sometimes
theyłve changed beyond recognition, but not one has ever died without
descendants."

�Thatłs a fact of history, but itłs not a universal law,"
Jasim persisted. �If wełre going to argue from the Amalgam all the time, wełll
get nowhere. If the Aloof werenłt exceptional, we wouldnłt be here."

�Thatłs true. But I wonłt accept that theyłre dead until I
see some evidence."

�What would count as evidence? Apart from a million years of
silence?"

Leila said, �Silence could mean anything. If theyłre really
dead, wełll find something more, something definite."

�Such as?"

�If we see it, wełll know."

They began the project in earnest, reviewing data from the ancient
observatories, stopping only to gather food, eat and sleep. They had resisted
making detailed plans back on Najib, reasoning that any approach they mapped
out in advance was likely to be rendered obsolete once they learned about the
latest investigations. Now that theyłd arrived and found the state of play
utterly unchanged, Leila wished that theyłd come armed with some clear options
for dealing with the one situation they could have prepared for before theyłd
left.

In fact, though they might have felt like out-of-touch
amateurs back on Najib, now that the Aloof had become their entire raison dłętre
it was far harder to relax and indulge in the kind of speculation that might
actually bear fruit, given that every systematic approach had failed. Having
come twenty thousand light years for this, they couldnłt spend their time
day-dreaming, turning the problem over in the backs of their minds while they
surrendered to the rhythms of Nazdeekłs rural idyll. So they studied everything
that had been tried before, searching methodically for a new approach, hoping
to see the old ideas with fresh eyes, hoping thatby chance if for no other
reasonthey might lack some crucial blind spot that had afflicted all of their
predecessors.

After seven months without results or inspiration, it was
Jasim who finally dragged them out of the rut. �Wełre getting nowhere," he
said. �Itłs time to accept that, put all this aside, and go visit the
neighbours."

Leila stared at him as if hełd lost his mind. �Go visit
them? How? What makes you think that theyłre suddenly going to let us in?"

He said, �The neighbours. Remember? Over the hill. The ones
who might actually want to talk to us."

4

Their neighbours had published a pr�cis stating that they welcomed
social contact in principle, but might take a while to respond. Jasim sent them
an invitation, asking if theyłd like to join them in their house, and waited.

After just three days, a reply came back. The neighbours did
not want to put them to the trouble of altering their own house physically, and
preferred not to become acorporeal at present. Given the less stringent
requirements of Leila and Jasimłs own species when embodied, might they wish to
come instead to the neighboursł house?

Leila said, �Why not?" They set a date and time.

The neighboursł pr�cis included all the biological and sociological
details needed to prepare for the encounter. Their biochemistry was
carbon-based and oxygen-breathing, but employed a different replicator to Leila
and Jasimłs DNA. Their ancestral phenotype resembled a large furred snake, and
when embodied they generally lived in nests of a hundred or so. The minds of
the individuals were perfectly autonomous, but solitude was an alien and
unsettling concept for them.

Leila and Jasim set out late in the morning, in order to
arrive early in the afternoon. There were some low, heavy clouds in the sky,
but it was not completely overcast, and Leila noticed that when the sun passed
behind the clouds, she could discern some of the brightest stars from the edge
of the bulge.

Jasim admonished her sternly, �Stop looking. This is our day
off."

The Snakesł building was a large squat cylinder resembling a
water tank, which turned out to be packed with something mossy and pungent.
When they arrived at the entrance, three of their hosts were waiting to greet
them, coiled on the ground near the mouth of a large tunnel emerging from the
moss. Their bodies were almost as wide as their guestsł, and some eight or ten
metres long. Their heads bore two front-facing eyes, but their other sense
organs were not prominent. Leila could make out their mouths, and knew from the
briefing how many rows of teeth lay behind them, but the wide pink gashes
stayed closed, almost lost in the grey fur.

The Snakes communicated with a low-frequency thumping, and
their system of nomenclature was complex, so Leila just mentally tagged the
three of them with randomly chosen, slightly exotic namesTim, John and Sarahand
tweaked her translator so shełd recognise intuitively who was who, who was
addressing her, and the significance of their gestures.

�Welcome to our home," said Tim enthusiastically.

�Thank you for inviting us," Jasim replied.

�Wełve had no visitors for quite some time," explained
Sarah. �So we really are delighted to meet you."

�How long has it been?" Leila asked.

�Twenty years," said Sarah.

�But we came here for the quiet life," John added. �So we expected
it would be a while."

Leila pondered the idea of a clan of a hundred ever finding
a quiet life, but then, perhaps unwelcome intrusions from outsiders were of a
different nature to family dramas.

�Will you come into the nest?" Tim asked. �If you donłt wish
to enter we wonłt take offence, but everyone would like to see you, and some of
us arenłt comfortable coming out into the open."

Leila glanced at Jasim. He said privately, �We can push our
vision to IR. And tweak ourselves to tolerate the smell."

Leila agreed.

�Okay," Jasim told Tim.

Tim slithered into the tunnel and vanished in a quick, elegant
motion, then John motioned with his head for the guests to follow. Leila went
first, propelling herself up the gentle slope with her knees and elbows. The
plant the Snakesł cultivated for the nest formed a cool, dry, resilient
surface. She could see Tim ten metres or so ahead, like a giant glow-worm
shining with body heat, slowing down now to let her catch up. She glanced back
at Jasim, who looked even weirder than the Snakes now, his face and arms
blotched with strange bands of radiance from the exertion.

After a few minutes, they came to a large chamber. The air
was humid, but after the confines of the tunnel it felt cool and fresh. Tim led
them towards the centre, where about a dozen other Snakes were already waiting
to greet them. They circled the guests excitedly, thumping out a delighted
welcome. Leila felt a surge of adrenaline; she knew that she and Jasim were in
no danger, but the sheer size and energy of the creatures was overwhelming.

�Can you tell us why youłve come to Nazdeek?" asked Sarah.

�Of course." For a second or two Leila tried to maintain eye
contact with her, but like all the other Snakes she kept moving restlessly, a
gesture that Leilałs translator imbued with a sense of warmth and enthusiasm.
As for lack of eye contact, the Snakesł own translators would understand
perfectly that some aspects of ordinary, polite human behaviour became
impractical under the circumstances, and would not mislabel her actions. �Wełre
here to learn about the Aloof," she said.

�The Aloof?" At first Sarah just seemed perplexed, then
Leilałs translator hinted at a touch of irony. �But they offer us nothing."

Leila was tongue-tied for a moment. The implication was subtle
but unmistakable. Citizens of the Amalgam had a protocol for dealing with each
otherłs curiosity: they published a pr�cis, which spelled out clearly any
information that they wished people in general to know about them, and also
specified what, if any, further inquiries would be welcome. However, a citizen
was perfectly entitled to publish no pr�cis at all and have that decision
respected. When no information was published, and no invitation offered, you
simply had no choice but to mind your own business.

�They offer us nothing as far as we can tell," she said, �but
that might be a misunderstanding, a failure to communicate."

�They send back all the probes," Tim replied. �Do you really
think wełve misunderstood what that means?"

Jasim said, �It means that they donłt want us physically
intruding on their territory, putting our machines right next to their homes,
but Iłm not convinced that it proves that they have no desire to communicate
whatsoever."

�We should leave them in peace," Tim insisted. �Theyłve seen
the probes, so they know wełre here. If they want to make contact, theyłll do
it in their own time."

�Leave them in peace," echoed another Snake. A chorus of affirmation
followed from others in the chamber.

Leila stood her ground. �We have no idea how many different
species and cultures might be living in the bulge. One of them sends back the
probes, but for all we know there could be a thousand others who donłt yet even
know that the Amalgam has tried to make contact."

This suggestion set off a series of arguments, some between
guests and hosts, some between the Snakes themselves. All the while, the Snakes
kept circling excitedly, while new ones entered the chamber to witness the
novel sight of these strangers.

When the clamour about the Aloof had quietened down enough
for her to change the subject, Leila asked Sarah, �Why have you come to Nazdeek
yourself?"

�Itłs out of the way, off the main routes. We can think
things over here, undisturbed."

�But you could have the same amount of privacy anywhere. Itłs
all a matter of what you put in your pr�cis."

Sarahłs response was imbued with a tinge of amusement. �For
us, it would be unimaginably rude to cut off all contact explicitly, by decree.
Especially with others from our own ancestral species. To live a quiet life, we
had to reduce the likelihood of encountering anyone who would seek us out. We
had to make the effort of rendering ourselves physically remote, in order to
reap the benefits."

�Yet youłve made Jasim and myself very welcome."

�Of course. But that will be enough for the next twenty
years."

So much for resurrecting their social life. �What exactly is
it that youłre pondering in this state of solitude?"

�The nature of reality. The uses of existence. The reasons
to live, and the reasons not to."

Leila felt the skin on her forearms tingle. Shełd almost
forgotten that shełd made an appointment with death, however uncertain the
timing.

She explained how she and Jasim had made their decision to
embark on a grand project before dying.

�Thatłs an interesting approach," Sarah said. �Iłll have to
give it some thought." She paused, then added, �Though Iłm not sure that youłve
solved the problem."

�What do you mean?"

�Will it really be easier now to choose the right moment to
give up your life? Havenłt you merely replaced one delicate judgement with an
even more difficult one: deciding when youłve exhausted the possibilities for
contacting the Aloof?"

�You make it sound as if we have no chance of succeeding."
Leila was not afraid of the prospect of failure, but the suggestion that it was
inevitable was something else entirely.

Sarah said, �Wełve been here on Nazdeek for fifteen thousand
years. We donłt pay much attention to the world outside the nest, but even from
this cloistered state wełve seen many people break their backs against this
rock."

�So when will you accept that your own project is finished?"
Leila countered. �If you still donłt have what youłre looking for after fifteen
thousand years, when will you admit defeat?"

�I have no idea," Sarah confessed. �I have no idea, any more
than you do."

5

When the way forward first appeared, there was nothing to
set it apart from a thousand false alarms that had come before it.

It was their seventeenth year on Nazdeek. They had launched
their own observatoryarmed with the latest refinements culled from around the
galaxyfifteen years before, and it had been confirming the null results of its
predecessors ever since.

They had settled into an unhurried routine, systematically exploring
the possibilities that observation hadnłt yet ruled out. Between the scenarios
that were obviously stone cold deadthe presence of an energy-rich,
risk-taking, extroverted civilisation in the bulge actively seeking contact by
every means at its disposaland the infinite number of possibilities that could
never be distinguished at this distance from the absence of all life, and the absence
of all machinery save one dumb but efficient gatekeeper, tantalising clues
would bubble up out of the data now and then, only to fade into statistical
insignificance in the face of continued scrutiny.

Tens of billions of stars lying within the Aloofłs territory
could be discerned from Nazdeek, some of them evolving or violently interacting
on a time scale of years or months. Black holes were flaying and swallowing
their companions. Neutron stars and white dwarfs were stealing fresh fuel and
flaring into novas. Star clusters were colliding and tearing each other apart.
If you gathered data on this whole menagerie for long enough, you could expect
to see almost anything. Leila would not have been surprised to wander into the
garden at night and find a great welcome sign spelled out in the sky, before
the fortuitous pattern of novas faded and the message dissolved into randomness
again.

When their gamma ray telescope caught a glimmer of something
oddthe nuclei of a certain isotope of fluorine decaying from an excited state,
when there was no nearby source of the kind of radiation that could have put
the nuclei into that state in the first placeit might have been just another
random, unexplained fact to add to a vast pile. When the same glimmer was seen
again, not far away, Leila reasoned that if a gas cloud enriched with fluorine
could be affected at one location by an unseen radiation source, it should not
be surprising if the same thing happened elsewhere in the same cloud.

It happened again. The three events lined up in space and
time in a manner suggesting a short pulse of gamma rays in the form of a
tightly focused beam, striking three different points in the gas cloud. Still,
in the mountains of data they had acquired from their predecessors, coincidences
far more compelling than this had occurred hundreds of thousands of times.

With the fourth flash, the balance of the numbers began to
tip. The secondary gamma rays reaching Nazdeek gave only a weak and distorted
impression of the original radiation, but all four flashes were consistent with
a single, narrow beam. There were thousands of known gamma ray sources in the
bulge, but the frequency of the radiation, the direction of the beam, and the
time profile of the pulse did not fit with any of them.

The archives revealed a few dozen occasions when the same
kind of emissions had been seen from fluorine nuclei under similar conditions.
There had never been more than three connected events before, but one sequence
had occurred along a path not far from the present one.

Leila sat by the stream and modelled the possibilities. If
the beam was linking two objects in powered flight, prediction was impossible.
If receiver and transmitter were mostly in free-fall, though, and only made
corrections occasionally, the past and present data combined gave her a
plausible forecast for the beamłs future orientation.

Jasim looked into her simulation, a thought-bubble of stars
and equations hovering above the water. �The whole path will lie out of bounds,"
he said.

�No kidding." The Aloofłs territory was more or less
spherical, which made it a convex set: you couldnłt get between any two points
that lay inside it without entering the territory itself. �But look how much
the beam spreads out. From the fluorine data, Iłd say it could be tens of
kilometres wide by the time it reaches the receiver."

�So they might not catch it all? They might let some of the
beam escape into the disk?" He sounded unpersuaded.

Leila said, �Look, if they really were doing everything
possible to hide this, we would never have seen these blips in the first place."

�Gas clouds with this much fluorine are extremely rare. They
obviously picked a frequency that wouldnłt be scattered under ordinary
circumstances."

�Yes, but thatłs just a matter of getting the signal through
the local environment. We choose frequencies ourselves that wonłt interact with
any substance thatłs likely to be present along the route, but no choice is
perfect, and we just live with that. It seems to me that theyłve done the same
thing. If they were fanatical purists, theyłd communicate by completely
different methods."

�All right." Jasim reached into the model. �So where can we
go thatłs in the line of sight?"

The short answer was: nowhere. If the beam was not blocked
completely by its intended target it would spread out considerably as it made
its way through the galactic disk, but it would not grow so wide that it would
sweep across a single point where the Amalgam had any kind of outpost.

Leila said, �This is too good to miss. We need to get a
decent observatory into its path."

Jasim agreed. �And we need to do it before these nodes
decide theyłve drifted too close to something dangerous, and switch on their
engines for a course correction."

They crunched through the possibilities. Wherever the Amalgam
had an established presence, the infrastructure already on the ground could
convert data into any kind of material object. Transmitting yourself to such a
place, along with whatever you needed, was simplicity itself: lightspeed was the
only real constraint. Excessive demands on the local resources might be denied,
but modest requests were rarely rejected.

Far more difficult was building something new at a site with
raw materials but no existing receiver; in that case, instead of pure data, you
needed to send an engineering spore of some kind. If you were in a hurry, not
only did you need to spend energy boosting the spore to relativistic velocitiesa
cost that snowballed due to the mass of protective shieldingyou then had to
waste much of the time you gained on a lengthy braking phase, or the spore
would hit its target with enough energy to turn it into plasma. Interactions
with the interstellar medium could be used to slow down the spore, avoiding the
need to carry yet more mass to act as a propellant for braking, but the whole
business was disgustingly inefficient.

Harder still was getting anything substantial to a given
point in the vast empty space between the stars. With no raw materials to hand
at the destination, everything had to be moved from somewhere else. The best
starting point was usually to send an engineering spore into a cometary cloud,
loosely bound gravitationally to its associated star, but not every such cloud
was open to plunder, and everything took time, and obscene amounts of energy.

To arrange for an observatory to be delivered to the most accessible
point along the beamłs line of sight, travelling at the correct velocity, would
take about fifteen thousand years all told. That assumed that the local
cultures who owned the nearest facilities, and who had a right to veto the use
of the raw materials, acceded immediately to their request.

�How long between course corrections?" Leila wondered. If
the builders of this hypothetical network were efficient, the nodes could drift
for a while in interstellar space without any problems, but in the bulge
everything happened faster than in the disk, and the need to counter
gravitational effects would come much sooner. There was no way to make a firm
prediction, but they could easily have as little as eight or ten thousand
years.

Leila struggled to reconcile herself to the reality. �Wełll
try at this location, and if wełre lucky we might still catch something. If
not, wełll try again after the beam shifts." Sending the first observatory
chasing after the beam would be futile; even with the present free-fall motion
of the nodes, the observation point would be moving at a substantial fraction
of lightspeed relative to the local stars. Magnified by the enormous distances
involved, a small change in direction down in the bulge could see the beam
lurch thousands of light years sideways by the time it reached the disk.

Jasim said, �Wait." He magnified the region around the projected
path of the beam.

�What are you looking for?"

He asked the map, �Are there two outposts of the Amalgam lying
on a straight line that intersects the beam?"

The map replied in a tone of mild incredulity. �No."

�That was too much to hope for. Are there three lying on a
plane that intersects the beam?"

The map said, �There are about ten-to-the-eighteen triples
that meet that condition."

Leila suddenly realised what it was he had in mind. She laughed
and squeezed his arm. �You are completely insane!"

Jasim said, �Let me get the numbers right first, then you
can mock me." He rephrased his question to the map. �For how many of those
triples would the beam pass between them, intersecting the triangle whose
vertices they lie on?"

�About ten-to-the-sixth."

�How close to us is the closest point of intersection of the
beam with any of those trianglesif the distance in each case is measured via
the worst of the three outposts, the one that makes the total path longest."

�Seven thousand four hundred and twenty-six light years."

Leila said, �Collision braking. With three components?"

�Do you have a better idea?"

Better than twice as fast as the fastest conventional
method? �Nothing comes to mind. Let me think about it."

Braking against the flimsy interstellar medium was a slow
process. If you wanted to deliver a payload rapidly to a point that
fortuitously lay somewhere on a straight line between two existing outposts,
you could fire two separate packages from the two locations and let them �collide"
when they metor rather, let them brake against each other magnetically. If you
arranged for the packages to have equal and opposite momenta, they would come
to a halt without any need to throw away reaction mass or clutch at passing
molecules, and some of their kinetic energy could be recovered as electricity
and stored for later use.

The aim and the timing had to be perfect. Relativistic
packages did not make in-flight course corrections, and the data available at
each launch site about the otherłs precise location was always a potentially
imperfect prediction, not a rock-solid statement of fact. Even with the Amalgamłs
prodigious astrometric and computing resources, achieving millimetre alignments
at thousand-light-year distances could not be guaranteed.

Now Jasim wanted to make three of these bullets meet, perform
an elaborate electromagnetic dance, and end up with just the right velocity
needed to keep tracking the moving target of the beam.

In the evening, back in the house, they sat together working
through simulations. It was easy to find designs that would work if everything
went perfectly, but they kept hunting for the most robust variation, the one
that was most tolerant of small misalignments. With standard two-body collision
braking, the usual solution was to have the first package, shaped like a
cylinder, pass right through a hole in the second package. As it emerged from
the other side and the two moved apart again, the magnetic fields were switched
from repulsive to attractive. Several �bounces" followed, and in the process as
much of the kinetic energy as possible was gradually converted into
superconducting currents for storage, while the rest was dissipated as
electromagnetic radiation. Having three objects meeting at an angle would not
only make the timing and positioning more critical, it would destroy the
simple, axial symmetry and introduce a greater risk of instability.

It was dawn before they settled on the optimal design, which
effectively split the problem in two. First, package one, a sphere, would meet
package two, a torus, threading the gap in the middle, then bouncing back and
forth through it seventeen times. The plane of the torus would lie at an angle
to its direction of flight, allowing the sphere to approach it head-on. When
the two finally came to rest with respect to each other, they would still have
a component of their velocity carrying them straight towards package three, a
cylinder with an axial borehole.

Because the electromagnetic interactions were the same as
the two-body caseself-centring, intrinsically stablea small amount of
misalignment at each of these encounters would not be fatal. The usual two-body
case, though, didnłt require the combined package, after all the bouncing and
energy dissipation was completed, to be moving on a path so precisely
determined that it could pass through yet another narrow hoop.

There were no guarantees, and in the end the result would be
in other peoplełs hands. They could send requests to the three outposts, asking
for these objects to be launched at the necessary times on the necessary
trajectories. The energy needs hovered on the edge of politeness, though, and
it was possible that one or more of the requests would simply be refused.

Jasim waved the models away, and they stretched out on the
carpet, side by side.

He said, �I never thought wełd get this far. Even if this is
only a mirage, I never thought wełd find one worth chasing."

Leila said, �I donłt know what I expected. Some kind of
great folly: some long, exhausting, exhilarating struggle that felt like
wandering through a jungle for years and ending up utterly lost."

�And then what?"

�Surrender."

Jasim was silent for a while. Leila could sense that he was
brooding over something, but she didnłt press him.

He said, �Should we travel to this observatory ourselves, or
wait here for the results?"

�We should go. Definitely! I donłt want to hang around here
for fifteen thousand years, waiting. We can leave the Nazdeek observatories
hunting for more beam fluorescence and broadcasting the results, so wełll hear
about them wherever we end up."

�That makes sense." Jasim hesitated, then added, �When we
go, I donłt want to leave a back-up."

�Ah." Theyłd travelled from Najib leaving nothing of themselves
behind: if their transmission had somehow failed to make it to Nazdeek, no
stored copy of the data would ever have woken to resume their truncated lives.
Travel within the Amalgamłs established network carried negligible risks,
though. If they flung themselves towards the hypothetical location of this
yet-to-be-assembled station in the middle of nowhere, it was entirely possible
that theyłd sail off to infinity without ever being instantiated again.

Leila said, �Are you tired of what wełre doing? Of what wełve
become?"

�Itłs not that."

�This one chance isnłt the be-all and end-all. Now that we
know how to hunt for the beams, Iłm sure wełll find this one again after its
shifts. We could find a thousand others, if wełre persistent."

�I know that," he said. �I donłt want to stop, I donłt want
to end this. But I want to risk ending it. Just once. While that still means
something."

Leila sat up and rested her head on her knees. She could
understand what he was feeling, but it still disturbed her.

Jasim said, �Wełve already achieved something extraordinary.
No onełs found a clue like this in a million years. If we leave that to prosperity,
it will be pursued to the end, we can be sure of that. But I desperately want
to pursue it myself. With you."

�And because you want that so badly, you need to face the
chance of losing it?"

�Yes."

It was one thing they had never tried. In their youth, they
would never have knowingly risked death. Theyłd been too much in love, too
eager for the life theyłd yet to live; the stakes would have been unbearably
high. In the twilight years, back on Najib, it would have been an easy thing to
do, but an utterly insipid pleasure.

Jasim sat up and took her hand. �Have I hurt you with this?"

�No, no." She shook her head pensively, trying to gather her
thoughts. She didnłt want to hide her feelings, but she wanted to express them
precisely, not blurt them out in a confusing rush. �I always thought wełd reach
the end together, though. Wełd come to some point in the jungle, look around,
exchange a glance, and know that wełd arrived. Without even needing to say it
aloud."

Jasim drew her to him and held her. �All right, Iłm sorry.
Forget everything I said."

Leila pushed him away, annoyed. �This isnłt something you
can take back. If itłs the truth, itłs the truth. Just give me some time to
decide what I want."

They put it aside, and buried themselves in work: polishing
the design for the new observatory, preparing the requests to send to the three
outposts. One of the planets they would be petitioning belonged to the Snakes,
so Leila and Jasim went to visit the nest for a second time, to seek advice on
the best way to beg for this favour. Their neighbours seemed more excited just
to see them again than they were at the news that a tiny rent had appeared in
the Aloofłs million-year-old cloak of discretion. When Leila gently pushed her
on this point, Sarah said, �Youłre here, here and now, our guests in flesh and
blood. Iłm sure Iłll be dead long before the Aloof are willing to do the same."

Leila thought: What kind of strange greed is it that Iłm
suffering from? I can be feted by creatures who rose up from the dust through a
completely different molecule than my own ancestors. I can sit among them and
discuss the philosophy of life and death. The Amalgam has already joined every
willing participant in the galaxy into one vast conversation. And I want to go
and eavesdrop on the Aloof? Just because theyłve played hard-to-get for a
million years?

They dispatched requests for the three modules to be built
and launched by their three as-yet unwitting collaborators, specifying the
final countdown to the nanosecond but providing a ten-year period for the
project to be debated. Leila felt optimistic; however blas� the Nazdeek nest
had been, she suspected that no space-faring culture really could resist the
chance to peek behind the veil.

They had thirty-six years to wait before they followed in
the wake of their petitions; on top of the ten-year delay, the new observatoryłs
modules would be travelling at a fraction of a percent below lightspeed, so
they needed a head start.

No more tell-tale gamma ray flashes appeared from the bulge,
but Leila hadnłt expected any so soon. They had sent the news of their
discovery to other worlds close to the Aloofłs territory, so eventually a
thousand other groups with different vantage points would be searching for the
same kind of evidence and finding their own ways to interpret and exploit it.
It hurt a little, scattering their hard-won revelation to the wind for anyone
to useperhaps even to beat them to some far greater prizebut theyłd relied on
the generosity of their predecessors from the moment theyłd arrived on Nazdeek,
and the sheer scale of the overall problem made it utterly perverse to cling
selfishly to their own small triumph.

As the day of their departure finally arrived, Leila came to
a decision. She understood Jasimłs need to put everything at risk, and in a
sense she shared it. If she had always imagined the two of them ending this
togetherstruggling on, side by side, until the way forward was lost and the
undergrowth closed in on themthen that was what shełd risk. She would take the
flip side to his own wager.

When the house took their minds apart and sent them off to
chase the beam, Leila left a copy of herself frozen on Nazdeek. If no word of
their safe arrival reached it by the expected time, it would wake and carry on
the search.

Alone.

6

�Welcome to Trident. Wełre honoured by the presence of our
most distinguished guest."

Jasim stood beside the bed, waving a triangular flag. Red,
green and blue in the corners merged to white in the centre.

�How long have you been up?"

�About an hour," he said. Leila frowned, and he added apologetically,
�You were sleeping very deeply, I didnłt want to disturb you."

�I should be the one giving the welcome," she said. �Youłre
the one who might never have woken."

The bedroom window looked out into a dazzling field of
stars. It was not a view facing the bulgeby now Leila could recognise the
distinctive spectra of the regionłs stars with easebut even these disk stars
were so crisp and bright that this was like no sky she had ever seen.

�Have you been downstairs?" she said.

�Not yet. I wanted us to decide on that together." The house
had no physical wing here; the tiny observatory had no spare mass for such
frivolities as embodying them, let alone constructing architectural follies in
the middle of interstellar space. �Downstairs" would be nothing but a scape
that they were free to design at will.

�Everything worked," she said, not quite believing it.

Jasim spread his arms. �Wełre here, arenłt we?"

They watched a reconstruction of the first two modules coming
together. The timing and the trajectories were as near to perfect as they could
have hoped for, and the superconducting magnets had been constructed to a
standard of purity and homogeneity that made the magnetic embrace look like an
idealised simulation. By the time the two had locked together, the third module
was just minutes away. Some untraceable discrepancy between reality and
prediction in the transfer of momentum to radiation had the composite moving at
a tiny angle away from its expected course, but when it met the third module
the magnetic fields still meshed in a stable configuration, and there was
energy to spare to nudge the final assembly precisely into step with the
predicted swinging of the Aloofłs beam.

The Amalgam had lived up to its promise: three worlds full
of beings they had never met, who owed them nothing, who did not even share
their molecular ancestry, had each diverted enough energy to light up all their
cities for a decade, and followed the instructions of strangers down to the
atom, down to the nanosecond, in order to make this work.

What happened now was entirely in the hands of the Aloof.

Trident had been functioning for about a month before its designers
had arrived to take up occupancy. So far, it had not yet observed any gamma ray
signals spilling out of the bulge. The particular pulse that Leila and Jasim
had seen triggering fluorescence would be long gone, of course, but the
usefulness of their present location was predicated on three assumptions: the
Aloof would use the same route for many other bursts of data; some of the
radiation carrying that data would slip past the intended receiver; and the two
nodes of the network would have continued in free fall long enough for the
spilt data to be arriving here still, along the same predictable path.

Without those three extra components, delivered by their
least reliable partners, Trident would be worthless.

�Downstairs," Leila said. �Maybe a kind of porch with glass
walls?"

�Sounds fine to me."

She conjured up a plan of the house and sketched some ideas,
then they went down to try them out at full scale.

They had been into orbit around Najib, and they had
travelled embodied to its three beautiful, barren sibling worlds, but they had
never been in interstellar space before. Or at least, they had never been
conscious of it.

They were still not truly embodied, but you didnłt need
flesh and blood to feel the vacuum around you; to be awake and plugged-in to an
honest depiction of your surroundings was enough. The nearest of Tridentłs
contributor worlds was six hundred light years away. The distance to Najib was
unthinkable. Leila paced around the porch, looking out at the stars,
vertiginous in her virtual body, unsteady in the phoney gravity.

It had been twenty-eight thousand years since theyłd left
Najib. All her children and grandchildren had almost certainly chosen death,
long ago. No messages had been sent after them to Nazdeek; Leila had asked for
that silence, fearing that it would be unbearably painful to hear news, day
after day, to which she could give no meaningful reply, about events in which
she could never participate. Now she regretted that. She wanted to read the
lives of her grandchildren, as she might the biography of an ancestor. She
wanted to know how things had ended up, like the time traveller she was.

A second month of observation passed, with nothing. A data
feed reaching them from Nazdeek was equally silent. For any new hint of the
beamłs location to reach Nazdeek, and then the report of that to reach Trident,
would take thousands of years longer than the direct passage of the beam
itself, so if Nazdeek saw evidence that the beam was �still" on course, that
would be old news about a pulse they had not been here to intercept. However,
if Nazdeek reported that the beam had shifted, at least that would put them out
of their misery immediately, and tell them that Trident had been built too
late.

Jasim made a vegetable garden on the porch and grew exotic
food in the starlight. Leila played along, and ate beside him; it was a
harmless game. They could have painted anything at all around the house: any
planet theyłd visited, drawn from their memories, any imaginary world. If this
small pretence was enough to keep them sane and anchored to reality, so be it.

Now and then, Leila felt the strangest of the many pangs of
isolation Trident induced: here, the knowledge of the galaxy was no longer at
her fingertips. Their descriptions as travellers had encoded their vast
personal memories, declarative and episodic, and their luggage had included
prodigious libraries, but she was used to having so much more. Every civilised
planet held a storehouse of information that was simply too bulky to fit into
Trident, along with a constant feed of exabytes of news flooding in from other
worlds. Wherever you were in the galaxy, some news was old news, some cherished
theories long discredited, some facts hopelessly out of date. Here, though,
Leila knew, there were billions of rigourously established truthsthe results
of hundreds of millennia of thought, experiment, and observationthat had
slipped out of her reach. Questions that any other child of the Amalgam could
expect to have answered instantly would take twelve hundred years to receive a
reply.

No such questions actually came into her mind, but there
were still moments when the mere fact of it was enough to make her feel
unbearably rootless, cut adrift not only from her past and her people, but from
civilisation itself.

Trident shouted: �Data!"

Leila was half-way through recording a postcard to the Nazdeek
Snakes. Jasim was on the porch watering his plants. Leila turned to see him
walking through the wall, commanding the bricks to part like a gauze curtain.

They stood side by side, watching the analysis emerge.

A pulse of gamma rays of the expected frequency, from precisely
the right location, had just washed over Trident. The beam was greatly
attenuated by distance, not to mention having had most of its energy
intercepted by its rightful owner, but more than enough had slipped past and
reached them for Trident to make sense of the nature of the pulse.

It was, unmistakably, modulated with information. There were
precisely repeated phase shifts in the radiation that were unimaginable in any
natural gamma ray source, and which would have been pointless in any artificial
beam produced for any purpose besides communication.

The pulse had been three seconds long, carrying about
ten-to-the-twenty-fourth bits of data. The bulk of this appeared to be random,
but that did not rule out meaningful content, it simply implied efficient
encryption. The Amalgamłs network sent encrypted data via robust classical
channels like this, while sending the keys needed to decode it by a second,
quantum channel. Leila had never expected to get hold of unencrypted data, laying
bare the secrets of the Aloof in an instant. To have clear evidence that
someone in the bulge was talking to someone else, and to have pinned down part
of the pathway connecting them, was vindication enough.

There was more, though. Between the messages themselves,
Trident had identified brief, orderly, unencrypted sequences. Everything was
guesswork to a degree, but with such a huge slab of data statistical measures
were powerful indicators. Part of the data looked like routing information,
addresses for the messages as they were carried through the network. Another
part looked like information about the nodesł current and future trajectories.
If Trident really had cracked that, they could work out where to position its
successor. In fact, if they placed the successor close enough to the bulge,
they could probably keep that one observatory constantly inside the spill from
the beam.

Jasim couldnłt resist playing devilłs advocate. �You know,
this could just be one part of whatever throws the probes back in our faces,
talking to another part. The Aloof themselves could still be dead, while their
security system keeps humming with paranoid gossip."

Leila said blithely, �Hypothesise away. Iłm not taking the
bait."

She turned to embrace him, and they kissed. She said, �Iłve
forgotten how to celebrate. What happens now?"

He moved his fingertips gently along her arm. Leila opened
up the scape, creating a fourth spatial dimension. She took his hand, kissed
it, and placed it against her beating heart. Their bodies reconfigured,
nerve-endings crowding every surface, inside and out.

Jasim climbed inside her, and she inside him, the topology
of the scape changing to wrap them together in a mutual embrace. Everything
vanished from their lives but pleasure, triumph, and each otherłs presence, as
close as it could ever be.

7

�Are you here for the Listening Party?"

The chitinous heptapod, whołd been wandering the crowded
street with a food cart dispensing largesse at random, offered Leila a plate of
snacks tailored to her and Jasimłs preferences. She accepted it, then paused to
let Tassef, the planet theyłd just set foot on, brief her as to the meaning of
this phrase. People, Tassef explained, had travelled to this world from
throughout the region in order to witness a special event. Some fifteen
thousand years before, a burst of data from the Aloofłs network had been picked
up by a nearby observatory. In isolation, these bursts meant very little;
however, the locals were hopeful that at least one of several proposed observatories
near Massa, on the opposite side of the bulge, would have seen spillage
including many of the same data packets, forty thousand years before. If any
such observations had in fact taken place, news of their precise contents
should now, finally, be about to reach Tassef by the longer, disk-based routes
of the Amalgamłs own network. Once the two observations could be compared, it
would become clear which messages from the earlier Eavesdropping session had
made their way to the part of the Aloofłs network that could be sampled from
Tassef. The comparison would advance the project of mapping all the symbolic addresses
seen in the data onto actual physical locations.

Leila said, �Thatłs not why we came, but now we know, wełre
even more pleased to be here."

The heptapod emitted a chirp that Leila understood as a gracious
welcome, then pushed its way back into the throng.

Jasim said, �Remember when you told me that everyone would
get bored with the Aloof while we were still in transit?"

�I said that would happen eventually. If not this trip, the
next one."

�Yes, but you said it five journeys ago."

Leila scowled, preparing to correct him, but then she
checked and he was right.

They hadnłt expected Tassef to be so crowded when theyłd
chosen it as their destination, some ten thousand years before. The planet had
given them a small room in this city, Shalouf, and imposed a thousand-year
limit on their presence if they wished to remain embodied without adopting
local citizenship. More than a billion visitors had arrived over the last fifty
years, anticipating the news of the observations from Massa, but unable to
predict the precise time it would reach Tassef because the details of the observatoriesł
trajectories had still been in transit.

She confessed, �I never thought a billion people would
arrange their travel plans around this jigsaw puzzle."

�Travel plans?" Jasim laughed. �We chose to have our own
deaths revolve around the very same thing."

�Yes, but wełre just weird."

Jasim gestured at the crowded street. �I donłt think we can
compete on that score."

They wandered through the city, drinking in the
decades-long-carnival atmosphere. There were people of every phenotype Leila
had encountered before, and more: bipeds, quadrupeds, hexapods, heptapods,
walking, shuffling, crawling, scuttling, or soaring high above the street on
feathered, scaled or membranous wings. Some were encased in their preferred
atmospheres; others, like Leila and Jasim, had chosen instead to be embodied in
ersatz flesh that didnłt follow every ancestral chemical dictate. Physics and
geometry tied evolutionłs hands, and many attempts to solve the same problems
had converged on similar answers, but the galaxyłs different replicators still
managed their idiosyncratic twists. When Leila let her translator sample the
cacophony of voices and signals at random, she felt as if the whole disk, the
whole Amalgam, had converged on this tiny metropolis.

In fact, most of the travellers had come just a few hundred
light years to be here. She and Jasim had chosen to keep their role in the
history of Eavesdropping out of their pr�cis, and Leila caught herself with a
rather smug sense of walking among the crowd like some unacknowledged sage,
bemused by the late-blooming, and no doubt superficial, interest of the masses.
On reflection, though, any sense of superior knowledge was hard to justify,
when most of these people would have grown up steeped in developments that she
was only belatedly catching up with. A new generation of observatories had been
designed while she and Jasim were in transit, based on �strong bullets":
specially designed femtomachines, clusters of protons and neutrons stable only
for trillionths of a second, launched at ultra-relativistic speeds so great
that time dilation enabled them to survive long enough to collide with other
components and merge into tiny, short-lived gamma-ray observatories. The basic
trick that had built Trident had gone from a one-off gamble into a
miniaturised, mass-produced phenomenon, with literally billions of strong bullets
being fired continuously from thousands of planets around the inner disk.

Femtomachines themselves were old hat, but it had taken the
technical challenges of Eavesdropping to motivate someone into squeezing a few
more tricks out of them. Historians had always understood that in the long run,
technological progress was a horizontal asymptote: once people had more or less
everything they wanted that was physically possible, every incremental change
would take exponentially longer to achieve, with diminishing returns and ever
less reason to bother. The Amalgam would probably spend an eon inching its way
closer to the flatline, but this was proof that shifts of circumstance alone
could still trigger a modest renaissance or two, without the need for any radical
scientific discovery or even a genuinely new technology.

They stopped to rest in a square, beside a small fountain
gushing aromatic hydrocarbons. The Tassef locals, quadrupeds with slick,
rubbery hides, played in the sticky black spray then licked each other clean.

Jasim shaded his eyes from the sun. He said, �Wełve had our
autumn child, and wełve seen its grandchildren prosper. Iłm not sure whatłs
left."

�No." Leila was in no rush to die, but theyłd sampled fifty
thousand years of their discoveryłs consequences. Theyłd followed in the wake
of the news of the gamma ray signals as it circled the inner disk, spending
less than a century conscious as they sped from world to world. At first theyłd
been hunting for some vital new role to play, but theyłd slowly come to accept
that the avalanche theyłd triggered had out-raced them. Physical and logical
maps of the Aloofłs network were being constructed, as fast as the laws of
physics allowed. Billions of people on thousands of planets, scattered around
the inner rim of the Amalgamłs territory, were sharing their observations to
help piece together the living skeleton of their elusive neighbours. When that
project was complete it would not be the end of anything, but it could mark the
start of a long hiatus. The encrypted, classical data would never yield
anything more than traffic routes; no amount of ingenuity could extract its
content. The quantum keys that could unlock it, assuming the Aloof even used
such things, would be absolutely immune to theft, duplication, or surreptitious
sampling. One day, there would be another breakthrough, and everything would
change again, but did they want to wait a hundreds thousand years, a million,
just to see what came next?

The solicitous heptapodsnot locals, but visitors from a
world thirty light years away who had nonetheless taken on some kind of innate
duty of hospitalityseemed to show up whenever anyone was hungry. Leila tried
to draw this second one into conversation, but it politely excused itself to
rush off and feed someone else.

Leila said, �Maybe this is it. Wełll wait for the news from
Massa, then celebrate for a while, then finish it."

Jasim took her hand. �That feels right to me. Iłm not
certain, but I donłt think Iłll ever be."

�Are you tired?" she said. �Bored?"

�Not at all," he replied. �I feel satisfied. With what wełve
done, what wełve seen. And I donłt want to dilute that. I donłt want to hang
around forever, watching it fade, until we start to feel the way we did on
Najib all over again."

�No."

They sat in the square until dusk, and watched the stars of
the bulge come out. Theyłd seen this dazzling jewelled hub from every possible
angle now, but Leila never grew tired of the sight.

Jasim gave an amused, exasperated sigh. �That beautiful, maddening,
unreachable place. I think the whole Amalgam will be dead and gone without
anyone setting foot inside it."

Leila felt a sudden surge of irritation, which deepened into
a sense of revulsion. �Itłs a place, like any other place! Stars, gas, dust,
planets. Itłs not some metaphysical realm. Itłs not even far away. Our own home
world is twenty times more distant."

�Our own home world doesnłt have an impregnable fence around
it. If we really wanted to, we could go back there."

Leila was defiant. �If we really wanted to, we could enter
the bulge."

Jasim laughed. �Have you read something in those messages
that you didnłt tell me about? How to say ęopen sesameł to the gatekeepers?"

Leila stood, and summoned a map of the Aloofłs network to
superimpose across their vision, criss-crossing the sky with slender cones of
violet light. One cone appeared head-on, as a tiny circle: the beam whose
spillage came close to Tassef. She put her hand on Jasimłs shoulder, and zoomed
in on that circle. It opened up before them like a beckoning tunnel.

She said, �We know where this beam is coming from. We donłt
know for certain that the traffic between these particular nodes runs in both
directions, but wełve found plenty of examples where it does. If we aim a
signal from here, back along the path of the spillage, and we make it wide
enough, then we wonłt just hit the sending node. Wełll hit the receiver as
well."

Jasim was silent.

�We know the data format," she continued. �We know the
routing information. We can address the data packets to a node on the other
side of the bulge, one where the spillage comes out at Massa."

Jasim said, �What makes you think theyłll accept the
packets?"

�Therełs nothing in the format we donłt understand, nothing
we canłt write for ourselves."

�Nothing in the unencrypted part. If therełs an
authorisation, even a checksum, in the encrypted part, then any packet without
that will be tossed away as noise."

�Thatłs true," she conceded.

�Do you really want to do this?" he said. Her hand was still
on his shoulder, she could feel his body growing tense.

�Absolutely."

�We mail ourselves from here to Massa, as unencrypted, classical
data that anyone can read, anyone can copy, anyone can alter or corrupt?"

�A moment ago you said theyłd throw us away as noise."

�Thatłs the least of our worries."

�Maybe."

Jasim shuddered, his body almost convulsing. He let out a
string of obscenities, then made a choking sound. �Whatłs wrong with you? Is
this some kind of test? If I call your bluff, will you admit that youłre
joking?"

Leila shook her head. �And no, itłs not revenge for what you
did on the way to Trident. This is our chance. This is what we were waiting to
donot the Eavesdropping, thatłs nothing! The bulge is right here in front of
us. The Aloof are in there, somewhere. We canłt force them to engage with us,
but we can get closer to them than anyone has ever been before."

�If we go in this way, they could do anything to us."

�Theyłre not barbarians. They havenłt made war on us. Even
the engineering spores come back unharmed."

�If we infest their network, thatłs worse than an
engineering spore."

�ęInfest None of these routes are crowded. A few exabytes
passing through is nothing."

�You have no idea how theyłll react."

�No," she confessed. �I donłt. But Iłm ready to find out."

Jasim stood. �We could send a test message first. Then go to
Massa and see if it arrived safely."

�We could do that," Leila conceded. �That would be a
sensible plan."

�So you agree?" Jasim gave her a wary, frozen smile. �Wełll
send a test message. Send an encyclopedia. Send greetings in some universal
language."

�Fine. Wełll send all of those things first. But Iłm not
waiting more than one day after that. Iłm not going to Massa the long way. Iłm
taking the short-cut, Iłm going through the bulge."

8

The Amalgam had been so generous to Leila, and local
interest in the Aloof so intense, that she had almost forgotten that she was
not, in fact, entitled to a limitless and unconditional flow of resources, to
be employed to any end that involved her obsession.

When she asked Tassef for the means to build a high-powered
gamma-ray transmitter to aim into the bulge, it interrogated her for an hour,
then replied that the matter would require a prolonged and extensive
consultation. It was, she realised, no use protesting that compared to hosting
a billion guests for a couple of centuries, the cost of this was nothing. The
sticking point was not the energy use, or any other equally microscopic
consequence for the comfort and amenity of the Tassef locals. The issue was
whether her proposed actions might be seen as unwelcome and offensive by the
Aloof, and whether that affront might in turn provoke some kind of retribution.

Countless probes and spores had been gently and patiently returned
from the bulge unharmed, but theyłd come blundering in at less than lightspeed.
A flash of gamma rays could not be intercepted and returned before it struck
its chosen target. Though it seemed to Leila that it would be a trivial matter
for the network to choose to reject the data, it was not unreasonable to
suppose that the Aloofłs sensibilities might differ on this point from her own.

Jasim had left Shalouf for a city on the other side of the
planet. Leilałs feelings about this were mixed; it was always painful when they
separated, but the reminder that they were not irrevocably welded together also
brought an undeniable sense of space and freedom. She loved him beyond measure,
but that was not the final word on every question. She was not certain that she
would not relent in the end, and die quietly beside him when the news came
through from Massa; there were moments when it seemed utterly perverse,
masochistic and self-aggrandising to flee from that calm, dignified end for the
sake of trying to cap their modest revolution with a new and spectacularly
dangerous folly. Nor though, was she certain that Jasim would not change his
own mind, and take her hand while they plunged off this cliff together.

When the months dragged on with no decision on her request,
no news from Massa and no overtures from her husband, Leila became an orator,
travelling from city to city promoting her scheme to blaze a trail through the
heart of the bulge. Her words and image were conveyed into virtual fora, but
her physical presence was a way to draw attention to her cause, and Listening
Party pilgrims and Tassefi alike packed the meeting places when she came. She
mastered the localsł language and style, but left it inflected with some
suitably alien mannerisms. The fact that a rumour had arisen that she was one
of the First Eavesdroppers did no harm to her attendance figures.

When she reached the city of Jasimłs self-imposed exile, she
searched the audience for him in vain. As she walked out into the night a sense
of panic gripped her. She felt no fear for herself, but the thought of him
dying here alone was unbearable.

She sat in the street, weeping. How had it come to this?
They had been prepared for a glorious failure, prepared to be broken by the
Aloofłs unyielding silence, and instead the fruits of their labour had swept through
the disk, reinvigorating a thousand cultures. How could the taste of success be
so bitter?

Leila imagined calling out to Jasim, finding him, holding
him again, repairing their wounds.

A splinter of steel remained inside her, though. She looked
up into the blazing sky. The Aloof were there, waiting, daring her to stand
before them. To come this far, then step back from the edge for the comfort of
a familiar embrace, would diminish her. She would not retreat.

The news arrived from Massa: forty thousand years before,
the spillage from the far side of the bulge had been caught in time. Vast
swathes of the data matched the observations that Tassef had been holding in
anticipation of this moment, for the last fifteen thousand years.

There was more: reports of other correlations from other observatories
followed within minutes. As the message from Massa had been relayed around the
inner disk, a cascade of similar matches with other stores of data had been
found.

By seeing where packets dropped out of the stream, their abstract
addresses became concrete, physical locations within the bulge. As Leila stood
in Shaloufłs main square in the dusk, absorbing the reports, the Aloofłs
network was growing more solid, less ethereal, by the minute.

The streets around her were erupting with signs of elation:
polyglot shouts, chirps and buzzes, celebratory scents and vivid pigmentation
changes. Bursts of luminescence spread across the square. Even the relentlessly
sober heptapods had abandoned their food carts to lie on their backs, spinning
with delight. Leila wheeled around, drinking it in, commanding her translator
to punch the meaning of every disparate gesture and sound deep into her brain,
unifying the kaleidoscope into a single emotional charge.

As the stars of the bulge came out, Tassef offered an
overlay for everyone to share, with the newly mapped routes shining like golden
highways. From all around her, Leila picked up the signals of those who were
joining the view: people of every civilisation, every species, every replicator
were seeing the Aloofłs secret roads painted across the sky.

Leila walked through the streets of Shalouf, feeling Jasimłs
absence sharply, but too familiar with that pain to be overcome by it. If the
joy of this moment was muted, every celebration would be blighted in the same
way, now. She could not expect anything else. She would grow inured to it.

Tassef spoke to her.

�The citizens have reached a decision. They will grant your
request."

�Iłm grateful."

�There is a condition. The transmitter must be built at
least twenty light-years away, either in interstellar space, or in the circumstellar
region of an uninhabited system."

�I understand." This way, in the event that the Aloof felt
threatened to the point of provoking destructive retribution, Tassef would
survive an act of violence, at least on a stellar scale, directed against the
transmitter itself.

�We advise you to prepare your final plans for the hardware,
and submit them when youłre sure they will fulfil your purpose."

�Of course."

Leila went back to her room, and reviewed the plans she had
already drafted. She had anticipated the Tassefi wanting a considerable safety
margin, so she had worked out the energy budgets for detailed scenarios
involving engineering spores and forty-seven different cometary clouds that
fell within Tassefłs jurisdiction. It took just seconds to identify the best
one that met the required conditions, and she lodged it without hesitation.

Out on the streets, the Listening Party continued. For the
billion pilgrims, this was enough: they would go home, return to their
grandchildren, and die happy in the knowledge that they had finally seen
something new in the world. Leila envied them; therełd been a time when that
would have been enough for her, too.

She left her room and rejoined the celebration, talking,
laughing, dancing with strangers, letting herself grow giddy with the moment.
When the sun came up, she made her way home, stepping lightly over the sleeping
bodies that filled the street.

The engineering spores were the latest generation: strong bullets
launched at close to lightspeed that shed their momentum by diving through the
heart of a star, and then rebuilding themselves at atomic density as they
decayed in the stellar atmosphere. In effect, the dying femtomachines
constructed nanomachines bearing the same blueprints as theyłd carried within
themselves at nuclear densities, and which then continued out to the cometary
cloud to replicate and commence the real work of mining raw materials and
building the gamma ray transmitter.

Leila contemplated following in their wake, sending herself
as a signal to be picked up by the as-yet-unbuilt transmitter. It would not
have been as big a gamble as Jasimłs with Trident; the strong bullets had
already been used successfully this way in hundreds of similar stars.

In the end, she chose to wait on Tassef for a signal that
the transmitter had been successfully constructed, and had tested, aligned and
calibrated itself. If she was going to march blindly into the bulge, it would
be absurd to stumble and fall prematurely, before she even reached the
precipice.

When the day came, some ten thousand people gathered in the
centre of Shalouf to bid the traveller a safe journey. Leila would have
preferred to slip away quietly, but after all her lobbying she had surrendered
her privacy, and the Tassefi seemed to feel that she owed them this last splash
of colour and ceremony.

Forty-six years after the Listening Party, most of the
pilgrims had returned to their homes, but of the few hundred who had lingered
in Shalouf nearly all had showed up for this curious footnote to the main
event. Leila wasnłt sure that anyone here believed the Aloofłs network would do
more than bounce her straight back into the disk, but the affection these
well-wishers expressed seemed genuine. Someone had even gone to the trouble of
digging up a phrase in the oldest known surviving language of her ancestral
species: safar bekheyr, may your journey be blessed. They had written it across
the sky in an ancient script that shełd last seen eighty thousand years before,
and it had been spread among the crowd phonetically so that everyone she met
could offer her this hopeful farewell as she passed.

Tassef, the insentient delegate of all the planetłs
citizens, addressed the crowd with some sombre ceremonial blather. Leilałs mind
wandered, settling on the observation that she was probably partaking in a
public execution. No matter. She had said goodbye to her friends and family
long ago. When she stepped through the ceremonial gate, which had been smeared
with a tarry mess that the Tassefi considered the height of beauty, she would
close her eyes and recall her last night on Najib, letting the intervening millennia
collapse into a dream. Everyone chose death in the end, and no onełs exit was
perfect. Better to rely on your own flawed judgements, better to make your own
ungainly mess of it, than live in the days when nature would simply take you at
random.

As Tassef fell silent, a familiar voice rose up from the
crowd.

�Are you still resolved to do this foolish thing?"

Leila glared down at her husband. �Yes, I am."

�You wonłt reconsider?"

�No."

�Then Iłm coming with you."

Jasim pushed his way through the startled audience, and
climbed onto the stage.

Leila spoke to him privately. �Youłre embarrassing us both."

He replied the same way. �Donłt be petty. I know Iłve hurt
you, but the blame lies with both of us."

�Why are you doing this? Youłve made your own wishes very
plain."

�Do you think I can watch you walk into danger, and not walk
beside you?"

�You were ready to die if Trident failed. You were ready to
leave me behind then."

�Once I spoke my mind on that you gave me no choice. You
insisted." He took her hand. �You know I only stayed away from you all this
time because I hoped it would dissuade you. I failed. So now Iłm here."

Leilałs heart softened. �Youłre serious? Youłll come with
me?"

Jasim said, �Whatever they do to you, let them do it to us
both."

Leila had no argument to make against this, no residue of anger,
no false solicitousness. She had always wanted him beside her at the end, and
she would not refuse him now.

She spoke to Tassef. �One more passenger. Is that
acceptable?" The energy budget allowed for a thousand years of test transmissions
to follow in her wake; Jasim would just be a minor blip of extra data.

�Itłs acceptable." Tassef proceeded to explain the change to
the assembled crowd, and to the onlookers scattered across the planet.

Jasim said, �Wełll interweave the data from both of us into
a single packet. I donłt want to end up at Massa and find theyłve sent you to
Jahnom by mistake."

�All right." Leila arranged the necessary changes. None of
the Eavesdroppers yet knew that they were coming, and no message sent the long
way could warn them in time, but the data they sent into the bulge would be
prefaced by instructions that anyone in the Amalgam would find clear and
unambiguous, asking that their descriptions only be embodied if they were
picked up at Massa. If they were found in other spillage along the way, they didnłt
want to be embodied multiple times. And if they did not emerge at Massa at all,
so be it.

Tassefłs second speech came to an end. Leila looked down at
the crowd one last time, and let her irritation with the whole bombastic
ceremony dissipate into amusement. If she had been among the sane, she might
easily have turned up herself to watch a couple of ancient fools try to step
onto the imaginary road in the sky, and wish them safar bekheyr.

She squeezed Jasimłs hand, and they walked towards the gate.

9

Leilałs fingers came together, her hand empty. She felt as
if she was falling, but nothing in sight appeared to be moving. Then again, all
she could see was a distant backdrop, its scale and proximity impossible to
judge: thousands of fierce blue stars against the blackness of space.

She looked around for Jasim, but she was utterly alone. She
could see no vehicle or other machine that might have disgorged her into this
emptiness. There was not even a planet below her, or a single brightest star to
which she might be bound. Absurdly, she was breathing. Every other cue told her
that she was drifting through vacuum, probably through interstellar space. Her
lungs kept filling and emptying, though. The air, and her skin, felt neither
hot nor cold.

Someone or something had embodied her, or was running her as
software. She was not on Massa, she was sure of that; she had never visited
that world, but nowhere in the Amalgam would a guest be treated like this. Not
even one who arrived unannounced in data spilling out from the bulge.

Leila said, �Are you listening to me? Do you understand me?"
She could hear her own voice, flat and without resonance. The acoustics made
perfect sense in a vast, empty, windless place, if not an airless one.

Anywhere in the Amalgam, you knew whether you were embodied
or not; it was the nature of all bodies, real or virtual, that declarative
knowledge of every detail was there for the asking. Here, when Leila tried to
summon the same information, her mind remained blank. It was like the strange
absence shełd felt on Trident, when shełd been cut off from the repositories of
civilisation, but here the amputation had reached all the way inside her.

She inhaled deeply, but there was no noticeable scent at
all, not even the whiff of her own body odour that she would have expected,
whether she was wearing her ancestral phenotype or any of the forms of ersatz
flesh that she adopted when the environment demanded it. She pinched the skin
of her forearm; it felt more like her original skin than any of the substitutes
shełd ever worn. They might have fashioned this body out of something both
remarkably lifelike and chemically inert, and placed her in a vast, transparent
container of air, but she was beginning to pick up a strong stench of ersatz
physics. Air and skin alike, she suspected, were made of bits, not atoms.

So where was Jasim? Were they running him too, in a separate
scape? She called out his name, trying not to make the exploratory cry sound
plaintive. She understood all too well now why hełd tried so hard to keep her
from this place, and why hełd been unable to face staying behind: the thought
that the Aloof might be doing something unspeakable to his defenceless
consciousness, in some place she couldnłt hope to reach or see, was like a
white hot blade pressed to her heart. All she could do was try to shut off the
panic and talk down the possibility. All right, hełs alone here, but so am I,
and itłs not that bad. She would put her faith in symmetry; if they had not
abused her, why would they have harmed Jasim?

She forced herself to be calm. The Aloof had taken the
trouble to grant her consciousness, but she couldnłt expect the level of
amenity she was accustomed to. For a start, it would be perfectly reasonable if
her hosts were unable or unwilling to plug her into any data source equivalent
to the Amalgamłs libraries, and perhaps the absence of somatic knowledge was
not much different. Rather than deliberately fooling her about her body, maybe
they had looked at the relevant data channels and decided that anything they
fed into them would be misleading. Understanding her transmitted description
well enough to bring her to consciousness was one thing, but it didnłt
guarantee that they knew how to translate the technical details of their
instantiation of her into her own language.

And if this ignorance-plus-honesty excuse was too sanguine
to swallow, it wasnłt hard to think of the Aloof as being pathologically
secretive without actually being malicious. If they wanted to keep quiet about
the way theyłd brought her to life lest it reveal something about themselves,
that too was understandable. They need not be doing it for the sake of
tormenting her.

Leila surveyed the sky around her, and felt a jolt of recognition.
Shełd memorised the positions of the nearest stars to the target node where her
transmission would first be sent, and now a matching pattern stood out against
the background in a collection of distinctive constellations. She was being
shown the sky from that node. This didnłt prove anything about her actual
location, but the simplest explanation was that the Aloof had instantiated her
here, rather than sending her on through the network. The stars were in the
positions shełd predicted for her time of arrival, so if this was the reality,
there had been little delay in choosing how to deal with the intruder. No
thousand-year-long deliberations, no passing of the news to a distant
decision-maker. Either the Aloof themselves were present here, or the machinery
of the node was so sophisticated that they might as well have been. She could
not have been woken by accident; it had to have been a deliberate act. It made
her wonder if the Aloof had been expecting something like this for millennia.

�What now?" she asked. Her hosts remained silent. �Toss me
back to Tassef?" The probes with their reversed trajectories bore no record of
their experience; perhaps the Aloof wouldnłt incorporate these new memories
into her description before returning her. She spread her arms imploringly. �If
youłre going to erase this memory, why not speak to me first? Iłm in your hands
completely, you can send me to the grave with your secrets. Why wake me at all,
if you donłt want to talk?"

In the silence that followed, Leila had no trouble imagining
one answer: to study her. It was a mathematical certainty that some questions
about her behaviour could never be answered simply by examining her static
description; the only reliable way to predict what shełd do in any given
scenario was to wake her and confront her with it. They might, of course, have
chosen to wake her any number of times before, without granting her memories of
the previous instantiations. She experienced a moment of sheer existential
vertigo: this could be the thousandth, the billionth, in a vast series of
experiments, as her captors permuted dozens of variables to catalogue her
responses.

The vertigo passed. Anything was possible, but she preferred
to entertain more pleasant hypotheses.

�I came here to talk," she said. �I understand that you donłt
want us sending in machinery, but there must be something we can discuss,
something we can learn from each other. In the disk, every time two
space-faring civilisations met, they found they had something in common. Some
mutual interests, some mutual benefits."

At the sound of her own earnest speech dissipating into the
virtual air around her, Leila started laughing. The arguments shełd been
putting for centuries to Jasim, to her friends on Najib, to the Snakes on
Nazdeek, seemed ridiculous now, embarrassing. How could she face the Aloof and
claim that she had anything to offer them that they had not considered, and
rejected, hundreds of thousands of years before? The Amalgam had never tried to
keep its nature hidden. The Aloof would have watched them, studied them from
afar, and consciously chosen isolation. To come here and list the advantages of
contact as if theyłd never crossed her hostsł minds was simply insulting.

Leila fell silent. If she had lost faith in her role as
cultural envoy, at least shełd proved to her own satisfaction that there was
something in here smarter than the sling-shot fence the probes had encountered.
The Aloof had not embraced her, but the whole endeavour had not been in vain.
To wake in the bulge, even to silence, was far more than shełd ever had the
right to hope for.

She said, �Please, just bring me my husband now, then wełll
leave you in peace."

This entreaty was met in the same way as all the others.
Leila resisted speculating again about experimental variables. She did not
believe that a million-year-old civilisation was interested in testing her
tolerance to isolation, robbing her of her companion and seeing how long she
took to attempt suicide. The Aloof did not take orders from her; fine. If she
was neither an experimental subject to be robbed of her sanity, nor a valued
guest whose every wish was granted, there had to be some other relationship
between them that she had yet to fathom. She had to be conscious for a reason.

She searched the sky for a hint of the node itself, or any
other feature she might have missed, but she might as well have been living
inside a star map, albeit one shorn of the usual annotations. The Milky Way,
the plane of stars that bisected the sky, was hidden by the thicker clouds of
gas and dust here, but Leila had her bearings; she knew which way led deeper
into the bulge, and which way led back out to the disk.

She contemplated Tassefłs distant sun with mixed emotions,
as a sailor might look back on the last sight of land. As the yearning for that
familiar place welled up, a cylinder of violet light appeared around her,
encircling the direction of her gaze. For the first time, Leila felt her
weightlessness interrupted: a gentle acceleration was carrying her forward
along the imaginary beam.

�No! Wait!" She closed her eyes and curled into a ball. The
acceleration halted, and when she opened her eyes the tunnel of light was gone.

She let herself float limply, paying no attention to
anything in the sky, waiting to see what happened if she kept her mind free of
any desire for travel.

After an hour like this, the phenomenon had not recurred.
Leila turned her gaze in the opposite direction, into the bulge. She cleared
her mind of all timidity and nostalgia, and imagined the thrill of rushing
deeper into this violent, spectacular, alien territory. At first there was no
response from the scape, but then she focused her attention sharply in the
direction of a second node, the one shełd hoped her transmission would be
forwarded to from the first, on its way through the galactic core.

The same violet light, the same motion. This time, Leila
waited a few heartbeats longer before she broke the spell.

Unless this was some pointlessly sadistic game, the Aloof
were offering her a clear choice. She could return to Tassef, return to the Amalgam.
She could announce that shełd put a toe in these mysterious waters, and lived
to tell the tale. Or she could dive into the bulge, as deep as shełd ever
imagined, and see where the network took her.

�No promises?" she asked. �No guarantee Iłll come out the
other side? No intimations of contact, to tempt me further?" She was thinking
aloud, she did not expect answers. Her hosts, she was beginning to conclude,
viewed strangers through the prism of a strong, but very sharply delineated,
sense of obligation. They sent back the insentient probes to their owners,
scrupulously intact. They had woken this intruder to give her the choice: did
she really want to go where her transmission suggested, or had she wandered in
here like a lost child who just needed to find the way home? They would do her
no harm, and send her on no journey without her consent, but those were the
limits of their duty of care. They did not owe her any account of themselves.
She would get no greeting, no hospitality, no conversation.

�What about Jasim? Will you give me a chance to consult with
him?" She waited, picturing his face, willing his presence, hoping they might
read her mind if her words were beyond them. If they could decode a yearning
towards a point in the sky, surely this wish for companionship was not too
difficult to comprehend? She tried variations, dwelling on the abstract
structure of their intertwined data in the transmission, hoping this might
clarify the object of her desire if his physical appearance meant nothing to them.

She remained alone.

The stars that surrounded her spelt out the only choices on
offer. If she wanted to be with Jasim once more before she died, she had to
make the same decision as he did.

Symmetry demanded that he faced the same dilemma.

How would he be thinking? He might be tempted to retreat
back to the safety of Tassef, but hełd reconciled with her in Shalouf for the
sole purpose of following her into danger. He would understand that shełd want
to go deeper, would want to push all the way through to Massa, opening up the
short-cut through the core, proving it safe for future travellers.

Would he understand, too, that shełd feel a pang of guilt at
this presumptuous line of thought, and that shełd contemplate making a
sacrifice of her own? He had braved the unknown for her, and they had reaped
the reward already: they had come closer to the Aloof than anyone in history.
Why couldnłt that be enough? For all Leila knew, her hosts might not even wake
her again before Massa. What would she be giving up if she turned back now?

More to the point, what would Jasim expect of her? That shełd
march on relentlessly, following her obsession to the end, or that shełd put
her love for him first?

The possibilities multiplied in an infinite regress. They
knew each other as well as two people could, but they didnłt carry each otherłs
minds inside them.

Leila drifted through the limbo of stars, wondering if Jasim
had already made his decision. Having seen that the Aloof were not the
torturers hełd feared, had he already set out for Tassef, satisfied that she
faced no real peril at their hands? Or had he reasoned that their experience at
this single node meant nothing? This was not the Amalgam, the culture could be
a thousand times more fractured.

This cycle of guesses and doubts led nowhere. If she tried
to pursue it to the end shełd be paralysed. There were no guarantees; she could
only choose the least worst case. If she returned to Tassef, only to find that
Jasim had gone on alone through the bulge, it would be unbearable: she would
have lost him for nothing. If that happened, she could try to follow him,
returning to the bulge immediately, but she would already be centuries behind
him.

If she went on to Massa, and it was Jasim who retreated, at
least shełd know that hełd ended up in safety. Shełd know, too, that he had not
been desperately afraid for her, that the Aloofłs benign indifference at this
first node had been enough to persuade him that theyłd do her no harm.

That was her answer: she had to continue, all the way to
Massa. With the hope, but no promise, that Jasim would have thought the same
way.

The decision made, she lingered in the scape. Not from any
second thoughts, but from a reluctance to give up lightly the opportunity shełd
fought so hard to attain. She didnłt know if any member of the Aloof was
watching and listening to her, reading her thoughts, examining her desires.
Perhaps they were so indifferent and incurious that theyłd delegated everything
to insentient software, and merely instructed their machines to baby-sit her
while she made up her mind where she wanted to go. She still had to make one
last attempt to reach them, or she would never die in peace.

�Maybe youłre right," she said. �Maybe youłve watched us for
the last million years, and seen that we have nothing to offer you. Maybe our
technology is backwards, our philosophy naive, our customs bizarre, our manners
appalling. If thatłs true, though, if wełre so far beneath you, you could at
least point us in the right direction. Offer us some kind of argument as to why
we should change."

Silence.

Leila said, �All right. Forgive my impertinence. I have to
tell you honestly, though, that we wonłt be the last to bother you. The Amalgam
is full of people who will keep trying to find ways to reach you. This is going
to go on for another million years, until we believe that we understand you. If
that offends you, donłt judge us too harshly. We canłt help it. Itłs who we
are."

She closed her eyes, trying to assure herself that there was
nothing shełd regret having left unsaid.

�Thank you for granting us safe passage," she added, �if
thatłs what youłre offering. I hope my people can return the favour one day, if
therełs anywhere you want to go."

She opened her eyes and sought out her destination: deeper
into the network, on towards the core.

10

The mountains outside the town of Astraahat started with a
gentle slope that promised an easy journey, but gradually grew steeper.
Similarly, the vegetation was low and sparse in the foothills, but became
steadily thicker and taller the higher up the slope you went.

Jasim said, �Enough." He stopped and leant on his climbing
stick.

�One more hour?" Leila pleaded.

He considered this. �Half an hour resting, then half an hour
walking?"

�One hour resting, then one hour walking."

He laughed wearily. �All right. One of each."

The two of them hacked away at the undergrowth until there
was a place to sit.

Jasim poured water from the canteen into her hands, and she
splashed her face clean.

They sat in silence for a while, listening to the sounds of
the unfamiliar wildlife. Under the forest canopy it was almost twilight, and
when Leila looked up into the small patch of sky above them she could see the
stars of the bulge, like tiny, pale, translucent beads.

At times it felt like a dream, but the experience never
really left her. The Aloof had woken her at every node, shown her the view,
given her a choice. She had seen a thousand spectacles, from one side of the
core to the other: cannibalistic novas, dazzling clusters of newborn stars,
twin white dwarfs on the verge of collision. She had seen the black hole at the
galaxyłs centre, its accretion disk glowing with X-rays, slowly tearing stars
apart.

It might have been an elaborate lie, a plausible simulation,
but every detail accessible from disk-based observatories confirmed what she
had witnessed. If anything had been changed, or hidden from her, it must have
been small. Perhaps the artifacts of the Aloof themselves had been painted out
of the view, though Leila thought it was just as likely that the marks theyłd
left on their territory were so subtle, anyway, that therełd been nothing to
conceal.

Jasim said sharply, �Where are you?"

She lowered her gaze and replied mildly, �Iłm here, with
you. Iłm just remembering."

When theyłd woken on Massa, surrounded by delirious, cheering
Eavesdroppers, theyłd been asked: What happened in there? What did you see?
Leila didnłt know why shełd kept her mouth shut and turned to her husband
before replying, instead of letting every detail come tumbling out immediately.
Perhaps she just hadnłt known where to begin.

For whatever reason, it was Jasim who had answered first. �Nothing.
We stepped through the gate on Tassef, and now here we are. On the other side
of the bulge."

For almost a month, shełd flatly refused to believe him. Nothing?
You saw nothing? It had to be a lie, a joke. It had to be some kind of revenge.

That was not in his nature, and she knew it. Still, shełd
clung to that explanation for as long as she could, until it became impossible
to believe any longer, and shełd asked for his forgiveness.

Six months later, another traveller had spilled out of the
bulge. One of the die-hard Listening Party pilgrims had followed in their wake
and taken the short cut. Like Jasim, this heptapod had seen nothing,
experienced nothing.

Leila had struggled to imagine why she might have been singled
out. So much for her theory that the Aloof felt morally obliged to check that
each passenger on their network knew what they were doing, unless theyłd
decided that her actions were enough to demonstrate that intruders from the
disk, considered generically, were making an informed choice. Could just one
sample of a working, conscious version of their neighbours really be enough for
them to conclude that they understood everything they needed to know? Could
this capriciousness, instead, have been part of a strategy to lure in more
visitors, with the enticing possibility that each one might, with luck, witness
something far beyond all those whołd preceded them? Or had it been part of a
scheme to discourage intruders by clouding the experience with uncertainty? The
simplest act of discouragement would have been to discard all unwelcome
transmissions, and the most effective incentive would have been to offer a few
plain words of welcome, but then, the Aloof would not have been the Aloof if
theyłd followed such reasonable dictates.

Jasim said, �You know what I think. You wanted to wake so
badly, they couldnłt refuse you. They could tell I didnłt care as much. It was
as simple as that."

�What about the heptapod? It went in alone. It wasnłt just
tagging along to watch over someone else."

He shrugged. �Maybe it acted on the spur of the moment. They
all seem unhealthily keen to me, whatever theyłre doing. Maybe the Aloof could
discern its mood more clearly."

Leila said, �I donłt believe a word of that."

Jasim spread his hands in a gesture of acceptance. �Iłm sure
you could change my mind in five minutes, if I let you. But if we walked back
down this hill and waited for the next traveller from the bulge, and the next,
until the reason some of them received the grand tour and some didnłt finally
became plain, there would still be another question, and another. Even if I
wanted to live for ten thousand years more, Iłd rather move on to something
else. And in this last hour ..." He trailed off.

Leila said, �I know. Youłre right."

She sat, listening to the strange chirps and buzzes emitted
by creatures she knew nothing about. She could have absorbed every recorded
fact about them in an instant, but she didnłt care, she didnłt need to know.

Someone else would come after them, to understand the Aloof,
or advance that great, unruly, frustrating endeavour by the next increment. She
and Jasim had made a start, that was enough. What theyłd done was more than she
could ever have imagined, back on Najib. Now, though, was the time to stop,
while they were still themselves: enlarged by the experience, but not
disfigured beyond recognition.

They finished their water, drinking the last drops. They
left the canteen behind. Jasim took her hand and they climbed together,
struggling up the slope side by side.

The Safe-Deposit Box

I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One
name, unchanging, mine until death. I donłt know what my name is, but that doesnłt
matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

* * * *

I wake just before the alarm goes off (I usually do), so Iłm
able to reach out and silence it the instant it starts screeching. The woman
beside me doesnłt move; I hope the alarm wasnłt meant for her too. Itłs
freezing cold and pitch black, except for the bedside clockłs red digits slowly
coming into focus. Ten to four! I groan softly. What am I? A garbage collector?
A milkman? This body is sore and tired, but that tells me nothing; theyłve all
been sore and tired lately, whatever their profession, their income, their
lifestyle. Yesterday I was a diamond merchant. Not quite a millionaire, but
close. The day before I was a bricklayer, and the day before that I sold
menswear. Crawling out of a warm bed felt pretty much the same each time.

I find my hand travelling instinctively to the switch for
the reading light on my side of the bed. When I click it on, the woman stirs
and mumbles, ęJohnny?ł but her eyes remain closed. I make my first conscious
effort to access this hostłs memories; sometimes I can pick up a frequently
used name. Linda? Could be. Linda. I mouth it silently, looking at the tangle
of soft brown hair almost hiding her sleeping face.

The situation, if not the individual, is comfortingly familiar.
Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife. I whisper to her, ęI love you,ł and I mean
it; I love, not this particular woman, (with a past Iłll barely glimpse, and a
future that I have no way of sharing), but the composite woman of which, today,
she is a partmy nickering, inconstant companion, my lover made up of a million
pseudorandom words and gestures, held together only by the fact that I behold
her, known in her entirety to no one but me.

In my romantic youth, I used to speculate: Surely Iłm not
the only one of my kind? Might there not be another like me, but who wakes each
morning in the body of a woman? Might not whatever mysterious factors determine
the selection of my host act in parallel on her, drawing us together, keeping
us together day after day, transporting us, side by side, from host couple to
host couple?

Not only is it unlikely, it simply isnłt true. The last time
(nearly twelve years ago now) that I cracked up and started spouting the
unbelievable truth, my hostłs wife did not break in with shouts of relief and
recognition, and her own, identical, confession. (She didnłt do much at all,
actually. I expected her to find my rantings frightening and traumatic, I
expected her to conclude at once that I was dangerously insane. Instead, she
listened briefly, apparently found what I was saying either boring or
incomprehensible, and so, very sensibly, left me alone for the rest of the
day.)

Not only is it untrue, it simply doesnłt matter. Yes, my
lover has a thousand faces, and yes, a different soul looks out from every pair
of eyes, but I can still find (or imagine) as many unifying patterns in my
memories of her, as any other man or woman can find (or imagine) in their own
perceptions of their own most faithful lifelong companion.

Man looks fondly upon sleeping wife.

I climb out from under the blankets and stand for a moment,
shivering, looking around the room, eager to start moving to keep myself warm,
but unable to decide what to do first. Then I spot a wallet on top of the chest
of drawers.

Iłm John Francis OłLeary, according to the driverłs licence.
Date of birth: 15 November, 1951which makes me one week older than when I went
to bed. Although I still have occasional daydreams about waking up twenty years
younger, that seems to be as unlikely for me as it is for anyone else; in
thirty-nine years, so far as I know, Iłve yet to have a host born any time but
November or December of 1951. Nor have I ever had a host either born, or
presently living, outside this city.

I donłt know how I move from one host to the next, but since
any process could be expected to have some finite effective range, my
geographical confinement is not surprising. Therełs desert to the east, ocean
to the west, and long stretches of barren coast to the north and south; the distances
from town to town are simply too great for me to cross. In fact, I never even
seem to get close to the outskirts of the city, and on reflection thatłs not
surprising: if there are one hundred potential hosts to the west of me, and
five to the east, then a jump to a randomly chosen host is not a jump in a random
direction. The populous centre attracts me with a kind of statistical gravity.

As for the restrictions on host age and birthplace, Iłve
never had a theory plausible enough to believe for more than a day or two. It
was easy when I was twelve or thirteen, and could pretend I was some kind of
alien prince, imprisoned in the bodies of Earthlings by a wicked rival for my
cosmic inheritance; the bad guys must have put something in the cityłs water,
late in 1951, which was drunk by expectant mothers, thus preparing their unborn
children to be my unwitting jailers. These days I accept the likelihood that
Iłll simply never know the answer.

I am sure of one thing, though: both restrictions were
essential to whatever approximation to sanity I now possess. Had I ęgrown upł
in bodies of completely random ages, or in hosts scattered worldwide, with a
different language and culture to contend with every day, I doubt that Iłd even
existno personality could possibly emerge from such a cacophony of
experiences. (Then again, an ordinary person might think the same of my own,
relatively stable, origins.)

I donłt recall being John OłLeary before, which is unusual.
This city contains only six thousand men aged thirty-nine, and of those,
roughly one thousand would have been born in November or December. Since
thirty-nine years is more than fourteen thousand days, the odds by now are
heavily against first-timers, and Iłve visited most hosts several times within
memory.

In my own inexpert way, Iłve explored the statistics a
little. Any given potential host should have, on average, one thousand days, or
three years, between my visits. Yet the average time I should expect to pass
without repeating any hosts myself is a mere forty days (the average to date is
actually lower, twenty-seven days, presumably because some hosts are more
susceptible than others). When I first worked this out it seemed paradoxical,
but only because the averages donłt tell the whole story; a fraction of all
repeat visits occur within weeks rather than years, and of course itłs these
abnormally fast ones that determine the rate for me.

In a safe-deposit box (with a combination lock) in the
centre of the city, I have records covering the past twenty-two years. Names,
addresses, dates of birth, and dates of each visit since 1968, for over eight
hundred hosts. One day soon, when I have a host who can spare the time, I
really must rent a computer with a database package and shift all that crap on
to disk; that would make statistical tests a thousand times easier. I donłt
expect astounding revelations; if I found some kind of bias or pattern in the
data, well, so what? Would that tell me anything? Would that change anything?
Still, it seems like a good thing to do.

Partly hidden under a pile of coins beside the wallet isoh,
bliss!an ID badge, complete with photo. John OłLeary is an orderly at the
Pearlman Psychiatric Institute. The photo shows part of a light blue uniform,
and when I open his wardrobe there it is. I believe this body could do with a
shower, though, so I postpone dressing.

The house is small and plainly furnished, but very clean and
in good repair. I pass one room that is probably a childłs bedroom, but the
door is closed and I leave it that way, not wanting to risk waking anyone. In
the living room, I look up the Pearlman Institute in the phone book, and then
locate it in a street directory. Iłve already memorised my own address from the
licence, and the Institutełs not far away; I work out a route that shouldnłt
take more than twenty minutes, at this hour of the morning. I still donłt know
when my shift starts; surely not before five.

Standing in the bathroom, shaving, I stare for a moment into
my new brown eyes, and I canłt help noticing that John OłLeary is not bad
looking at all. Itłs a thought that leads nowhere. For a long while now,
thankfully, Iłve managed to accept my fluctuating appearance with relative
tranquillity, though it hasnłt always been that way. I had several neurotic
patches, in my teens and early twenties, when my mood would swing violently
between elation and depression, depending on how I felt about my latest body. Often,
for weeks after departing an especially good-looking host (which of course Iłd
have delayed for as long as possible, by staying awake night after night), Iłd
fantasise obsessively about returning, preferably to stay. At least an
ordinary, screwed-up adolescent knows he has no choice but to accept the body
in which he was born. I had no such comfort.

Iłm more inclined now to worry about my health, but thatłs
every bit as futile as fretting over appearance. Therełs no point whatsoever in
me exercising, or watching my diet, since any such gesture is effectively
diluted one-thousandfold. ęMył weight, ęmył fitness, ęmył alcohol and tobacco
consumption, canłt be altered by my own personal initiativetheyłre public
health statistics, requiring vastly expensive advertising campaigns to budge
them even slightly.

After showering, I comb my hair in imitation of the ID photo,
hoping that itłs not too out of date.

Linda opens her eyes and stretches as I walk, naked, back
into the bedroom, and the sight of her gives me an erection at once. I havenłt
had sex for months; almost every host lately seems to have managed to screw himself
senseless the night before I arrived, and to have subsequently lost interest
for the following fortnight. Apparently, my luck has changed. Linda reaches out
and grabs me.

ęIłll be late for work,ł I protest.

She turns and looks at the clock. ęThatłs crap. You donłt
start until six. If you eat breakfast here, instead of detouring to that greasy
truck stop, you wonłt have to leave for an hour.ł

Her fingernails are pleasantly sharp. I let her drag me
towards the bed, then I lean over and whisper, ęYou know, thatłs exactly what I
wanted to hear.ł

* * * *

My earliest memory is of my mother reverently holding a
bawling infant towards me, saying, ęLook, Chris! This is your baby brother.
This is Paul! Isnłt he beautiful?ł I couldnłt understand what all the fuss was
about. Siblings were like pets or toys; their number, their ages, their sexes,
their names, all fluctuated as senselessly as the furniture or the wallpaper.

Parents were clearly superior; they changed appearance and
behaviour, but at least their names stayed the same. I naturally assumed that
when I grew up, my name would become ęDaddył, a suggestion that was usually
greeted with laughter and amused agreement. I suppose I thought of my parents
as being basically like me; their transformations were more extreme than my
own, but everything else about them was bigger, so that made perfect sense.
That they were in a sense the same from day to day, I never doubted; my mother
and father were, by definition, the two adults who did certain things: scolded
me, hugged me, tucked me into bed, made me eat disgusting vegetables, and so
on. They stood out a mile, you couldnłt miss them. Occasionally one or the
other was absent, but never for more than a day.

The past and future werenłt problems; I simply grew up with
rather vague notions as to what they actually were. ęYesterdaył and ętomorrowł
were like ęonce upon a timełI was never disappointed by broken promises of
future treats, or baffled by descriptions of alleged past events, because I
treated all such talk as intentional fiction. I was often accused of telling
ęliesł, and I assumed that was just a label applied to stories that were
insufficiently interesting. Memories of events more than one day old were
clearly worthless ęliesł, so I did my best to forget them.

Iłm sure I was happy. The world was a kaleidoscope. I had a
new house to explore every day, different toys, different playmates, different
food. Sometimes the colour of my skin would change (and it thrilled me to see
that my parents, brothers and sisters almost always chose to make their own
skin the same as mine). Now and then I woke up as a girl, but at some point
(around the age of four, I think) this began to trouble me, and soon after
that, it simply stopped happening.

I had no suspicion that I was moving, from house to house,
from body to body. I changed, my house changed, the other houses, and the
streets and shops and parks around me, changed. I travelled now and then to the
city centre with my parents, but I thought of it not as a fixed location (since
it was reached by a different route each time) but as a fixed feature of the
world, like the sun or the sky.

School was the start of a long period of confusion and
misery. Although the school building, the classroom, the teacher, and the other
children, changed like everything else in my environment, the repertoire was
clearly not as wide as that of my house and family. Travelling to the same
school, but along different streets, and with a different name and face, upset
me, and the gradual realisation that classmates were copying my own previous
names and facesand, worse still, I was being saddled with ones theyłd usedwas
infuriating.

These days, having lived with the approved world-view for so
long, I sometimes find it hard to understand how my first year at school wasnłt
enough to make everything perfectly clearuntil I recall that my glimpses of
each classroom were generally spaced weeks apart, and that I was shuttling back
and forth at random between more than a hundred schools. I had no diary, no
records, no class lists in my head, no means of even thinking about what was
happening to menobody trained me in the scientific method. Even Einstein was a
great deal older than six, when he worked out his theory of relativity.

I kept my disquiet from my parents, but I was sick of dismissing
my memories as lies; I tried discussing them with other children, which brought
ridicule and hostility. After a period of fights and tantrums, I grew
introverted. My parents said things like ęYoułre quiet today!ł, day after day,
proving to me exactly how stupid they were.

Itłs a miracle that I learnt anything. Even now, Iłm unsure
how much of my reading ability belongs to me, and how much comes from my hosts.
Iłm sure that my vocabulary travels with me, but the lower-level business of
scanning the page, of actually recognising letters and words, feels quite
different from day to day. (Driving is similar; almost all of my hosts have
licences, but Iłve never had a single lesson myself. I know the traffic rules,
I know the gears and pedals, but Iłve never tried going out on to the road in a
body that hasnłt done it beforeit would make a nice experiment, but those
bodies tend not to own cars.)

I learnt to read. I learnt quickly to read quicklyif I
didnłt finish a book the day I started it, I knew I might not get my hands on
it again for weeks, or months. I read hundreds of adventure stories, full of
heroes and heroines with friends, brothers and sisters, even pets, that stayed
with them day after day. Each book hurt a little more, but I couldnłt stop
reading, I couldnłt give up hoping that the next book I opened would start with
the words, ęOne sunny morning a boy woke up, and wondered what his name was.ł

One day I saw my father consulting a street directory, and,
despite my shyness, I asked him what it was. Iłd seen world globes and maps of
the country at school, but never anything like this. He pointed out our house,
my school, and his place of work, both on the detailed street maps, and on the
key map of the whole city inside the front cover.

At that time, one brand of street directory had a virtual
monopoly. Every family owned one, and every day for weeks, I browbeat my father
or mother into showing me things on the key map. I successfully committed a lot
of it to memory (once I tried making pencil marks, thinking they might somehow
inherit the magical permanence of the directory itself, but they proved to be
as transitory as all the writing and drawing I did at school). I knew I was on
to something profound, but the concept of my own motion, from place to place in
an unchanging city, still failed to crystallise.

Not long afterwards, when my name was Danny Foster (a movie
projectionist, these days, with a beautiful wife called Kate to whom I lost my
virginity, though probably not Dannyłs), I went to a friendłs eighth birthday
party. I didnłt understand birthdays at all; some years I had none, some years
I had two or three. The birthday boy, Charlie McBride, was no friend of mine so
far as I was concerned, but my parents bought me a gift to take, a plastic toy
machine gun, and drove me to his house; I had no say in any of it. When I
arrived home, I pestered Dad into showing me, on a street map, exactly where
Iłd been, and the route the car had taken.

A week later, I woke up with Charlie McBridełs face, plus a
house, parents, little brother, older sister, and toys, all identical to those
Iłd seen at his party. I refused to eat breakfast until my mother showed me our
house on a street map, but I already knew where shełd point to.

I pretended to set off for school. My brother was too young
for school, and my sister too old to want to be seen with me; in such
circumstances I normally followed the clear flow of other children through the
streets, but today I ignored it.

I still remembered landmarks from the trip to the party. I
got lost a few times, but I kept stumbling upon streets Iłd seen before; dozens
of fragments of my world were starting to connect. It was both exhilarating and
terrifying; I thought I was uncovering a vast conspiracy, I thought everyone
had been purposely concealing the secrets of existence, and at last I was on
the verge of outsmarting them all.

When I reached Dannyłs house, though, I didnłt feel triumphant,
I simply felt lonely and deceived and confused. Revelation or no revelation, I
was still a child. I sat on the front steps and cried. Mrs Foster came out, in
a fluster, calling me Charlie, asking me where my mother was, how Iłd got here,
why I wasnłt at school. I yelled abuse at this filthy liar, whołd pretended,
like they all had, to be my mother. Phone calls were made, and I was driven
home screaming, to spend the day in my bedroom, refusing to eat, refusing to
speak, refusing to explain my unforgivable behaviour.

That night, I overheard my ęparentsł discussing me,
arranging what in retrospect I now believe was a visit to a child psychologist.

I never made it to that appointment.

* * * *

For the past eleven years now, Iłve been spending my days at
the hostłs workplace. Itłs certainly not for the hostłs sake; Iłm far more
likely to get him sacked by screwing up at his job than by causing him one
dayłs absence every three years. Itłs, well, itłs what I do, itłs who I am
these days. Everybody has to define themselves somehow; I am a professional
impersonator. The pay and conditions are variable, but a vocation cannot be
denied.

Iłve tried constructing an independent life for myself, but
Iłve never been able to make it work. When I was much younger, and mostly
unmarried, Iłd set myself things to study. Thatłs when I first hired the
safe-deposit boxto keep notes in. I studied mathematics, chemistry and
physics, in the cityłs central library, but when any subject began to grow
difficult, it was hard to find the discipline to push myself onwards. What was
the point? I knew I could never be a practising scientist. As for uncovering
the nature of my plight, it was clear that the answer was not going to lie in
any library book on neurobiology. In the cool, quiet reading rooms, with
nothing to listen to but the soporific drone of the air conditionings, Iłd
lapse into daydreams as soon as the words or equations in front of me stopped
making easy sense.

I once did a correspondence course in undergraduate level
physics; I hired a post office box, and kept the key to it in my safe-deposit
box. I completed the course, and did quite well, but I had no one to tell of my
achievement.

A while after that I got a pen pal in Switzerland. She was a
music student, a violinist, and I told her I was studying physics at the local
university. She sent me a photo, and, eventually, I did the same, after waiting
for one of my best-looking hosts. We exchanged letters regularly, every week
for more than a year. One day she wrote, saying she was coming to visit, asking
for details of how we could meet. I donłt think Iłd ever felt as lonely as I
did then. If I hadnłt sent that photo, I could at least have seen her for one
day. I could have spent a whole afternoon, talking face to face with my only
true friend, the only person in the world who actually knew, not one of my
hosts, but me. I stopped writing at once, and I gave up renting the post office
box.

Iłve contemplated suicide at times, but the fact that it
would be certain murder, and perhaps do nothing to me but drive me into another
host, makes an effective deterrent.

Since leaving behind all the turmoil and bitterness of my
childhood, Iłve generally tried to be fair to my hosts. Some days Iłve lost
control and done things that must have inconvenienced or embarrassed them (and
I take a little cash for my safe-deposit box from those who can easily spare
it), but Iłve never set out to intentionally harm anyone. Sometimes I almost
feel that they know about me and wish me well, although all the indirect
evidence, from questioning wives and friends when Iłve had closely spaced
visits, suggests that the missing days are hidden by seamless amnesiamy hosts
donłt even know that theyłve been out of action, let alone have a chance of
guessing why. As for me knowing them, well, I sometimes see love and respect in
the eyes of their families and colleagues, I sometimes see physical evidence of
achievements I can admireone host has written a novel, a black comedy about
his Vietnam experiences, that Iłve read and enjoyed; one is an amateur
telescope-maker, with a beautifully crafted, thirty-centimetre Newtonian
reflector, through which I viewed Halleyłs cometbut there are too many of
them. By the time I die, Iłll have glimpsed each of their lives for just twenty
or thirty randomly scattered days.

* * * *

I drive around the perimeter of the Pearlman Institute,
seeing what windows are lit, what doors are open, what activity is visible.
There are several entrances, ranging from one clearly for the public, complete
with plushly carpeted foyer and polished mahogany reception desk, to a rusty
metal swing door opening on to a dingy bitumen-covered space between two
buildings. I park in the street, rather than risk taking a spot on the premises
to which Iłm not entitled.

Iłm nervous as I approach what I hope is the correct
doorway; I still get a pain in my gut in those awful seconds just before Iłm
first seen by a colleague, and it becomes, very suddenly, a hundred times
harder to back outand, looking on the bright side, a whole lot easier to
continue.

ęMorning, Johnny.ł

ęMorning.ł

The nurse continues past me even as this brief exchange
takes place. Iłm hoping to find out where Iłm meant to be from a kind of social
binding strength; the people I spend most time with ought to greet me with more
than a nod and two words. I wander a short way along a corridor, trying to get
used to the squeaking of my rubber-soled shoes on the linoleum. Suddenly a
gruff voice cries out, ęOłLeary!ł and I turn to see a young man in a uniform
like mine, striding along the corridor towards me, wearing a thunderous frown,
arms stuck out unnaturally, face twitching. ęStanding around! Dawdling! Again!ł
His behaviour is so bizarre that, for a fraction of a second, Iłm convinced
hełs one of the patients; some psychotic with a grudge against me has killed
another orderly, stolen his uniform, and is about to produce a bloodstained
hatchet. Then the man puffs out his cheeks and stands there glaring, and I
suddenly twig; hełs not insane, hełs just parodying some obese, aggressive
superior. I prod his inflated face with one finger, as if bursting a balloon,
which gives me a chance to get close enough to read his badge: Ralph Dopita.

ęYou jumped a mile! I couldnłt believe it! So at last I got
the voice perfect!ł

ęAnd the face as well. But youłre lucky, you were born
ugly.ł

He shrugs. ęYour wife didnłt think so last night.ł

ęYou were drunk; that wasnłt my wife, it was your mother.ł

ęDonłt I always say youłre like a father to me?ł

The corridor, after much seemingly gratuitous winding, leads
into a kitchen, all stainless steel and steam, where two other orderlies are
standing around, and three cooks are preparing breakfast. With hot water
constantly running in one sink, the clunking of trays and utensils, the hissing
of fat, and the tortured sound of a failing ventilation fan, itłs almost
impossible to hear anyone speak. One of the orderlies mimes being a chicken,
and then makes a gestureswinging one hand above his head, pointing outwards,
as if to take in the whole building. ęEnough eggs to feedł he shouts, and the
others crack up, so I laugh along with them.

Later, I follow them to a storeroom off the kitchen, where
each of us grabs a trolley. Pinned up on a board, sheathed in transparent
plastic, are four patient lists, one for each ward, ordered by room number. Beside
each name is a little coloured circular sticker, green, red or blue. I hang
back until therełs only one left to grab.

There are three kinds of meal prepared: bacon and eggs with
toast, cereal, and a mushy yellow puree resembling baby food, in descending
order of popularity. On my own list there are more red stickers than green, and
only a single blue, but Iłm fairly certain that there were more green than red
in total, when I saw all four lists together. As I load my trolley on this
basis, I managed to catch a second look at Ralphłs list, which is mainly green,
and the contents of his trolley confirms that I have the code right.

Iłve never been in a psychiatric hospital before, either as
patient or staff member. I spent a day in prison about five years ago, where I
narrowly avoided getting my hostłs skull smashed in; I never discovered what
hełd done, or how long his sentence was, but Iłm rather hoping hełll be out by
the time I get back to him.

My vague expectation that this place will be similar turns
out to be pleasantly wrong. The prison cells were personalised to some degree,
with pictures on the walls, and idiosyncratic possessions, but they still
looked like cells. The rooms here are far less cluttered with that kind of
thing, but their underlying character is a thousand times less harsh. There are
no bars on the windows, and the doors in my ward have no locks. Most patients
are already awake, sitting up in bed, greeting me with a quiet ęGood morningł;
a few take their trays into a common room, where therełs a TV tuned to news.
Perhaps the degree of calm is unnatural, due solely to drugs; perhaps the
peacefulness that makes my job untraumatic is stultifying and oppressive to the
patients. Perhaps not. Maybe one day Iłll find out.

My last patient, the single blue sticker, is listed as
Klein, F. C. A skinny, middle-aged man with untidy black hair and a few daysł
stubble. Hełs lying so straight that I expect to see straps holding him in
place, but there are none. His eyes are open but they donłt follow me, and when
I greet him therełs no response.

Therełs a bedpan on a table beside the bed, and on a hunch I
sit him up and arrange it beneath him; hełs easily manipulated, not exactly
cooperating, but not dead weight either. He uses the bedpan impassively. I find
some paper and wipe him, then I take the bedpan to the toilets, empty it, and
wash my hands thoroughly. Iłm feeling only slightly queasy; OłLearyłs inurement
to tasks like this is probably helping.

Klein sits with a fixed gaze as I hold a spoonful of yellow
mush in front of him, but when I touch it to his lips he opens his mouth wide.
He doesnłt close his mouth on the spoon, so I have to turn it and tip the food
off, but he does swallow the stuff, and only a little ends up on his chin.

A woman in a white coat pops her head into the room and
says, ęCould you shave Mr Klein, please, Johnny, hełs going to St Margaretłs
for some tests this morning,ł and then vanishes before I can reply.

After taking the trolley back to the kitchen, collecting
empty trays along the way, I find all I need in the storeroom. I move Klein on
to a chairagain he seems to make it easy, without quite assisting. He stays
perfectly still as I lather and shave him, except for an occasional blink. I
manage to nick him only once, and not deeply.

The same woman returns, this time carrying a thick manila
folder and a clipboard, and she stands beside me. I get a peek at her badgeDr
Helen Lidcombe.

ęHowłs it going, Johnny?ł

ęOK.ł

She hovers expectantly, and I feel suddenly uneasy. I must be
doing something wrong. Or maybe Iłm just too slow. ęNearly finished,ł I mutter.
She reaches out with one hand and absent-mindedly massages the back of my neck.
Walking on eggs time. Why canłt my hosts lead uncomplicated lives? Sometimes I
feel like Iłm living the outtakes from a thousand soap operas. What does John
OłLeary have a right to expect of me? To determine the precise nature and
extent of this relationship, and leave him neither more nor less involved
tomorrow than he was yesterday? Some chance.

ęYoułre very tense.ł

I need a safe topic, quickly. The patient.

ęThis guy, I donłt know, some days he just gets to me.ł

ęWhat, is he behaving differently?ł

ęNo, no, I just wonder. What it must be like for him.ł

ęLike nothing much.ł

I shrug. ęHe knows when hełs sitting on a bedpan. He knows
when hełs being fed. Hełs not a vegetable.ł

ęItłs hard to say what he �knows". A leech with a couple of
neurons �knows" when to suck blood. All things considered, he does remarkably
well, but I donłt think he has anything like consciousness, or even anything
like dreams.ł She gives a little laugh. ęAll he has is memories, though
memories of what I canłt imagine.ł

I start wiping off the shaving soap. ęHow do you know he has
memories?ł

ęIłm exaggerating.ł She reaches into the folder and pulls
out a photographic transparency. It looks like a side-on head X-ray, but blobs
and bands of artificial colour adorn it. ęLast month I finally got the money to
do a few PET scans. There are things going on in Mr Kleinłs hippocampus that look
suspiciously like long-term memories being laid down.ł She whips the
transparency back in the folder before Iłve had a chance for a proper look.
ęBut comparing anything in his head with studies on normals is like comparing
the weather on Mars with the weather on Jupiter.ł

Iłm growing curious, so I take a risk, and ask with a
furrowed brow, ęDid you ever tell me exactly how he ended up like this?ł

She rolls her eyes. ęDonłt start with that again! You know
Iłd get in trouble.ł

ęWho do you think Iłd blab to?ł I copy Ralph Dopitałs imitation,
for a second, and Helen bursts out laughing. ęHardly. You havenłt said more
than three words to him since youłve been here: �Sorry, Dr Pearlman."ę

ęSo why donłt you tell me?ł

ęIf you told your friendsł

ęDo you think I tell my friends everything? Is that what you
think? Donłt you trust me at all?ł

She sits on Kleinłs bed. ęClose the door.ł I do it.

ęHis father was a pioneering neurosurgeon.ł

ęWhat?ł

ęIf you say a wordł

ęI wonłt, I promise. But what did he do? Why?ł

ęHis primary research interest was redundancy and functional
crossover; the extent to which people with lost or damaged portions of the
brain manage to transfer the functions of the impaired regions into healthy
tissue.

ęHis wife died giving birth to a son, their only child. He
must have been psychotic already, but that put him right off the planet. He
blamed the child for his wifełs death, but he was too cold-blooded to do
something simple like kill it.ł

Iłm about ready to tell her to shut up, that I really do not
wish to know any more, but John OłLeary is a big, tough man with a strong
stomach, and I mustnłt disgrace him in front of his lover.

ęHe raised the child �normally", talking to it, playing with
it, and so on, and making extensive notes on how it was developing; vision,
coordination, the rudiments of speech, you name it. When it was a few months
old, he implanted a network of cannulae, a web of very fine tubes, spanning
almost the entire brain, but narrow enough not to cause any problems
themselves. And then he kept on as before, stimulating the child, and recording
its progress. And every week, via the cannulae, he destroyed a little more of
its brain.ł

I let out a long string of obscenities. Klein, of course,
just sits there, but suddenly Iłm ashamed of violating his privacy, however
meaningless that concept might be in his case. My face is flushed with blood, I
feel slightly dizzy, slightly less than real. ęHow come he ever survived? How
come therełs anything left at all?ł

ęThe extent of his fatherłs insanity saved him, if thatłs
the word to use. You see, for months during which he was regularly losing brain
tissue, the child actually continued to develop neurologicallymore slowly than
normal, of course, but moving perceptibly forwards nonetheless. Professor Klein
was too much the scientist to bury a result like that; he wrote up all his
observations and tried to get them published. The journal thought it was some
kind of sick hoax, but they told the police, who eventually got around to
investigating. But by the time the child was rescued, wellł She nods towards
the impassive Klein.

ęHow much of his brain is left? Isnłt there a chance?ł

ęLess than ten per cent. There are cases of microcephalics
who live almost normal lives with a similar brain mass, but being born that
way, having gone through foetal brain development that way, isnłt a comparable
situation. There was a young girl a few years ago, who had a hemispherectomy to
cure severe epilepsy, and emerged from it with very little impairment, but shełd
had years for her brain to gradually switch functions out of the damaged hemisphere.
She was extremely lucky; in most cases that operation has been utterly
disastrous. As for Mr Klein, well, Iłd say he wasnłt lucky at all.ł

* * * *

I seem to spend most of the rest of the morning mopping corridors.
When an ambulance arrives to take Klein away for his tests, I feel mildly
offended that no one asks for my assistance; the two ambulancemen, watched by
Helen, plonk him into a wheelchair and wheel him away, like couriers collecting
a heavy parcel. But I have even less right than John OłLeary to feel possessive
or protective about ęmył patients, so I push Klein out of my thoughts.

I eat lunch with the other orderlies in the staff room. We
play cards, and make jokes that even I find stale by now, but I enjoy the
company nonetheless. I am teasingly accused several times of having lingering
ęeast-coast tendenciesł, which makes sense; if OłLeary lived over east for a
while, that would explain why I donłt remember him. The afternoon passes
slowly, but sleepily. Dr Pearlman has flown somewhere, suddenly, to do whatever
eminent psychiatrists or neurologists (Iłm not even sure which he is) are
called to do with great urgency in faraway citiesand this seems to let everyone,
the patients included, relax. When my shift ends at three ołclock, and I walk
out of the building saying ęSee you tomorrowł to everyone I pass, I feel (as
usual) a certain sense of loss. It will pass.

Because itłs Friday, I detour to the city centre to update
the records in my safe-deposit box. In the pre-rush traffic I begin to feel
mild elation, as all the minor tribulations of coping with the Pearlman
Psychiatric Institute recede, banished for months, or years, or maybe even
decades.

After making diary entries for the week, and adding a new
page headed JOHN FRANCIS OłLEARY to my thick ring-binder full of host details,
the itch to do something with all this information grows in me, as it does now
and then. But what? The prospect of renting a computer and arranging a place to
use it is too daunting on a sleepy Friday afternoon. I could update, with the
help of a calculator, my average host-repeat rate. That would be pretty bloody
thrilling.

Then I recall the PET scan that Helen Lidcombe waved in
front of me. Although I donłt know a thing about interpreting such pictures
myself, I can imagine how exciting it must be for a trained specialist to
actually see brain processes displayed that way. If I could turn all my
hundreds of pages of data into one coloured picturewell, it might not tell me
a damn thing, but the prospect is somehow infinitely more attractive than
messing about to produce a few statistics that donłt tell me a damn thing
either.

I buy a street directory, the brand I am familiar with from
childhood, with the key map inside the front cover. I buy a packet of five
felt-tipped pens. I sit on a bench in a shopping arcade, covering the map with
coloured dots; a red dot for a host whołs had from one to three visits, an
orange dot for a host whołs had four to six, and so on up to blue. It takes me
an hour to complete, and when Iłm finished the result does not look like a
glossy, computer-generated brain scan at all. It looks like a mess.

And yet. Although the colours donłt form isolated bands, and
intermingle extensively, therełs a definite concentration of blue in the cityłs
north-east. As soon as I see this, it rings true; the north-east is more
familiar to me than anywhere else. And, a geographical bias would explain the
fact that I repeat hosts more frequently than I ought to. For each colour, I
sketch a shaky pencil line that joins up all of its outermost points, and then
another for all its innermost points. None of these lines intersects another.
Itłs no perfect set of concentric circles by any means, but each curve is
roughly centred on that patch of blue in the north-east. A region which
contains, amongst many other things, the Pearlman Psychiatric Institute.

I pack everything back into the safe-deposit box. I need to
give this a lot more thought. Driving home, a very vague hypothesis begins to
form, but the traffic fumes, the noise, the glare of the setting sun, all make
it hard to pin the idea down.

Linda is furious. ęWhere have you been? Our daughter had to
ring me, in tears, from a public phone box, with money borrowed from a complete
stranger, and I had to pretend to be sick and leave work and drive halfway
across town to pick her up. Where the hell have you been?ł

ęII got caught up, with Ralph, he was celebratingł

ęI rang Ralph. You werenłt with Ralph.ł

I stand there in silence. She stares at me for a full
minute, then turns and stomps away.

I apologise to Laura (I see the name on her school books),
who is no longer crying but looks like she has been for hours. She is eight
years old, and adorable, and I feel like dirt. I offer to help with her
homework, but she assures me she doesnłt need anything at all from me, so I
leave her in peace.

Linda, not surprisingly, barely says a word to me for the
rest of the evening. Tomorrow this problem will be John OłLearyłs, not mine,
which makes me feel twice as bad about it. We watch TV in silence. When she
goes to bed, I wait an hour before following her, and if she isnłt asleep when
I climb in, shełs doing a good imitation.

I lie in the dark with my eyes open, thinking about Klein
and his long-term memories, his fatherłs unspeakable ęexperimentł, my brain
scan of the city.

I never asked Helen how old Klein was, and now itłs too late
for that, but therełll surely be something in the newspapers from the time of
his fatherłs trial. First thing tomorrowscrew my hostłs obligationsIłll go to
the central library and check that out.

Whatever consciousness is, it must be resourceful, it must
be resilient. Surviving for so long in that tiny child, pushed into ever smaller
corners of his mutilated, shrinking brain. But when the number of living
neurons fell so low that no resourcefulness, no ingenuity, could make them
suffice, what then? Did consciousness vanish in an instant? Did it slowly fade
away, as function after function was discarded, until nothing remained but a
few reflexes, and a parody of human dignity? Or did ithow could it?reach out
in desperation to the brains of a thousand other children, those young enough,
flexible enough, to donate a fraction of their own capacity to save this one
child from oblivion? Each one donating one day in a thousand from their own
lives, to rescue me from that ruined shell, fit now for nothing but eating,
defecating, and storing my long-term memories?

Klein, F. C. I donłt even know what the initials stand for.
Linda mumbles something and turns over. I feel remarkably unperturbed by my
speculations, perhaps because I donłt honestly believe that this wild theory
could possibly be true. And yet, is it so much stranger than the mere fact of
my existence?

And if I did believe it, how should I feel? Horrified by my
own fatherłs atrocities towards me? Yes. Astonished by such a miracle of human
tenacity? Certainly.

I finally manage to cryfor Klein, F. C, or for myself, I
donłt know. Linda doesnłt wake, but moved by some dream or instinct, she turns
to me and holds me. Eventually I stop shaking, and the warmth of her body flows
into me, peace itself.

As I feel sleep approaching, I make a resolution: from tomorrow,
I start anew. From tomorrow, an end to mimicking my hosts. From tomorrow,
whatever the problems, whatever the setbacks, Iłm going to carve out a life of
my own.

* * * *

I dream a simple dream. I dream that I have a name. One
name, unchanging, mine until death. I donłt know what my name is, but that
doesnłt matter. Knowing that I have it is enough.

Scatter My Ashes

Every night, at exactly a quarter past three, something
dreadful happens on the street outside our bedroom window. We peek through the
curtains, yawning and shivering in the life-draining chill, and then we clamber
back beneath the blankets without exchanging a word, to hug each other tightly
and hope for sound sleep before itłs time to rise.

Usually what we witness verges on the mundane. Drunken young
men fighting, swaying about with outstretched knives, cursing incoherently.
Robbery, bashings, rape. We wince to see such violence, but we can hardly be
shocked or surprised any more, and wełre never tempted to intervene: itłs
always far too cold, for a start! A single warm exhalation can coat the window
pane with mist, transforming the most stomach-wrenching assault into a safely
cryptic ballet for abstract blobs of light.

On some nights, though, when the shadows in the room are
subtly wrong, when the familiar street looks like an abandoned film set, or a
painting of itself perversely come to life, we are confronted by truly
disturbing sights, oppressive apparitions which almost make us doubt wełre
awake, or, if awake, sane. I canłt catalogue these visions, for most, mercifully,
are blurred by morning, leaving only a vague uneasiness and a reluctance to be
alone even in the brightest sunshine.

One image, though, has never faded.

In the middle of the road was a giant human skull. How big
was it? Big enough for a child, perhaps six or seven years old, to stand
trapped between the jaws, bracing them apart with outstretched arms and legs,
trembling with the effort but somehow, miraculously, keeping the massive teeth
from closing in.

As we watched I felt, strange as it may sound, inspired, uplifted,
filled with hope by the sight of that tiny figure holding out against the
blind, brutal creature of evil. Wouldnłt we all like to think of innocence as a
tangible force to be reckoned with? Despite all evidence to the contrary.

Then the four huge, blunt teeth against which the child was
straining began to reform, tapering to needle-fine points. A drop of blood fell
from the back of each upraised hand. I cried out something, angry and
horrified. But I didnłt move.

A gash appeared in the back of the childłs neck. Not a
wound: a mouth, the childłs new and special mouth, violently writhing,
stretched open ever wider by four sharp, slender fangs growing in perfect
mimicry of the larger fangs impaling the childłs palms and feet.

The new mouth began to scream, at first a clumsy, choking
sound, made without a tongue, but then a torn, bloody scrap of flesh appeared
in place, the tongue of the old mouth uprooted and inverted, and the cries gave
full voice to an intensity of suffering and fear that threatened to melt the
glass of the window, sear away the walls of the room, and drag us into a pit of
darkness where one final scream would echo forever.

When it was over, we climbed into bed and snuggled up together.

I dreamt that I found a jigsaw puzzle, hidden in a dark,
lost corner of the house. The pieces were in a plain cardboard box, unaccompanied
by any illustration of what the assembled puzzle portrayed. Wendy laughed and
told me not to waste my time, but I sat frowning over it for an hour every evening,
until after many weeks only a handful of pieces remained unplaced.

Somehow, even then, I didnłt know what the picture was, but
as I lazily filled in the very last gap, I felt a sudden overpowering
conviction that whatever the jigsaw showed, I did not want to see it.

I woke a little before dawn. I kissed Wendy very softly, I
gently stroked her shoulders and breasts with my fingertips. She rearranged
herself, pulled a face, but didnłt wake. I was about to brush her forehead with
one hand, which I knew would make her open her eyes and give me a sleepy smile,
when it occurred to me that if she did, there might be small, fanged mouths
behind her eyelids.

When I woke again it was half past seven, and she was
already up. I hate that, I hate waking in an empty bed. She was reading the
paper as I sat down to breakfast.

�So, whatłs happening in the world?"

�A fifth childłs gone missing."

�Shit. Donłt they have any suspects yet? Any evidence, any
clues?"

�A fisherman reported something floating on the lake. The police
went out in a boat to have a look."

�And?"

�It turned out to be a calf foetus."

I gulped coffee. I hate the taste of coffee, and it sets my
stomach squirming, but I simply have to drink it.

�It says police will be diving all day today, searching the
lake."

�I might go out there, then. The lake looks fantastic in
this weather."

�When Iłm snug in my office with the heater on full blast, Iłll
think of you."

�Think of the divers. Theyłll have the worst of it."

�At least they know theyłll get paid. You could spend the
whole day there for nothing."

�Iłd rather take my kind of risk than theirs."

Once she was gone, I cut out the article on the vanished
child. The walls of my study are papered with newsprint, ragged grey odd-shaped
pieces affixed only at their top corners, free to rustle when the door is
opened or closed. Sometimes, when Iłm sitting at my desk for a moment after Iłve
switched off the lamp, I get a strong impression of diseased skin.

�Put them in a scrap book!" says Wendy, whenever she ventures
in to grimace at the state of the room. �Or better still, put them in a filing
cabinet and see if you can lose the key!" But I need to keep them this way, I
need to see them all at once, spread out before me like a satellite photograph,
an aerial view of this age of violence. Iłm looking for a pattern. My gaze
darts from headline to headline, from STRANGLER to STALKER to RIPPER to
SLASHER, hunting for a clue to the terrible unity, hunting for the nature of
the single dark force that I know lies behind all the different nightmare
stories, all the different fearful names.

I have books too, of course, I have shelves stuffed with volumes,
some learned, some hysterical, from treatises on Vlad the Impaler to
discussions of the entrails of London prostitutes to heavy psychoanalysis of
the Manson gang. I have skimmed these works, read a page here and a page there
only, for to clutter my mind with details can only distract me from the whole.

I recall precisely when my obsession began. I was ten. A convict,
a murderer, had escaped from a nearby prison, and warnings were broadcast
urging us to barricade our homes. My parents, naturally, tried not to alarm me,
but we all slept together that night, in the room with the smallest window, and
when the poor cat mewed to be let in the back door, my mother would let nobody,
not even my father, budge.

I dozed and woke, dozed and woke, and each time dreamt that
I was not sleeping but lying awake, waiting for the utter certainty of the
unstoppable, blood-thirsty creature bursting through the door and slicing us
all in two.

They caught him the next morning. They caught him too late.
A service station attendant was dead, cut up beyond belief by an implement that
was never found.

They showed the killer on TV that night, and he looked nothing
like the stuff of nightmares: thin, awkward, squinting, dwarfed between two
massive, smug policemen. Yet for all his apparent weakness and shyness, he
seemed to know something, he seemed to be holding a secret, not so much about
murder itself as about the cameras, the viewers, about exactly what he meant to
us. He averted his eyes from the lenses, but the hint of a smile on his lips
declared that everything was, and always would be, just the way he wanted it,
just the way hełd planned it from the start.

I drove to the lake and set up my camera with its longest
lens, but after peering through the viewfinder for ten minutes, keeping the
police boat perfectly framed, following its every tiny drift, I switched to
binoculars to save my eyes and neck. Nothing was happening. Faint shouts
reached me now and then, but the tones were always of boredom, discomfort,
irritation. Soon I put down the binoculars. If they found something, Iłd hear
the change at once.

I drank coffee from a flask, I paced. I took a few shots of
divers backflipping into the water, but none seemed special, none captured the
mood. I watched the water birds and felt somehow guilty for not knowing their
names.

The sky and the water were pale grey, the colour of soggy
newsprint. Thick smoke rose from a factory on the far shore, but seemed to fall
back down again on almost the same spot. The chill, the bleakness, and the
morbid nature of my vigil worked together to fill me with an oppressive sense
of gloom, but cutting through that dullness and despair was the acid taste of
anticipation.

My back was turned when I heard the shouts of panic. It took
me seconds to spot the boat again, forever to point the camera. An inert diver
was being hauled on board, to the sound of much angry swearing. Someone ripped
off his face mask and began resuscitation. Each time I fired the shutter, I
thought: what if he dies? If he dies it will be my fault, because if he dies Iłll
have a sale for sure.

I packed up my gear and fled before the boat reached the
shore, but not before the ambulance arrived. I glanced at the driver, who
looked about my age, and thought: why am I doing my job, and not his? Why am I
a voyeur, a parasite, a vulture, a leech, when I could be saving peoplełs lives
and sleeping the sleep of the just every night?

Later, I discovered that the cop was in a coma. Evidently
therełd been a malfunction of his air supply. I sold one of the pictures, which
appeared with the caption KISS OF LIFE! The editor said, �That could easily win
you a prize." I smiled immodestly and mumbled about luck.

Wendy is a literary agent. We went out to dinner that night
with one of her clients, to celebrate the signing of a contract. The writer was
a quiet, thoughtful, attractive woman. Her husband worked in a bank, but played
football for some team or other on weekends, and was built like a vault.

�So, what do you do for a crust," he asked.

�Iłm a freelance photographer."

�Whatłs that mean? Fashion models for the front of Vogue or
centrefolds for Playboy?"

�Neither. Most of my work is for newspapers, or news magazines.
I had a picture in Time last year."

�What of?"

�Flood victims trapped on the roof of their farm."

�Yeah? Did you pay them some of what you got for it?"

Wendy broke in and described my dayłs achievement, and the
topic switched naturally to that of the missing child.

�If they ever catch the bloke whołs doing it," said the
footballer, �he shouldnłt be killed. He should be tortured for a couple of
days, and then crippled. Say they cut off both his legs. Then therełs no chance
hełll escape from prison on his own steam, and when they let him free in a year
or two, like they always end up doing, whołs he going to hurt?"

I said, �Why does everyone assume therełs a killer? Nobodyłs
yet found a single drop of blood, or a fingerprint, or a footprint. Nobody
knows for sure that the children are dead, nobodyłs proved that at all."

The writer said, �Maybe the Innocents are ascending into Heaven."

For a moment I thought she was serious, but then she smirked
at the cleverness of her sarcasm. I kept my mouth shut for the rest of the
evening.

In the taxi home, though, I couldnłt help muttering a vague,
clumsy insult about Neanderthal fascists who revelled in torture. Wendy laughed
and put an arm around my waist.

�Jealousy really becomes you," she said. I couldnłt think of
an intelligent reply.

That night, we witnessed a particularly brutal robbery. A
taxi pulled up across the road, and the passengers dragged the driver out and
kicked him in the head until he was motionless. They virtually stripped him
naked searching for the key to his cashbox, then they smashed his radio,
slashed his tyres, and stabbed him in the stomach before walking off, whistling
Rossini.

Once Wendy had drifted back to sleep, I crept out of the bedroom
and phoned for an ambulance. I nearly went outside to see what I could do, but
thought: if I move him, if I even just try to stop the bleeding, Iłll probably
do more harm than good, maybe manage to kill him with my well-intentioned
incompetence. End up in court. Iłd be crazy to take the risk.

I fell asleep before the ambulance arrived. By morning there
wasnłt a trace of the incident. The taxi must have been towed away, the blood
washed off the road by the water truck.

A sixth child had vanished. I returned to the lake, but found
it was deserted. I dipped my hand in the water: it was oily, and surprisingly
warm. Then I drove back home, cut out the relevant articles, and taped them
into place on the wall.

As I did so, the jigsaw puzzle dream flooded into my mind,
with the dizzying power of d�ją vu. I stared at the huge grey mosaic, almost
expecting it to change before my eyes, but then the mood passed and I shook my
head and laughed weakly.

The door opened. I didnłt turn. Someone coughed. I still
didnłt turn.

�Excuse me."

It was a man in his mid-thirties, Iłd say. Balding slightly,
but with a young, open face. He was dressed like an office worker, in a white
shirt with the cuffs rolled up, neatly pressed black trousers, a plain blue
tie.

�What do you want?"

�Iłm sorry. I knocked on the front door, and it was ajar.
Then I called out twice."

�I didnłt hear you."

�Iłm sorry."

�What do you want?"

�Can I look? At your walls? Oh, there! The Marsden Mangler!
I wonder how many people remember him today. Five years ago there were two thousand
police working full time on that case, and probably a hundred reporters
scurrying back and forth between the morgue and the night club belt. You know,
half the jury fainted when they showed slides at the trial, including an
abattoir worker."

�Nobody fainted. A few people closed their eyes, thatłs all.
I was there."

�Watching the jury and not the slides, apparently."

�Watching both. Were you there?"

�Oh, yes! Every day without fail."

�Well, I donłt remember you. And I got to know most of the
regular faces in the public gallery."

�I was never in the public gallery." He crossed the room to
peer closely at a Sunday paperłs diagram detailing the modus operandi of the
Knightsbridge Knifeman. �This is pretty coy, isnłt it? I mean, anybody would
think that the female genitalia" I glared at him, and he turned his attention
to something else, smiling a slight smile of tolerant amusement.

�How did you find out about my collection of clippings?" It
wasnłt something that I boasted about, and Wendy found it a bit embarrassing,
perhaps a bit sick.

�Collection of clippings! You mustnłt call it that! Iłll
tell you what this room is: itłs a shrine. No lesser word will do. A shrine."

I glanced behind me. The door was closed. I watched him as
he read a two-page spread on a series of unsolved axe murders, and though his
gaze was clearly directed at the print, I felt as if he was staring straight
back at me.

Then I knew that I had seen him before. Twenty years before,
on television, smiling shyly as they hustled him along, never quite looking at
the camera, but never quite turning away. My eyes began to water, and a crazy
thought filled my head: hadnłt I known then, hadnłt I been certain, that the
killer would come and get me, that nothing would stand in his way? That the man
had not aged was unremarkable, no, it was necessary, because if he had aged I
would never have recognised him, and recognition was exactly what he wanted.
Recognition was the start of my fear.

I said, �You might tell me your name."

He looked up. �Iłm sorry. I have been discourteous, havenłt
I? But" (he shrugged) �I have so many nicknames." He gestured widely with
both hands, taking in all the walls, all the headlines. I pictured the door
handle, wondering how quickly I could turn it with palms stinking wet, with
numb, clumsy fingers. �My friends, though, call me Jack."

He easily lifted me over his head, and then somehow (did he
float up off the floor, or did he stretch up, impossibly doubling his height?)
pinned me face-down against the ceiling. Four fangs grew to fill his mouth, and
his mouth opened to fill my vision. It was like hanging over a living well, and
as his distorted words echoed up from the depths, I thought: if I fall, nobody
will ever find me.

�Tonight you will take my photograph. Catch me in the act
with your brightest flashgun. Thatłs what you want, isnłt it?" He shook me. �Isnłt
it?" I closed my eyes, but that brought visions of a tumbling descent. I
whispered, �Yes."

�You invoke me and invoke me and invoke me!" he ranted. �Arenłt
you ever sick of blood? Arenłt you ever sick of the taste of blood? Today itłs
the blood of tiny children, tomorrow the blood of old women, next the blood of
... who? Dark-haired prostitutes? Teenaged baby sitters? Blue-eyed homosexuals?
And each time simply leaves you more jaded, longing for something crueller and
more bizarre. Canłt you sweeten your long, bland lives with anything but blood?

�Colour film. Bring plenty of colour film. Kodachrome, I
want saturated hues. Understand?" I nodded. He told me where and when: a nearby
street corner, at three fifteen.

I hit the floor with my hands out in front of me, jarring
one wrist but not breaking it. I was alone. I ran through the house, I searched
every room, then I locked the doors and sat on the bed, shaking, emitting
small, unhappy noises every few minutes.

When Iłd calmed down, I went out and bought ten rolls of Kodachrome.

We ate at home that night. I was supposed to cook something,
but I ended up making do with frozen pizzas. Wendy talked about her tax
problems, and I nodded.

�And what did you do with yourself today?"

�Research."

�For what?"

�Iłll tell you tomorrow."

We made love. For a while it seemed like some sort of
ritual, some kind of magic: Wendy was giving me strength, yes, she was
fortifying me with mystical energy and spiritual power. Afterwards, I couldnłt
laugh at such a ludicrous idea, I could only despise myself for being able to
take it seriously for a moment.

I dreamt that she gave me a shining silver sword.

�Whatłs it for?" I asked her.

�When you feel like running away, stab yourself in the foot."

I climbed out of bed at two. It was utterly freezing, even
once I was fully dressed. I sat in the kitchen with the light off, drinking
coffee until I was so bloated that I could hardly breathe. Then I staggered to
the toilet and threw it all up. My throat and lungs stung, I wanted to curl up
and dissolve, or crawl back to the warm blankets, back to Wendy, to stay hidden
under the covers until morning.

As I clicked the front door shut, it was like diving into a
moonlit pool. Being safe indoors was at once a distant memory, lying warm in
bed was a near-forgotten dream. No cars, no distant traffic noises, no clouds,
just a huge night sky and empty, endless streets.

It was five to three when I reached the place. I paced for a
while, then walked around the block, but that only killed three minutes. I
chose a direction and resolved to walk a straight line for seven minutes, then
turn around and come back.

If I didnłt turn around, if I kept walking, would he catch
me? Would he return to the house and punish me? What if we moved, to another
city, another state?

I passed a phone box, an almost blinding slab of solid
light. I jingled my pockets, then remembered that Iłd need no coin. I stood
outside the booth for two minutes, I lingered in the half-open doorway for
three, and then I lifted and replaced the handset a dozen times before I
finally dialled.

When the operator answered, I slammed the phone down. I
needed to defecate, I needed to lie down. I dialled again, and asked for the
police. It was so easy. I even gave them my true name and address when they
asked, without the least hesitation. I said �thank you" about six thousand
times.

I looked at my watch: thirteen past three. I ran for the
corner, camera swinging by the carrying strap, and made it back in ninety
seconds.

Someone was climbing out through a dark window, holding a
gagged, struggling child. It wasnłt the man whołd called himself Jack, it wasnłt
the killer Iłd seen on TV when I was ten.

I raised my camera.

Drop it and do something, drop it and save the child, you
fool! Me against him? Against that? Iłd be slaughtered! The police are coming,
itłs their job, isnłt it? Just take the pictures. Itłs what you really want, itłs
what youłre here to do.

Once Iłd fired the shutter, once Iłd taken the first shot,
it was like flicking through the pages of a magazine. I was sickened, I was
horrified, I was angry, but I wasnłt there, so what could I do? The child was
tortured. The child was raped. The child was mutilated. The child suffered but
I heard no cries, and I saw only the flashgunłs frozen tableaux, a sequence of
badly made waxworks.

The killer and I arranged each shot with care. He waited patiently
while the flash recharged, and while I changed rolls. He was a consummate
model: each pose he struck appeared completely natural, utterly spontaneous.

I didnłt notice just when the child actually died. I only
noticed when I ran out of film. It was then that I looked around at the houses
on the street and saw half a dozen couples, peeking through their bedroom
windows and stifling yawns.

He sprinted away when the police arrived. They didnłt pursue
him in the car; one officer loped off after him, the other knelt to examine the
remains, then walked up to me. He tipped his head at my camera.

�Got it all, did you?"

I nodded. Accomplice, accomplice, accomplice. How could I
ever explain, let alone try to excuse, my inaction?

�Fantastic. Well done."

Two more police cars appeared, and then the officer whołd
gone in pursuit came marching up the street, pushing the hand-cuffed killer
ahead of him.

The best of the photographs were published widely, even
shown on TV (�the following scenes may disturb some viewers"). A thousand
law-abiding citizens rioted outside the courthouse, burning and slashing
effigies, when he appeared to be placed on remand.

He was killed in his cell a week before the trial was due to
start. He was tortured, raped and mutilated first. He must have been expecting
to die, because he had written out a will:

Burn my body and scatter my ashes from a high place.

Only then will I be happy. Only then will I find peace.

They did it for him, too.

He has a special place on my wall now, and I never tire of reviewing
it. The whole process can be seen at a glance. How the tabloids cheered him on,
rewarding each presumed death with ever larger headlines, ever grislier
speculations. How the serious papers strove so earnestly to understand him,
with scholarly dissertations on the formative years of the great modern
killers. How all the well-oiled mechanisms slipped into gear, how everybody
knew their role. Quotes from politicians: �The community is outraged." But the
outrage was bottled, recycled, flat and insincere.

What would-be killer could hesitate, could resist for even a
second, such a cosy niche so lovingly prepared.

And I understand now why he wanted me there that night. He
must have believed that if people could see, in colour, in close-up, the kind
of atrocities that we treat as an industry, an entertainment, a thrilling diversion
from the pettiness and banality of our empty lives, then we would at last
recoil, we would at last feel some genuine shock, some genuine sadness, we
would at last be cured, and he would be free.

He was wrong.

So theyłve burnt his corpse and scattered his ashes. So
what? Did he really believe that could possibly help him, did he really hope to
end the interminable cycle of his incarnations?

I dream of fine black cinders borne by the wind, floating
down to anoint ten thousand feverish brows. The sight of the tortured child,
you see, has exerted an awful fascination upon people around the world.

The first wave of imitators copied the murder exactly as portrayed
by my slides.

The second wave embellished and improvised.

The current fashion is for live broadcasts, and the change
of medium has, of course, had some influence on the technical details of the
act.

I often sit in my study these days, just staring at the
walls. Now and then I suffer moments of blind panic, when I am convinced for no
reason that Jack has returned, and is standing right behind me with his mouth
stretched open. But when I turn and look, I am always still alone. Alone with
the headlines, alone with the photographs, alone with my obsession. And that,
somehow, is far more frightening.

Copyright (c) Greg Egan, 1988. All rights reserved.

First published in Interzone #23, Spring 1988. Revised
Wednesday, 16 May 2001

Seeing

I gaze down at the dusty top surface of the bank of lights
suspended from the ceiling of the operating theatre. Therełs a neatly
hand-lettered sticker on the grey-painted metalslightly yellowing, the writing
a little faded, peeling at one corner. It reads:

IN CASE OF OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE

PHONE [phone]

Iłm puzzled: Iłve never come across a local number starting
with a oneand when I look again, itłs clear that the digit in question is
actually a seven. I was mistaken about the ędustł, too; itłs nothing but a play
of light on the slightly uneven surface of the paint. Dust in a sterile,
air-filtered room like thiswhat was I thinking?

I shift my attention to my body, draped in green save for a
tiny square aperture above my right temple, where the macrosurgeonłs probe is
following the bulletłs entry wound into my skull. The spindly robot has the
operating table to itself, although a couple of gowned-and-masked humans are
present, off to one side, watching what I take to be X-ray views of the probe
approaching its target; from my vantage point, the screen is foreshortened, the
images hard to decipher. Injected microsurgeons must already have staunched the
bleeding, repaired hundreds of blood vessels, broken up any dangerous clots.
The bullet itself, though, is too physically tough and chemically inert to be
fragmented and removed, like a kidney stone, by a swarm of tiny robots; therełs
no alternative to reaching in and plucking it out. I used to read up on this
type of operationand lie awake afterwards, wondering when my time would
finally come. I often pictured this very momentand Iłd swear, now, that when I
imagined it, it looked exactly like this, down to the last detail. But I canłt
tell if thatłs just run-of-the-mill d�ją vu, or if my obsessively rehearsed
visualisation is fuelling this present hallucination.

I begin to wonder, calmly, about the implications of my
exotic point of view. Out-of-body experiences are supposed to suggest proximity
to death ... but then, all the thousands of people whołve reported them
survived to tell the tale, didnłt they? With no way of balancing that against
the unknown number who must have died, itłs absurd to treat the situation as
signifying anything at all about my chances of life or death. The effect is
certainly linked to severe physical trauma, but itłs only the ludicrous notion
that the ęsoulł has parted from the bodyand is perilously close to floating
off down a tunnel of light into the afterlifethat associates the experience
with death.

Memories leading up to the attack start coming back to me, hazily.
Arriving to speak at Zeitgeist Entertainmentłs AGM. (Physically present for the
first time in yearsbad move. Just because I sold off HyperConference Systems,
why did I have to eschew the technology?) That lunatic Murchison making a scene
outside the Hilton, screaming something about meme!stiffing him on his
miniseries contract. (As if Iłd even read it, let alone personally drafted
every clause. Why couldnłt he have gone and mowed down the legal department,
instead?) The motorised window of the bulletproof Rolls gliding upwards to shut
out his ranting, the mirrored glass moving silently, reassuringlyand then
jamming ...

I was wrong about one thing: I always thought the bullet
would come from some anal-retentive cinephile, outraged by one of Zeitgeistłs
ęSequels to the Celluloid Classicsł. The software avatars we use as directors
are always constructed with meticulous care, by psychologists and film
historians committed to re-creating the true persona of the original auteur ...
but some purists are never happy, and there were death threats for more than a
year after Hannah and Her Sisters II, in 3-D. What I failed to anticipate was a
man whołd just signed a seven-figure deal for the rights to his life storyout
on bail only because of Zeitgeistłs generous advancetrying to blow me away
over a discounted residual rate for satellite transmissions dubbed into the
Inuit language.

I notice that the unlikely sticker on top of the lights has
vanished. What does that presage? If my delusion is breaking down, am I
deteriorating, or recovering? Is an unstable hallucination healthier than a
consistent one? Is reality about to come crashing in? What should I be seeing,
right now? Pure darkness, if I really am under all that green swaddling, eyes
closed, anaesthetised. I try to ęclose my eyesłbut the concept just doesnłt
translate. I do my best to lose consciousness (if thatłs the right word for
what Iłm experiencing); I try to relax, as if aiming for sleepbut then a faint
whir from the surgeonłs probe as it reverses direction rivets my attention.

I watchphysically unable to avert my unphysical gazeas the
gleaming silver needle of the probe slowly retracts. It seems to take forever,
and I rack my brain for a judgement as to whether this is a piece of
masochistic dream-theatricality, or a touch of authenticity, but I canłt
decide.

Finallyand I know it a moment before it happens (but then,
Iłve felt that way all along)the tip of the needle emerges, bonded
outrageously by nothing more esoteric than a speck of high-strength glue (or so
I once read) to the dull, slightly crumpled bullet.

I see the green cloth covering my chest rise and fall in an
emphatic sigh of relief. I doubt the plausibility of this from an anaesthetised
man on a breathing machinethen suddenly, overwhelmingly weary of trying to
imagine the world at all, I allow it to disintegrate into psychedelic static,
then darkness.

* * * *

A familiar, but unplaceable, voice says, ęThis onełs from
Serial Killers For Social Responsibility. �Deeply shocked ... a tragedy for the
industry ... praying for Mr Lowełs swift recovery." Then they go on to disavow
any knowledge of Randolph Murchison; they say that whatever he might or might
not have done to hitchhikers in the past, celebrity assassination attempts
involve an entirely separate pathology, and any irresponsible comments which
blur the issue by confusing the two will result in a class actionł

I open my eyes and say, ęCan someone please tell me why
therełs a mirror on the ceiling over my bed? Is this a hospital, or a fucking
bordello?ł

The room falls silent. I squint up at the glass with a fixed
gaze, unable to make out its borders, waiting for an explanation for this
bizarre piece of decor. Then one possibility dawns on me: Am I paralysed? Is
this the only way to show me my surroundings? I fight down a sense of panic:
even if itłs true, it need not be permanent. Nerves can be regrown, whateverłs
damaged can be repaired. Iłve survived, thatłs what countsthe rest is just a
matter of rehabilitation. And isnłt this what I always expected? A bullet in
the brain? A brush with death? Rebirth in a state of helplessness?

In the mirror, I can see four people gathered around the
bedand I recognise them easily enough, in spite of the awkward view: James
Long, my personal assistant, whose voice woke me. Andrea Stuart, Zeitgeistłs
senior vice-president. My estranged wife, JessicaI knew shełd come. And my
son, Alexhe must have dropped everything, and caught the first flight out of
Moscow.

And on the bed, almost buried under a tangle of tubes and
cables, linked to a dozen monitors and pumps, an ashen, bandaged, gaunt figure
which I suppose must be me.

James glances up at the ceiling, looks down again, then says
gently, ęMr Lowe, there is no mirror. Shall I tell the doctors youłre awake?ł

I scowl, try to move my head, fail. ęAre you blind? Iłm
staring right at it. And if Iłm not plugged into enough machinery to tell
whoeverłs monitoring it all that Iłm awakeł

James gives an embarrassed cough, a code he uses in meetings
when I start to wander too far from the facts. I try again to turn to look him
in the eye, and this time

This time, I succeed. Or at least, I see the figure on the
bed turn its head

and my whole sense of my surroundings inverts, like an
all-encompassing optical illusion exposed. Floor becomes ceiling and ceiling
floorwithout anything moving a millimetre. I feel like bellowing at the top of
my lungs, but only manage a startled grunt ... and after a second or two, itłs
hard to imagine that Iłd ever been fooled, the reality is so obvious.

There is no mirror. Iłm watching all this from the ceiling,
the way I watched the bullet being extracted. Iłm still up here. I havenłt come
down.

I close my eyesand the room fades out, taking two or three
seconds to vanish completely.

I open my eyes. The view returns, unchanged.

I say, ęAm I dreaming? Are my eyes really open? Jessica?
Tell me whatłs going on. Is my face bandaged? Am I blind?ł

James says, ęYour wife isnłt here, Mr Lowe. We havenłt been
able to reach her yet.ł He hesitates, then adds, ęYour face isnłt bandagedł

I laugh indignantly. ęWhat are you talking about? Whołs that
standing next to you?ł

ęNobodyłs standing next to me. Ms Stuart and I are the only
people with you, right now.ł

Andrea clears her throat, and says, ęThatłs right, Philip.
Please, try to calm down. Youłve just had major surgeryyoułre going to be
fine, but you have to take it easy.ł How did she get therenear the foot of the
bed? The figure below turns to look at her, sweeping his gaze across the
intervening space, andas easily as the implausible one changed into a seven,
as easily as the whole ludicrous sticker ceased to existmy wife and son are
banished from my vision of the room.

I say, ęIłm going mad.ł Thatłs not true, though: Iłm dazed,
and distinctly queasy, but a long way from coming unhinged. I notice that my
voicevery reasonablyseems to come out of my one-and-only mouth, the mouth of
the figure below meas opposed to the point in empty space where my mouth would
be, were I literally, bodily, hovering near the ceiling. I felt my larynx
vibrate, my lips and tongue move, down there ... and yet the sense that I am
above, looking down, remains as convincing as ever. Itłs as if ... my entire
body has become as peripheral as a foot or a fingertipconnected and
controlled, still a part of me, but certainly not encompassing the centre of my
being. I move my tongue in my mouth, touch the tip to the point of my left
incisor, swallow some saliva; the sensations are all intelligible, consistent,
familiar. But I donłt find myself rushing down to ęoccupył the place where
these things are happeningany more than Iłve ever felt my sense of self
pouring into my big toe, upon curling it against the sole of my shoe.

James says, ęIłll fetch the doctors.ł I hunt for any trace
of inconsistency in the direction of his voice ... but Iłm not up to the task
of dissecting the memory of his speech into relative intensities in my left and
right ears, and then confronting myself with the paradox that anyone truly up
here, facing down, would hear it all differently. All I know is that the words
seem to have emerged from his lips, in the customary manner.

Andrea clears her throat again, and says, ęPhilip? Do you
mind if I make a call? Tokyo opens in less than an hour, and when they hear
that youłve been shotł

I cut her off. ęDonłt callgo there, in person. Take the next
suborbitalyou know that always impresses the market. Look, Iłm glad you were
here when I wokełglad your presence, at least, turned out to be more than
wishful thinkingłbut the biggest favour you can do for me now is to make
damned sure that Zeitgeist comes through this unscathed.ł I try to make eye
contact as I say this, but I canłt tell whether I succeed or not. Itłs twenty
years since we were lovers, but shełs still my closest friend. Iłm not even
sure why Iłm so desperate to get rid of herbut I canłt help feeling exposed up
here ... as if she might suddenly glance up and see mesee some part of me that
my flesh always concealed.

ęAre you sure?ł

ęIłm positive. James can baby-sit me, thatłs what hełs paid
for. And if I know youłre looking after Zeitgeist, I wonłt have to lie here
sweating about it; Iłll know itłs all under control.ł

In fact, as soon as shełs gone, the idea of worrying about
anything as remote and inconsequential as my companyłs share price begins to
seem utterly bizarre. I turn my head so that the figure on the bed looks
straight up at ęmeł once more. I slide my hand across my chest, and most of the
cables and tubes that were ęcovering meł disappear, leaving behind nothing but
a slightly wrinkled sheet. I laugh weaklyan odd sight. It looks like a memory
of the last time I laughed into a mirror.

James returns, followed by four generic white-coated
figureswhose number shrinks to two, a young man and a middle-aged woman, when
I turn my head towards them.

The woman says, ęMr Lowe, Iłm Dr Tyler, your neurologist.
How are you feeling?ł

ęHow am I feeling? I feel like Iłm up on the ceiling.ł

ęYoułre still giddy from the anaesthetic?ł

ęNo!ł I very nearly shout: Canłt you look at me when Iłm
speaking to you? But I calm myself, and say evenly, ęIłm not �giddy"Iłm
hallucinating. I see everything as if Iłm up on the ceiling, looking down. Do
you understand me? Iłm watching my own lips move as I say these words. Iłm
staring down at the top of your head. Iłm having an out-of-body experiencerght
now, right in front of you.ł Or right above you. ęIt started in the operating
theatre. I saw the robot take out the bullet. I know, it was just a delusion, a
kind of lucid dreamI didnłt really see anything ... but itłs still happening.
Iłm awake, and itłs still happening. I canłt come down.ł

Dr Tyler says firmly, ęThe surgeon didnłt remove the bullet.
It was never embedded; it only grazed your skull. The impact caused a fracture,
and forced some bone fragments into the underlying tissuebut the damaged
region is very small.ł

I smile with relief to hear thisand then stop myself; it
looks too strange, too self-conscious. I say, ęThatłs wonderful news. But Iłm
still up here.ł

Dr Tyler frowns. How do I know that? Shełs bent over me, her
face seems to be hiddenyet the knowledge reaches me somehow, as if conveyed
through an extra sense. This is insane: the things I must be ęseeingł with my
own eyesthe things Iłm entitled to knoware taking on an air of unreliable
clairvoyance, while my ęvisionł of the rooma patchwork of wild guesses and
wishful thinkingmasquerades as the artless truth.

ęDo you think you can sit up?ł

I canslowly. Iłm very weak, but certainly not paralysed,
and with an ungainly scrabbling of feet and elbows, I manage to raise myself
into a sitting position. The exertion makes me sharply aware of every limb,
every joint, every muscle ... but aware most of all that their relationships
with each other remain unchanged. The hip bone is still connected to the thigh
bone, and thatłs still what countshowever far away from both I feel ęmyselfł
to be.

My view stays fixed as my body movesbut I donłt find that
especially disconcerting; at some level, it seems no stranger than the simple
understanding that turning your head doesnłt send the world spinning in the
opposite direction.

Dr Tyler holds out her right hand. ęHow many fingers?ł

ęTwo.ł

ęNow?ł

ęFour.ł

She shields her hand from aerial scrutiny with a clipboard.
ęNow?ł

ęOne. I canłt see it, though. I just guessed.ł

ęYou guessed right. Now?ł

ęThree.ł

ęRight again. And now?ł

ęTwo.ł

ęCorrect.ł

She hides her hand from the figure on the bed, ęexposingł it
to me-above. I make three wrong guesses in a row, one right, one wrong, then
wrong again.

All of which makes perfect sense, of course: I know only
what my eyes can see; the rest is pure guesswork. I am, demonstrably, not
observing the world from a point three metres above my head. Having the truth
rendered obvious makes no difference, though: I fail to descend.

Dr Tyler suddenly jabs two fingers towards my eyes, stopping
just short of contact. Iłm not even startled; from this distance, itłs no more
threatening than watching The Three Stooges. ęBlink reflex working,ł she
saysbut I know I should have done more than blink.

She looks around the room, finds a chair, places it beside
the bed. Then she tells her colleague, ęGet me a broom.ł

She stands on the chair. ęI think we should try to pin down
exactly where you think you are.ł The young man returns with a two-metre-long
white plastic tube. ęVaccum cleaner extension,ł he explains. ęThere are no
brooms in the private wards.ł

James stands clear, glancing upwards self-consciously every
now and then. Hełs beginning to look alarmed, in a diplomatic sort of way.

Dr Tyler takes the tube, raises it up with one hand, and
starts scraping the end across the ceiling. ęTell me when Iłm getting warm, Mr
Lowe.ł The thing looms towards me, moving in from the left, then slides across
the bottom of my field of view, missing me by a few centimetres.

ęAm I close yet?ł

ęIł The scraping sound is intimidating; it takes some
effort to bring myself to cooperate, to guide the implement home.

When the tube finally closes over me, I fight off a sense of
claustrophobia, and stare down the long dark tunnel. At the far end, in a
circle of dazzling radiance, is the tip of Dr Tylerłs white lace-up shoe.

ęWhat do you see now?ł

I describe the view. Keeping the top end fixed, she tilts
the tube towards the bed, until it points directly at my bandaged forehead, my
startled eyesa strange, luminous cameo.

ęTry ... moving towards the light,ł she suggests.

I try. I screw up my face, I grit my teeth, I urge myself
forward, down the tunnel: back to my skull, back to my citadel, back to my
private screening room. Back to the throne of my ego, the anchor of my identity.
Back home.

Nothing happens.

* * * *

I always knew Iłd get a bullet in the brain. It had to
happen: Iłd made far too much money, had far too much good luck. Deep down, I
always understood that, sooner or later, my life would be brought into balance.
And I always expected my would-be assassin to failleaving me crippled,
speechless, amnesic; forced to struggle to make myself whole again, forced to
rediscoveror reinventmyself.

Given a chance to start my life again.

But this? What kind of redemption is this?

Eyes closed or open, I have no trouble identifying pinpricks
all over my body, from the soles of my feet to the top of my scalpbut the
surface of my skin, however clearly delineated, still fails to enclose me.

Dr Tyler shows me-below photographs of torture victims, humorous
cartoons, pornography. I cringe, I smile, I get an erectionbefore I even know
what Iłm ęlookingł at.

ęLike a split-brain patient,ł I muse. ęIsnłt that what
happens? Show them an image in half their visual field, and they respond to it
emotionallywithout being able to describe what theyłve seen.ł

ęYour corpus callosum is perfectly intact. Youłre not a
split-brain patient, Mr Lowe.ł

ęNot horizontallybut what about vertically?ł Therełs a
stony silence. I say, ęIłm only joking. Canłt I make a joke?ł I see her write
on her clipboard: inappropriate affect. I ęreadł the remark effortlessly, in
spite of my elevationbut I donłt have the nerve to ask her if itłs really what
she wrote.

A mirror is thrust in front of my faceand when itłs taken
away, I see myself as less pale, less wasted than before. The mirror is turned
towards me-above, and the place where I ęamł is ęshownł to be emptybut I knew
that all along.

I ęlook aroundł with my eyes every chance I getand my vision
of the room grows more detailed, more stable, more consistent. I experiment
with sounds, tapping my fingers on the side of the bed, on my ribs, my jaw, my
skull. I have no trouble convincing myself that my hearing is still taking
place in my earsthe closer a sound is to those organs down there, the louder
it seems, as alwaysbut nor do I have any difficulty interpreting these cues
correctly; when I snap my fingers beside my right ear, itłs obvious that the
source of the sound is close to my ear, not close to me.

Finally, Dr Tyler lets me try to walk. Iłm clumsy and
unsteady at first, distracted by my unfamiliar perspective, but I soon learn to
take what I need from the viewthe positions of obstaclesand ignore the rest.
As my body crosses the room, I move with it, hovering more or less directly
abovesometimes lagging behind or moving ahead, but never by far. Curiously, I
feel no conflict between my sense of balance, telling me Iłm upright, and my
downwards gaze, which ęshouldł (but doesnłt) suggest that my body is facing the
floor. That meaning has been stripped away, somehowand it has nothing to do
with the fact that I can ęseeł myself standing. Perhaps my true orientation is
gleaned, subconsciously, from the evidence of my eyes, at some point before the
damaged part of my brain corrupts the informationlike my ęclairvoyantł
knowledge of ęhiddenł objects.

I could walk a kilometre, Iłm sure, but not very quickly. I
place my body in a wheelchair, and a taciturn orderly pushes itand meout of
the room. The smooth, involuntary motion of my point of view is alarming at
first, but then gradually starts to make sense: after all, I can feel my hands
on the armrests, the chair against my legs, my buttocks, my backłpartł of me
is in the wheelchair, and, like a roller-skater staring down at his feet, I
should be able to swallow the notion that the ęrestł of me is attached, and
obliged to follow. Down corridors, up ramps, in and out of elevators, through
swing doors ... I fantasise daringly about wandering off on my ownturning left
when the orderly turns rightbut the truth is, I canłt begin to imagine how I
could make that happen.

We turn into a crowded walkway linking the hospitalłs two
main blocks, and end up travelling alongside another patient in a wheelchaira
man about my age, his head also bandaged. I wonder what hełs been through, and
whatłs in store for him nowbut this doesnłt seem like the time or place to
strike up a conversation about it. From above (at least, as I see it) these two
head-wound cases in hospital gowns are almost indistinguishable, and I find
myself wondering: Why do I care what happens to one of these bodies, so much
more than the other? How can it be so important ... when I can barely tell them
apart?

I grip the armrests of the chair tightlybut resist the
temptation to raise a hand and signal to myself: This one is me.

We finally reach Medical Imaging. Strapped to a motorised table,
my blood infused with a cocktail of radioactive substances, Iłm guided into a
helmet comprised of several tonnes of superconducting magnets and particle
detectors. My whole head is engulfed by the thing, but the room doesnłt vanish
at once. The technicians, cut loose from reality, keep themselves busy fussing
with the scannerłs controlslike old celluloid-movie extras pretending, unconvincingly,
to know how to operate a nuclear power station or an interstellar spacecraft.
Gradually, the scene fades to black.

When I emerge, with dark-adapted eyes, for a second or two
the room is unbearably bright.

* * * *

ęWe have no previous case histories of a lesion in exactly
this location,ł admits Dr Tyler, thoughtfully holding the brain scan at an
angle which allows me to observe, and simultaneously visualise, its contents.
She insists on addressing her remarks solely to me-below, though, which makes
me feel a bit like a patronised childignored by the adults, who, instead,
crouch down and say hello to Teddy.

ęWe do know itłs associative cortex. Higher-level sense-data
processing and integration. The place where your brain constructs models of the
world, and your relationship to it. From your symptoms, it seems youłve lost
access to the primary model, so youłre making do with a secondary one.ł

ęWhatłs that supposed to mean? Primary model, secondary
model? Iłm still looking at everything through the same pair of eyes, arenłt
I?ł

ęYes.ł

ęThen how can I fail to see it that way? If a camera is
damaged, it produces a faulty imageit doesnłt start giving you birdłs-eye
views from down on the ground.ł

ęForget about cameras. Vision is nothing like photographyitłs
an elaborate cognitive act. A pattern of light on your retina doesnłt mean a
thing until itłs been analysed: that means everything from detecting edges,
detecting motion, extracting features from noise, simplifying,
extrapolatingall the way up to constructing hypothetical objects, testing them
against reality, comparing them to memories and expectations ... the end
product is not a movie in your head, itłs a set of conclusions about the world.

ęThe brain assembles those conclusions into models of your
surroundings. The primary model includes information about more or less
everything thatłs directly visible at any given momentand nothing else. It
makes the most efficient use of all your visual data, and it makes the least
possible number of assumptions. So it has a lot of advantagesbut it doesnłt
arise automatically just because the data was gathered through your eyes. And
itłs not the only possibility: we all build other models, all the time; most
people can imagine their surroundings from almost any angleł

I laugh incredulously. ęNot like this. Nobody could imagine
a view as vivid as this. I certainly never could.ł

ęThen perhaps youłve managed to redeploy some of the neural
pathways responsible for the intensity of the primary modelł

ęI donłt want to redeploy them! I want the primary model
back!ł I hesitate, put off by the look of apprehension on my face, but I have
to know. ęCan you do thatcan you repair the damage? Put in a neural graft?ł

Dr Tyler tells my Teddy Bear, gently, ęWe can replace the
damaged tissue, but the regionłs not well enough understood to be repaired,
directly, by microsurgeons. We wouldnłt know which neurons to join to which.
All we can do is inject some immature neurons into the site of the lesion, and
leave them to form their own connections.ł

ęAnd ... will they form the right ones?ł

ęTherełs a good chance they will, eventually.ł

ęA good chance. If they do, how long will it take?ł

ęSeveral months, at least.ł

ęIłll want a second opinion.ł

ęOf course.ł

She pats my hand sympatheticallybut leaves without so much
as a glance in my direction.

Several months. At least. The room begins to rotate
slowlyso slowly that it never actually moves at all. I close my eyes and wait
for the feeling to pass. My vision lingers, refusing to fade. Ten seconds.
Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds. There I am, on the bed below, eyes closed ...
but that doesnłt render me invisible, does it? It doesnłt make the world
disappear. Thatłs half the trouble with this whole delusion: itłs so fucking
reasonable.

I put the heels of my palms against my eyes, and press,
hard. A mosaic of glowing triangles spreads out rapidly from the centre of my
field of view, a shimmering pattern in grey and white; soon it eclipses the
whole room.

When I take my hands away, the afterimage slowly fades to
darkness.

* * * *

I dream that I look down upon my sleeping bodyand then
drift away, rising up calmly, effortlessly, high into the air. I float above
Manhattanthen London, Zurich, Moscow, Nairobi, Cairo, Beijing. Wherever the
Zeitgeist Network reaches, Iłm there. I wrap the planet in my being. I have no
need of a body; I orbit with the satellites, I flow through the optical fibres.
From the slums of Calcutta to the mansions of Beverly Hills, I am the
Zeitgeist, the Spirit of the Age

I wake suddenly, and hear myself swearing, before I even
know why.

Then I realise Iłve wet the bed.

* * * *

James flies in dozens of the top neurologists from around
the world, and arranges remote consultations with another ten. They argue about
the precise interpretation of my symptomsbut their recommendations for
treatment are all essentially the same.

So, a small number of my own neurons, collected during the
original surgery, are genetically regressed to a foetal state, stimulated to
multiply in vivo, then injected back into the lesion. Local anaesthetic only;
at least this time I get to ęseeł more or less what really happens.

In the days that followfar too early for any effects from
the treatmentI find myself adapting to the status quo with disarming speed. My
coordination improves, until I can perform most simple tasks with confidence,
unaided: eating and drinking, urinating and defecating, washing and shavingall
the lifelong familiar routines start to seem ordinary again, in spite of the exotic
perspective. At first, I keep catching glimpses of Randolph Murchison (played
by the persona of Anthony Perkins) sneaking into the steam-clouded bathroom
every time I take a showerbut that passes.

Alex visits, finally able to tear himself away from the busy
Moscow bureau of Zeitgeist News. I watch the scene, oddly touched by the
ineloquence of both father and sonbut puzzled, too, that the awkward
relationship ever caused me so much pain and confusion. These two men are not
closebut thatłs not the end of the world. Theyłre not close to a few billion
other people, either. It doesnłt matter.

By the end of the fourth week, Iłm desperately boredand losing
patience with the infantile tests with concealed wooden blocks that Dr Young,
my psychologist, insists I perform twice daily. Five red and four blue blocks
can turn into three red and one green, when the partition hiding them from my
eyes is liftedand so on, a thousand times ... but it no more demolishes my
world-view than pictures of vases that turn into pairs of human profiles, or patterns
with gaps that magically fill themselves in when aligned with the retinal blind
spot.

Dr Tyler admits, under duress, that therełs no reason I
canłt be discharged, but

ęIłd still prefer to keep you under observation.ł

I say, ęI think I can do that myself.ł

* * * *

A two-metre-wide auxiliary screen attached to the videophone
lies on the floor of my study; a crutch, perhaps, but at least it takes the
clairvoyance factor out of knowing whatłs happening on the smaller screen in
front of my face.

Andrea says, ęRemember that team of Creative Consultants we
hired last spring? Theyłve come up with a brilliant new concept: �Celluloid
Classics That Might Have Been"ground-breaking movies that were almost made,
but didnłt quite survive the development process. They plan to start the series
with Three Burglarsa Hollywood remake of Tenue de Soiree, with Arnold
Schwarzenegger in the Depardieu role, and either Leonard Nimoy or Ivan Reitman
directing. Marketing have run a simulation which shows twenty-three per cent of
subscribers taking the pilot. The costings arenłt too bad, either; we already
own emulation rights for most of the personas we need.ł

I nod my puppet head. ęThat all sounds ... fine. Is there anything
else we need to discuss?ł

ęJust one more thing. The Randolph Murchison Story.ł

ęWhatłs the problem?ł

ęAudience Psychology wonłt approve the latest version of the
screenplay. We canłt leave out Murchisonłs attack on you, itłs far too well
knownł

ęI never asked for it to be left out. I just want my
post-operative condition left unspecified. Lowe gets shot. Lowe survives.
Therełs no need to clutter up a perfectly good story about mutilated hitchhikers
with details of a minor characterłs neurological condition.ł

ęNo, of course notand thatłs not the problem. The problem
is, if we cover the attack at all, wełll have to mention the reason for it, the
miniseries itself ... and AP says viewers wonłt be comfortable with that degree
of reflexivity. For current affairs, all rightthe programme is its own main
subject, the presentersł actions are the newsthatłs taken for granted, people
are used to it. But docudrama is different. You canłt use a fictional narrative
styletelling the audience itłs safe to get emotionally involved, itłs all just
entertainment, it canłt really touch themand then throw in a reference to the
very programme theyłre watching.ł

I shrug. ęAll right. Fine. If therełs no way around it, axe
the project. We can live with that; we can write it off.ł

She nods, unhappily. It was the decision she wanted, Iłm
surebut not so casually given.

When she hangs up, and the screen goes blank, the sight of
the unchanging room quickly becomes monotonous. I switch to cable input, and
flick through a few dozen channels from Zeitgeist and its major competitors.
The whole world is there to gaze upon, from the latest Sudanese famine to the
Chinese civil war, from a body paint fashion parade in New York to the bloody
aftermath of the bombing of the British parliament. The whole worldor a model
of the world: part truth, part guesswork, part wish-fulfilment.

I lean back in my chair until Iłm staring straight down into
my eyes. I say, ęIłm sick of this place. Letłs get out of here.ł

* * * *

I watch the snow dust my shoulders between the sharp gusts
of wind that blow it away. The icy sidewalk is deserted; nobody in this part of
Manhattan seems to walk anywhere in the most clement weather any more, let
alone on a day like this. I can just make out the four bodyguards, ahead of me
and behind me, at the edge of my vision.

I wanted a bullet in the head. I wanted to be destroyed and
reborn. I wanted a magic path to redemption. And what have I ended up with?

I raise my head, and a ragged, bearded tramp materialises beside
me, stamping his feet on the sidewalk, hugging himself, shivering. He says
nothing, but I stop walking.

One man below me is warmly dressed, in an overcoat and
overshoes. The other is wearing threadbare jeans, a tattered bomber jacket, and
baseball shoes full of holes.

The disparity is ridiculous. The warmly dressed man takes
off his overcoat and hands it to the shivering man, then walks on.

And I think: What a beautiful scene for The Philip Lowe
Story.

Silver Fire

I was in my office at home, grading papers for Epidemiology
410, when the call came through from John Brecht in Maryland. Realtime, not a
polite message to be dealt with whenever I chose. Iłd grown into the habit of
thinking of Colonel Brecht as �my old boss." Apparently that had been
premature.

He said, �Wełve found a little Silver Fire anomaly which I
think might interest you, Claire. A little blip on the autocorrelation
transform which just wonłt go away. And seeing as youłre on vacation"

�_My students_ are on vacation. I still have work to do."

�Oh, I think Columbia can find someone to take over those
menial tasks for a week or two."

I regarded him in silence for a moment, trying to decide
whether or not to tell him to find someone else to take over his own _menial
tasks_.

I said, �What exactly are we talking about?"

Brecht smiled. �A faint trail. Hovering on the verge of
significance. Your specialty." A map appeared on the screen; his face shrank to
an inset. �It seems to start in North Carolina, around Greensboro, heading
west." The map was peppered with dots marking the locations of recent Silver
Fire casescolor-coded by the time elapsed since a notional �day of infection",
the dots themselves positioned wherever the patient had been at the time. Having
been told exactly what to look for, I could just make out a vague spectral
progression cutting through the scattered blossoms of localized outbreaks: a
kind of smudged rainbow trail from red to violet, dissolving into uncertainty
just west of Knoxville, Tennessee. Then again ... if I squinted, I could
discern another structure, about as convincing, sweeping down in an amazingly
perfect arc from Kentucky. A few more minutes, and Iłd see the hidden face of
Groucho Marx. The human brain is far too good at finding patterns; without
rigorous statistical tools wełre helpless, animists grasping at meaning in
every random puff of air.

I said, �So how do the numbers look?"

�The P valuełs borderline," Brecht conceded. �But I still
think itłs worth checking out."

The visible part of this hypothetical trail spanned at least
ten days. _Three days_ after exposure to the virus, the average person was
either dead or in intensive carenot driving blithely across the countryside.
Maps tracing the precise routes of infection generally looked like random walks
with mean free paths five or ten kilometers long; even air travel, at worst,
tended to spawn a multitude of scattered small outbreaks. If wełd stumbled on
someone who was infectious but asymptomatic, then that was definitely _worth
checking out_.

Brecht said, �As of now, you have full access to the notifications
database. Iłd offer you our provisional analysisbut Iłm sure you can do better
with the raw data, yourself."

�No doubt."

�Good. Then you can leave tomorrow."

* * * *

I woke before dawn and packed in ten minutes, while Alex lay
cursing me in his sleep. Then I realized I had three hours to kill, and
absolutely nothing left to do, so I crawled back into bed. When I woke for the
second time, Alex and Laura were both up, and eating breakfast.

As I sat down opposite Laura, though, I wondered if I was
dreaming: one of those insidiously reassuring
no-need-to-wake-because-you-already-have dreams. My fourteen-year-old daughterłs
face and arms were covered in alchemical and zodiacal symbols in iridescent
reds, greens and blues. She looked like a character in some dire
VR-as-psychedelia movie whołd been mauled by the special effects software.

She stared back at me defiantly, as if Iłd somehow expressed
disapproval. In fact, I hadnłt yet worked my way around to such a mundane
emotionand by the time I did, I kept my mouth firmly shut. Knowing Laura,
these were definitely not fakes which would wash offbut transdermal enzyme
patches could still erase them as bloodlessly as the dye-bearing ones which had
implanted them. So I was good, I didnłt say a word: no cheap reverse-psychology
(�Oh, arenłt they _sweet?_"), no (honest) complaints about the harassment Iłd
get from her principal if they werenłt gone by the start of term.

Laura said, �Did you know that Isaac Newton spent more time
on alchemy than he did on the theory of gravity?"

�Yes. Did you know he also died a virgin? Role models are
great, arenłt they?"

Alex gave me a sideways warning look, but didnłt buy in. Laura
continued, �Therełs a whole secret history of science thatłs been censored from
the official accounts. Hidden knowledge thatłs only coming to light now that
everyone has access to the original sources."

It was hard to know how to respond honestly to this without
groaning aloud. I said evenly, �I think youłll find that most of it has actually
ęcome to lightł before. Itłs just turned out to be of limited interest. But
sure, itłs fascinating to see some of the blind alleys people have explored."

Laura smiled at me pityingly. �_Blind alleys!_" She finished
picking the toast crumbs off her plate, then she rose and left the room with a
spring in her step, as if shełd won some kind of battle.

I said plaintively, �What did I miss? When did all this
start?"

Alex was unfazed. �I think itłs mostly just the music. Or
rather, three seventeen-year-old boys with supernaturally perfect skin and big
brown contact lenses, called The Alchemists"

�Yes, I _know_ the bandbut New Hermetics is more than the
bubblegum music, itłs a major cult"

He laughed. �Oh, come on! Wasnłt your sister deeply in lust
with the lead singer of some quasi-Satanic heavy metal group? I donłt recall
her ending up nailing black cats to upside-down crucifixes."

�That was never _lust_. She just wanted to discover his
hair-care secrets."

Alex said firmly, �Laura is fine. Just ... relax and sit it
out. Unless you want to buy her a copy of _Foucaultłs Pendulum_?"

�Shełd probably miss the irony."

He prodded me on the arm; mock-violence, but genuine anger. �_Thatłs_
unfair. Shełll chew up New Hermetics and spit it out in ... six months, at the
most. How long did Scientology last? A week?"

I said, �_Scientology_ is crass, transparent gibberish. New
Hermetics has five thousand years of cultural adornment to draw on. Itłs every
bit as insidious as Buddhism or Catholicism: therełs a tradition, therełs a
whole esthetic"

Alex cut in, �Yesand in six monthsł time, shełll
understand: the esthetic can be appreciated without swallowing any of the bullshit.
Just because alchemy was a blind alley, that doesnłt mean it isnłt still
elegant and fascinating ... but _being_ elegant and fascinating doesnłt render
a word of it true."

I reflected on that for a while, then I leaned over and
kissed him. �I hate it when youłre right: you always make it sound so obvious.
Iłm too damn protective, arenłt I? Shełll work it all out for herself."

�You know she will."

I glanced at my watch. �_Shit_. Can you drive me to La Guardia?
Iłm never going to get a cab, now."

* * * *

Early in the pandemic, Iłd pulled a few strings and arranged
for a group of my students to observe a Silver Fire patient close up. It had
seemed wrong to bury ourselves in the abstractions of maps and graphs,
numerical models and extrapolationshowever vital they were to the battlewithout
witnessing the real physical condition of an individual human being.

We didnłt have to don biohazard suits; the young man lay in
a glass-walled, hermetically sealed room. Tubes brought him oxygen, water,
electrolytes and nutrientsalong with antibiotics, antipyritics,
immunosuppressants, and pain killers. No bed, no mattress; the patient was
embedded in a transparent polymer gel: a kind of buoyant semi-solid which
limited pressure sores and drew away the blood and lymphatic fluid weeping out
through what used to be his skin.

I surprised myself by crying, silently and briefly, hot
tears of anger. Rage dissipating into a vacuum; I knew there was no one to
blame. Half the students had medical degreesbut if anything, they seemed more
shaken than the green statisticians whołd never set foot in a trauma ward or an
operating theaterprobably because they could better imagine what the man would
have been feeling without a skull full of opiates.

The official label for the condition was Systemic Fibrotic
Viral Sclerodermabut SFVS was unpronounceable, and apparently peoplełs eyes glazed
over if news readers spelt out four whole letters. I used the new name like
everyone elsebut I never stopped loathing it. It was too fucking poetic by
far.

When the Silver Fire virus infected fibroblasts in the
subcutaneous connective tissue, it caused them to go into overdrive, manufacturing
vast quantities of collagenin a variant form transcribed from the normal gene
but imperfectly assembled. This denatured protein formed solid plaques in the
extracellular space, disrupting the nutrient flow to the dermis aboveand
eventually becoming so bulky as to shear it off completely. Silver Fire flayed
you from within. A good strategy for releasing large amounts of virus, maybethough
when it had stumbled on the trick, no one knew. The presumed animal host in
which the parent strain lived, benignly or otherwise, was yet to be found.

If the lymph-glistening sickly white of naked collagen
plaques was �silver", the fever, the autoimmune response, and the sensation of
being burned alive was �fire." Mercifully, the pain couldnłt last long, either
way. The standard First World palliative treatment included constant deep
anesthesiaand if you didnłt get that level of high-tech intervention, you went
into shock, fast, and died.

Two years after the first outbreaks, the origin of the virus
remained unknown, a vaccine was still a remote prospectand though patients
could be kept alive almost indefinitely, all attempts to effect a cure by
purging the body of the virus and grafting cultured skin had failed.

Four hundred thousand people had been infected, worldwide;
nine out of ten were dead. Ironically, rapid onset due to malnutrition had all
but eliminated Silver Fire in the poorest nations; most outbreaks in Africa had
burned themselves out on the spot. The US not only had more hospitalized
victims on life support, per capita, than any other nation; it was heading for
the top of the list in the rate of new cases.

A handshake or even a ride in a packed bus could transmit
the viruswith a low probability for each contact event, but it added up. The
only thing that helped in the medium term was isolating potential carriersand
to date it had seemed that no one could remain infectious and healthy for long.
If the �trail" Brechtłs computers had found was more than a statistical mirage,
cutting it short might save dozens of livesand understanding it might save thousands.

* * * *

It was almost noon when the plane touched down at the Triad
airport on the outskirts of Greensboro. There was a hire car waiting for me; I
waved my notepad at the dashboard to transmit my profile, then waited as the
seating and controls rearranged themselves slightly, piezoelectric actuators
humming. As I started to reverse out of the parking bay, the stereo began a
soothing improvisation, flashing up a deadpan title: _Music for Leaving
Airports on June 11, 2008_.

I got a shock driving into town: there were dozens of large
plots of tobacco visible from the road. The born-again weed was encroaching
everywhere, and not even the suburbs were safe. The irony had become cliched,
but it was still something to witness the reality firsthand: even as nicotine
was finally going the way of absinthe, more tobacco was being cultivated than
ever beforebecause tobacco mosaic virus had turned out to be an extremely
convenient and efficient vector for introducing new genes. The leaves of these
plants would be loaded with pharmaceuticals or vaccine antigensand worth
twenty times as much as their unmodified ancestors at the height of demand.

My first appointment was still almost an hour away, so I
drove around town in search of lunch. Iłd been so wound up since Brechtłs call,
I was surprised at just how good I felt to have arrived. Maybe it was no more
than traveling south, with the sudden slight shift in the angle of the lighta
kind of beneficent latitudinal equivalent of jet lag. Certainly, everything in
downtown Greensboro appeared positively luminous after NYC, with modern buildings
in pastel shades looking curiously harmonious beside the gleamingly preserved
historic ones.

I ended up eating sandwiches in a small dinerand going
through my notes again, obsessively. It was seven years since Iłd done anything
like this for real, and Iłd had little time to make the mental transition from
theoretician back to practitioner.

Therełd been four new cases of Silver Fire in Greensboro in
the preceding fortnight. Health authorities everywhere had long ago given up
trying to establish the path of infection for every last case; given the ease
of transmission, and the inability to question the patients themselves, it was
a massively labor-intensive process which yielded few tangible benefits. The
most useful strategy wasnłt backtracking, but rather quarantining the family,
workmates and other known contacts of each new case, for about a week. Carriers
were infectious for two or three days at the most before becomingvery
obviouslysick themselves; you didnłt need to go looking for them. Brechtłs
rainbow trail either meant an exception to this rule ... or a ripple of new
cases propagating from town to town without any single carrier.

Greensborołs population was about a quarter of a millionthough
it depended on exactly where you drew the boundaries. North Carolina had never
gone in much for implosive urbanization; growth in rural areas had actually
outstripped growth in the major cities in recent years, and the microvillage
movement had taken off here in a big wayat least as much as on the west coast.

I displayed a contoured population density map of the region
on my notepad; even Raleigh, Charlotte and Greensboro were only modest
elevations against the gently undulating background of the countrysideand only
the Appalachians themselves cut a deep trench through this inverted topography.
Hundreds of small new communities dotted the map, between the already numerous
established towns. The microvillages werenłt literally self-sustaining, but
they were definitely high-tech Green, with photovoltaics, small-scale local
water treatment, and satellite links in lieu of connections to any centralized
utilities. Most of their income came from cottage service industries: software,
design, music, animation.

I switched on an overlay showing the estimated magnitude of
population flows, on the timescale relevant to Silver Fire. The major roads and
highways glowed white hot, and the small towns were linked into the skein by
their own slender capillaries ... but the microvillages all but vanished from
the scene: everyone worked from home. So it wasnłt all that unlikely for a
random Silver Fire outbreak to have spread straight down the interstate, rather
than diffusing in a classic drunkardłs walk across this relatively populous
landscape.

Still ... the whole point of being here was to find out the
one thing that none of the computer models could tell me: whether or not the
assumptions they were based on were dangerously flawed.

* * * *

I left the diner and set to work. The four cases came from
four separate families; I was in for a long day.

All the people I interviewed were out of quarantine, but
still suffering various degrees of shock. Silver Fire hit like an express
train: there was no time to grasp what was happening before a perfectly healthy
child or parent, spouse or lover, all but died in front of your eyes. The last
thing you needed was a two-hour interrogation by a total stranger.

It was dusk by the time I reached the last familyand any
joy Iłd felt at being back in the field had long since worn off. I sat in the
car for a minute, staring at the immaculate garden and lace curtains, listening
to the crickets, wishing I didnłt have to go in and face these people.

Diane Clayton taught high school mathematics; her husband,
Ed, was an engineer, working night shifts for the local power company. They had
a thirteen-year-old daughter, Cheryl. Mike, eighteen, was in the hospital.

I sat with the three of them, but it was Ms Clayton who did
most of the talking. She was scrupulously patient and courteous with mebut
after a while, it became clear that she was still in a kind of daze. She
answered every question slowly and thoughtfullybut I had no idea if she really
knew what she was saying, or whether she was just going through the motions on
autopilot.

Mikełs father wasnłt much help, since the shift work had
kept him out of synch with the rest of the family. I tried increasing eye
contact with Cheryl, encouraging her to speak. It was absurd, but I felt guilty
even as I did itas if Iłd come here to sell the family some junk product, and
now I was trying to bypass parental resistance.

�So ... Tuesday night he definitely stayed home?" I was
filling in a chart of Mike Claytonłs movements for the week before symptoms
appearedhour-by-hour. It was a fastidious, nit-picking Gestapo routine that
made the old days of merely asking for a list of sexual partners and fluids
exchanged seem positively idyllic.

�Yes, thatłs right." Diane Clayton screwed her eyes shut and
ran through her memories of the night again. �I watched some television with
Cheryl, then went to bed around ... eleven. Mike must have been in his room all
the time." Hełd been on vacation from UNC Greensboro, with no reason to spend
his evenings studyingbut he might have been socializing electronically, or
watching a movie.

Cheryl glanced at me uncertainly, then said shyly, �I think
he went out."

Her mother turned to her, frowning. �Tuesday night? No!"

I asked Cheryl, �Do you have any idea where?"

�Some nightclub, I think."

�He said that?"

She shrugged. �He was dressed for it."

�But he didnłt say where?"

�No."

�Could it have been somewhere else? A friendłs place? A party?"
My information was that no nightclubs in Greensboro were open on Tuesdays.

Cheryl thought it over. �He said he was going dancing. Thatłs
all he said."

I turned back to Diane Clayton; she was clearly upset at
being cut out of the discussion. �Do you know who he might have gone with?"

If Mike was in a steady relationship he hadnłt mentioned the
fact, but she gave me the names of three old school friends. She kept
apologizing to me for her �negligence."

I said, �Itłs all right. Really. No one can remember every
last detail."

She was still distraught when I left, an hour later. Her son
leaving the house without telling heror the fact that hełd told her, and it
had slipped her mindwas now (somehow) the reason for the whole tragedy.

I felt partly to blame for her distress, myselfthough I
didnłt see how I could have handled things any differently. The hospital would
have offered her expert counselingthat wasnłt my job at all. And there was
sure to be more of the same ahead; if I started taking it personally, Iłd be a
wreck in a matter of days.

I managed to track down all three friends before elevenabout
the latest I dared call anyonebut none of them had been with Mike on Tuesday
night, or had any idea where hełd been. They helped me cross-check some other
details, though. I ended up sitting in the car making calls for almost two
hours.

Maybe therełd been a party, maybe there hadnłt. Maybe it had
been a pretext for something else; the possibilities were endless. Blank spots
on the charts were a matter of course; I could have spent a month in Greensboro
trying to fill them all in, without success. If the hypothetical carrier _had_
been at this hypothetical party (and the other three members of the Greensboro
Four definitely hadnłtthey were all accounted for on the night) Iłd just have
to pick up the trail further on.

I checked into a motel and lay awake for a while, listening
to the traffic on the interstate. Thinking of Alex and Lauraand trying to
imagine the unimaginable.

_But it couldnłt happen to them. They were mine. Iłd protect
them._

How? By moving to Antarctica?

Silver Fire was rarer than cancer, rarer than heart disease,
rarer than death by automobile. Rarer than gunshot wounds, in some cities. But
there was no strategy for avoiding itshort of complete physical isolation.

And Diane Clayton was now torturing herself for failing to
keep her eighteen-year-old son locked up for the summer vacation. Asking
herself, over and over: _What did I do wrong? Why did this happen? What am I
being punished for?_

I should have taken her aside, looked her squarely in the
eye, and reminded her: �This is not your fault! Therełs nothing you could have
done to prevent it!"

I should have said: _It just happened. People suffer like
this for no reason. There is no sense to be made of your sonłs ruined life.
There is no meaning to be found here. Just a random dance of molecules._

* * * *

I woke early and skipped breakfast; I was on the I-40,
heading west, by seven thirty. I drove straight past Winston-Salem; a couple of
people had been infected there recentlybut not recently enough to be part of
the trail.

Sleep had taken the edge off my pessimism. The morning was
cool and clear, and the countryside was stunningor at least, it was where it
hadnłt been turned over to monotonous biotech crops, or worse: golf courses.

Still, some things had definitely changed for the better. It
was on the I-40more than twenty years beforethat Iłd first heard a radio
evangelist preaching the eightiesł gospel of hate: AIDS as Godłs instrument, HIV
as the righteous virus sent down from Heaven to smite adulterers, junkies and
faggots. (Iłd been young and hot-headed, then; Iłd pulled off at the next exit,
phoned the radio station, and heaped abuse on some poor receptionist.) But proponents
of this subtle theology had fallen curiously silent ever since an immortalized
cell line derived from the bone marrow of a Kenyan prostitute had proved more
than a match for the omnipotent deityłs secret weapon. And if Christian
fundamentalism wasnłt exactly dead and buried, its power base had certainly
gone into decline; the kind of ignorance and insularity it relied upon seemed
to be becoming almost impossible to sustain against the tide of information.

Local audio had long since shifted to the net, of course,
evangelists and all; the old frequencies had fallen silent. And I was out of
range of cellular contact with the beast with 20,000 channels ... but the car
did have a satellite link. I switched on my notepad, hoping for some light
relief.

Iłd programmed Ariadne, my knowledge miner, to scan all
available media outlets for references to Silver Fire. Maybe it was sheer
masochism, but there was something perversely fascinating about the distorted
shadow the real pandemic cast in the shallows of media space: rumors and
misinformation, hysteria, exploitation.

The tabloid angles, as always, were predictably inane:
Silver Fire was a disease from space / the inevitable result of fluoridation /
the reason half a dozen celebrities had disappeared from the public gaze. Three
false modes of transmission were on offer: today it was tampons, Mexican orange
juice, and mosquitoes (again). Several young victims with attractive �before"
shots and family members willing to break down on camera had been duly rounded
up. New century, same old fox shit.

The most bizarre item in Ariadnełs latest sweep wasnłt
classic tabloid at all, though. It was an interview on a program called _The
Terminal Chat Show_ (23:00 GMT, Thursdays, on Britainłs Channel 4) with a
Canadian academic, James Springer, who was touring the UK (in the flesh) to
promote his new hypertext, _The Cyber Sutras_.

Springer was a balding, middle-aged, avuncular man. He was
introduced as Associate Professor of Theory at McGill University; apparently
only the hopelessly reductionist asked: �Theory of _what?_" His area of
expertise was described as �computers and spirituality"but for reasons I
couldnłt quite fathom, his opinion was sought on Silver Fire.

�The crucial thing," he insisted smoothly, �is that Silver
Fire is the very first plague of the Information Age. AIDS was certainly
post-industrial and post-modernist, but its onset predated the emergence of
true Information Age cultural sensibilities. AIDS, for me, embodied the whole
negative zeitgeist of Western materialism confronting its inevitable _fin de
siecle_ crisis of confidencebut with Silver Fire, I think wełre free to
embrace far more positive metaphors for this so-called ędisease.ł"

The interviewer inquired warily, �So ... youłre hopeful that
Silver Fire victims will be spared the stigmatization and hysteria that
accompanied AIDS?"

Springer nodded cheerfully. �Of course! Wełve made enormous
strides forward in cultural analysis since those days! I mean, if Burroughsł
_Cities of the Red Night_ had only penetrated the collective subconscious more
fully when it appeared, the whole course of the AIDS plague might have been
radically differentand thatłs a hot topic in Uchronic Studies which one of my
doctoral students is currently pursuing. But therełs no doubt that Information
Age cultural forms have fully prepared us for Silver Fire. When I look at
global techno-anarchist raves, trading-card tattoo body comics, and affordable
desktop implementations of the Dalai Lama ... itłs clear to me that Silver Fire
is a sequence of RNA whose time has come. If it didnłt exist, wełd have to
synthesize it!"

* * * *

My next stop was a town called Statesville. A brother and
sister in their late teens, Ben and Lisa Walker, and the sisterłs boyfriend,
Paul Scott, were in hospital in Winston-Salem. The families had only just
returned home.

Lisa and Ben had been living with their widower father and a
nine-year-old brother. Lisa had worked in a local store, alongside the ownerwhołd
remained symptom-free. Ben had worked in a vaccine-extraction plant, and Paul
Scott had been unemployed, living with his mother. Lisa seemed the most likely
of the three to have become infected first; in theory, all it took was an
accidental brush of skin against skin as a credit card changed handsalbeit
with only a 1-in-100 chance of transmission. In the larger cities, some people
who dealt with the public in the flesh had taken to wearing glovesand some
(arguably paranoid) subway commuters covered every square centimeter of skin
below the neck, even in midsummerbut the absolute risk was so small that few
strategies like this had become widespread.

I grilled Mr Walker as gently as I could. His childrenłs movements
for most of the week were like clockwork; the only time during the window of
infection when theyłd been anywhere but work or home was Thursday night. Both
had been out until the early hours, Lisa visiting Paul, Ben visiting his
girlfriend, Martha Amos. Whether the couples had gone anywhere, or stayed in,
he wasnłt certainbut there wasnłt much happening locally on a week night, and
they hadnłt mentioned driving out of town.

I phoned Martha Amos; she told me that she and Ben had been
at her house, alone, until about two. Since she hadnłt been infected,
presumably Ben had picked up the virus from his sister sometime laterand Lisa
had either been infected by Paul that night, or vice versa.

According to Paulłs mother, hełd barely left the house all
week, which made him an unlikely entry point. Statesville seemed to be making
perfect sense: customer to Lisa in the store (Thursday afternoon), Lisa to Paul
(Thursday night), Lisa to Ben (Friday morning). Next stop, Iłd ask the store
owner what she remembered about their out-of-town customers that day.

But then Ms Scott said, �Thursday night, Paul was over at
the Walkers until late. Thatłs the only time he went out, that I can think of."

�He went to see Lisa? She didnłt come here?"

�No. He left for the Walkers, about half past eight."

�And they were just going to hang around the house? They had
nothing special planned?"

�Paul doesnłt have a lot of money, you know. They canłt afford
to go out muchitłs not easy for them." She spoke in a relaxed, confiding toneas
if the relationship, with all its minor tribulations, had merely been put on
hold. I hoped someone would be around to support her when the truth struck home
in a couple of days.

I called at Martha Amosłs house. I hadnłt paid close enough
attention to her when Iłd phoned; I could see now that she was not in good
shape.

I asked her, �Did Ben happen to tell you where his sister
went with Paul Scott on Thursday night?"

She stared at me expressionlessly.

�Iłm sorry, I know this is intrusivebut no one else seems
to know. If you can remember anything he said, it could be very helpful."

Martha said, �He told me to say he was with me. I always covered
for him. His father wouldnłt have ... _approved_."

�Hang on. Ben wasnłt with you on Thursday night?"

�I went with him a couple of times. But itłs not my kind of
thing. The people are all right. The musicłs shit, though."

�Where? Are you talking about some bar?"

�No! _The villages._ Ben and Paul and Lisa went out to the
villages, Thursday night." She suddenly focused on me properly, for the first
time since Iłd arrived; I think shełd finally realized that she hadnłt been
making a lot of sense. �They hold ęEvents.ł Which are just dance parties,
really. Itłs no big deal. OnlyBenłs father would assume itłs all about
_drugs_. Which itłs not." She put her face in her hands. �But thatłs where they
caught Silver Fire, isnłt it?"

�I donłt know."

She was shaking; I reached across and touched her arm. She
looked up at me and said wearily, �You know what hurts the most?"

�What?"

�I didnłt go with them. I keep thinking: _If Iłd gone, it
would have been all right_. They wouldnłt have caught it then. I would have
kept them safe."

She searched my faceas if for some hint as to what she
might have done. _I was hunting down Silver Fire, wasnłt I?_ I ought to have
been able to tell her, precisely, how she could have warded off the curse: what
magic she hadnłt performed, what sacrifice she hadnłt made.

And Iłd seen this a thousand times beforebut I still didnłt
know what to say. All it took was the shock of grief to peel away the veneer of
understanding: _Life is not a morality play. Disease is just disease; it
carries no hidden meaning. There are no gods we failed to appease, no elemental
spirits we failed to bargain with._ Every sane adult knew thisbut the
knowledge was still only skin deep. At some level, we still hadnłt swallowed
the hardest-won truth of all: _The universe is indifferent._

Martha hugged herself, rocking gently. �I know itłs crazy,
thinking like that. But it still hurts."

* * * *

I spent the rest of the day trying to find someone who could
tell me more about Thursday nightłs �Event" (such as where, exactly, it had
taken placethere were at least four possibilities within a twenty kilometer
radius). I had no luck, though; it seemed microvillage culture was very much a
minority taste, and Statesvillełs only three enthusiasts were now
_incommunicado_. Drugs werenłt the issue with most of the people I talked to;
they just seemed to think the villagers were boring tech-heads with appalling
taste in music.

Another night, another motel. It was beginning to feel like
old times.

Mike Clayton had gone dancing, somewhere, on the Tuesday
night. _Out in the villages?_ Presumably he hadnłt traveled quite this far, but
an unknown persona tourist, maybemight easily have been at both Events:
Tuesday night near Greensboro, Thursday night near Statesville. If this was
true, it would narrow down the possibilities considerablyat least compared
with the number of people whołd simply passed through the towns themselves.

I pored over road maps for a while, trying to decide which
village would be easiest to add to the next dayłs itinerary. Iłd searched the
directories for some kind of �microvillage night life" web sitein vain, but
that didnłt mean anything. The address had no doubt made its way, by electronic
diffusion, to everyone who was genuinely interestedand whichever village I
went to, half a dozen people were sure to know all about the Events.

I climbed into bed around midnightbut then reached for my
notepad again, to check with Ariadne. Silver Fire had made the big time: video
fiction. There was a reference in the latest episode of NBCłs �hit sci-fi drama",
_Mutilated Mystic Empaths in N-Space_.

Iłd heard of the series, but never watched it before, so I
quickly scanned the pilot. �Donłt you know the first law of astronavigation!
Ask a _computer_ to solve equations in _17-dimensional hypergeometry_ ... and
its rigid, deterministic, linear mind would shatter like a diamond dropped into
a black hole! Only _twin telepathic Buddhist nuns_, with seventh-dan black
belts in karate, and enough self-discipline to _hack their own legs from their
bodies_, could ever hope to master the _intuitive skills_ required to navigate
the treacherous quantum fluctuations of N-space and rescue that stranded fleet!"

�My God, Captain, youłre rightbut where will we find ... ?"

_MME_ was set in the 22nd centurybut the Silver Fire reference
was no clumsy anachronism. Our heroines miscalculate a difficult trans-galactic
jump (breathing the wrong way during the recitation of a crucial mantra), and
end up in Present Day San Francisco. There, a small boy and his dog, on the run
from mafia hit men, help them repair a vital component in their Tantric Energy
Source. After humiliating the assassins with a perfectly choreographed display
of legless martial arts amid the scaffolding of a high-rise construction site,
they track down the boyłs mother to a hospital, where she turns out to be
infected with Silver Fire.

The camera angles here grow coy. The few glimpses of actual
flesh are sanitized fantasies: glowing ivory, smooth and dry.

The boy (whose recently slaughtered accountant-for-the-mob
father concealed the truth from him), bursts into tears when he sees her. But
the MMEs are philosophical:

�These well-meaning doctors and nurses will tell you that
your Mom has suffered a terrible fatebut in time, the truth will be understood
by all. Silver Fire is the closest we can come, in this world, to the Ecstasy
of Unbeing. You observe only the frozen shell of her body ... but inside, in
the realm of _shunyata_, a great and wonderful transformation is at work."

�Really?"

�Really."

Boy dries tears, theme music soars, dog jumps up and licks
everyonełs faces. Cathartic laughter all round.

(Except, of course, from the mother.)

* * * *

The next day, I had appointments in two small towns further
along the highway. The first patient was a divorced forty-five-year-old man, a
technician at a textile factory. Neither his brother nor his colleagues could
offer me much help; for all they knew, he could have driven to a different town
(or village) every single night during the period in question.

In the next town, a couple in their mid-thirties and their
eight-year-old daughter had died. The symptoms must have hit all three
more-or-less simultaneouslyand escalated more rapidly than usualbecause no
one had managed to call for help.

The womanłs sister told me without hesitation, �Friday
night, they would have gone out to the villages. Thatłs what they usually did."

�And they would have taken their daughter?"

She opened her mouth to replybut then froze and just stared
at me, mortifiedas if I was blaming her sister for recklessly exposing the
child to some unspeakable danger. There were photographs of all three on the
mantelpiece behind her. This woman had discovered their disintegrating bodies.

I said gently, �No place is safer than any other. It only
looks that way in hindsight. They could have caught Silver Fire anywhere at alland
Iłm just trying to trace the path of the infection, after the event."

She nodded slowly. �They always took Phoebe. She loved the
villages; she had friends in most of them."

�Do you know which village they went to, that night?"

�I think it was Herodotus."

Out in the car, I found it on the map. It wasnłt much
further from the highway than the one Iłd chosen purely for convenience; I could
probably drive out there and still make it to the next motel by a civilized
hour.

I clicked on the tiny dot; the information window told me:
_Herodotus, Catawba County. Population 106, established 2004._

I said, �More."

The map said, �Thatłs all."

* * * *

Solar panels, twin satellite dishes, vegetable gardens,
water tanks, boxy prefabricated buildings ... there was no single component of
the village which couldnłt have been found on almost any large rural property.
It was only seeing all of them thrown together in the middle of the countryside
that was startling. Herodotus resembled nothing so much as a 20th century
artistłs impression of a pioneering settlement on some Earth-likebut
definitely alienplanet.

A major exception was the car park, discreetly hidden behind
the huge banks of photovoltaic cells. With only a bus and two other cars, there
was room for maybe a hundred more vehicles. Visitors were clearly welcome in
Herodotus; there wasnłt even a meter to feed.

Despite the prefabs, there was no army-camp feel to the
layout; the buildings obeyed some symmetry I couldnłt quite parse, clustered
around a central squarebut they certainly werenłt lined up in rows like
quonset huts. As I entered the square, I could see a basketball game in
progress in a court off to one side; teenagers playing, and younger children
watching. It was the only obvious sign of life. I approachedfeeling a bit like
a trespasser, even if this was as much a public space as the main street of any
ordinary town.

I stood by the other spectators and watched the game for a
while. None of the children spoke to me, but it didnłt feel like I was being
actively snubbed. The teams were mixed-sex, and play was intense but
good-natured. The kids were Anglo-, African-, Chinese-American. Iłd heard
rumors that certain villages were �effectively segregated"whatever that meantbut
it might well have been nothing but propaganda.

The microvillage movement had stirred some controversy when
it started, but the lifestyle wasnłt exactly radical. A hundred or so peoplewho
would have worked from their homes in towns or cities anywaypooled their
resources and bought some cheap land out in the country, making up for the lack
of amenities with a few state-of-the-art technological fixes. Residents were
just as likely to be stockbrokers as artists or musiciansand though any characterization
was bound to be unfair, most villages were definitely closer to yuppie
sanctuaries than anarchist communes.

I couldnłt have faced the physical isolation, myselfand no
amount of bandwidth would have compensatedbut if the people here were happy,
all power to them. I was ready to concede that in fifty yearsł time, living in
Queens would be looked on as infinitely more perverse and inexplicable than
living in a place like Herodotus.

A young girl, six or seven years old, tapped my arm. I
smiled down at her. �Hello."

She said, �Are you on the trail of happiness?"

Before I could ask her what she meant, someone called out, �Hello
there!"

I turned; it was a womanin her mid-twenties, I guessedshielding
her eyes from the sun. She approached, smiling, and offered me her hand.

�Iłm Sally Grant."

�Claire Booth."

�Youłre a bit early for the Event. It doesnłt start until
nine thirty."

�I"

�So if you want a meal at my place, youłd be welcome."

I hesitated. �Thatłs very kind of you."

�Ten dollars sound fair? Thatłs what Iłd charge if I opened
the cafeteriaonly there were no bookings tonight, so I wonłt be."

I nodded.

�Well, drop in around seven. Iłm number twenty-three."

�Thank you. Thank you very much."

I sat on a bench in the village square, shaded from the
sunset by the hall in front of me, listening to the cries from the basketball
court. I knew I should have told Ms Grant straight away what I was doing here;
shown her my ID, asked the questions I was permitted to ask, and left. _But
mightnłt I learn more by staying to watch the Event? Informally?_ Even a few
crude firsthand observations of the demographics of this unmodelled contact
between the villagers and the other local populations might be usefuland
though the carrier was obviously long gone, this was still a chance to get a
very rough profile of the kind of person I was looking for.

Uneasily, I came to a decision. There was no reason not to
stay for the partyand no need to make the villagers anxious and defensive by
telling them why I was here.

* * * *

From the inside, the Grantsł house looked more like a
spacious, modern apartment than a factory-built box which had been delivered on
the back of a truck to the middle of nowhere. Iłd been unconsciously expecting
the clutter of a mobile home, with too many mod-cons per cubic meter to leave
room to breathe, but Iłd misjudged the scale completely.

Sallyłs husband, Oliver, was an architect. She edited travel
guides by day; the cafeteria was a sideline. They were founding residents,
originally from Raleigh; there were still only a handful of later arrivals.
Herodotus, they explained, was self-sufficient in (vegetarian) staple foods,
but there were regular deliveries of all the imports any small town relied on.
They both made occasional trips to Greensboro, or interstate, but their routine
work was pure telecommuting.

�And when youłre not on holidays, Claire?"

�Iłm an administrator at Columbia."

�That must be fascinating." It certainly turned out to be a
good choice; my hosts changed the subject back to themselves immediately.

I asked Sally, �So what clinched the move for you? Raleighłs
not exactly the crime capital of the nation." I found it hard to believe that
the real estate prices could have driven them out, either.

She replied without hesitation, �Spiritual criteria, Claire."

I blinked.

Oliver laughed pleasantly. �Itłs all right, you havenłt come
to the wrong place!" He turned to his wife. �Did you see her face? Youłd think
shełd stumbled onto some enclave of _Mormons_ or _Baptists!_"

Sally explained, apologetically, �I meant the word in its
broadest sense, of course: an understanding that we need to _resensitize
ourselves_ to the _moral dimensions_ of the world around us."

That left me none the wiser, but she was clearly expecting a
sympathetic response. I said tentatively, �And you think ... living in a small
community like this makes your civic responsibilities clearer, more readily
apparent?"

Now Sally was bemused. �Well ... yes, I suppose it does. But
thatłs just politics, really, isnłt it? Not _spirituality_. I meant" She
raised her hands, and beamed at me. �I just _meant_, the reason youłre here,
yourself! We came to Herodotus to findfor a lifetimewhat youłve come here to
find for a few hours, yourself!"

* * * *

I heard the other cars begin to arrive while I sat drinking
coffee with Sally in the living room. Oliver had excused himself for an urgent
meeting with a construction manager in Tokyo. I passed the time with small-talk
about Alex and Laura, and my Worst Ever New York Experience horror storiessome
of which were true. It wasnłt a lack of curiosity that kept me from probing
Sally about the EventI was just afraid of alerting her to the fact that I had
no idea what Iłd let myself in for. When she left me for a minute, I scanned
the roomwithout rising from my chairfor any sign of what she might have _come
here to find for a lifetime_. All I had time to take in were a few CD covers,
the half-dozen visible ones on a large rotating rack. Most looked like modern
music/video, from bands Iłd never heard of. There was one familiar title,
though: James Springerłs _The Cyber Sutras_.

By the time the three of us crossed the square and
approached the village halla barn-like structure, resembling a very large cargo
containerI was quite tense. There were thirty or forty people in the square,
most but not all in their late teens or early twenties, dressed in the kind of
diverse mock-casual clothing that might have been seen outside any nightclub in
the country. _So what was I afraid was going to happen?_ Just because Ben
Walker couldnłt tell his father about it, and Mike Clayton couldnłt tell his
mother, didnłt mean Iłd wandered into some southern remake of _Twin Peaks_.
Maybe bored kids just snuck out to the villages to pop hallucinogens at dance
partiesmy own youth resurrected before my eyes, with safer drugs and better
light shows.

As we approached the hall, a small group of people filed in
through the self-opening doors, giving me a brief glimpse of bodies silhouetted
against swirling lights, and a blast of music. My anxiety began to seem absurd.
Sally and Oliver were into psychedelics, that was alland Herodotusłs founders
had apparently decided to create a congenial environment in which to use them.
I paid the sixty-dollar entry fee, smiling with relief.

Inside, the walls and ceiling were ablaze with convoluted patterns:
soft-edged multi-hued fractals pulsing with the music, like vast color-coded
simulations of turbulent fluids cascading down giant fret-boards at Mach 5. The
dancers cast no shadows; these were high-power wall-screens, not projections.
Stunning resolutionand astronomically expensive.

Sally pressed a fluorescent-pink capsule into my hand. Harmony
or Halcyon, maybe; I no longer knew what was fashionable. I tried to thank her,
and offer some excuse about �saving it for later"but she didnłt hear a word,
so we just smiled at each other meaninglessly. The hallłs sound insulation was
extraordinary (which was lucky for the other villagers); I would never have
guessed from outside that my brain was going to be pureed.

Sally and Oliver vanished into the crowd. I decided to hang
around for half an hour or so, then slip out and drive on to the motel. I stood
and watched the people dancing, trying to keep my head clear despite the
stupefying backdrops ... though I doubted that I could learn much about the
carrier that I didnłt already know. _Probably under 25. Probably not towing
small children._ Sally had given me all the details I needed to obtain
information on Events from here to Memphispast and future. The search was
still going to be difficult, but at least I was making progress.

A sudden loud cheer from the crowd broke through the music_and
the room was transformed before my eyes_. For a moment I was utterly
disorientatedand even when the world began to make visual sense again, it took
me a while to get the details straight.

The wall-screens now showed dancers in identical rooms to
the one I was standing in; only the ceiling continued to play the abstract
animation. These identical rooms all had wall-screens themselves, which also
showed identical rooms full of dancers ... much like the infinite regress
between a pair of mirrors.

And at first, I thought the �other rooms" were merely
realtime images of the Herodotus dance hall itself. But ... the swirling vortex
pattern on the ceiling joined seamlessly with the animation on the ceilings of �adjacent"
rooms, combining to form a single complex image; there was no repetition,
reflected or otherwise. And the crowds of dancers were _not_ identicalthough
they all looked sufficiently alike to make it hard to be sure, from a distance.
Belatedly, I turned around and examined the closest wall, just four or five
meters away. A young man �behind" the screen raised a hand in greeting, and I
returned the gesture automatically. We couldnłt quite make convincing eye
contactand wherever the cameras were placed, that would have been a lot to ask
forbut it was, still, almost possible to believe that nothing really separated
us but a thin wall of glass.

The man smiled dreamily and walked away.

I had goose bumps. This was nothing new in principle, but
the technology here had been pushed to its limits. The sense of being in an
infinite dance hall was utterly compelling; I could see no �furthest hall" in
any direction (and when they ran out of real ones, they could have easily
recycled them). The flatness of the images, the incorrect scaling as you moved,
the lack of parallax (worst of all when I tried to peer into the �corner rooms"
between the main four ... which �should" have been possible, but wasnłt) served
more to make the space beyond the walls appear exotically distorted than to
puncture the effect. The brain actually struggled to compensate, to cover up
the flawsand if Iłd swallowed Sallyłs capsule, I doubt I would have been
nit-picking. As it was, I was grinning like a child on a fairground ride.

I saw people dancing facing the walls, loosely forming
couples or groups across the link. I was mesmerized; I forgot all thoughts of
leaving. After a while, I bumped into Oliver, who was swaying happily by
himself. I screamed into his ear, �These are all other villages?" He nodded,
and shouted back, �East is east and west is west!" Meaning ... the virtual
layout followed real geographyit just abolished the intervening distances? I
recalled something James Springer had said in his _Terminal Chat Show_
interview: _We must invent a new cartography, to rechart the planet in its
newborn, Protean state. There is no separation, now. There are no borders._

Yeah ... and the world was just one giant party. Still, at
least they werenłt splicing in live connections to war zones. Iłd seen enough
we-dance/you-dodge-shells �solidarity" in the nineties to last a lifetime.

It suddenly occurred to me: _If the carrier really was
traveling from Event to Event ... then he or she was �here" with me. Right now.
My quarry had to be one of the dancers in this giant, imaginary hall_.

And this fact implied no opportunitylet alone any kind of
danger. It wasnłt as if Silver Fire carriers conveniently fluoresced in the
dark. But it still felt like the strangest moment of a long, strange night: to
understand that the two of us were finally �connected", to understand that Iłd �found"
the object of my search.

Even if it did me no good at all.

* * * *

Just after midnightas the novelty was wearing off, and I
was finally making up my mind to leavesome of the dancers began cheering
loudly again. This time it took me even longer to see why. People started
turning to face the east, and excitedly pointing something out to each other.

Weaving through one of the distant crowds of dancersin a
village three screens removedwere a number of human figures. They might have
been naked, some male some female, but it was hard to be sure: they could only
be seen in glimpses ... and they were shining so brightly that most details
were swamped in their sheer luminosity.

They glowed an intense silver-white. The light transformed
their immediate surroundingsthough the effect was more like a halo of luminous
gas, diffusing through the air, than a spotlight cast on the crowd. The dancers
around them seemed oblivious to their presenceas did those in the intervening
halls; only the people in Herodotus paid them the kind of attention their
spectacular appearance deserved. I couldnłt yet tell whether they were pure
animation, with plausible paths computed through gaps in the crowd, or
unremarkable (but real) actors, enhanced by software.

My mouth was dry. I couldnłt believe that the presence of
these silver figures could be pure coincidencebut what were they meant to
signify? Did the people of Herodotus know about the string of local outbreaks?
That wasnłt impossible; an independent analysis might have been circulated on
the net. Maybe this was meant as some kind of bizarre �tribute" to the victims.

I found Oliver again. The music had softened, as if in deference
to the vision, and he seemed to have come down a little; we managed to have
something approaching a conversation.

I pointed to the figureswho were now marching smoothly
straight through the image of the image of a wall-screen, proving themselves
entirely virtual.

He shouted, �Theyłre walking the trail of happiness!"

I mimed incomprehension.

�Healing the land for us! Making amends! Undoing the trail
of tears!"

_The trail of tears?_ I was lost for a while, then a memory
from high school surfaced abruptly. The �Trail of Tears" was the brutal forced
march of the Cherokee from what was now part of Georgia, all the way to
Oklahoma, in the 1830s. Thousands had died along the way; some had escaped, and
hidden in the Appalachians. Herodotus, I was fairly sure, was hundreds of
kilometers from the historical route of the marchbut that didnłt seem to be
the point. As the silver figures moved across the dance floor twice-removed, I
could see them spreading their arms wide, as if performing some kind of
benediction.

I shouted, �But what does _Silver Fire_ have to do with?"

�Their bodies are frozenso their spirits are free to walk
the Trail of Happiness through cyberspace for us! Didnłt you know? Thatłs what
Silver Fire is _for!_ To renew everything! To bring happiness to the land! _To
make amends!_" Oliver beamed at me with absolute sincerity, radiating pure good
will.

I stared at him in disbelief. This man, clearly, hated no
one ... but what hełd just spewed out was nothing but a New Age remix of the
rantings of that radio evangelist, twenty years before, whołd seized upon AIDS
as the incontrovertible proof of his own _spiritual beliefs_.

I shouted angrily, �Silver Fire is a merciless, agonizing"

Oliver tipped his head back and laughed, uproariously,
without a trace of maliceas if I was the one telling ghost stories.

I turned and walked away.

The trail-walkers split into two streams as they crossed the
hall immediately to the east of us. Half went north, half went south, as they �detoured
around" Herodotus. They couldnłt move among usbut this way, the illusion
remained almost seamless.

_And if Iłd been drugged out of my skull? If Iłd embraced
the whole mythology of the Trail of Happinessand come here hoping to see it
confirmed?_ In the morning, would I have half-believed that the roaming spirits
of Silver Fire patients had marched right past me?

Bestowing their luminous blessing on the crowd.

Near enough to touch.

* * * *

I threaded my way toward the camouflaged exit. Outside, the
cool air and the silence were surreal; I felt more disembodied and dreamlike
than ever. I staggered toward the car park, and waved my notepad to make the
hire car flash its lights.

My head cleared as I approached the highway. I decided to
drive on through the night; I was so agitated that I didnłt think I had much
chance of sleeping. I could find a motel in the morning, shower, and catch a
nap before my next appointment.

I still didnłt know what to make of the Eventwhat solid
link there could be between the carrier and the villagersł mad syncretic
cyberbabble. If it was nothing but coincidence, the irony was grotesquebut
what was the alternative? _Some �pilgrim" on the Trail of Happiness,
deliberately spreading the virus?_ The idea was ludicrousand not just because
it was unthinkably obscene. A carrier could only _know_ that he or she had been
infected if distinctive symptoms had appeared ... but _distinctive symptoms_
only marked the brutal end stage of the disease; a prolonged mild infectionif
such a thing existedwould be indistinguishable from influenza. Once Silver
Fire progressed far enough to affect the visible layers of the skin, the only options
for cross-country travel all involved flashing lights and sirens.

* * * *

At about half past three in the morning, I switched on my
notepad. I wasnłt exactly drowsy, but I wanted something to keep me alert.

Ariadne had plenty.

First, a heated debate on _The Reality Studio_a program on
the Intercampus Ideas Network. A freelance zoologist from Seattle named Andrew
Feld spoke firstputting the case that Silver Fire �proved beyond doubt" his �controversial
and paradigm-subverting" S-force theory of life, which �combined the transgressive
genius of Einstein and Sheldrake with the insights of the Maya and the latest
developments in superstrings, to create a new, life-affirming biology to take
the place of soulless, mechanistic Western science."

In reply, virologist Margaret Ortega from UCLA explained in
detail why Feldłs ideas were superfluous, failed to account foror clashed
directly withnumerous observed biological phenomena ... and were neither more
nor less �mechanistic" than any other theory which didnłt leave everything in
the universe to the whim of God. She also ventured the opinion that most people
were capable of _affirming life_ without casually discarding all of human
knowledge in the process.

Feld was a clueless idiot on a wish-fulfillment trip. Ortega
wiped the floor with him.

But when the nationwide audience of students voted, he was
declared winner by a majority of two to one.

Next item: Protesters were blockading the Medical Research
Laboratories of the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg, calling for an end to
Silver Fire research. Safety was not the issue. Protest organizer and �acclaimed
cultural agitator" Kid Ransom had held an impromptu press conference:

�We must reclaim Silver Fire from the gray, small-minded
scientists, and learn to tap its wellspring of mythical power for the benefit
of all humanity! These technocrats who seek to _explain_ everything are like
vandals rampaging through a gallery, scrawling equations on all the beautiful
works of art!"

�But how will humanity ever find a cure for this disease,
without research?"

�There is no such thing as disease! There is only transformation!"

There were four more news stories, all concerning (mutually
exclusive) proclamations about the �secret truth" (or secret ineffability)
behind Silver Fireand maybe each one, alone, would have seemed no more than a
sad, sick joke. But as the countryside materialized around methe purple-gray
ridge of the Black Mountains to the north starkly beautiful in the dawnI was
slowly beginning to understand. _This was not my world anymore_. Not in Herodotus,
not in Seattle, not in Hamburg or Montreal or London. Not even in New York.

In my world, there were no nymphs in trees and streams. No
gods, no ghosts, no ancestral spirits. _Nothing_outside our own cultures, our
own laws, our own passionsexisted in order to punish us or comfort us, to
affirm any act of hatred or love.

My own parents had understood this, perfectlybut theirs had
been the first generation, ever, to be so free of the shackles of superstition.
And after the briefest flowering of understanding, my own generation had grown
complacent. At some level, we must have started taking it for granted that _the
way the universe worked_ was now obvious to any child ... even though it went
against everything innate to the species: the wild, undisciplined love of
patterns, the craving to extract meaning and comfort from everything in sight.

We thought we were passing on everything that mattered to
our children: science, history, literature, art. Vast libraries of information
lay at their fingertips. But we hadnłt fought hard enough to pass on the
hardest-won truth of all: _Morality comes only from within. Meaning comes only
from within. Outside our own skulls, the universe is indifferent._

Maybe, in the West, wełd delivered the death blows to the
old doctrinal religions, the old monoliths of delusion ... but that victory
meant nothing at all.

Because taking their place now, everywhere, was the saccharine
poison of _spirituality_.

* * * *

I checked into a motel in Asheville. The parking lot was
full of campervans, people heading for the national parks; I was lucky, I got
the last room.

My notepad chimed while I was in the shower. An analysis of
the latest data reported to the Centers for Disease Control showed the �anomaly"
extending almost two hundred kilometers further west along the I-40about
half-way to Nashville. _Five more people on the Trail of Happiness._ I sat and
stared at the map for a whilethen I dressed, packed my bag again, and checked
out.

I made ten calls as I was driving up into the mountains,
canceling all my appointments with relatives from Asheville to Jefferson City,
Tennessee. The time had passed for being cautious and methodical, for gathering
every last scrap of data along the way. I _knew_ the transmission had to be
taking place at the Eventsthe only question was whether it was accidental or
deliberate.

_Deliberate how? With a vial full of fibroblasts, teeming
with Silver Fire?_ It had taken researchers at the NIH over a year to learn how
to culture the virusand theyłd only succeeded in March. I couldnłt believe
that their work had been replicated by amateurs in less than three months.

The highway plunged between the lavish wooded slopes of the
Great Smoky Mountains, following the Pigeon River most of the way. I programmed
a predictive modelby voiceas I drove. I had a calendar for the Events, now,
and I had five approximate dates of infection. Case notifications would always
be too late; the only way to catch up was to extrapolate. And I could only
assume that the carrier would continue moving steadily westwards, never
lingering, always traveling on to the next Event.

I reached Knoxville around midday, stopped for lunch, then
drove straight on.

The model said: _Pliny, Saturday Jan 14, 9.30 pm._ My first
chance to search the infinite dance hall for the carrier, without an impassable
wall between us.

My first chance to be in the presence of Silver Fire.

* * * *

I arrived earlybut not so early as to attract the attention
of Plinyłs equivalents of Sally and Oliver. I stayed in the car for an hour,
improvising ways to look busy, recording the license numbers of arriving
vehicles. There were a lot of four-wheel drives and utilities, and a few
campervans. Many villagers favored bicyclesbut the carrier would have to have
been a real fanaticand extremely fitto have cycled all the way from
Greensboro.

The Event followed much the same pattern as the one in Herodotus
the night beforethough Herodotus itself wasnłt taking part. The crowd was
similar, too: mostly young, but with enough exceptions to keep me from looking
completely out of place. I wandered around, trying to commit every face to
memory without attracting too much attention. _Had all these people swallowed
the Silver Fire myth, as Iłd heard it from Oliver?_ The possibility was almost
too bleak to contemplate. The only thing that gave me any hope was that when Iłd
compared the number of villages listed on the Event calendar with the number in
the region, it was less than one in twenty. The microvillage movement itself
had nothing to do with this insanity.

Someone offered me a pink capsulenot for free, this time. I
gave her twenty dollars, and pocketed the drug for analysis. There was a
slender chance that someone was passing out doctored capsulesalthough stomach
acid tended to make short work of the virus.

A handsome blond kidbarely in his twentieshovered around
me for a while as the trail-walkers appeared. When theyłd vanished into the
west, he approached me, took my elbow, and made an offer I couldnłt quite hear
over the musicthough I thought I got the gist of it. I was too distracted to
feel amazed or flatteredlet alone temptedand I got rid of him in five seconds
flat. He walked away looking woundedbut not long afterward, I saw him leaving
with a woman half my age.

I stayed to the very endand on Saturday nights, that meant
five in the morning. I staggered out into the light, discouraged, although I
didnłt know what Iłd seriously hoped to see. _Someone walking around with an
aerosol spray, administering doses of Silver Fire?_ When I reached the car park
I realized that many of the cars had arrived after Iłd gone inand some might
have come and gone unseen. I recorded the license plates Iłd missed, trying to
be discreet, but almost past caring; I hadnłt slept for thirty-six hours.

* * * *

The nearest Event west of Pliny, on Sunday night, was past
the Mississippi and half-way across Arkansas; I made a calculated guess that
the carrier would take this as an opportunity for a night off.

Monday evening, I drove into Eudoxuspopulation 165, established
2002, about an hour from Nashvilleready to spend all night in the car park if
I had to. I needed to record every license plate, or there wasnłt much point
being here.

I hadnłt told Brecht what I was doing; I still had no solid
evidence, and I was afraid of sounding paranoid. Iłd called Alex before leaving
Nashville, but I hadnłt told him much, either. Laura had declined to speak to
me when hełd called out and told her I was on the line, but that was nothing
new. I missed them both already, more than Iłd anticipatedbut I wasnłt sure
how Iłd manage when I finally made it home, to a daughter who was turning away
from reason, and a husband who took it for granted that any bright adolescent
would recapitulate five thousand years of intellectual progress in six months.

Thirty-five vehicles arrived between ten and elevennone Iłd
seen beforeand then the flow tapered off abruptly. I scanned the entertainment
channels on my notepad, satisfied by anything with color and movement; Iłd had
enough of Ariadnełs bad news.

Just before midnight, a blue Ford campervan rolled up and
parked in the corner opposite me. A young man and a young woman got out; they
seemed excited, but a little waryas if they couldnłt quite believe that their
parents werenłt watching from the shadows.

As they crossed the car park, I realized that the guy was
the blond kid whołd spoken to me in Pliny.

I waited five minutes, then went and checked their license
plate; it was a Massachusetts registration. I hadnłt recorded it on Saturday
night, so I would have missed the fact that they were following the Trail, if
one of them hadnłt

_Hadnłt what?_

I stood there frozen behind the van, trying to stay calm,
replaying the incident in my mind. I knew I hadnłt let him paw me for long_but
how long would it have taken?_

I glanced up at the disinterested stars, trying to savor the
irony because it tasted much better than the fear. Iłd always known therełd be
a riskand the odds were still heavily in my favor. I could put myself into
quarantine in Nashville in the morning; nothing I did right now would make the
slightest difference

But I wasnłt thinking straight. If theyłd _traveled
together_ all the way from Massachusettsor even from Greensboroone should
have infected the other long ago. The probability of the two of them sharing
the same freakish resistance to the virus was negligible, even if they were
brother and sister.

They couldnłt both be unwitting, asymptomatic carriers. So either
they had nothing to do with the outbreaks

_or they were transporting the virus outside their bodies,
and handling it with great care_.

A bumper sticker boasted: STATE-OF-THE-ART SECURITY! I
placed a hand against the rear door experimentally; the van didnłt emit so much
as a warning beep. I tried shaking the handle aggressively; still nothing. If
the system was calling a security firm in Nashville for an armed response, I
had all the time I needed. If it was trying to call its owners, it wouldnłt
have much luck getting a signal through the aluminum frame of the village hall.

There was no one in sight. I went back to my car, and
fetched the toolkit.

I knew I had no legal right. There were emergency powers I
could have invokedbut I had no intention of calling Maryland and spending half
the night fighting my way through the correct procedures. And I knew I was
putting the prosecution case at risk, by tainting everything with illegal
search and seizure.

I didnłt care. They werenłt going to have the chance to send
one more person down the Trail of Happiness, even if I had to burn the van to
the ground.

I levered a small, tinted fixed window out of its rubber
frame in the door. Still no wailing siren. I reached in, groped around, and
unlocked the door.

Iłd thought they must have been half-educated biochemists,
whołd learned enough cytology to duplicate the published fibroblast culturing
techniques.

I was wrong. They were medical students, and theyłd
half-learned other skills entirely.

They had their friend cushioned in polymer gel, contained in
something like a huge tropical fish tank. They had oxygen set up, a urethral
catheter, and half a dozen drips. I played my torch beam over the inverted
bottles, checking the various drugs and their concentrations. I went through
them all twice, hoping Iłd missed onebut I hadnłt.

I shone the beam down onto the girlłs skinless white face,
peering through the delicate streamers of red rising up through the gel. She
was in an opiate haze deep enough to keep her motionless and silentbut she was
still conscious. Her mouth was frozen in a rictus of pain.

And shełd been like this for sixteen days.

I staggered back out of the van, my heart pounding, my
vision going black. I collided with the blond kid; the girl was with him, and
they had another couple in tow.

I turned on him and started punching him, screaming incoherently;
I donłt remember what I said. He put up his hands to shield his face, and the
others came to his aid: pinning me gently against the van, holding me still
without striking a single blow.

I was crying now. The campervan girl said, �Sssh. Itłs all
right. No onełs going to hurt you."

I pleaded with her. �Donłt you understand? Shełs in pain!
_All this time, shełs been in pain!_ What did you think she was doing?
_Smiling?_"

�Of course shełs smiling. This is what she always wanted.
She made us promise that if she ever caught Silver Fire, shełd walk the Trail."

I rested my head against the cool metal, closed my eyes for
a moment, and tried to think of a way to get through to them.

But I didnłt know how.

When I opened my eyes, the boy was standing in front of me.
He had the most gentle, compassionate face imaginable. He wasnłt a torturer, or
a bigot, or even a fool. Hełd just swallowed some beautiful lies.

He said, �Donłt you understand? All _you_ see in there is a
woman dying in pain_but we all have to learn to see more_. The time has come
to regain the lost skills of our ancestors: the power to see visions, demons
and angels. The power to see the spirits of the wind and the rain. The power to
walk the Trail of Happiness."

Singleton

I was walking north along George Street towards Town Hall
railway station, pondering the ways I might solve the tricky third question of
my linear algebra assignment, when I encountered a small crowd blocking the
footpath. I didnłt give much thought to the reason they were standing there; Iłd
just passed a busy restaurant, and I often saw groups of people gathered
outside. But once Iłd started to make my way around them, moving into an alley
rather than stepping out into the traffic, it became apparent that they were
not just diners from a farewell lunch for a retiring colleague, putting off
their return to the office for as long as possible. I could see for myself
exactly what was holding their attention.

Twenty metres down the alley, a man was lying on his back on
the ground, shielding his bloodied face with his hands, while two men stood
over him, relentlessly swinging narrow sticks of some kind. At first I thought
the sticks were pool cues, but then I noticed the metal hooks on the ends. Iłd
only ever seen these obscure weapons before in one other place: my primary
school, where an appointed window monitor would use them at the start and end
of each day. They were meant for opening and closing an old-fashioned kind of
hinged pane when it was too high to reach with your hands.

I turned to the other spectators. �Has anyone called the police?"
A woman nodded without looking at me, and said, �Someone used their mobile, a
couple of minutes ago."

The assailants must have realised that the police were on
their way, but it seemed they were too committed to their task to abandon it
until that was absolutely necessary. They were facing away from the crowd, so
perhaps they werenłt entirely reckless not to fear identification. The man on
the ground was dressed like a kitchen hand. He was still moving, trying to
protect himself, but he was making less noise than his attackers; the need, or
the ability, to cry out in pain had been beaten right out of him.

As for calling for help, he could have saved his breath.

A chill passed through my body, a sick cold churning
sensation that came a moment before the conscious realisation: Iłm going to
watch someone murdered, and Iłm going to do nothing. But this wasnłt a drunken
brawl, where a few bystanders could step in and separate the combatants; the
two assailants had to be serious criminals, settling a score. Keeping your
distance from something like that was just common sense. Iłd go to court, Iłd
be a witness, but no one could expect anything more of me. Not when thirty
other people had behaved in exactly the same way.

The men in the alley did not have guns. If theyłd had guns,
they would have used them by now. They werenłt going to mow down anyone who got
in their way. It was one thing not to make a martyr of yourself, but how many
people could these two grunting slobs fend off with sticks?

I unstrapped my backpack and put it on the ground. Absurdly,
that made me feel more vulnerable; I was always worried about losing my
textbooks. Think about this. You donłt know what youłre doing. I hadnłt been in
so much as a fist fight since I was thirteen. I glanced at the strangers around
me, wondering if anyone would join in if I implored them to rush forward
together. But that wasnłt going to happen. I was a willowy, unimposing
eighteen-year-old, wearing a T-shirt adorned with Maxwellłs Equations. I had no
presence, no authority. No one would follow me into the fray.

Alone, Iłd be as helpless as the guy on the ground. These
men would crack my skull open in an instant. There were half a dozen
solid-looking office workers in their twenties in the crowd; if these weekend
rugby players hadnłt felt competent to intervene, what chance did I have?

I reached down for my backpack. If I wasnłt going to help,
there was no point being here at all. Iłd find out what had happened on the
evening news.

I started to retrace my steps, sick with self-loathing. This
wasnłt kristallnacht. Therełd be no embarrassing questions from my
grandchildren. No one would ever reproach me.

As if that were the measure of everything.

�Fuck it." I dropped my backpack and ran down the alley.

I was close enough to smell the three sweating bodies over
the stench of rotting garbage before I was even noticed. The nearest of the
attackers glanced over his shoulder, affronted, then amused. He didnłt bother
redeploying his weapon in mid-stroke; as I hooked an arm around his neck in the
hope of overbalancing him, he thrust his elbow into my chest, winding me. I
clung on desperately, maintaining the hold even though I couldnłt tighten it.
As he tried to prise himself loose, I managed to kick his feet out from under
him. We both went down onto the asphalt; I ended up beneath him.

The man untangled himself and clambered to his feet. As I
struggled to right myself, picturing a metal hook swinging into my face,
someone whistled. I looked up to see the second man gesturing to his companion,
and I followed his gaze. A dozen men and women were coming down the alley,
advancing together at a brisk walk. It was not a particularly menacing sightIłd
seen angrier crowds with peace signs painted on their facesbut the sheer
numbers were enough to guarantee some inconvenience. The first man hung back
long enough to kick me in the ribs. Then the two of them fled.

I brought my knees up, then raised my head and got into a
crouch. I was still winded, but for some reason it seemed vital not to remain
flat on my back. One of the office workers grinned down at me. �You fuckwit.
You could have got killed."

The kitchen hand shuddered, and snorted bloody mucus. His
eyes were swollen shut, and when he lay his hands down beside him, I could see
the bones of his knuckles through the torn skin. My own skin turned icy, at
this vision of the fate Iłd courted for myself. But if it was a shock to
realise how I might have ended up, it was just as sobering to think that Iłd
almost walked away and let them finish him off, when the intervention had
actually cost me nothing.

I rose to my feet. People milled around the kitchen hand, asking
each other about first aid. I remembered the basics from a course Iłd done in
high school, but the man was still breathing, and he wasnłt losing vast amounts
of blood, so I couldnłt think of anything helpful that an amateur could do in
the circumstances. I squeezed my way out of the gathering and walked back to
the street. My backpack was exactly where Iłd left it; no one had stolen my
books. I heard sirens approaching; the police and the ambulance would be there
soon.

My ribs were tender, but I wasnłt in agony. Iłd cracked a
rib falling off a trail bike on the farm when I was twelve, and I was fairly
sure that this was just bruising. For a while I walked bent over, but by the
time I reached the station I found I could adopt a normal gait. I had some
grazed skin on my arms, but I couldnłt have appeared too battered, because no
one on the train looked at me twice.

That night, I watched the news. The kitchen hand was described
as being in a stable condition. I pictured him stepping out into the alley to
empty a bucket of fish-heads into the garbage, to find the two of them waiting
for him. Iłd probably never learn what the attack had been about unless the
case went to trial, and as yet the police hadnłt even named any suspects. If
the man had been in a fit state to talk in the alley, I might have asked him
then, but any sense that I was entitled to an explanation was rapidly fading.

The reporter mentioned a student �leading the charge of
angry citizens" whołd rescued the kitchen hand, and then she spoke to an eye
witness, who described this young man as �a New Ager, wearing some kind of
astrological symbols on his shirt." I snorted, then looked around nervously in
case one of my housemates had made the improbable connection, but no one else
was even in earshot.

Then the story was over.

I felt flat for a moment, cheated of the minor rush that
fifteen secondsł fame might have delivered; it was like reaching into a biscuit
tin when you thought there was one more chocolate chip left, to find that there
actually wasnłt. I considered phoning my parents in Orange, just to talk to
them from within the strange afterglow, but Iłd established a routine and it
was not the right day. If I called unexpectedly, theyłd think something was
wrong.

So, that was it. In a weekłs time, when the bruises had
faded, Iłd look back and doubt that the incident had ever happened.

I went upstairs to finish my assignment.

Francine said, �Therełs a nicer way to think about this. If
you do a change of variables, from x and y to z and z-conjugate, the
Cauchy-Riemann equations correspond to the condition that the partial
derivative of the function with respect to z-conjugate is equal to zero."

We were sitting in the coffee shop, discussing the complex
analysis lecture wełd had half an hour before. Half a dozen of us from the same
course had got into the habit of meeting at this time every week, but today the
others had failed to turn up. Maybe there was a movie being screened, or a
speaker appearing on campus that I hadnłt heard about.

I worked through the transformation shełd described. �Youłre
right," I said. �Thatłs really elegant!"

Francine nodded slightly in assent, while retaining her
characteristic jaded look. She had an undisguisable passion for mathematics,
but she was probably bored out of her skull in class, waiting for the lecturers
to catch up and teach her something she didnłt already know.

I was nowhere near her level. In fact, Iłd started the year
poorly, distracted by my new surroundings: nothing so glamorous as the
temptations of the night life, just the different sights and sounds and scale
of the place, along with the bureaucratic demands of all the organisations that
now impinged upon my life, from the university itself down to the shared house
groceries subcommittee. In the last few weeks, though, Iłd finally started
hitting my stride. Iłd got a part-time job, stacking shelves in a supermarket;
the pay was lousy, but it was enough to take the edge off my financial anxieties,
and the hours werenłt so long that they left me with no time for anything but
study.

I doodled harmonic contours on the notepaper in front of me.
�So what do you do for fun?" I said. �Apart from complex analysis?"

Francine didnłt reply immediately. This wasnłt the first
time wełd been alone together, but Iłd never felt confident that I had the
right words to make the most of the situation. At some point, though, Iłd
stopped fooling myself that there was ever going to be a perfect moment, with
the perfect phrase falling from my lips: something subtle but intriguing slipped
deftly into the conversation, without disrupting the flow. So now Iłd made my
interest plain, with no attempt at artfulness or eloquence. She could judge me
as she knew me from the last three months, and if she felt no desire to know me
better, I would not be crushed.

�I write a lot of Perl scripts," she said. �Nothing
complicated; just odds and ends that I give away as freeware. Itłs very
relaxing."

I nodded understandingly. I didnłt think she was being deliberately
discouraging; she just expected me to be slightly more direct.

�Do you like Deborah Conway?" Iłd only heard a couple of her
songs on the radio myself, but a few days before Iłd seen a poster in the city
announcing a tour.

�Yeah. Shełs great."

I started thickening the conjugation bars over the variables
Iłd scrawled. �Shełs playing at a club in Surry Hills," I said. �On Friday.
Would you like to go?"

Francine smiled, making no effort now to appear world-weary.
�Sure. That would be nice."

I smiled back. I wasnłt giddy, I wasnłt moonstruck, but I
felt as if I was standing on the shore of an ocean, contemplating its breadth.
I felt the way I felt when I opened a sophisticated monograph in the library,
and was reduced to savouring the scent of the print and the crisp symmetry of
the notation, understanding only a fraction of what I read. Knowing there was
something glorious ahead, but knowing too what a daunting task it would be to
come to terms with it.

I said, �Iłll get the tickets on my way home."

To celebrate the end of exams for the year, the household
threw a party. It was a sultry November night, but the back yard wasnłt much
bigger than the largest room in the house, so we ended up opening all the doors
and windows and distributing food and furniture throughout the ground floor and
the exterior, front and back. Once the faint humid breeze off the river
penetrated the depths of the house, it was equally sweltering and
mosquito-ridden everywhere, indoors and out.

Francine and I stayed close for an hour or so, obeying the
distinctive dynamics of a couple, until by some unspoken mutual understanding
it became clear that we could wander apart for a while, and that neither of us
was so insecure that wełd resent it.

I ended up in a corner of the crowded back yard, talking to
Will, a biochemistry student whołd lived in the house for the last four years.
On some level, he probably couldnłt help feeling that his opinions about the
way things were run should carry more weight than anyone elsełs, which had
annoyed me greatly when Iłd first moved in. Wełd since become friends, though,
and I was glad to have a chance to talk to him before he left to take up a
scholarship in Germany.

In the middle of a conversation about the work hełd be
doing, I caught sight of Francine, and he followed my gaze.

Will said, �It took me a while to figure out what finally
cured you of your homesickness."

�I was never homesick."

�Yeah, right." He took a swig of his drink. �Shełs changed
you, though. You have to admit that."

�I do. Happily. Everythingłs clicked, since we got together."
Relationships were meant to screw up your studies, but my marks were soaring.
Francine didnłt tutor me; she just drew me into a state of mind where
everything was clearer.

�The amazing thing is that you got together at all." I
scowled, and Will raised a hand placatingly. �I just meant, when you first
moved in, you were pretty reserved. And down on yourself. When we interviewed
you for the room, you practically begged us to give it to someone more
deserving."

�Now youłre taking the piss."

He shook his head. �Ask any of the others."

I fell silent. The truth was, if I took a step back and
contemplated my situation, I was as astonished as he was. By the time Iłd left
my home town, it had become clear to me that good fortune had nothing much to
do with luck. Some people were born with wealth, or talent, or charisma. They
started with an edge, and the benefits snowballed. Iłd always believed that I
had, at best, just enough intelligence and persistence to stay afloat in my
chosen field; Iłd topped every class in high school, but in a town the size of
Orange that meant nothing, and Iłd had no illusions about my fate in Sydney.

I owed it to Francine that my visions of mediocrity had not
been fulfilled; being with her had transformed my life. But where had I found
the nerve to imagine that I had anything to offer her in return?

�Something happened," I admitted. �Before I asked her out."

�Yeah?"

I almost clammed up; I hadnłt told anyone about the events
in the alley, not even Francine. The incident had come to seem too personal, as
if to recount it at all would be to lay my conscience bare. But Will was off to
Munich in less than a week, and it was easier to confide in someone I didnłt
expect to see again.

When I finished, Will bore a satisfied grin, as if Iłd explained
everything. �Pure karma," he announced. �I should have guessed."

�Oh, very scientific."

�Iłm serious. Forget the Buddhist mystobabble; Iłm talking
about the real thing. If you stick to your principles, of course things go
better for youassuming you donłt get killed in the process. Thatłs elementary
psychology. People have a highly developed sense of reciprocity, of the
appropriateness of the treatment they receive from each other. If things work
out too well for them, they canłt help asking, ęWhat did I do to deserve this?ł
If you donłt have a good answer, youłll sabotage yourself. Not all the time,
but often enough. So if you do something that improves your self-esteem"

�Self-esteem is for the weak," I quipped. Will rolled his
eyes. �I donłt think like that," I protested.

�No? Why did you even bring it up, then?"

I shrugged. �Maybe it just made me less pessimistic. I could
have had the crap beaten out of me, but I didnłt. That makes asking someone to
a concert seem a lot less dangerous." I was beginning to cringe at all this
unwanted analysis, and I had nothing to counter Willłs pop psychology except an
equally folksy version of my own.

He could see I was embarrassed, so he let the matter drop.
As I watched Francine moving through the crowd, though, I couldnłt shake off an
unsettling sense of the tenuousness of the circumstances that had brought us
together. There was no denying that if Iłd walked away from the alley, and the
kitchen hand had died, I would have felt like shit for a long time afterwards.
I would not have felt entitled to much out of my own life.

I hadnłt walked away, though. And even if the decision had
come down to the wire, why shouldnłt I be proud that Iłd made the right choice?
That didnłt mean everything that followed was tainted, like a reward from some
sleazy, palm-greasing deity. I hadnłt won Francinełs affection in a medieval
test of bravery; wełd chosen each other, and persisted with that choice, for a
thousand complicated reasons.

We were together now; that was what mattered. I wasnłt going
to dwell on the path that had brought me to her, just to dredge up all the
doubts and insecurities that had almost kept us apart.

2012

As we drove the last kilometre along the road south from Ar
Rafidiyah, I could see the Wall of Foam glistening ahead of us in the morning
sunlight. Insubstantial as a pile of soap bubbles, but still intact, after six
weeks.

�I canłt believe itłs lasted this long," I told Sadiq.

�You didnłt trust the models?"

�Fuck, no. Every week, I thought wełd come over the hill and
therełd be nothing but a shrivelled-up cobweb."

Sadiq smiled. �So you had no faith in my calculations?"

�Donłt take it personally. There were a lot of things we
could have both got wrong."

Sadiq pulled off the road. His students, Hassan and Rashid,
had climbed off the back of the truck and started towards the Wall before Iłd
even got my face mask on. Sadiq called them back, and made them put on plastic
boots and paper suits over their clothes, while the two of us did the same. We
didnłt usually bother with this much protection, but today was different.

Close up, the Wall almost vanished: all you noticed were isolated,
rainbow-fringed reflections, drifting at a leisurely pace across the otherwise
invisible film as water redistributed itself, following waves induced in the
membrane by the interplay of air pressure, thermal gradients, and surface
tension. These images might easily have been separate objects, scraps of
translucent plastic blowing around above the desert, held aloft by a breeze too
faint to detect at ground level.

The further away you looked, though, the more crowded the
hints of light became, and the less plausible any alternative hypothesis that
denied the Wall its integrity. It stretched for a kilometre along the edge of
the desert, and rose an uneven fifteen to twenty metres into the air. But it
was merely the first, and smallest, of its kind, and the time had come to put
it on the back of the truck and drive it all the way back to Basra.

Sadiq took a spray can of reagent from the cabin, and shook
it as he walked down the embankment. I followed him, my heart in my mouth. The
Wall had not dried out; it had not been torn apart or blown away, but there was
still plenty of room for failure.

Sadiq reached up and sprayed what appeared from my vantage
to be thin air, but I could see the fine mist of droplets strike the membrane.
A breathy susurration rose up, like the sound from a steam iron, and I felt a
faint warm dampness before the first silken threads appeared, crisscrossing the
region where the polymer from which the Wall was built had begun to shift
conformations. In one state, the polymer was soluble, exposing hydrophilic
groups of atoms that bound water into narrow sheets of feather-light gel. Now,
triggered by the reagent and powered by sunlight, it was tucking these groups
into slick, oily cages, and expelling every molecule of water, transforming the
gel into a desiccated web.

I just hoped it wasnłt expelling anything else.

As the lacy net began to fall in folds at his feet, Hassan
said something in Arabic, disgusted and amused. My grasp of the language
remained patchy; Sadiq translated for me, his voice muffled by his face mask: �He
says probably most of the weight of the thing will be dead insects." He shooed
the youths back towards the truck before following himself, as the wind blew a
glistening curtain over our heads. It descended far too slowly to trap us, but
I hastened up the slope.

We watched from the truck as the Wall came down, the wave of
dehydration propagating along its length. If the gel had been an elusive sight
close up, the residue was entirely invisible in the distance; there was less
substance to it than a very long pantyhosealbeit, pantyhose clogged with
gnats.

The smart polymer was the invention of Sonja Helvig, a Norwegian
chemist; Iłd tweaked her original design for this application. Sadiq and his
students were civil engineers, responsible for scaling everything up to the
point where it could have a practical benefit. On those terms, this experiment
was still nothing but a minor field trial.

I turned to Sadiq. �You did some mine clearance once, didnłt
you?"

�Years ago." Before I could say anything more, hełd caught
my drift. �Youłre thinking that might have been more satisfying? Bang, and itłs
gone, the proof is there in front of you?"

�One less mine, one less bomblet," I said. �However many
thousands there were to deal with, at least you could tick each one off as a
definite achievement."

�Thatłs true. It was a good feeling." He shrugged. �But what
should we do? Give up on this, because itłs harder?"

He took the truck down the slope, then supervised the
students as they attached the wisps of polymer to the specialised winch theyłd
built. Hassan and Rashid were in their twenties, but they could easily have
passed for adolescents. After the war, the dictator and his former backers in
the west had found it mutually expedient to have a generation of Iraqi children
grow up malnourished and without medical care, if they grew up at all. More
than a million people had died under the sanctions. My own sick joke of a
nation had sent part of its navy to join the blockade, while the rest stayed
home to fend off boatloads of refugees from this, and other, atrocities.
General Moustache was long dead, but his comrades-in-genocide with more
salubrious addresses were all still at large: doing lecture tours, running
think tanks, lobbying for the Nobel peace prize.

As the strands of polymer wound around a core inside the
winchłs protective barrel, the alpha count rose steadily. It was a good sign:
the fine particles of uranium oxide trapped by the Wall had remained bound to
the polymer during dehydration, and the reeling in of the net. The radiation
from the few grams of U-238 wełd collected was far too low to be a hazard in
itself; the thing to avoid was ingesting the dust, and even then the unpleasant
effects were as much chemical as radiological. Hopefully, the polymer had also
bound its other targets: the organic carcinogens that had been strewn across
Kuwait and southern Iraq by the apocalyptic oil well fires. There was no way to
determine that until we did a full chemical analysis.

We were all in high spirits on the ride back. What wełd
plucked from the wind in the last six weeks wouldnłt spare a single person from
leukaemia, but it now seemed possible that over the years, over the decades,
the technology would make a real difference.

I missed the connection in Singapore for a direct flight
home to Sydney, so I had to go via Perth. There was a four-hour wait in Perth;
I paced the transit lounge, restless and impatient. I hadnłt set eyes on
Francine since shełd left Basra three months earlier; she didnłt approve of
clogging up the limited bandwidth into Iraq with decadent video. When Iłd
called her from Singapore shełd been busy, and now I couldnłt decide whether or
not to try again.

Just when Iłd resolved to call her, an email came through on
my notepad, saying that shełd received my message and would meet me at the
airport.

In Sydney, I stood by the baggage carousel, searching the
crowd. When I finally saw Francine approaching, she was looking straight at me,
smiling. I left the carousel and walked towards her; she stopped and let me
close the gap, keeping her eyes fixed on mine. There was a mischievousness to
her expression, as if shełd arranged some kind of prank, but I couldnłt guess
what it might be.

When I was almost in front of her, she turned slightly, and
spread her arms. �Ta-da!"

I froze, speechless. Why hadnłt she told me?

I walked up to her and embraced her, but shełd read my expression.
�Donłt be angry, Ben. I was afraid youłd come home early if you knew."

�Youłre right, I would have." My thoughts were piling up on
top of each other; I had three monthsł worth of reactions to get through in
fifteen seconds. We hadnłt planned this. We couldnłt afford it. I wasnłt ready.

Suddenly I started weeping, too shocked to be self-conscious
in the crowd. The knot of panic and confusion inside me dissolved. I held her
more tightly, and felt the swelling in her body against my hip.

�Are you happy?" Francine asked.

I laughed and nodded, choking out the words: �This is wonderful!"

I meant it. I was still afraid, but it was an exuberant
fear. Another ocean had opened up before us. We would find our bearings. We
would cross it together.

It took me several days to come down to Earth. We didnłt
have a real chance to talk until the weekend; Francine had a teaching position
at UNSW, and though she could have set her own research aside for a couple of
days, marking could wait for no one. There were a thousand things to plan; the
six-month UNESCO fellowship that had paid for me to take part in the project in
Basra had expired, and Iłd need to start earning money again soon, but the fact
that Iłd made no commitments yet gave me some welcome flexibility.

On Monday, alone in the flat again, I started catching up on
all the journals Iłd neglected. In Iraq Iłd been obsessively single-minded,
instructing my knowledge miner to keep me informed of work relevant to the
Wall, to the exclusion of everything else.

Skimming through a summary of six monthsł worth of papers, a
report in Science caught my eye: An Experimental Model for Decoherence in the
Many-Worlds Cosmology. A group at Delft University in the Netherlands had
arranged for a simple quantum computer to carry out a sequence of arithmetic
operations on a register which had been prepared to contain an equal
superposition of binary representations of two different numbers. This in
itself was nothing new; superpositions representing up to 128 numbers were now
manipulated daily, albeit only under laboratory conditions, at close to
absolute zero.

Unusually, though, at each stage of the calculation the
qubits containing the numbers in question had been deliberately entangled with
other, spare qubits in the computer. The effect of this was that the section
performing the calculation had ceased to be in a pure quantum state: it
behaved, not as if it contained two numbers simultaneously, but as if there
were merely an equal chance of it containing either one. This had undermined
the quantum nature of the calculation, just as surely as if the whole machine
had been imperfectly shielded and become entangled with objects in the environment.

There was one crucial difference, though: in this case, the
experimenters had still had access to the spare qubits that had made the
calculation behave classically. When they performed an appropriate measurement
on the state of the computer as a whole, it was shown to have remained in a
superposition all along. A single observation couldnłt prove this, but the
experiment had been repeated thousands of times, and within the margins of
error, their prediction was confirmed: although the superposition had become
undetectable when they ignored the spare qubits, it had never really gone away.
Both classical calculations had always taken place simultaneously, even though
theyłd lost the ability to interact in a quantum-mechanical fashion.

I sat at my desk, pondering the result. On one level, it was
just a scaling-up of the quantum eraser experiments of the ę90s, but the image
of a tiny computer program running through its paces, appearing �to itself" to
be unique and alone, while in fact a second, equally oblivious version had been
executing beside it all along, carried a lot more resonance than an interference
experiment with photons. Iłd become used to the idea of quantum computers performing
several calculations at once, but that conjuring trick had always seemed
abstract and ethereal, precisely because the parts continued to act as a
complicated whole right to the end. What struck home here was the stark
demonstration of the way each calculation could come to appear as a distinct
classical history, as solid and mundane as the shuffling of beads on an abacus.

When Francine arrived home I was cooking dinner, but I
grabbed my notepad and showed her the paper.

�Yeah, Iłve seen it," she said.

�What do you think?"

She raised her hands and recoiled in mock alarm.

�Iłm serious."

�What do you want me to say? Does this prove the Many Worlds
interpretation? No. Does it make it easier to understand, to have a toy model
like this? Yes."

�But does it sway you at all?" I persisted. �Do you believe
the results would still hold, if they could be scaled up indefinitely?" From a
toy universe, a handful of qubits, to the real one.

She shrugged. �I donłt really need to be swayed. I always
thought the MWI was the most plausible interpretation anyway."

I left it at that, and went back to the kitchen while she
pulled out a stack of assignments.

That night, as we lay in bed together, I couldnłt get the
Delft experiment out of my mind.

�Do you believe there are other versions of us?" I asked Francine.

�I suppose there must be." She conceded the point as if it
was something abstract and metaphysical, and I was being pedantic even to raise
it. People who professed belief in the MWI never seemed to want to take it
seriously, let alone personally.

�And that doesnłt bother you?"

�No," she said blithely. �Since Iłm powerless to change the
situation, whatłs the use in being upset about it?"

�Thatłs very pragmatic," I said. Francine reached over and
thumped me on the shoulder. �That was a compliment!" I protested. �I envy you
for having come to terms with it so easily."

�I havenłt, really," she admitted. �Iłve just resolved not
to let it worry me, which isnłt quite the same thing."

I turned to face her, though in the near-darkness we could
barely see each other. I said, �What gives you the most satisfaction in life?"

�I take it youłre not in the mood to be fobbed off with a
soppy romantic answer?" She sighed. �I donłt know. Solving problems. Getting
things right."

�What if for every problem you solve, therełs someone just
like you who fails, instead?"

�I cope with my failures," she said. �Let them cope with
theirs."

�You know it doesnłt work like that. Some of them simply donłt
cope. Whatever you find the strength to do, therełll be someone else who wonłt."

Francine had no reply.

I said, �A couple of weeks ago, I asked Sadiq about the time
he was doing mine clearance. He said it was more satisfying than mopping up DU;
one little explosion, right before your eyes, and you know youłve done
something worthwhile. We all get moments in our lives like that, with that
pure, unambiguous sense of achievement: whatever else we might screw up, at
least therełs one thing that wełve done right." I laughed uneasily. �I think Iłd
go mad, if I couldnłt rely on that."

Francine said, �You can. Nothing youłve done will ever disappear
from under your feet. No onełs going to march up and take it away from you."

�I know." My skin crawled, at the image of some less
favoured alter ego turning up on our doorstep, demanding his dues. �That seems
so fucking selfish, though. I donłt want everything that makes me happy to be
at the expense of someone else. I donłt want every choice to be like ...
fighting other versions of myself for the prize in some zero-sum game."

�No." Francine hesitated. �But if the reality is like that,
what can you do about it?"

Her words hung in the darkness. What could I do about it?
Nothing. So did I really want to dwell on it, corroding the foundations of my
own happiness, when there was absolutely nothing to be gained, for anyone?

�Youłre right. This is crazy." I leant over and kissed her. �Iłd
better let you get to sleep."

�Itłs not crazy," she said. �But I donłt have any answers."

The next morning, after Francine had left for work, I picked
up my notepad and saw that shełd mailed me an e-book: an anthology of cheesy �alternate
(sic) history" stories from the ę90s, entitled My God, Itłs Full of Tsars! �What
if Gandhi had been a ruthless soldier of fortune? What if Theodore Roosevelt
had faced a Martian invasion? What if the Nazis had had Janet Jacksonłs choreographer?"

I skimmed through the introduction, alternately cackling and
groaning, then filed the book away and got down to work. I had a dozen minor
administrative tasks to complete for UNESCO, before I could start searching in
earnest for my next position.

By mid-afternoon, I was almost done, but the growing sense
of achievement I felt at having buckled down and cleared away these tedious
obligations brought with it the corollary: someone infinitesimally different
from mesomeone who had shared my entire history up until that morninghad
procrastinated instead. The triviality of this observation only made it more
unsettling; the Delft experiment was seeping into my daily life on the most
mundane level.

I dug out the book Francine had sent and tried reading a few
of the stories, but the authorsł relentlessly camp take on the premise hardly
amounted to a reductio ad absurdum, or even a comical existential balm. I didnłt
really care how hilarious it would have been if Marilyn Monroe had been
involved in a bedroom farce with Richard Feynman and Richard Nixon. I just
wanted to lose the suffocating conviction that everything I had become was a
mirage; that my life had been nothing but a blinkered view of a kind of torture
chamber, where every glorious reprieve Iłd ever celebrated had in fact been an
unwitting betrayal.

If fiction had no comfort to offer, what about fact? Even if
the Many Worlds cosmology was correct, no one knew for certain what the
consequences were. It was a fallacy that literally everything that was
physically possible had to occur; most cosmologists Iłd read believed that the
universe as a whole possessed a single, definite quantum state, and while that
state would appear from within as a multitude of distinct classical histories,
there was no reason to assume that these histories amounted to some kind of exhaustive
catalogue. The same thing held true on a smaller scale: every time two people
sat down to a game of chess, there was no reason to believe that they played
every possible game.

And if Iłd stood in an alley, nine years before, struggling
with my conscience? My subjective sense of indecision proved nothing, but even
if Iłd suffered no qualms and acted without hesitation, to find a human being
in a quantum state of pure, unshakeable resolve would have been freakishly
unlikely at best, and in fact was probably physically impossible.

�Fuck this." I didnłt know when Iłd set myself up for this
bout of paranoia, but I wasnłt going to indulge it for another second. I banged
my head against the desk a few times, then picked up my notepad and went
straight to an employment site.

The thoughts didnłt vanish entirely; it was too much like
trying not to think of a pink elephant. Each time they recurred, though, I
found I could shout them down with threats of taking myself straight to a
psychiatrist. The prospect of having to explain such a bizarre mental problem
was enough to give me access to hitherto untapped reserves of self-discipline.

By the time I started cooking dinner, I was feeling merely
foolish. If Francine mentioned the subject again, Iłd make a joke of it. I didnłt
need a psychiatrist. I was a little insecure about my good fortune, and still
somewhat rattled by the news of impending fatherhood, but it would hardly have
been healthier to take everything for granted.

My notepad chimed. Francine had blocked the video again, as
if bandwidth, even here, was as precious as water.

�Hello."

�Ben? Iłve had some bleeding. Iłm in a taxi. Can you meet me
at St Vincentłs?"

Her voice was steady, but my own mouth went dry. �Sure. Iłll
be there in fifteen minutes." I couldnłt add anything: I love you, it will be
all right, hold on. She didnłt need that, it would have jinxed everything.

Half an hour later, I was still caught in traffic,
white-knuckled with rage and helplessness. I stared down at the dashboard, at
the real-time map with every other gridlocked vehicle marked, and finally
stopped deluding myself that at any moment I would turn into a magically
deserted side-street and weave my way across the city in just a few more
minutes.

In the ward, behind the curtains drawn around her bed, Francine
lay curled and rigid, her back turned, refusing to look at me. All I could do
was stand beside her. The gynaecologist was yet to explain everything properly,
but the miscarriage had been accompanied by complications, and shełd had to
perform surgery.

Before Iłd applied for the UNESCO fellowship, wełd discussed
the risks. For two prudent, well-informed, short-term visitors, the danger had
seemed microscopic. Francine had never travelled out into the desert with me,
and even for the locals in Basra the rates of birth defects and miscarriages
had fallen a long way from their peaks. We were both taking contraceptives;
condoms had seemed like overkill. Had I brought it back to her, from the
desert? A speck of dust, trapped beneath my foreskin? Had I poisoned her while
we were making love?

Francine turned towards me. The skin around her eyes was
grey and swollen, and I could see how much effort it took for her to meet my
gaze. She drew her hands out from under the bedclothes, and let me hold them;
they were freezing.

After a while, she started sobbing, but she wouldnłt release
my hands. I stroked the back of her thumb with my own thumb, a tiny, gentle
movement.

2020

�How do you feel now?" Olivia Maslin didnłt quite make eye
contact as she addressed me; the image of my brain activity painted on her
retinas was clearly holding her attention.

�Fine," I said. �Exactly the same as I did before you
started the infusion."

I was reclining on something like a dentistłs couch, halfway
between sitting and lying, wearing a tight-fitting cap studded with magnetic
sensors and inducers. It was impossible to ignore the slight coolness of the
liquid flowing into the vein in my forearm, but that sensation was no different
than it had been on the previous occasion, a fortnight before.

�Could you count to ten for me, please."

I obliged.

�Now close your eyes and picture the same familiar face as
the last time."

Shełd told me I could choose anyone; Iłd picked Francine. I
brought back the image, then suddenly recalled that, the first time, after
contemplating the detailed picture in my head for a few secondsas if I was
preparing to give a description to the policeIłd started thinking about
Francine herself. On cue, the same transition occurred again: the frozen,
forensic likeness became flesh and blood.

I was led through the whole sequence of activities once
more: reading the same short story (�Two Old-Timers" by F. Scott Fitzgerald),
listening to the same piece of music (from Rossiniłs The Thieving Magpie),
recounting the same childhood memory (my first day at school). At some point, I
lost any trace of anxiety about repeating my earlier mental states with
sufficient fidelity; after all, the experiment had been designed to cope with
the inevitable variation between the two sessions. I was just one volunteer out
of dozens, and half the subjects would be receiving nothing but saline on both
occasions. For all I knew, I was one of them: a control, merely setting the
baseline against which any real effect would be judged.

If I was receiving the coherence disruptors, though, then as
far as I could tell theyłd had no effect on me. My inner life hadnłt evaporated
as the molecules bound to the microtubules in my neurons, guaranteeing that any
kind of quantum coherence those structures might otherwise have maintained
would be lost to the environment in a fraction of a picosecond.

Personally, Iłd never subscribed to Penrosełs theory that
quantum effects might play a role in consciousness; calculations dating back to
a seminal paper by Max Tegmark, twenty years before, had already made sustained
coherence in any neural structure extremely unlikely. Nevertheless, it had
taken considerable ingenuity on the part of Olivia and her team to rule out the
idea definitively, in a series of clear-cut experiments. Over the past two
years, theyłd chased the ghost away from each of the various structures that different
factions of Penrosełs disciples had anointed as the essential quantum
components of the brain. The earliest proposalthe microtubules, huge polymeric
molecules that formed a kind of skeleton inside every cellhad turned out to be
the hardest to target for disruption. But now it was entirely possible that the
cytoskeletons of my very own neurons were dotted with molecules that coupled
them strongly to a noisy microwave field in which my skull was, definitely,
bathed. In which case, my microtubules had about as much chance of exploiting
quantum effects as I had of playing a game of squash with a version of myself
from a parallel universe.

When the experiment was over, Olivia thanked me, then became
even more distant as she reviewed the data. Raj, one of her graduate students,
slid out the needle and stuck a plaster over the tiny puncture wound, then
helped me out of the cap.

�I know you donłt know yet if I was a control or not," I
said, �but have you noticed significant differences, with anyone?" I was almost
the last subject in the microtubule trials; any effect should have shown up by
now.

Olivia smiled enigmatically. �Youłll just have to wait for
publication." Raj leant down and whispered, �No, never."

I climbed off the couch. �The zombie walks!" Raj declaimed.
I lunged hungrily for his brain; he ducked away, laughing, while Olivia watched
us with an expression of pained indulgence. Die-hard members of the Penrose
camp claimed that Oliviałs experiments proved nothing, because even if people
behaved identically while all quantum effects were ruled out, they could be
doing this as mere automata, totally devoid of consciousness. When Olivia had
offered to let her chief detractor experience coherence disruption for himself,
hełd replied that this would be no more persuasive, because memories laid down
while you were a zombie would be indistinguishable from ordinary memories, so
that looking back on the experience, youłd notice nothing unusual.

This was sheer desperation; you might as well assert that everyone
in the world but yourself was a zombie, and you were one, too, every second
Tuesday. As the experiments were repeated by other groups around the world,
those people whołd backed the Penrose theory as a scientific hypothesis, rather
than adopting it as a kind of mystical dogma, would gradually accept that it
had been refuted.

I left the neuroscience building and walked across the
campus, back towards my office in the physics department. It was a mild, clear
spring morning, with students out lying on the grass, dozing off with books
balanced over their faces like tents. There were still some advantages to
reading from old-fashioned sheaves of e-paper. Iłd only had my own eyes chipped
the year before, and though Iłd adapted to the technology easily enough, I
still found it disconcerting to wake on a Sunday morning to find Francine
reading the Herald beside me with her eyes shut.

Oliviałs results didnłt surprise me, but it was satisfying
to have the matter resolved once and for all: consciousness was a purely
classical phenomenon. Among other things, this meant that there was no
compelling reason to believe that software running on a classical computer
could not be conscious. Of course, everything in the universe obeyed quantum
mechanics at some level, but Paul Benioff, one of the pioneers of quantum
computing, had shown back in the ę80s that you could build a classical Turing
machine from quantum mechanical parts, and over the last few years, in my spare
time, Iłd studied the branch of quantum computing theory that concerned itself
with avoiding quantum effects.

Back in my office, I summoned up a schematic of the device I
called the Qusp: the quantum singleton processor. The Qusp would employ all the
techniques designed to shield the latest generation of quantum computers from
entanglement with their environment, but it would use them to a very different
end. A quantum computer was shielded so it could perform a multitude of
parallel calculations, without each one spawning a separate history of its own,
in which only one answer was accessible. The Qusp would perform just a single
calculation at a time, but on its way to the unique result it would be able to
pass safely through superpositions that included any number of alternatives,
without those alternatives being made real. Cut off from the outside world
during each computational step, it would keep its temporary quantum ambivalence
as private and inconsequential as a daydream, never being forced to act out
every possibility it dared to entertain.

The Qusp would still need to interact with its environment
whenever it gathered data about the world, and that interaction would
inevitably split it into different versions. If you attached a camera to the
Qusp and pointed it at an ordinary objecta rock, a plant, a birdthat object
could hardly be expected to possess a single classical history, and so neither
would the combined system of Qusp plus rock, Qusp plus plant, Qusp plus bird.

The Qusp itself, though, would never initiate the split. In
a given set of circumstances, it would only ever produce a single response. An
AI running on the Qusp could make its decisions as whimsically, or with as much
weighty deliberation as it liked, but for each distinct scenario it confronted,
in the end it would only make one choice, only follow one course of action.

I closed the file, and the image vanished from my retinas.
For all the work Iłd put into the design, Iłd made no effort to build the
thing. Iłd been using it as little more than a talisman: whenever I found
myself picturing my life as a tranquil dwelling built over a slaughter house, Iłd
summon up the Qusp as a symbol of hope. It was proof of a possibility, and a
possibility was all it took. Nothing in the laws of physics could prevent a
small portion of humanityłs descendants from escaping their ancestorsł
dissipation.

Yet Iłd shied away from any attempt to see that promise fulfilled,
firsthand. In part, Iłd been afraid of delving too deeply and uncovering a flaw
in the Quspłs design, robbing myself of the one crutch that kept me standing
when the horror swept over me. It had also been a matter of guilt: Iłd been the
one granted happiness, so many times, that it had seemed unconscionable to
aspire to that state yet again. Iłd knocked so many of my hapless cousins out
of the ring, it was time I threw a fight and let the prize go to my opponent
instead.

That last excuse was idiotic. The stronger my determination
to build the Qusp, the more branches there would be in which it was real.
Weakening my resolve was not an act of charity, surrendering the benefits to
someone else; it merely impoverished every future version of me, and everyone
they touched.

I did have a third excuse. It was time I dealt with that
one, too.

I called Francine.

�Are you free for lunch?" I asked. She hesitated; there was
always work she could be doing. �To discuss the Cauchy-Riemann equations?" I
suggested.

She smiled. It was our code, when the request was a special
one. �All right. One ołclock?"

I nodded. �Iłll see you then."

Francine was twenty minutes late, but that was less of a
wait than I was used to. Shełd been appointed deputy head of the mathematics
department eighteen months before, and she still had some teaching duties as
well as all the new administrative work. Over the last eight years, Iłd had a
dozen short-term contracts with various bodiesgovernment departments,
corporations, NGOsbefore finally ending up as a very lowly member of the
physics department at our alma mater. I did envy her the prestige and security
of her job, but Iłd been happy with most of the work Iłd done, even if it had
been too scattered between disciplines to contribute to anything like a
traditional career path.

Iłd bought Francine a plate of cheese-and-salad sandwiches,
and she attacked them hungrily as soon as she sat down. I said, �Iłve got ten
minutes at the most, havenłt I?"

She covered her mouth with her hand and replied defensively,
�It could have waited until tonight, couldnłt it?"

�Sometimes I canłt put things off. I have to act while I
still have the courage."

At this ominous prelude she chewed more slowly. �You did the
second stage of Oliviałs experiment this morning, didnłt you?"

�Yeah." Iłd discussed the whole procedure with her before I
volunteered.

�So I take it you didnłt lose consciousness, when your
neurons became marginally more classical than usual?" She sipped chocolate milk
through a straw.

�No. Apparently no one ever loses anything. Thatłs not
official yet, but"

Francine nodded, unsurprised. We shared the same position on
the Penrose theory; there was no need to discuss it again now.

I said, �I want to know if youłre going to have the
operation."

She continued drinking for a few more seconds, then released
the straw and wiped her upper lip with her thumb, unnecessarily. �You want me
to make up my mind about that, here and now?"

�No." The damage to her uterus from the miscarriage could be
repaired; wełd been discussing the possibility for almost five years. Wełd both
had comprehensive chelation therapy to remove any trace of U-238. We could have
children in the usual way with a reasonable degree of safety, if that was what
we wanted. �But if youłve already decided, I want you to tell me now."

Francine looked wounded. �Thatłs unfair."

�What is? Implying that you might not have told me, the instant
you decided?"

�No. Implying that itłs all in my hands."

I said, �Iłm not washing my hands of the decision. You know
how I feel. But you know Iłd back you all the way, if you said you wanted to
carry a child." I believed I would have. Maybe it was a form of doublethink,
but I couldnłt treat the birth of one more ordinary child as some kind of
atrocity, and refuse to be a part of it.

�Fine. But what will you do if I donłt?" She examined my
face calmly. I think she already knew, but she wanted me to spell it out.

�We could always adopt," I observed casually.

�Yes, we could do that." She smiled slightly; she knew that
made me lose my ability to bluff, even faster than when she stared me down.

I stopped pretending that there was any mystery left; shełd
seen right through me from the start. I said, �I just donłt want to do this,
then discover that it makes you feel that youłve been cheated out of what you
really wanted."

�It wouldnłt," she insisted. �It wouldnłt rule out anything.
We could still have a natural child as well."

�Not as easily." This would not be like merely having workaholic
parents, or an ordinary brother or sister to compete with for attention.

�You only want to do this if I can promise you that itłs the
only child wełd ever have?" Francine shook her head. �Iłm not going to promise
that. I donłt intend having the operation any time soon, but Iłm not going to
swear that I wonłt change my mind. Nor am I going to swear that if we do this
it will make no difference to what happens later. It will be a factor. How
could it not be? But it wonłt be enough to rule anything in or out."

I looked away, across the rows of tables, at all the
students wrapped up in their own concerns. She was right; I was being unreasonable.
Iłd wanted this to be a choice with no possible downside, a way of making the
best of our situation, but no one could guarantee that. It would be a gamble,
like everything else.

I turned back to Francine.

�All right; Iłll stop trying to pin you down. What I want to
do right now is go ahead and build the Qusp. And when itłs finished, if wełre
certain we can trust it ... I want us to raise a child with it. I want us to
raise an AI."

2029

I met Francine at the airport, and we drove across Sćo Paulo
through curtains of wild, lashing rain. I was amazed that her plane hadnłt been
diverted; a tropical storm had just hit the coast, halfway between us and Rio.

�So much for giving you a tour of the city," I lamented.
Through the windscreen, our actual surroundings were all but invisible; the
bright overlay we both perceived, surreally coloured and detailed, made the
experience rather like perusing a 3D map while trapped in a car wash.

Francine was pensive, or tired from the flight. I found it
hard to think of San Francisco as remote when the time difference was so small,
and even when Iłd made the journey north to visit her, it had been nothing
compared to all the ocean-spanning marathons Iłd sat through in the past.

We both had an early night. The next morning, Francine accompanied
me to my cluttered workroom in the basement of the universityłs engineering
department. Iłd been chasing grants and collaborators around the world, like a
child on a treasure hunt, slowly piecing together a device that few of my
colleagues believed was worth creating for its own sake. Fortunately, Iłd managed
to find pretextsor even genuine spin-offsfor almost every stage of the work.
Quantum computing, per se, had become bogged down in recent years, stymied by
both a shortage of practical algorithms and a limit to the complexity of
superpositions that could be sustained. The Qusp had nudged the technological
envelope in some promising directions, without making any truly exorbitant
demands; the states it juggled were relatively simple, and they only needed to
be kept isolated for milliseconds at a time.

I introduced Carlos, Maria and Jun, but then they made themselves
scarce as I showed Francine around. We still had a demonstration of the �balanced
decoupling" principle set up on a bench, for the tour by one of our corporate
donors the week before. What caused an imperfectly shielded quantum computer to
decohere was the fact that each possible state of the device affected its
environment slightly differently. The shielding itself could always be improved,
but Carlosłs group had perfected a way to buy a little more protection by sheer
deviousness. In the demonstration rig, the flow of energy through the device
remained absolutely constant whatever state it was in, because any drop in
power consumption by the main set of quantum gates was compensated for by a
rise in a set of balancing gates, and vice versa. This gave the environment one
less clue by which to discern internal differences in the processor, and to
tear any superposition apart into mutually disconnected branches.

Francine knew all the theory backwards, but shełd never seen
this hardware in action. When I invited her to twiddle the controls, she took
to the rig like a child with a game console.

�You really should have joined the team," I said.

�Maybe I did," she countered. �In another branch."

Shełd moved from UNSW to Berkeley two years before, not long
after Iłd moved from Delft to Sćo Paulo; it was the closest suitable position
she could find. At the time, Iłd resented the fact that shełd refused to
compromise and work remotely; with only five hoursł difference, teaching at
Berkeley from Sćo Paulo would not have been impossible. In the end, though, Iłd
accepted the fact that shełd wanted to keep on testing me, testing both of us.
If we werenłt strong enough to stay together through the trials of a prolonged
physical separationor if I was not sufficiently committed to the project to
endure whatever sacrifices it entailedshe did not want us proceeding to the
next stage.

I led her to the corner bench, where a nondescript grey box
half a metre across sat, apparently inert. I gestured to it, and our retinal
overlays transformed its appearance, �revealing" a maze with a transparent lid
embedded in the top of the device. In one chamber of the maze, a slightly
cartoonish mouse sat motionless. Not quite dead, not quite sleeping.

�This is the famous Zelda?" Francine asked.

�Yes." Zelda was a neural network, a stripped-down, stylised
mouse brain. There were newer, fancier versions available, much closer to the
real thing, but the ten-year-old, public domain Zelda had been good enough for
our purposes.

Three other chambers held cheese. �Right now, she has no experience
of the maze," I explained. �So letłs start her up and watch her explore." I
gestured, and Zelda began scampering around, trying out different passages,
deftly reversing each time she hit a cul-de-sac. �Her brain is running on a
Qusp, but the maze is implemented on an ordinary classical computer, so in
terms of coherence issues, itłs really no different from a physical maze."

�Which means that each time she takes in information, she
gets entangled with the outside world," Francine suggested.

�Absolutely. But she always holds off doing that until the
Qusp has completed its current computational step, and every qubit contains a
definite zero or a definite one. Shełs never in two minds when she lets the
world in, so the entanglement process doesnłt split her into separate branches."

Francine continued to watch, in silence. Zelda finally found
one of the chambers containing a reward; when shełd eaten it, a hand scooped
her up and returned her to her starting point, then replaced the cheese.

�Here are ten thousand previous trials, superimposed." I replayed
the data. It looked as if a single mouse was running through the maze, moving
just as wełd seen her move when Iłd begun the latest experiment. Restored each
time to exactly the same starting condition, and confronted with exactly the
same environment, Zeldalike any computer program with no truly random
influenceshad simply repeated herself. All ten thousand trials had yielded
identical results.

To a casual observer, unaware of the context, this would
have been a singularly unimpressive performance. Faced with exactly one
situation, Zelda the virtual mouse did exactly one thing. So what? If youłd
been able to wind back a flesh-and-blood mousełs memory with the same degree of
precision, wouldnłt it have repeated itself too?

Francine said, �Can you cut off the shielding? And the balanced
decoupling?"

�Yep." I obliged her, and initiated a new trial.

Zelda took a different path this time, exploring the maze by
a different route. Though the initial condition of the neural net was
identical, the switching processes taking place within the Qusp were now opened
up to the environment constantly, and superpositions of several different
eigenstatesstates in which the Quspłs qubits possessed definite binary values,
which in turn led to Zelda making definite choiceswere becoming entangled with
the outside world. According to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics, this interaction was randomly �collapsing" the superpositions into
single eigenstates; Zelda was still doing just one thing at a time, but her
behaviour had ceased to be deterministic. According to the MWI, the interaction
was transforming the environmentFrancine and me includedinto a superposition
with components that were coupled to each eigenstate; Zelda was actually
running the maze in many different ways simultaneously, and other versions of
us were seeing her take all those other routes.

Which scenario was correct?

I said, �Iłll reconfigure everything now, to wrap the whole
setup in a Delft cage." A �Delft cage" was jargon for the situation Iłd first
read about seventeen years before: instead of opening up the Qusp to the
environment, Iłd connect it to a second quantum computer, and let that play the
role of the outside world.

We could no longer watch Zelda moving about in real time, but
after the trial was completed, it was possible to test the combined system of
both computers against the hypothesis that it was in a pure quantum state in
which Zelda had run the maze along hundreds of different routes, all at once. I
displayed a representation of the conjectured state, built up by superimposing
all the paths shełd taken in ten thousand unshielded trials.

The test result flashed up: CONSISTENT.

�One measurement proves nothing," Francine pointed out.

�No." I repeated the trial. Again, the hypothesis was not refuted.
If Zelda had actually run the maze along just one path, the probability of the
computersł joint state passing this imperfect test was about one percent. For
passing it twice, the odds were about one in ten thousand.

I repeated it a third time, then a fourth.

Francine said, �Thatłs enough." She actually looked queasy.
The image of the hundreds of blurred mouse trails on the display was not a
literal photograph of anything, but if the old Delft experiment had been enough
to give me a visceral sense of the reality of the multiverse, perhaps this
demonstration had finally done the same for her.

�Can I show you one more thing?" I asked.

�Keep the Delft cage, but restore the Quspłs shielding?"

�Right."

I did it. The Qusp was now fully protected once more whenever
it was not in an eigenstate, but this time, it was the second quantum computer,
not the outside world, to which it was intermittently exposed. If Zelda split
into multiple branches again, then shełd only take that fake environment with
her, and wełd still have our hands on all the evidence.

Tested against the hypothesis that no split had occurred,
the verdict was: CONSISTENT. CONSISTENT. CONSISTENT.

We went out to dinner with the whole of the team, but
Francine pleaded a headache and left early. She insisted that I stay and finish
the meal, and I didnłt argue; she was not the kind of person who expected you
to assume that she was being politely selfless, while secretly hoping to be
contradicted.

After Francine had left, Maria turned to me. �So you two are
really going ahead with the Frankenchild?" Shełd been teasing me about this for
as long as Iłd known her, but apparently she hadnłt been game to raise the
subject in Francinełs presence.

�We still have to talk about it." I felt uncomfortable
myself, now, discussing the topic the moment Francine was absent. Confessing my
ambition when I applied to join the team was one thing; it would have been
dishonest to keep my collaborators in the dark about my ultimate intentions.
Now that the enabling technology was more or less completed, though, the issue
seemed far more personal.

Carlos said breezily, �Why not? There are so many others
now. Sophie. Linus. Theo. Probably a hundred we donłt even know about. Itłs not
as if Benłs child wonłt have playmates." AdaiAutonomously Developing
Artificial Intelligenceshad been appearing in a blaze of controversy every few
months for the last four years. A Swiss researcher, Isabelle Schib, had taken
the old models of morphogenesis that had led to software like Zelda, refined
the technique by several orders of magnitude, and applied it to human genetic
data. Wedded to sophisticated prosthetic bodies, Isabellełs creations inhabited
the physical world and learnt from their experience, just like any other child.

Jun shook his head reprovingly. �I wouldnłt raise a child
with no legal rights. What happens when you die? For all you know, it could end
up as someonełs property."

Iłd been over this with Francine. �I canłt believe that in
ten or twenty yearsł time there wonłt be citizenship laws, somewhere in the
world."

Jun snorted. �Twenty years! How long did it take the U.S. to
emancipate their slaves?"

Carlos interjected, �Whołs going to create an adai just to
use it as a slave? If you want something biddable, write ordinary software. If
you need consciousness, humans are cheaper."

Maria said, �It wonłt come down to economics. Itłs the
nature of the things that will determine how theyłre treated."

�You mean the xenophobia theyłll face?" I suggested.

Maria shrugged. �You make it sound like racism, but we arenłt
talking about human beings. Once you have software with goals of its own, free
to do whatever it likes, where will it end? The first generation makes the next
one better, faster, smarter; the second generation even more so. Before we know
it, wełre like ants to them."

Carlos groaned. �Not that hoary old fallacy! If you really believe
that stating the analogy ęants are to humans, as humans are to xł is proof that
itłs possible to solve for x, then Iłll meet you where the south pole is like
the equator."

I said, �The Qusp runs no faster than an organic brain; we
need to keep the switching rate low, because that makes the shielding
requirements less stringent. It might be possible to nudge those parameters,
eventually, but therełs no reason in the world why an adai would be better
equipped to do that than you or I would. As for making their own offspring
smarter ... even if Schibłs group has been perfectly successful, they will have
merely translated human neural development from one substrate to another. They
wonłt have ęimprovedł on the process at allwhatever that might mean. So if the
adai have any advantage over us, it will be no more than the advantage shared
by flesh-and-blood children: cultural transmission of one more generationłs
worth of experience."

Maria frowned, but she had no immediate comeback.

Jun said dryly, �Plus immortality."

�Well, yes, there is that," I conceded.

Francine was awake when I arrived home.

�Have you still got a headache?" I whispered.

�No."

I undressed and climbed into bed beside her.

She said, �You know what I miss the most? When wełre fucking
on-line?"

�This had better not be complicated; Iłm out of practice."

�Kissing."

I kissed her, slowly and tenderly, and she melted beneath
me. �Three more months," I promised, �and Iłll move up to Berkeley."

�To be my kept man."

�I prefer the term ęunpaid but highly valued caregiver.ł"
Francine stiffened. I said, �We can talk about that later." I started kissing
her again, but she turned her face away.

�Iłm afraid," she said.

�So am I," I assured her. �Thatłs a good sign. Everything
worth doing is terrifying."

�But not everything terrifying is good."

I rolled over and lay beside her. She said, �On one level,
itłs easy. What greater gift could you give a child, than the power to make
real decisions? What worse fate could you spare her from, than being forced to
act against her better judgment, over and over? When you put it like that, itłs
simple.

�But every fibre in my body still rebels against it. How
will she feel, knowing what she is? How will she make friends? How will she
belong? How will she not despise us for making her a freak? And what if wełre
robbing her of something shełd value: living a billion lives, never being
forced to choose between them? What if she sees the gift as a kind of
impoverishment?"

�She can always drop the shielding on the Qusp," I said. �Once
she understands the issues, she can choose for herself."

�Thatłs true." Francine did not sound mollified at all; she
would have thought of that long before Iłd mentioned it, but she wasnłt looking
for concrete answers. Every ordinary human instinct screamed at us that we were
embarking on something dangerous, unnatural, hubristicbut those instincts were
more about safeguarding our own reputations than protecting our child-to-be. No
parent, save the most wilfully negligent, would be pilloried if their
flesh-and-blood child turned out to be ungrateful for life; if Iłd railed
against my own mother and father because Iłd found fault in the existential
conditions with which Iłd been lumbered, it wasnłt hard to guess which side
would attract the most sympathy from the world at large. Anything that went
wrong with our child would be grounds for lynchinghowever much love, sweat,
and soul-searching had gone into her creationbecause wełd had the temerity to
be dissatisfied with the kind of fate that everyone else happily inflicted on
their own.

I said, �You saw Zelda today, spread across the branches.
You know, deep down now, that the same thing happens to all of us."

�Yes." Something tore inside me as Francine uttered that admission.
Iłd never really wanted her to feel it, the way I did.

I persisted. �Would you willingly sentence your own child to
that condition? And your grandchildren? And your great-grandchildren?"

�No," Francine replied. A part of her hated me now; I could
hear it in her voice. It was my curse, my obsession; before she met me, shełd
managed to believe and not believe, taking her acceptance of the multiverse
lightly.

I said, �I canłt do this without you."

�You can, actually. More easily than any of the
alternatives. You wouldnłt even need a stranger to donate an egg."

�I canłt do it unless youłre behind me. If you say the word,
Iłll stop here. Wełve built the Qusp. Wełve shown that it can work. Even if we
donłt do this last part ourselves, someone else will, in a decade or two."

�If we donłt do this," Francine observed acerbically, �wełll
simply do it in another branch."

I said, �Thatłs true, but itłs no use thinking that way. In
the end, I canłt function unless I pretend that my choices are real. I doubt
that anyone can."

Francine was silent for a long time. I stared up into the
darkness of the room, trying hard not to contemplate the near certainty that
her decision would go both ways.

Finally, she spoke.

�Then letłs make a child who doesnłt need to pretend."

2031

Isabelle Schib welcomed us into her office. In person, she
was slightly less intimidating than she was on-line; it wasnłt anything
different in her appearance or manner, just the ordinariness of her
surroundings. Iłd envisaged her ensconced in some vast, pristine, high-tech
building, not a couple of pokey rooms on a back-street in Basel.

Once the pleasantries were out of the way, Isabelle got
straight to the point. �Youłve been accepted," she announced. �Iłll send you
the contract later today."

My throat constricted with panic; I should have been elated,
but I just felt unprepared. Isabellełs group licensed only three new adai a
year. The short-list had come down to about a hundred couples, winnowed from
tens of thousands of applicants. Wełd travelled to Switzerland for the final
selection process, carried out by an agency that ordinarily handled adoptions.
Through all the interviews and questionnaires, all the personality tests and
scenario challenges, Iłd managed to half-convince myself that our dedication
would win through in the end, but that had been nothing but a prop to keep my
spirits up.

Francine said calmly, �Thank you."

I coughed. �Youłre happy with everything wełve proposed?" If
there was going to be a proviso thrown in that rendered this miracle worthless,
better to hear it now, before the shock had worn off and Iłd started taking
things for granted.

Isabelle nodded. �I donłt pretend to be an expert in the relevant
fields, but Iłve had the Quspłs design assessed by several colleagues, and I
see no reason why it wouldnłt be an appropriate form of hardware for an adai. Iłm
entirely agnostic about the MWI, so I donłt share your view that the Qusp is a
necessity, but if you were worried that I might write you off as cranks because
of it," she smiled slightly, �you should meet some of the other people Iłve had
to deal with.

�I believe you have the adaiłs welfare at heart, and youłre
not suffering from any of the superstitionstechnophobic or technophilicthat
would distort the relationship. And as youłll recall, Iłll be entitled to
visits and inspections throughout your period of guardianship. If youłre found
to be violating any of the terms of the contract, your licence will be revoked,
and Iłll take charge of the adai."

Francine said, �What do you think the prospects are for a happier
end to our guardianship?"

�Iłm lobbying the European parliament, constantly," Isabelle
replied. �Of course, in a few yearsł time several adai will reach the stage
where their personal testimony begins contributing to the debate, but none of
us should wait until then. The ground has to be prepared."

We spoke for almost an hour, on this and other issues.
Isabelle had become quite an expert at fending off the attentions of the media;
she promised to send us a handbook on this, along with the contract.

�Did you want to meet Sophie?" Isabelle asked, almost as an
afterthought.

Francine said, �That would be wonderful." Francine and I had
seen a video of Sophie at age four, undergoing a battery of psychological
tests, but wełd never had a chance to converse with her, let alone meet her
face to face.

The three of us left the office together, and Isabelle drove
us to her home on the outskirts of the town.

In the car, the reality began sinking in anew. I felt the
same mixture of exhilaration and claustrophobia that Iłd experienced nineteen
years before, when Francine had met me at the airport with news of her
pregnancy. No digital conception had yet taken place, but if sex had ever felt
half as loaded with risks and responsibilities as this, I would have remained
celibate for life.

�No badgering, no interrogation," Isabelle warned us as she
pulled into the driveway.

I said, �Of course not."

Isabelle called out, �Marco! Sophie!" as we followed her
through the door. At the end of the hall, I heard childish giggling, and an
adult male voice whispering in French. Then Isabellełs husband stepped out from
behind the corner, a smiling, dark-haired young man, with Sophie riding on his
shoulders. At first I couldnłt look at her; I just smiled politely back at
Marco, while noting glumly that he was at least fifteen years younger than I
was. How could I even think of doing this, at forty-six? Then I glanced up, and
caught Sophiełs eye. She gazed straight back at me for a moment, appearing
curious and composed, but then a fit of shyness struck her, and she buried her
face in Marcołs hair.

Isabelle introduced us, in English; Sophie was being raised
to speak four languages, though in Switzerland that was hardly phenomenal.
Sophie said, �Hello" but kept her eyes lowered. Isabelle said, �Come into the
living room. Would you like something to drink?"

The five of us sipped lemonade, and the adults made polite,
superficial conversation. Sophie sat on Marcołs knees, squirming restlessly,
sneaking glances at us. She looked exactly like an ordinary, slightly gawky,
six-year-old girl. She had Isabellełs straw-coloured hair, and Marcołs brown
eyes; whether by fiat or rigorous genetic simulation, she could have passed for
their biological daughter. Iłd read technical specifications describing her
body, and seen an earlier version in action on the video, but the fact that it
looked so plausible was the least of its designersł achievements. Watching her
drinking, wriggling and fidgeting, I had no doubt that she felt herself
inhabiting this skin, as much as I did my own. She was not a puppeteer posing
as a child, pulling electronic strings from some dark cavern in her skull.

�Do you like lemonade?" I asked her.

She stared at me for a moment, as if wondering whether she
should be affronted by the presumptuousness of this question, then replied, �It
tickles."

In the taxi to the hotel, Francine held my hand tightly.

�Are you OK?" I asked.

�Yes, of course."

In the elevator, she started crying. I wrapped my arms
around her.

�She would have turned eighteen this year."

�I know."

�Do you think shełs alive, somewhere?"

�I donłt know. I donłt know if thatłs a good way to think
about it."

Francine wiped her eyes. �No. This will be her. Thatłs the
way to see it. This will be my girl. Just a few years late."

Before flying home, we visited a small pathology lab, and
left samples of our blood.

Our daughterłs first five bodies reached us a month before her
birth. I unpacked all five, and laid them out in a row on the living room
floor. With their muscles slack and their eyes rolled up, they looked more like
tragic mummies than sleeping infants. I dismissed that grisly image; better to
think of them as suits of clothes. The only difference was that we hadnłt
bought pyjamas quite so far ahead.

From wrinkled pink newborn to chubby eighteen-month-old, the
progression made an eerie sighteven if an organic childłs development, short
of serious disease or malnourishment, would have been scarcely less
predictable. A colleague of Francinełs had lectured me a few weeks before about
the terrible �mechanical determinism" wełd be imposing on our child, and though
his arguments had been philosophically naive, this sequence of immutable
snapshots from the future still gave me goose bumps.

The truth was, reality as a whole was deterministic, whether
you had a Qusp for a brain or not; the quantum state of the multiverse at any
moment determined the entire future. Personal experienceconfined to one branch
at a timecertainly appeared probabilistic, because there was no way to predict
which local future youłd experience when a branch split, but the reason it was
impossible to know that in advance was because the real answer was �all of them".

For a singleton, the only difference was that branches never
split on the basis of your personal decisions. The world at large would
continue to look probabilistic, but every choice you made was entirely
determined by who you were and the situation you faced.

What more could anyone hope for? It was not as if who you
were could be boiled down to some crude genetic or sociological profile; every
shadow youłd seen on the ceiling at night, every cloud youłd watched drift
across the sky, would have left some small imprint on the shape of your mind.
Those events were fully determined too, when viewed across the multiversewith
different versions of you witnessing every possibilitybut in practical terms,
the bottom line was that no private investigator armed with your genome and a
potted biography could plot your every move in advance.

Our daughterłs choiceslike everything elsehad been written
in stone at the birth of the universe, but that information could only be
decoded by becoming her along the way. Her actions would flow from her
temperament, her principles, her desires, and the fact that all of these
qualities would themselves have prior causes did nothing to diminish their
value. Free will was a slippery notion, but to me it simply meant that your
choices were more or less consistent with your naturewhich in turn was a
provisional, constantly-evolving consensus between a thousand different influences.
Our daughter would not be robbed of the chance to act capriciously, or even
perversely, but at least it would not be impossible for her ever to act wholly
in accordance with her ideals.

I packed the bodies away before Francine got home. I wasnłt
sure if the sight would unsettle her, but I didnłt want her measuring them up
for more clothes.

The delivery began in the early hours of the morning of Sunday,
December 14, and was expected to last about four hours, depending on traffic. I
sat in the nursery while Francine paced the hallway outside, both of us
watching the data coming through over the fibre from Basel.

Isabelle had used our genetic information as the starting
point for a simulation of the development in utero of a complete embryo,
employing an �adaptive hierarchy" model, with the highest resolution reserved
for the central nervous system. The Qusp would take over this task, not only
for the newborn childłs brain, but also for the thousands of biochemical
processes occurring outside the skull that the artificial bodies were not
designed to perform. Apart from their sophisticated sensory and motor
functions, the bodies could take in food and excrete wastesfor psychological
and social reasons, as well as for the chemical energy this providedand they
breathed air, both in order to oxidise this fuel, and for vocalisation, but
they had no blood, no endocrine system, no immune response.

The Qusp Iłd built in Berkeley was smaller than the Sćo
Paulo version, but it was still six times as wide as an infantłs skull. Until
it was further miniaturised, our daughterłs mind would sit in a box in a corner
of the nursery, joined to the rest of her by a wireless data link. Bandwidth
and time lag would not be an issue within the Bay Area, and if we needed to
take her further afield before everything was combined, the Qusp wasnłt too
large or delicate to move.

As the progress bar I was overlaying on the side of the Qusp
nudged 98 per cent, Francine came into the nursery, looking agitated.

�We have to put it off, Ben. Just for a day. I need more
time to prepare myself."

I shook my head. �You made me promise to say no, if you
asked me to do that." Shełd even refused to let me tell her how to halt the
Qusp herself.

�Just a few hours," she pleaded.

Francine seemed genuinely distressed, but I hardened my
heart by telling myself that she was acting: testing me, seeing if Iłd keep my
word. �No. No slowing down or speeding up, no pauses, no tinkering at all. This
child has to hit us like a freight train, just like any other child would."

�You want me to go into labour now?" she said sarcastically.
When Iłd raised the possibility, half-jokingly, of putting her on a course of
hormones that would have mimicked some of the effects of pregnancy in order to
make bonding with the child easierfor myself as well, indirectlyshełd almost
bit my head off. I hadnłt been serious, because I knew it wasnłt necessary.
Adoption was the ultimate proof of that, but what we were doing was closer to
claiming a child of our own from a surrogate.

�No. Just pick her up."

Francine peered down at the inert form in the cot.

�I canłt do it!" she wailed. �When I hold her, she should
feel as if shełs the most precious thing in the world to me. How can I make her
believe that, when I know I could bounce her off the walls without harming her?"

We had two minutes left. I felt my breathing grow ragged. I
could send the Qusp a halt code, but what if that set the pattern? If one of us
had had too little sleep, if Francine was late for work, if we talked ourselves
into believing that our special child was so unique that we deserved a short
holiday from her needs, what would stop us from doing the same thing again?

I opened my mouth to threaten her: Either you pick her up,
now, or I do it. I stopped myself, and said, �You know how much it would harm
her psychologically, if you dropped her. The very fact that youłre afraid that
you wonłt convey as much protectiveness as you need to will be just as strong a
signal to her as anything else. You care about her. Shełll sense that."

Francine stared back at me dubiously.

I said, �Shełll know. Iłm sure she will."

Francine reached into the cot and lifted the slack body into
her arms. Seeing her cradle the lifeless form, I felt an anxious twisting in my
gut; Iłd experienced nothing like this when Iłd laid the five plastic shells
out for inspection.

I banished the progress bar and let myself free-fall through
the final seconds: watching my daughter, willing her to move.

Her thumb twitched, then her legs scissored weakly. I couldnłt
see her face, so I watched Francinełs expression. For an instant, I thought I
could detect a horrified tightening at the corners of her mouth, as if she was
about to recoil from this golem. Then the child began to bawl and kick, and
Francine started weeping with undisguised joy.

As she raised the child to her face and planted a kiss on
its wrinkled forehead, I suffered my own moment of disquiet. How easily that
tender response had been summoned, when the body could as well have been
brought to life by the kind of software used to animate the characters in games
and films.

It hadnłt, though. Therełd been nothing false or easy about
the road that had brought us to this momentlet alone the one that Isabelle had
followedand we hadnłt even tried to fashion life from clay, from nothing. Wełd
merely diverted one small trickle from a river already four billion years old.

Francine held our daughter against her shoulder, and rocked
back and forth. �Have you got the bottle? Ben?" I walked to the kitchen in a
daze; the microwave had anticipated the happy event, and the formula was ready.

I returned to the nursery and offered Francine the bottle. �Can
I hold her, before you start feeding?"

�Of course." She leant forward to kiss me, then held out the
child, and I took her the way Iłd learnt to accept the babies of relatives and
friends, cradling the back of her head beneath my hand. The distribution of
weight, the heavy head, the play of the neck, felt the same as it did for any
other infant. Her eyes were still screwed shut, as she screamed and swung her
arms.

�Whatłs your name, my beautiful girl?" Wełd narrowed the
list down to about a dozen possibilities, but Francine had refused to settle on
one until shełd seen her daughter take her first breath. �Have you decided?"

�I want to call her Helen."

Gazing down at her, that sounded too old to me.
Old-fashioned, at least. Great-Aunt Helen. Helena Bonham-Carter. I laughed inanely,
and she opened her eyes.

Hairs rose on my arms. The dark eyes couldnłt quite search
my face, but she was not oblivious to me. Love and fear coursed through my
veins. How could I hope to give her what she needed? Even if my judgment had
been faultless, my power to act upon it was crude beyond measure.

We were all she had, though. We would make mistakes, we
would lose our way, but I had to believe that something would hold fast. Some
portion of the overwhelming love and resolve that I felt right now would have
to remain with every version of me who could trace his ancestry to this moment.

I said, �I name you Helen."

2041

�Sophie! Sophie!" Helen ran ahead of us towards the arrivals
gate, where Isabelle and Sophie were emerging. Sophie, almost sixteen now, was
much less demonstrative, but she smiled and waved.

Francine said, �Do you ever think of moving?"

�Maybe if the laws change first in Europe," I replied.

�I saw a job in Z�rich I could apply for."

�I donłt think we should bend over backwards to bring them
together. They probably get on better with just occasional visits, and the net.
Itłs not as if they donłt have other friends."

Isabelle approached, and greeted us both with kisses on the
cheek. Iłd dreaded her arrival the first few times, but by now she seemed more
like a slightly overbearing cousin than a child protection officer whose very
presence implied misdeeds.

Sophie and Helen caught up with us. Helen tugged at Francinełs
sleeve. �Sophiełs got a boyfriend! Daniel. She showed me his picture." She
swooned mockingly, one hand on her forehead.

I glanced at Isabelle, who said, �He goes to her school. Hełs
really very sweet."

Sophie grimaced with embarrassment. �Three-year-old boys are
sweet." She turned to me and said, �Daniel is charming, and sophisticated, and
very mature."

I felt as if an anvil had been dropped on my chest. As we
crossed the car park, Francine whispered, �Donłt have a heart attack yet. Youłve
got a while to get used to the idea."

The waters of the bay sparkled in the sunlight as we drove
across the bridge to Oakland. Isabelle described the latest session of the
European parliamentary committee into adai rights. A draft proposal granting
personhood to any system containing and acting upon a significant amount of the
information content of human DNA had been gaining support; it was a tricky
concept to define rigorously, but most of the objections were Pythonesque
rather than practical. �Is the Human Proteomic Database a person? Is the
Harvard Reference Physiological Simulation a person?" The HRPS modelled the
brain solely in terms of what it removed from, and released into, the
bloodstream; there was nobody home inside the simulation, quietly going mad.

Late in the evening, when the girls were upstairs, Isabelle
began gently grilling us. I tried not to grit my teeth too much. I certainly
didnłt blame her for taking her responsibilities seriously; if, in spite of the
selection process, we had turned out to be monsters, criminal law would have
offered no remedies. Our obligations under the licensing contract were Helenłs
sole guarantee of humane treatment.

�Shełs getting good marks this year," Isabelle noted. �She
must be settling in."

�She is," Francine replied. Helen was not entitled to a
government-funded education, and most private schools had either been openly
hostile, or had come up with such excuses as insurance policies that would have
classified her as hazardous machinery. (Isabelle had reached a compromise with
the airlines: Sophie had to be powered down, appearing to sleep during flights,
but was not required to be shackled or stowed in the cargo hold.) The first community
school wełd tried had not worked out, but wełd eventually found one close to
the Berkeley campus where every parent involved was happy with the idea of
Helenłs presence. This had saved her from the prospect of joining a net-based
school; they werenłt so bad, but they were intended for children isolated by geography
or illness, circumstances that could not be overcome by other means.

Isabelle bid us good night with no complaints or advice; Francine
and I sat by the fire for a while, just smiling at each other. It was nice to
have a blemish-free report for once.

The next morning, my alarm went off an hour early. I lay motionless
for a while, waiting for my head to clear, before asking my knowledge miner why
it had woken me.

It seemed Isabellełs visit had been beaten up into a major
story in some east coast news bulletins. A number of vocal members of Congress
had been following the debate in Europe, and they didnłt like the way it was
heading. Isabelle, they declared, had sneaked into the country as an agitator.
In fact, shełd offered to testify to Congress any time they wanted to hear
about her work, but theyłd never taken her up on it.

It wasnłt clear whether it was reporters or anti-adai
activists whołd obtained her itinerary and done some digging, but all the
details had now been splashed around the country, and protesters were already
gathering outside Helenłs school. Wełd faced media packs, cranks, and activists
before, but the images the knowledge miner showed me were disturbing; it was
five a.m. and the crowd had already encircled the school. I had a flashback to
some news footage Iłd seen in my teens, of young schoolgirls in Northern Ireland
running the gauntlet of a protest by the opposing political faction; I could no
longer remember who had been Catholic and who had been Protestant.

I woke Francine and explained the situation.

�We could just keep her home," I suggested.

Francine looked torn, but she finally agreed. �It will
probably all blow over when Isabelle flies out on Sunday. One day off school
isnłt exactly capitulating to the mob."

At breakfast, I broke the news to Helen.

�Iłm not staying home," she said.

�Why not? Donłt you want to hang out with Sophie?"

Helen was amused. �ęHang outł? Is that what the hippies used
to say?" In her personal chronology of San Francisco, anything from before her
birth belonged to the world portrayed in the tourist museums of Haight-Ashbury.

�Gossip. Listen to music. Interact socially in whatever
manner you find agreeable."

She contemplated this last, open-ended definition. �Shop?"

�I donłt see why not." There was no crowd outside the house,
and though we were probably being watched, the protest was too large to be a
moveable feast. Perhaps all the other parents would keep their children home,
leaving the various placard wavers to fight among themselves.

Helen reconsidered. �No. Wełre doing that on Saturday. I
want to go to school."

I glanced at Francine. Helen added, �Itłs not as if they can
hurt me. Iłm backed up."

Francine said, �Itłs not pleasant being shouted at.
Insulted. Pushed around."

�I donłt think itłs going to be pleasant," Helen replied
scornfully. �But Iłm not going to let them tell me what to do."

To date, a handful of strangers had got close enough to yell
abuse at her, and some of the children at her first school had been about as
violent as (ordinary, drug-free, non-psychotic) nine-year-old bullies could be,
but shełd never faced anything like this. I showed her the live news feed. She
was not swayed. Francine and I retreated to the living room to confer.

I said, �I donłt think itłs a good idea." On top of
everything else, I was beginning to suffer from a paranoid fear that Isabelle
would blame us for the whole situation. Less fancifully, she could easily
disapprove of us exposing Helen to the protesters. Even if that was not enough
for her to terminate the licence immediately, eroding her confidence in us could
lead to that fate, eventually.

Francine thought for a while. �If we both go with her, both
walk beside her, what are they going to do? If they lay a finger on us, itłs
assault. If they try to drag her away from us, itłs theft."

�Yes, but whatever they do, she gets to hear all the poison
they spew out."

�She watches the news, Ben. Shełs heard it all before."

�Oh, shit." Isabelle and Sophie had come down to breakfast;
I could hear Helen calmly filling them in about her plans.

Francine said, �Forget about pleasing Isabelle. If Helen
wants to do this, knowing what it entails, and we can keep her safe, then we
should respect her decision."

I felt a sting of anger at the unspoken implication: having
gone to such lengths to enable her to make meaningful choices, Iłd be a
hypocrite to stand in her way. Knowing what it entails? She was nine-and-a-half
years old.

I admired her courage, though, and I did believe that we
could protect her.

I said, �All right. You call the other parents. Iłll inform
the police."

The moment we left the car, we were spotted. Shouts rang
out, and a tide of angry people flowed towards us.

I glanced down at Helen and tightened my grip on her. �Donłt
let go of our hands."

She smiled at me indulgently, as if I was warning her about
something trivial, like broken glass on the beach. �Iłll be all right, Dad."
She flinched as the crowd closed in, and then there were bodies pushing against
us from every side, people jabbering in our faces, spittle flying. Francine and
I turned to face each other, making something of a protective cage and a wedge
through the adult legs. Frightening as it was to be submerged, I was glad my
daughter wasnłt at eye level with these people.

�Satan moves her! Satan is inside her! Out, Jezebel spirit!"
A young woman in a high-collared lilac dress pressed her body against me and
started praying in tongues.

�G�delłs theorem proves that the non-computible, non-linear
world behind the quantum collapse is a manifest expression of Buddha-nature," a
neatly-dressed youth intoned earnestly, establishing with admirable economy
that he had no idea what any of these terms meant. �Ergo, there can be no soul
in the machine."

�Cyber nano quantum. Cyber nano quantum. Cyber nano quantum."
That chant came from one of our would-be �supporters", a middle-aged man in
lycra cycling shorts who was forcefully groping down between us, trying to lay
his hand on Helenłs head and leave a few flakes of dead skin behind; according
to cult doctrine, this would enable her to resurrect him when she got around to
establishing the Omega Point. I blocked his way as firmly as I could without
actually assaulting him, and he wailed like a pilgrim denied admission to
Lourdes.

�Think youłre going to live forever, Tinkerbell?" A leering
old man with a matted beard poked his head out in front of us, and spat
straight into Helenłs face.

�Arsehole!" Francine shouted. She pulled out a handkerchief
and started mopping the phlegm away. I crouched down and stretched my free arm
around them. Helen was grimacing with disgust as Francine dabbed at her, but
she wasnłt crying.

I said, �Do you want to go back to the car?"

�No."

�Are you sure?"

Helen screwed up her face in an expression of irritation. �Why
do you always ask me that? Am I sure? Am I sure? Youłre the one who sounds like
a computer."

�Iłm sorry." I squeezed her hand.

We ploughed on through the crowd. The core of the protesters
turned out to be both saner and more civilised than the lunatics whołd got to
us first; as we neared the school gates, people struggled to make room to let
us through uninjured, at the same time as they shouted slogans for the cameras.
�Healthcare for all, not just the rich!" I couldnłt argue with that sentiment,
though adai were just one of a thousand ways the wealthy could spare their
children from disease, and in fact they were among the cheapest: the total cost
in prosthetic bodies up to adult size came to less than the median lifetime
expenditure on healthcare in the U.S. Banning adai wouldnłt end the disparity
between rich and poor, but I could understand why some people considered it the
ultimate act of selfishness to create a child who could live forever. They
probably never wondered about the fertility rates and resource use of their own
descendants over the next few thousand years.

We passed through the gates, into a world of space and
silence; any protester who trespassed here could be arrested immediately, and
apparently none of them were sufficiently dedicated to Gandhian principles to
seek out that fate.

Inside the entrance hall, I squatted down and put my arms
around Helen. �Are you OK?"

�Yes."

�Iłm really proud of you."

�Youłre shaking." She was right; my whole body was trembling
slightly. It was more than the crush and the confrontation, and the sense of
relief that wełd come through unscathed. Relief was never absolute for me; I
could never quite erase the images of other possibilities at the back of my
mind.

One of the teachers, Carmela Peńa, approached us, looking stoical;
when theyłd agreed to take Helen, all the staff and parents had known that a
day like this would come.

Helen said, �Iłll be OK now." She kissed me on the cheek,
then did the same to Francine. �Iłm all right," she insisted. �You can go."

Carmela said, �Wełve got sixty per cent of the kids coming.
Not bad, considering."

Helen walked down the corridor, turning once to wave at us
impatiently.

I said, �No, not bad."

A group of journalists cornered the five of us during the
girlsł shopping trip the next day, but media organisations had grown wary of
lawsuits, and after Isabelle reminded them that she was presently enjoying �the
ordinary liberties of every private citizen"a quote from a recent eight-figure
judgment against Celebrity Stalkerthey left us in peace.

The night after Isabelle and Sophie flew out, I went in to Helenłs
room to kiss her good night. As I turned to leave, she said, �Whatłs a Qusp?"

�Itłs a kind of computer. Where did you hear about that?"

�On the net. It said I had a Qusp, but Sophie didnłt."

Francine and I had made no firm decision as to what wełd tell
her, and when. I said, �Thatłs right, but itłs nothing to worry about. It just
means youłre a little bit different from her."

Helen scowled. �I donłt want to be different from Sophie."

�Everyonełs different from everyone else," I said glibly. �Having
a Qusp is just like ... a car having a different kind of engine. It can still
go to all the same places." Just not all of them at once. �You can both still
do whatever you like. You can be as much like Sophie as you want." That wasnłt
entirely dishonest; the crucial difference could always be erased, simply by
disabling the Quspłs shielding.

�I want to be the same," Helen insisted. �Next time I grow,
why canłt you give me what Sophiełs got, instead?"

�What you have is newer. Itłs better."

�No one else has got it. Not just Sophie; none of the
others." Helen knew shełd nailed me: if it was newer and better, why didnłt the
younger adai have it too?

I said, �Itłs complicated. Youłd better go to sleep now; wełll
talk about it later." I fussed with the blankets, and she stared at me
resentfully.

I went downstairs and recounted the conversation to
Francine. �What do you think?" I asked her. �Is it time?"

�Maybe it is," she said.

�I wanted to wait until she was old enough to understand the
MWI."

Francine considered this. �Understand it how well, though?
Shełs not going to be juggling density matrices any time soon. And if we make
it a big secret, shełs just going to get half-baked versions from other
sources."

I flopped onto the couch. �This is going to be hard." Iłd rehearsed
the moment a thousand times, but in my imagination Helen had always been older,
and therełd been hundreds of other adai with Qusps. In reality, no one had
followed the trail wełd blazed. The evidence for the MWI had grown steadily
stronger, but for most people it was still easy to ignore. Ever more
sophisticated versions of rats running mazes just looked like elaborate
computer games. You couldnłt travel from branch to branch yourself, you couldnłt
spy on your parallel alter egosand such feats would probably never be
possible. �How do you tell a nine-year-old girl that shełs the only sentient
being on the planet who can make a decision, and stick to it?"

Francine smiled. �Not in those words, for a start."

�No." I put my arm around her. We were about to enter a minefieldand
we couldnłt help diffusing out across the perilous groundbut at least we had
each otherłs judgment to keep us in check, to rein us in a little.

I said, �Wełll work it out. Wełll find the right way."

2050

Around four in the morning, I gave in to the cravings and
lit my first cigarette in a month.

As I drew the warm smoke into my lungs, my teeth started
chattering, as if the contrast had forced me to notice how cold the rest of my
body had become. The red glow of the tip was the brightest thing in sight, but
if there was a camera trained on me it would be infrared, so Iłd been blazing
away like a bonfire, anyway. As the smoke came back up I spluttered like a cat
choking on a fur ball; the first one was always like that. Iłd taken up the
habit at the surreal age of sixty, and even after five years on and off, my
respiratory tract couldnłt quite believe its bad luck.

For five hours, Iłd been crouched in the mud at the edge of
Lake Pontchartrain, a couple of kilometres west of the soggy ruins of New
Orleans. Watching the barge, waiting for someone to come home. Iłd been tempted
to swim out and take a look around, but my aide sketched a bright red moat of
domestic radar on the surface of the water, and offered no guarantee that Iłd
remain undetected even if I stayed outside the perimeter.

Iłd called Francine the night before. It had been a short,
tense conversation.

�Iłm in Louisiana. I think Iłve got a lead."

�Yeah?"

�Iłll let you know how it turns out."

�You do that."

I hadnłt seen her in the flesh for almost two years. After
facing too many dead ends together, wełd split up to cover more ground:
Francine had searched from New York to Seattle; Iłd taken the south. As the
months had slipped away, her determination to put every emotional reaction
aside for the sake of the task had gradually eroded. One night, I was sure,
grief had overtaken her, alone in some soulless motel roomand it made no
difference that the same thing had happened to me, a months later or a week
before. Because we had not experienced it together, it was not a shared pain, a
burden made lighter. After forty-seven years, though we now had a single
purpose as never before, we were starting to come adrift.

Iłd learnt about Jake Holder in Baton Rouge, triangulating
on rumours and fifth-hand reports of bar-room boasts. The boasts were usually
empty; a prosthetic body equipped with software dumber than a microwave could
make an infinitely pliable slave, but if the only way to salvage any trace of
dignity when your buddies discovered that you owned the high-tech equivalent of
a blow-up doll was to imply that there was somebody home inside, apparently a
lot of men leapt at the chance.

Holder looked like something worse. Iłd bought his lifetime
purchasing records, and therełd been a steady stream of cyber-fetish porn over
a period of two decades. Hardcore and pretentious; half the titles contained
the word �manifesto". But the flow had stopped, about three months ago. The
rumours were, hełd found something better.

I finished the cigarette, and slapped my arms to get the
circulation going. She would not be on the barge. For all I knew, shełd heard
the news from Brussels and was already halfway to Europe. That would be a
difficult journey to make on her own, but there was no reason to believe that
she didnłt have loyal, trustworthy friends to assist her. I had too many
out-of-date memories burnt into my skull: all the blazing, pointless rows, all
the petty crimes, all the self-mutilation. Whatever had happened, whatever shełd
been through, she was no longer the angry fifteen-year-old whołd left for
school one Friday and never come back.

By the time shełd hit thirteen, we were arguing about everything.
Her body had no need for the hormonal flood of puberty, but the software had
ground on relentlessly, simulating all the neuroendocrine effects. Sometimes it
had seemed like an act of torture to put her through thatinstead of hunting
for some magic short-cut to maturitybut the cardinal rule had been never to
tinker, never to intervene, just to aim for the most faithful simulation
possible of ordinary human development.

Whatever wełd fought about, shełd always known how to shut
me up. �Iłm just a thing to you! An instrument! Daddyłs little silver bullet!"
I didnłt care who she was, or what she wanted; Iłd fashioned her solely to slay
my own fears. (Iłd lie awake afterwards, rehearsing lame counter-arguments.
Other children were born for infinitely baser motives: to work the fields, to
sit in boardrooms, to banish ennui, to save failing marriages.) In her eyes,
the Qusp itself wasnłt good or badand she turned down all my offers to disable
the shielding; that would have let me off the hook too easily. But Iłd made her
a freak for my own selfish reasons; Iłd set her apart even from the other adai,
purely to grant myself a certain kind of comfort. �You wanted to give birth to
a singleton? Why didnłt you just shoot yourself in the head every time you made
a bad decision?"

When she went missing, we were afraid shełd been snatched
from the street. But in her room, wełd found an envelope with the locator
beacon shełd dug out of her body, and a note that read: Donłt look for me. Iłm
never coming back.

I heard the tyres of a heavy vehicle squelching along the muddy
track to my left. I hunkered lower, making sure I was hidden in the
undergrowth. As the truck came to a halt with a faint metallic shudder, the
barge disgorged an unmanned motorboat. My aide had captured the data streams
exchanged, one specific challenge and response, but it had no clue how to crack
the general case and mimic the bargełs owner.

Two men climbed out of the truck. One was Jake Holder; I
couldnłt make out his face in the starlight, but Iłd sat within a few metres of
him in diners and bars in Baton Rouge, and my aide knew his somatic signature:
the electromagnetic radiation from his nervous system and implants; his bodyłs
capacitative and inductive responses to small shifts in the ambient fields; the
faint gamma-ray spectrum of his unavoidable, idiosyncratic load of
radioisotopes, natural and Chernobylesque.

I did not know who his companion was, but I soon got the general
idea.

�One thousand now," Holder said. �One thousand when you get
back." His silhouette gestured at the waiting motorboat.

The other man was suspicious. �How do I know it will be what
you say it is?"

�Donłt call her ęitł," Holder complained. �Shełs not an
object. Shełs my Lilith, my Lo-li-ta, my luscious clockwork succubus." For one
hopeful moment, I pictured the customer snickering at this overheated sales
pitch and coming to his senses; brothels in Baton Rouge openly advertised
machine sex, with skilled human puppeteers, for a fraction of the price.
Whatever he imagined the special thrill of a genuine adai to be, he had no way
of knowing that Holder didnłt have an accomplice controlling the body on the
barge in exactly the same fashion. He might even be paying two thousand dollars
for a puppet job from Holder himself.

�OK. But if shełs not genuine ..."

My aide overheard money changing hands, and it had modelled
the situation well enough to know how Iłd wish, always, to respond. �Move now,"
it whispered in my ear. I complied without hesitation; eighteen months before,
Iłd pavloved myself into swift obedience, with all the pain and nausea modern
chemistry could induce. The aide couldnłt puppet my limbsI couldnłt afford the
elaborate surgerybut it overlaid movement cues on my vision, a system Iłd
adapted from off-the-shelf choreography software, and I strode out of the
bushes, right up to the motorboat.

The customer was outraged. �What is this?"

I turned to Holder. �You want to fuck him first, Jake? Iłll
hold him down." There were things I didnłt trust the aide to control; it set
the boundaries, but it was better to let me improvise a little, and then treat
my actions as one more part of the environment.

After a moment of stunned silence, Holder said icily, �Iłve
never seen this prick before in my life." Hełd been speechless for a little too
long, though, to inspire any loyalty from a stranger; as he reached for his
weapon, the customer backed away, then turned and fled.

Holder walked towards me slowly, gun outstretched. �Whatłs
your game? Are you after her? Is that it?" His implants were mapping my bodyactively,
since there was no need for stealthbut Iłd tailed him for hours in Baton
Rouge, and my aide knew him like an architectural plan. Over the starlit grey
of his form, it overlaid a schematic, flaying him down to brain, nerves, and
implants. A swarm of blue fireflies flickered into life in his motor cortex,
prefiguring a peculiar shrug of the shoulders with no obvious connection to his
trigger finger; before theyłd reached the intensity that would signal his
implants to radio the gun, my aide said �Duck."

The shot was silent, but as I straightened up again I could
smell the propellant. I gave up thinking and followed the dance steps. As
Holder strode forward and swung the gun towards me, I turned sideways, grabbed
his right hand, then punched him hard, repeatedly, in the implant on the side
of his neck. He was a fetishist, so hełd chosen bulky packages, intentionally
visible through the skin. They were not hard-edged, and they were not
inflexiblehe wasnłt that masochisticbut once you sufficiently compressed even
the softest biocompatible foam, it might as well have been a lump of wood.
While I hammered the wood into the muscles of his neck, I twisted his forearm
upwards. He dropped the gun; I put my foot on it and slid it back towards the
bushes.

In ultrasound, I saw blood pooling around his implant. I
paused while the pressure built up, then I hit him again and the swelling burst
like a giant blister. He sagged to his knees, bellowing with pain. I took the
knife from my back pocket and held it to his throat.

I made Holder take off his belt, and I used it to bind his
hands behind his back. I led him to the motorboat, and when the two of us were
on board, I suggested that he give it the necessary instructions. He was sullen
but cooperative. I didnłt feel anything; part of me still insisted that the
transaction Iłd caught him in was a hoax, and that therełd be nothing on the
barge that couldnłt be found in Baton Rouge.

The barge was old, wooden, smelling of preservatives and unvanquished
rot. There were dirty plastic panes in the cabin windows, but all I could see
in them was a reflected sheen. As we crossed the deck, I kept Holder intimately
close, hoping that if there was an armed security system it wouldnłt risk
putting the bullet through both of us.

At the cabin door, he said resignedly, �Donłt treat her
badly." My blood went cold, and I pressed my forearm to my mouth to stifle an
involuntary sob.

I kicked open the door, and saw nothing but shadows. I
called out �Lights!" and two responded, in the ceiling and by the bed. Helen
was naked, chained by the wrists and ankles. She looked up and saw me, then
began to emit a horrified keening noise.

I pressed the blade against Holderłs throat. �Open those
things!"

�The shackles?"

�Yes!"

�I canłt. Theyłre not smart; theyłre just welded shut."

�Where are your tools?"

He hesitated. �Iłve got some wrenches in the truck. All the
rest is back in town."

I looked around the cabin, then I lead him into a corner and
told him to stand there, facing the wall. I knelt by the bed.

�Ssh. Wełll get you out of here." Helen fell silent. I
touched her cheek with the back of my hand; she didnłt flinch, but she stared
back at me, disbelieving. �Wełll get you out." The timber bedposts were thicker
than my arms, the links of the chains wide as my thumb. I wasnłt going to snap
any part of this with my bare hands.

Helenłs expression changed: I was real, she was not
hallucinating. She said dully, �I thought youłd given up on me. Woke one of the
backups. Started again."

I said, �Iłd never give up on you."

�Are you sure?" She searched my face. �Is this the edge of
whatłs possible? Is this the worst it can get?"

I didnłt have an answer to that.

I said, �You remember how to go numb, for a shedding?"

She gave me a faint, triumphant smile. �Absolutely." Shełd
had to endure imprisonment and humiliation, but shełd always had the power to
cut herself off from her bodyłs senses.

�Do you want to do it now? Leave all this behind?"

�Yes."

�Youłll be safe soon. I promise you."

�I believe you." Her eyes rolled up.

I cut open her chest and took out the Qusp.

Francine and I had both carried spare bodies, and clothes,
in the trunks of our cars. Adai were banned from domestic flights, so Helen and
I drove along the interstate, up towards Washington D.C., where Francine would
meet us. We could claim asylum at the Swiss embassy; Isabelle had already set
the machinery in motion.

Helen was quiet at first, almost shy with me as if with a
stranger, but on the second day, as we crossed from Alabama into Georgia, she
began to open up. She told me a little of how shełd hitchhiked from state to
state, finding casual jobs that paid e-cash and needed no social security
number, let alone biometric ID. �Fruit picking was the best."

Shełd made friends along the way, and confided her nature to
those she thought she could trust. She still wasnłt sure whether or not shełd
been betrayed. Holder had found her in a transientłs camp under a bridge, and
someone must have told him exactly where to look, but it was always possible
that shełd been recognised by a casual acquaintance whołd seen her face in the
media years before. Francine and I had never publicised her disappearance,
never put up flyers or web pages, out of fear that it would only make the
danger worse.

On the third day, as we crossed the Carolinas, we drove in
near silence again. The landscape was stunning, the fields strewn with flowers,
and Helen seemed calm. Maybe this was what she needed the most: just safety,
and peace.

As dusk approached, though, I felt I had to speak.

�Therełs something Iłve never told you," I said. �Something
that happened to me when I was young."

Helen smiled. �Donłt tell me you ran away from the farm? Got
tired of milking, and joined the circus?"

I shook my head. �I was never adventurous. It was just a
little thing." I told her about the kitchen hand.

She pondered the story for a while. �And thatłs why you
built the Qusp? Thatłs why you made me? In the end, it all comes down to that
man in the alley?" She sounded more bewildered than angry.

I bowed my head. �Iłm sorry."

�For what?" she demanded. �Are you sorry that I was ever
born?"

�No, but"

�You didnłt put me on that boat. Holder did that."

I said, �I brought you into a world with people like him.
What I made you, made you a target."

�And if Iłd been flesh and blood?" she said. �Do you think
there arenłt people like him, for flesh and blood? Or do you honestly believe
that if youłd had an organic child, there would have been no chance at all that
shełd have run away?"

I started weeping. �I donłt know. Iłm just sorry I hurt you."

Helen said, �I donłt blame you for what you did. And I understand
it better now. You saw a spark of good in yourself, and you wanted to cup your
hands around it, protect it, make it stronger. I understand that. Iłm not that
spark, but that doesnłt matter. I know who I am, I know what my choices are,
and Iłm glad of that. Iłm glad you gave me that." She reached over and squeezed
my hand. �Do you think Iłd feel better, here and now, just because some other
version of me handled the same situations better?" She smiled. �Knowing that
other people are having a good time isnłt much of a consolation to anyone."

I composed myself. The car beeped to bring my attention to a
booking it had made in a motel a few kilometres ahead.

Helen said, �Iłve had time to think about a lot of things.
Whatever the laws say, whatever the bigots say, all adai are part of the human
race. And what I have is something almost every person whołs ever lived thought
they possessed. Human psychology, human culture, human morality, all evolved
with the illusion that we lived in a single history. But we donłtso in the
long run, something has to give. Call me old-fashioned, but Iłd rather we
tinker with our physical nature than abandon our whole identities."

I was silent for a while. �So what are your plans, now?"

�I need an education."

�What do you want to study?"

�Iłm not sure yet. A million different things. But in the
long run, I know what I want to do."

�Yeah?" The car turned off the highway, heading for the
motel.

�You made a start," she said, �but itłs not enough. There
are people in billions of other branches where the Qusp hasnłt been invented
yetand the way things stand, therełll always be branches without it. Whatłs
the point in us having this thing, if we donłt share it? All those people
deserve to have the power to make their own choices."

�Travel between the branches isnłt a simple problem," I explained
gently. �That would be orders of magnitude harder than the Qusp."

Helen smiled, conceding this, but the corners of her mouth
took on the stubborn set I recognised as the precursor to a thousand smaller
victories.

She said, �Give me time, Dad. Give me time."

Steve Fever

Countless tiny machines hijack the living, borrowing their
hands, eyes, and ears, as the machines strive to resurrect just one man.

 

A few weeks after his 14th birthday, with the soybean
harvest fast approaching, Lincoln began having vivid dreams of leaving the farm
and heading for the city. Night after night, he pictured himself gathering
supplies, trudging down to the highway, and hitching his way to Atlanta. There
were problems with the way things got done in the dream, though, and each night
in his sleep he struggled to resolve them. The larder would be locked, of
course, so he dreamed up a side plot about collecting a stash of suitable tools
for breaking in. There were sensors all along the farmłs perimeter, so he
dreamed about different ways of avoiding or disabling them.

Even when he had a scenario that seemed to make sense, daylight
revealed further flaws. The grille that blocked the covered part of the irrigation
ditch that ran beneath the fence was too strong to be snipped away with bolt
cutters, and the welding torch had a biometric lock.

When the harvest began, Lincoln contrived to get a large
stone caught in the combine, and then volunteered to repair the damage. With
his father looking on, he did a meticulous job, and when he received the
expected praise he replied with what he hoped was a dignified mixture of pride
and bemusement, �Iłm not a kid anymore. I can handle the torch."

�Yeah." His father seemed embarrassed for a moment. Then he
squatted down, put the torch into supervisor mode, and added Lincolnłs touch to
the authorized list.

Lincoln waited for a moonless night. The dream kept
repeating itself, thrashing impatiently against his skull, desperate to be made
real.

When the night arrived and he left his room, barefoot in the
darkness, he felt he was finally enacting some long-rehearsed performanceless
a play than an elaborate dance that had seeped into every muscle in his body.
First he carried his boots to the back door and left them by the step. Then he
took his backpack to the larder, the borrowed tools in different pockets so
they wouldnłt clank against each other. The larder doorłs hinges were attached
on the inside, but hełd marked their positions with penknife scratches in the
varnish and practiced finding the scratches by touch. His mother had secured
the food store years before, after a midnight raid by Lincoln and his younger
brother, Sam, but it was still just a larder, not a jewel safe, and the awl bit
through the wood easily enough, finally exposing the tip of one of the screws
that held the hinges in place. The pliers he tried first couldnłt grip the
screw tightly enough to get it turning, but Lincoln had dreamed of an alternative.
With the awl, he cleared away a little more wood, then jammed a small hexagonal
nut onto the screwłs thread and used a T-handled socket wrench to turn them
together. The screw couldnłt move far, but this was enough to loosen it. He
removed the nut and used the pliers. With a few firm taps from a hammer,
delivered via the socket wrench, the screw broke free of the wood.

He repeated the procedure five more times, freeing the
hinges completely, and then strained against the door, keeping a firm grip on
the handle, until the tongue of the lock slipped from its groove.

The larder was pitch black, but he didnłt risk using his
flashlight; he found what he wanted by memory and touch, filling the backpack
with enough provisions for a week. After that? Hełd never wondered, in the
dream. Maybe hełd find new friends in Atlanta whołd help him. The idea struck a
chord, as if it were a truth he was remembering, not a hopeful speculation.

The toolshed was locked securely, but Lincoln was still
skinny enough to crawl through the hole in the back wall; it had been hidden by
junk for so long that it had fallen off the end of his fatherłs repair list.
This time he risked the flashlight and walked straight to the welding torch,
rather than groping his way across the darkness. He maneuvered it through the
hole and didnłt bother rearranging the rotting timbers that had concealed the
entrance. There was no point covering his tracks. He would be missed within
minutes of his parentsł rising, no matter what, so the important thing now was
speed.

He put on his boots and headed for the irrigation ditch.
Their German shepherd, Melville, trotted up and started licking Lincolnłs hand.
Lincoln stopped and petted him for a few seconds, then firmly ordered him back
toward the house. The dog made a soft, wistful sound but complied.

Twenty meters from the perimeter fence, Lincoln climbed into
the ditch. The enclosed section was still a few meters away, but he crouched
down immediately, practicing the necessary constrained gait and shielding
himself from the sensorsł gaze. He clutched the torch under one arm, careful to
keep it dry. The chill of the water didnłt much bother him; his boots grew
heavy, but he didnłt know what the ditch concealed, and hełd rather have
waterlogged boots than a rusty scrap of metal slicing his foot.

He entered the enclosed concrete cylinder; then a few steps
brought him to the metal grille. He switched on the torch and oriented himself
by the light of its control panel. When he put on the goggles he was blind, but
then he squeezed the trigger of the torch, and the arc lit up the tunnel around
him.

Each bar took just seconds to cut, but there were a lot of
them. In the confined space the heat was oppressive; his T-shirt was soon
soaked with sweat. Still, he had fresh clothes in his pack, and he could wash
in the ditch once he was through. If he was still not respectable enough to get
a ride, hełd walk to Atlanta.

�Young man, get out of there immediately."

Lincoln shut off the arc. The voice, and those words, could
only belong to his grandmother. For a few pounding heartbeats, he wondered if
hełd imagined it, but then in the same unmistakable tone, ratcheted up a notch,
she added, �Donłt play games with meI donłt have the patience for it."

Lincoln slumped in the darkness, disbelieving. Hełd dreamed
his way through every detail, past every obstacle. How could she appear out of
nowhere and ruin everything?

There wasnłt room to turn around, so he crawled backward to
the mouth of the tunnel. His grandmother was standing on the bank of the ditch.

�What exactly do you think youłre doing?" she demanded.

He said, �I need to get to Atlanta."

�Atlanta? All by yourself, in the middle of the night? What
happened? You got a craving for some special kind of food wełre not providing
here?"

Lincoln scowled at her sarcasm but knew better than to
answer back. �Iłve been dreaming about it," he said, as if that explained
everything. �Night after night. Working out the best way to do it."

His grandmother said nothing for a while, and when Lincoln
realized that hełd shocked her into silence he felt a pang of fear himself.

She said, �You have no earthly reason to run away. Is
someone beating you? Is someone treating you badly?"

�No, małam."

�So why exactly is it that you need to go?"

Lincoln felt his face grow hot with shame. How could he have
missed it? How could he have fooled himself into believing that the obsession
was his own? But even as he berated himself for his stupidity, his longing for
the journey remained.

�Youłve got the fever, havenłt you? You know where those
kind of dreams come from: nanospam throwing a party in your brain. Ten billion
idiot robots playing a game called Steve at Home."

She reached down and helped him out of the ditch. The
thought crossed Lincolnłs mind that he could probably overpower her, but then
he recoiled from the idea in disgust. He sat down on the grass and put his head
in his hands.

�Are you going to lock me up?" he asked.

�Nobodyłs turning anybody into a prisoner. Letłs go talk to
your parents. Theyłre going to be thrilled."

The four of them sat in the kitchen. Lincoln kept quiet and
let the others argue, too ashamed to offer any opinions of his own. How could
he have let himself sleepwalk like that? Plotting and scheming for weeks,
growing ever prouder of his own ingenuity, but doing it all at the bidding of
the worldłs stupidest, most despised dead man.

He still yearned to go to Atlanta. He itched to bolt from
the room, scale the fence, and jog all the way to the highway. He could see the
whole sequence in his mindłs eye; he was already thinking through the flaws in
the plan and hunting for ways to correct them.

He banged his head against the table. �Make it stop! Get
them out of me!"

His mother put an arm around his shoulders. �You know we canłt
wave a magic wand and get rid of them. Youłve got the latest counterware. All
we can do is send a sample to be analyzed, do our bit to speed the process
along."

The cure could be months away, or years. Lincoln moaned pitifully.
�Then lock me up! Put me in the basement!"

His father wiped a glistening streak of sweat from his
forehead. �Thatłs not going to happen. If I have to be beside you everywhere
you go, wełre still going to treat you like a human being." His voice was
strained, caught somewhere between fear and defiance.

Silence descended. Lincoln closed his eyes. Then his grandmother
spoke.

�Maybe the best way to deal with this is to let him scratch
his damned itch."

�What?" His father was incredulous.

�He wants to go to Atlanta. I can go with him."

�The Stevelets want him in Atlanta," his father replied.

�Theyłre not going to harm himthey just want to borrow him.
And like it or not, theyłve already done that. Maybe the quickest way to get
them to move on is to satisfy them."

Lincolnłs father said, �You know they canłt be satisfied."

�Not completely. But every path they take has its dead end,
and the sooner they find this one, the sooner theyłll stop bothering him."

His mother said, �If we keep him here, thatłs a dead end for
them too. If they want him in Atlanta, and hełs not in Atlanta"

�They wonłt give up that easily," his grandmother replied. �If
wełre not going to lock him up and throw away the key, theyłre not going to
take a few setbacks and delays as some kind of proof that Atlantałs beyond all
hope."

Silence again. Lincoln opened his eyes. His father addressed
Lincolnłs grandmother. �Are you sure youłre not infected yourself?"

She rolled her eyes. �Donłt go all Body Snatchers on me,
Carl. I know the two of you canłt leave the farm right now. So if you want to
let him go, Iłll look after him." She shrugged and turned her head away
imperiously. �Iłve said my piece. Now itłs your decision."

Lincoln drove the truck as far as the highway, then
reluctantly let his grandmother take the wheel. He loved the old machine, which
still had the engine his grandfather had installed, years before Lincoln was
born, to run on their home-pressed soybean oil.

�I plan to take the most direct route," his grandmother announced.
�Through Macon. Assuming your friends have no objection."

Lincoln squirmed. �Donłt call them that!"

�Iłm sorry." She glanced at him sideways. �But I still need
to know."

Reluctantly, Lincoln forced himself to picture the drive
ahead, and he felt a surge of rightness endorsing the plan. �No problem with
that," he muttered. He was under no illusion that he could prevent the
Stevelets from influencing his thoughts, but deliberately consulting them, as
if there were a third person sitting in the cabin, made him feel much worse.

He turned to look out the window, at the abandoned fields
and silos passing by. He had been down this stretch of highway a hundred times,
but each piece of blackened machinery now carried a disturbing new poignancy.
The Crash had come 30 years ago, but it still wasnłt truly over. The Stevelets
aspired to do no harmand supposedly they got better at that year by yearbut
they were still far too stupid and stubborn to be relied upon to get anything
right. They had just robbed his parents of two skilled pairs of hands in the
middle of the harvest; how could they imagine that that was harmless? Millions
of people around the world had died in the Crash, and that couldnłt all be
blamed on panic and self-inflicted casualties. The government had been crazy,
bombing half the farms in the Southeast; everyone agreed now that it had only
made things worse. But many other deaths could not have been avoided, except by
the actions of the Stevelets themselves.

You couldnłt reason with them, though. You couldnłt shame
them, or punish them. You just had to hope they got better at noticing when
they were screwing things up, while they forged ahead with their impossible
task.

�See that old factory?" Lincolnłs grandmother gestured at a
burned-out metal frame drooping over slabs of cracked concrete, standing in a
field of weeds. �There was a conclave there, almost 20 years ago."

Lincoln had been past the spot many times, and no one had ever
mentioned this before. �What happened? What did they try?"

�I heard it was meant to be a time machine. Some crackpot
had put his plans on the Net, and the Stevelets decided they had to check it
out. About a hundred people were working there, and thousands of animals."

Lincoln shivered. �How long were they at it?"

�Three years." She added quickly, �But theyłve learned to rotate
the workers now. Itłs rare for them to hang on to any individual for more than
a month or two."

A month or two. A part of Lincoln recoiled, but another part
thought: that wouldnłt be so bad. A break from the farm, doing something
different. Meeting new people, learning new skills, working with animals.

Rats, most likely.

Steve Hasluck had been part of a team of scientists
developing a new kind of medical nanomachine, refining the tiny surgical instruments
so they could make decisions of their own, on the spot. Stevełs team had
developed an efficient way of sharing computing power across a whole swarm,
allowing them to run large, complex programs known as �expert systems" that
codified decades of biological and clinical knowledge into pragmatic lists of
rules. The nanomachines didnłt really �know" anything, but they could churn
through a very long list of �If A and B, therełs an 80 percent chance of C" at
blistering speed, and a good list gave them a good chance of cutting a lot of
diseases off short.

Then Steve found out that he had cancer, and that his
particular kind wasnłt covered by anyonełs list of rules.

He took a batch of the nanomachines and injected them into a
roomful of caged rats, along with samples of his tumor. The nanomachines could
swarm all over the tumor cells, monitoring their actions constantly. The
polymer radio antennas they built beneath the ratsł skin let them share their
observations and hunches from host to host, like their own high-speed wireless
Internet, and report their findings back to Steve himself. With that much
information being gathered, how hard could it be to understand the problem and
fix it? But Steve and his colleagues couldnłt make sense of the data. Steve got
sicker, and all the gigabytes pouring out of the rats remained as useless as
ever.

Steve tried putting new software into the swarms. If nobody
knew how to cure his disease, why not let the swarms work it out? He gave them
access to vast clinical databases and told them to extract their own rules.
When the cure still failed to appear, he bolted on more software, including
expert systems seeded with basic knowledge of chemistry and physics. From this
starting point, the swarms worked out things about cell membranes and protein
folding that no one had ever realized before, but none of it helped Steve.

Steve decided that the swarms still had too narrow a view.
He gave them a general-purpose knowledge acquisition engine and let them drink
at will from the entire Web. To guide their browsing and their self-refinement,
he gave them two clear goals. The first was to do no harm to their hosts. The
second was to find a way to save his life or, failing that, to bring him back
from the dead.

That last rider might not have been entirely crazy, because
Steve had arranged to have his body preserved in liquid nitrogen. If that had
happened, maybe the Stevelets would have spent the next 30 years ferrying
memories out of his frozen brain. Unfortunately, Stevełs car hit a tree at high
speed just outside of Austin, TX, and his brain ended up as flamb�.

This made the news, and the Stevelets were watching. Between
their lessons from the Web and whatever instincts their creator had given them,
they figured out that they were now likely to be incinerated themselves. That
wouldnłt have mattered to them if not for the fact that theyłd decided the game
wasnłt over. Therełd been nothing about resurrecting charred flesh in the
online medical journals, but the Web embraced a wider range of opinions. The
swarms had read the sites of various groups convinced that self-modifying
software could find ways to make itself smarter, and then smarter again, until
nothing was beyond its reach. Resurrecting the dead was right there on every
bullet-pointed menu of miracles.

The Stevelets knew that they couldnłt achieve anything as a plume
of smoke wafting out of a rat crematorium, so the first thing they engineered
was a breakout. From the cages, from the building, from the city. The original
nanomachines couldnłt replicate themselves, and could be destroyed in an
instant by a simple chemical trigger, but somewhere in the sewers or the fields
or the silos, they had inspected and dissected each other to the point that
they were able to reproduce. They took the opportunity to alter some old
traits: the new generation of Stevelets lacked the suicide switch, and they
resisted external meddling with their software.

They might have vanished into the woods to build scarecrow
Steves out of sticks and leaves, but their software roots gave their task
rigor, of a kind. From the Net they had taken ten thousand crazy ideas about
the world, and though they lacked the sense to see that they were crazy, they
couldnłt simply take anything on faith, either. They had to test these claims,
one by one, as they groped their way toward Stevescence. And while the Web had
suggested that with their power to self-modify they could achieve anything,
they found that in reality there were countless crucial tasks that remained
beyond their abilities. Even with the aid of dexterous mutant rats, Steveware
Version 2 was never going to re�ngineer the fabric of space-time, or resurrect
Steve in a virtual world.

Within months of their escape, it must have become clear to
them that some hurdles could be jumped only with human assistance, because that
was when they started borrowing people. Doing them no physical harm, but
infesting them with the kinds of ideas and compulsions that turned them into
willing recruits.

The panic, the bombings, the Crash, had followed. Lincoln
hadnłt witnessed the worst of it. He hadnłt seen conclaves of harmless
sleepwalkers burned to death by mobs, or fields of grain napalmed by the
government, lest they feed and shelter nests of rats.

Over the decades, the war had become more subtle. Counterware
could keep the Stevelets at bay, for a while. The experts kept trying to
subvert the Steveware, spreading modified Stevelets packed with propositions
that aimed to cripple the swarms or, more ambitiously, make them believe that
their job was done. In response, the Steveware had developed verification and
encryption schemes that made it ever harder to corrupt or mislead. Some people
still advocated cloning Steve from surviving pathology samples, but most
experts doubted that the Steveware would be satisfied with that, or taken in by
any misinformation that made the clone look like something more.

The Stevelets aspired to the impossible and would accept no
substitutes, while humanity longed to be left unmolested, to get on with more
useful tasks. Lincoln had known no other world, but until now hełd viewed the struggle
from the sidelines, save shooting the odd rat and queuing up for his
counterware shots.

So what was his role now? Traitor? Double agent? Prisoner of
war? People talked about sleepwalkers and zombies, but in truth there was still
no right word for what he had become.

Late in the afternoon, as they approached Atlanta, Lincoln
felt his sense of the cityłs geography warping, the significance of familiar
landmarks shifting. New information coming through. He ran one hand over each
of his forearms, where hełd heard the antennas often grew, but the polymer was
probably too soft to feel beneath the skin. His parents could have wrapped his
body in foil to mess with reception, and put him in a tent full of bottled air
to keep out any of the chemical signals that the Stevelets also used, but none
of that would have rid him of the basic urge.

As they passed the airport, then the tangle of overpasses
where the highway from Macon merged with the one from Alabama, Lincoln couldnłt
stop thinking about the baseball stadium up ahead. Had the Stevelets
commandeered the home of the Braves? That would have made the news, surely, and
ramped the war up a notch or two.

�Next exit," he said. He gave directions that were half his
own, half flowing from an eerie dream logic, until they turned a corner and the
place where he knew he had to be came into view. It wasnłt the stadium itself;
that had merely been the closest landmark in his head, a beacon the Stevelets
had used to help guide him. �They booked a whole motel!" his grandmother
exclaimed.

�Bought," Lincoln guessed, judging from the amount of
visible construction work. The Steveware controlled vast financial assets, some
flat-out stolen from sleepwalkers but much of it honestly acquired by trading
the products of the rat factories: everything from high-grade pharmaceuticals
to immaculately faked designer shoes.

The original parking lot was full, but there were signs
showing the way to an overflow area near what had once been the pool. As they
headed for reception, Lincolnłs thoughts drifted weirdly to the time theyłd
come to Atlanta for one of Samłs spelling competitions.

There were three uniformed government Stevologists in the
lobby, seated at a small table with some equipment. Lincoln went first to the
reception desk, where a smiling young woman handed him two room keys before hełd
had a chance to say a word. �Enjoy the conclave," she said. He didnłt know if
she was a zombie like him or a former motel employee whołd been kept on, but
she didnłt need to ask him anything.

The government people took longer to deal with. His grandmother
sighed as they worked their way through a questionnaire, and then a woman
called Dana took Lincolnłs blood. �They usually try to hide," Dana said, �but
sometimes your counterware can bring us useful fragments, even when it canłt
stop the infection."

As they ate their evening meal in the motel dining room, Lincoln
tried to meet the eyes of the people around him. Some looked away nervously;
others offered him encouraging smiles. He didnłt feel as if he was being
inducted into a cult, and it wasnłt just the lack of pamphlets or speeches. He
hadnłt been brainwashed into worshipping Steve; his opinion of the dead man was
entirely unchanged. Like the desire to reach Atlanta in the first place, his
task here would be far more focused and specific. To the Steveware he was a
kind of machine, a machine it could instruct and tinker with the way Lincoln
could control and customize his phone, but the Steveware no more expected him
to share its final goal than he expected his own machines to enjoy his music,
or respect his friends.

Lincoln knew that he dreamed that night, but when he woke he
had trouble remembering the dream. He knocked on his grandmotherłs door; shełd
been up for hours. �I canłt sleep in this place," she complained. �Itłs quieter
than the farm."

She was right, Lincoln realized. They were close to the highway,
but traffic noise, music, sirens, all the usual city sounds, barely reached
them.

They went down to breakfast. When theyłd eaten, Lincoln was
at a loss to know what to do. He went to the reception desk; the same woman was
there.

He didnłt need to speak. She said, �Theyłre not quite ready
for you, sir. Feel free to watch TV, take a walk, use the gym. Youłll know when
youłre needed."

He turned to his grandmother. �Letłs take a walk."

They left the motel and walked around the stadium, then headed
east away from the highway, ending up in a leafy park a few blocks away. All
the people around them were doing ordinary things: pushing their kids on swings,
playing with their dogs. Lincolnłs grandmother said, �If you want to change
your mind, we can always go home."

As if his mind were his own to change. Still, at this moment
the compulsion that had brought him here seemed to have waned. He didnłt know
whether the Steveware had taken its eyes off him or was deliberately offering
him a choice, a chance to back out.

He said, �Iłll stay." He dreaded the idea of hitting the
road only to find himself summoned back. Part of him was curious, too. He
wanted to be brave enough to step inside the jaws of this whale, on the promise
that he would be disgorged in the end.

They returned to the motel, ate lunch, watched TV, ate
dinner. Lincoln checked his phone; his friends had been calling, wondering why
he hadnłt been in touch. He hadnłt told anyone where hełd gone. Hełd left it to
his parents to explain everything to Sam.

He dreamed again, and woke clutching at fragments. Good
times, an edge of danger, wide blue skies, the company of friends. It seemed
more like a dream he could have had on his own than anything that might have
come from the Steveware cramming his mind with equations so he could help test
another crackpot idea that the swarms had collected 30 years ago by Googling
the physics of immortality.

Three more days passed, just as aimlessly. Lincoln began to
wonder if hełd failed some test, or if therełd been a miscalculation leading to
a glut of zombies.

Early in the morning of their fifth day in Atlanta, as
Lincoln splashed water on his face in the bathroom, he felt the change. Shards
of his recurrent dream glistened potently in the back of his mind, while a set
of directions through the motel complex gelled in the foreground. He was being
summoned. It was all he could do to bang on his grandmotherłs door and shout
out a garbled explanation before he set off down the corridor.

She caught up with him. �Are you sleepwalking? Lincoln?"

�Iłm still here, but theyłre taking me soon."

She looked frightened. He grasped her hand and squeezed it. �Donłt
worry," he said. Hełd always imagined that when the time came hełd be the one
who was afraid, drawing his courage from her.

He turned a corner and saw the corridor leading into a large
space that might once have been a room for conferences or weddings. Half a
dozen people were standing around; Lincoln could tell that the three teenagers
were fellow zombies, while the adults were just there to look out for them. The
room had no furniture but contained an odd collection of items, including four
ladders and four bicycles. There was cladding on the walls, soundproofing, as
if the whole building werenłt quiet enough already.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lincoln saw a dark mass of quivering
fur: a swarm of rats, huddled against the wall. For a moment his skin crawled,
but then a heady sense of exhilaration swept his revulsion away. His own body
held only the tiniest fragment of the Steveware; at last he could confront the
thing itself.

He turned toward the rats and spread his arms. �You called,
and I came running. So what is it you want?" Disquietingly, memories of the
Pied Piper story drifted into his head. Irresistible music lured the rats away.
Then it lured away the children.

The rats gave no answer, but the room vanished.

Ty hit a patch of dust on the edge of the road, and it rose
up around him. He whooped with joy and pedaled twice as hard, streaking ahead
to leave his friends immersed in the cloud.

Errol caught up with him and reached across to punch him on
the arm, as if hełd raised the dust on purpose. It was a light blow, not enough
to be worth retribution; Ty just grinned at him.

It was a school day, but theyłd all sneaked off together
before lessons began. They couldnłt do anything in townthere were too many
people whołd know thembut then Dan had suggested heading for the water tower.
His father had some spray paint in the shed. Theyłd climb the tower and tag it.

There was a barbed-wire fence around the base of the tower,
but Dan had already been out here on the weekend and started a tunnel, which
didnłt take them long to complete. When they were through, Ty looked up and
felt his head swimming. Carlos said, �We should have brought a rope."

�Wełll be okay."

Chris said, �Iłll go first."

�Why?" Dan demanded.

Chris took his fancy new phone from his pocket and waved it
at them. �Best camera angle. I donłt want to be looking up your ass."

Carlos said, �Just promise you wonłt put it on the Web. If
my parents see this, Iłm screwed."

Chris laughed. �Mine, too. Iłm not that stupid."

�Yeah, well, you wonłt be on camera if youłre holding the
thing."

Chris started up the ladder. Dan went next, with one paint
can in the back pocket of his jeans. Ty followed, then Errol and Carlos.

The air had been still down on the ground, but as they went
higher a breeze came out of nowhere, cooling the sweat on Tyłs back. The ladder
started shuddering; he could see where it was bolted securely to the concrete
of the tower, but in between it could still flex alarmingly. Hełd treat it like
a fairground ride, he decided: a little scary, but probably safe.

When Chris reached the top, Dan let go of the ladder with
one hand, took the paint can, and reached out sideways into the expanse of
white concrete. He quickly shaped a blue background, a distorted diamond, and
then called down to Errol, who was carrying the red.

When Ty had passed the can up, he looked away, out across
the expanse of brown dust. He could see the town in the distance. He glanced up
and saw Chris leaning forward, gripping the ladder with one hand behind his
back while he aimed the phone down at them.

Ty shouted up at him, �Hey, Scorsese! Make me famous!"

Dan spent five minutes adding finicky details in silver. Ty
didnłt mind; it was good just being here. He didnłt need to mark the tower
himself; whenever he saw Danłs tag, hełd remember this feeling.

They clambered down, then sat at the base of the tower and
passed the phone around, checking out Chrisłs movie.

Lincoln had three rest days before he was called again, this
time for four days in succession. He fought hard to remember all the scenes he
was sleepwalking through, but even with his grandmother adding her accounts of
the �playacting" shełd witnessed, he found it hard to hold on to the details.

Sometimes he hung out with the other actors, shooting pool
in the motelłs game room, but there seemed to be an unspoken taboo against
discussing their roles. Lincoln doubted that the Steveware would punish them
even if they managed to overcome the restraint, but it was clear that it didnłt
want them to piece too much together. It had even gone to the trouble of
changing Stevełs name (as Lincoln and the other actors heard it, though
presumably not Steve himself), as if the anger they felt toward the man in
their ordinary lives might have penetrated into their roles. Lincoln couldnłt
even remember his own motherłs face when he was Ty; the farm, the Crash, the
whole history of the last 30 years, was gone from his thoughts entirely.

In any case, he had no wish to spoil the charade. Whatever
the Steveware thought it was doing, �Lincoln hoped it would believe it was
working perfectly, all the way from Stevełs small-town childhood to whatever
age it needed to reach before it could write this creation into flesh and
blood, congratulate itself on a job well done, and then finally, mercifully,
dissolve into rat piss and let the world move on.

Without warning, a fortnight after theyłd arrived, Lincoln
was no longer needed. He knew it when he woke, and after breakfast the woman at
reception asked him, politely, to pack his bags and hand back the keys. Lincoln
didnłt understand, but maybe Tyłs family had moved out of Stevełs hometown, and
the friends hadnłt stayed in touch. Lincoln had played his part; now he was
free.

When they returned to the lobby with their suitcases, Dana
spotted them and asked Lincoln if he was willing to be debriefed. He turned to
his grandmother. �Are you worried about the traffic?" Hełd already phoned his
father and told him theyłd be back by dinnertime.

She said, �You should do this. Iłll wait in the truck."

They sat at a table in the lobby. Dana asked his permission
to record his words, and he told her everything he could remember.

When Lincoln had finished, he said, �Youłre the Stevologist.
You think theyłll get there in the end?"

Dana gestured at her phone to stop recording. �One estimate,"
she said, �is that the Stevelets now comprise a hundred thousand times the
computational resources of all the brains of all the human beings whołve ever
lived."

Lincoln laughed. �And they still need stage props and
extras, to do a little VR?"

�Theyłve studied the anatomy of ten million human brains,
but I think they know that they still donłt fully understand consciousness.
They bring in real people for the bit parts, so they can concentrate on the
star. If you gave them a particular human brain, Iłm sure they could faithfully
copy it into software, but anything more complicated starts to get murky. How
do they know their Steve is conscious, when theyłre not conscious themselves?
He never gave them a reverse Turing test, a checklist they could apply. All they
have is the judgment of people like you."

Lincoln felt a surge of hope. �He seemed real enough to me."
His memories were blurredand he wasnłt even absolutely certain which of Tyłs
four friends was Stevebut none of them had struck him as less than human.

Dana said, �They have his genome. They have movies, they
have blogs, they have e-mails: from Steve and a lot of people who knew him.
They have a thousand fragments of his life. Like the borders of a giant jigsaw
puzzle."

�So thatłs good, right? A lot of data is good?"

Dana hesitated. �The scenes you described have been played
out thousands of times before. Theyłre trying to tweak their Steve to write the
right e-mails, pull the right faces for the cameraby himself, without
following a script like the extras. A lot of data sets the bar very high."

As Lincoln walked out to the parking lot, he thought about
the laughing, carefree boy hełd called Chris. Living for a few days, writing an
e-mailthen memory-wiped, re-set, started again. Climbing a water tower, making
a movie of his friends, but later turning the camera on himself, saying one
wrong wordand wiped again.

A thousand times. A million times. The Steveware was infinitely
patient, and infinitely stupid. Each time it failed, it would change the
actors, shuffle a few variables, and run the experiment over again. The
possibilities were endless, but it would keep on trying until the sun burned
out.

Lincoln was tired. He climbed into the truck beside his grandmother,
and they headed for home.

TAP

�I want you to find out who killed my mother, Ms OłConnor.
Will you do that?"

Helen Sharpłs voice was unsteady with anger; she seemed almost
as psyched up as if shełd come here to confront the killer, face-to-face. Under
the circumstances, though, the very act of insisting that there was a killer
was like shouting a defiant accusation from the rooftopswhich must have taken
some courage, even if she had no idea whom she was accusing.

I said carefully, �The coroner returned an open finding. Iłm
not a lawyer, but I imagine Third Hemisphere would still settle out of court
for a significant"

�Third Hemisphere have no case to answer! And sure, maybe
theyłd pay up anywayjust to avoid the publicity. But as it happens, Iłm not
interested in legalized blackmail." Her eyes flashed angrily; she made no
effort to conceal her outrage. No doubt her lawyers had already given her
exactly the same advice; it didnłt look like the idea would ever grow on her.
She was thirty-twoonly five years younger than mebut she radiated so much stubborn
idealism that I found it hard not to think of her as belonging to another
generation entirely.

I raised one hand in a conciliatory gesture. �Fine. Itłs
your decision. But I suggest you donłt sign anything that limits your optionsand
donłt make any public declarations of absolution. After six months paying my
expenses, you might change your mind. Or I might even turn up something that
will change it for you. Stranger things have happened." Though nothing much
stranger than a next-of-kin declining to screw a multinational for all it was
worth.

Sharp said impatiently, �The TAP implant was not
responsible. Therełs no evidence to suggest that it was."

�No, and therełs no evidence to suggest foul play, either."

�Thatłs why Iłm hiring you. To find it."

I glanced irritably at the north-facing window; the
allegedly smart pane was ablaze with sunlight, rendering most of the office
almost as hot as the sweltering streets of Kings Cross below.

Grace Sharp had been dead for a month. Iłd been following
the case informally, like everyone else in Sydney, out of sheer morbid
curiosity. On the evening of January 12, shełd been at work in her study,
apparently alone. The immediate cause of death had been a myocardial
infarction, but the autopsy had also shown signs of a powerful adrenaline
surge. That could have resulted from the pain and stress of a heart attack
already in progressor it could have come first, triggered by an unknown
external shock.

Or, the Total Affect Protocol chip in her brain might have
flooded her body with adrenaline for no good reason at all.

Sharp had been sixty-sevenin reasonable health for her age,
but old enough to blur the boundaries of the possible. Forensic pathologists
had struggled at the inquest to allocate probabilities to the three alternatives,
but therełd been no clear front-runner. Which was no doubt distressing for the
relativesand no doubt left them vulnerable to the fantasy that there had to be
a simple answer out there somewhere, just waiting to be found.

Helen Sharp said, �The media consensus is that my mother was
composing a poem just before she diedand she thought a word in TAP so ępowerfulł
that it killed her on the spot." Her tone was venomous. �Do they seriously
imagine that ninety thousand sane people would put something in their brains
which was capable of doing that? Or that the manufacturers would sell a device
which would leave them open to billions of dollars worth of compensation
claims? Or that the government licensing authorities"

I said, �Licensed pharmaceuticals have killed plenty of
people. Implants are even harder to test. And ęfail-safeł software written to
the most rigorous military specifications has crashed aircraft"

She seized on the analogy triumphantly. �And how do you know
that? Because the aircraftłs black box proved it! Well, the TAP implant has its
own black box: an independent chip which logs all its actions. And there was no
record of any malfunction. No record of the implant triggering an adrenaline
release at any levellet alone a fatal dose."

�Maybe the black box glitched, too. You say itłs independentbut
if therełs enough connectivity to let it know everything the implant does, the
combined system might still be vulnerable to some kind of shared failure mode
that the designers never anticipated."

Sharp clenched her fists in frustration. �Thatłs notliterallyimpossible,"
she conceded. �But I donłt believe itłs likely."

�All right. What do you think happened?"

Sharp composed herself, with the air of someone weary of repeating
the same message, gathering up her strength with a promise to herself that this
would be the last time.

She said, �My mother was working on a new poem that nightthe
black box makes that clear. But the time of death canłt be determined preciselyand
it could have been as much as fifteen minutes after the last recorded use of
the implant. I believe she was interrupted. I believe someone broke into the
apartment and killed her.

�I donłt know how they did it. Maybe they just terrorized
herwithout laying a finger on herand that was enough to bring on the heart
attack." Her voice was flat, deliberately emotionless. �Or maybe they gave her
a transdermal dose of a powerful stimulant. There are dozens of chemicals which
could have triggered a heart attack, without leaving a trace. She wasnłt found
for almost nine hours. There are carbohydrate analogs of stimulatory neuropeptides
which are degraded into glucose and water on a time scale of minutes."

I resisted the urge to cite the lack of evidence for an
intruder; it would have been a waste of breath. �Why, though? Why would anyone
want to kill her?"

She hesitated. �Iłm not sure how much you know about TAP."

�Assume the worst."

�Well ... itłs been wrongly described as just about
everything from ętelepathył to ęcomputerized Esperantoł to ęthe multimedia
standard for the brainł. Sure, it began with a fusion of language and VRbut itłs
been growing for almost fifteen years now. Therełs still a word for <>�she
sketched the angle-brackets with her fingers, and I picked up on the convention
later�which might as well be hundoand another for <> ... which will
evoke all that and more in all five senses, if you let it.

�But at the leading edge, now, wełre creating words for concepts,
emotions, states of mind, which might once have defied description altogether.
With TAP, ultimately therełs nothing a human being can experience which needs
to remain ... ineffable, mysterious, incommunicable. Nothing is beyond
discussion. Nothing is beyond analysis. Nothing is ęunspeakableł. And a lot of
people find that prospect threatening; it turns a lot of old power structures
on their head."

If that cliche came true every time it was invoked, power
structures would be oscillating faster than mains current. Helen Sharp was
pushing seven on my paranoia index; on top of all her understandable grief and
frustration, she belonged to a technosubculture which was poorly understood by
the mainstream, frequently misrepresentedand which clearly liked to think of
itself as a �dangerously" iconoclastic elite.

I said, �I know there are people who find TAP users ... unacceptable.
But whatłs going to drive them to extremes like murder, all of a sudden? In
fifteen years, has anyone, anywhere, been killed simply for having the implant?"

�Not to my knowledge. But"

�Then surely"

�But I can tell you exactly whatłs changed. I can tell you
why the conflict has just entered a whole new phase."

That got my attention. �Go on."

�You know itłs against the law to install a TAP implant in
anyone younger than eighteen years old?"

�Of course." The same restriction applied to all neural hardware,
other than therapeutic chips which restored normal function to the injured or
congenitally disabled.

�Early in March, a couple here in Sydney will commence legal
proceedings with the aim of ensuring that theyłre free to install the implant
in all their future childrenat the age of three months."

I was momentarily speechless. These plans had clearly been
kept within a very tight circle of supporters; the saturation media coverage of
the inquest hadnłt mentioned so much as a rumour. After a month of intense
journalistic scrutiny, I hadnłt expected the TAP-heads to have any surprises
left.

I said, �Legal proceedings on what basis?"

�That theyłre entitled to raise their family using whatever
language they choose. Thatłs guaranteed in Federal legislation: therełs a 2011
bill which brings into force most of the provisions of the 2005 UN Covenant on
Human Rights. Theyłll be seeking a ruling from the High Court which invalidates
the relevant sections of the New South Wales criminal codewhich is far more
difficult, from a legal point of view, than trying to defend themselves against
a prosecution after the fact ... but it does save them the trouble of having to
find a surgeon willing to risk martyrdom."

Sharp smiled faintly. �The same Federal law was invoked
about a year ago, by a signing couple who were being pressured by Community
Services to give their son a hearing implant. The parents won the first roundand
it looks like there isnłt going to be an appeal. But a pro-implant case was
always going to be much harder, of course. And signing is positively
respectable, compared to TAP."

�I assume the police know all this?"

�Of course. They donłt appear to be particularly interested,
thoughand I wasnłt able to raise it at the inquest. Legally speaking, I
suppose it really is just static."

�But you think"

�I think a death widely attributed to the TAP implant would
transform the prospects of the challenge succeeding from merely poor to ...
politically impossible. I think there are people whołd consider that to be a
result worth killing for."

Sharp fixed her gaze on me for a moment, and then nodded
slightly, almost sympatheticallyas if Iłd just uttered a word which expressed
all the conflicting emotions running through my head: <

I had to admit that it was a deeply unsettling notion: a
language which could encompass, if not the universe itself, then everything we
could possibly experience of it. At any given moment, there were �only" ten to
the power three thousand subjectively distinguishable states of the human
brain. A mere ten thousand bits of information: quite a mouthful, encoded as
syllablesbut only a millisecond flash in infrared. A TAP user could
effectively narrate his or her entire inner life, with one hundred percent
fidelity, in real time. Leopold Bloom, eat your heart out.

I boarded the southbound train, the skin on the back of my
neck still tingling. The carriage was packed, so I stood strap-hanging with my
eyes closed, letting the question spin in the darkness of my skull: Who, or
what, killed Grace Sharp? Work was never something I could switch on and offand
unless I reached the stage where part of me was thinking about the case every
waking moment, the chances were Iłd make no progress at all.

Helen Sharp believed in some faceless conspiracy against TAP
as a first language, driven by sheer linguistic xenophobiathough the real
opposition might also be motivated, in part, by perfectly valid concerns about
the unknown developmental consequences for a child growing up with TAP.

The serious media favoured a simple failure of technology;
several worthy editorials had rewritten the Sharp case as a cautionary tale
about the need for improved quality control in biomedical engineering.
Meanwhile, the tabloids had gleefully embraced the idea of the <> word,
quasi-mystical enough to give their anti-tech subscribers a frisson of
self-righteousness at the poetic justice of a TAP-head thinking herself into
oblivion ... and their pro-tech ones a frisson of awe at the sheer Power of the
Chip.

And it was still possible that Grace Sharp had simply had a
heart attack, all by herself. No assassins, no fatal poetry, no glitch.

So far, I could only agree with the coroner: I wasnłt
prepared to rule anything out.

By the time I arrived home, Mick had already eaten and retreated
to his room to play Austro-Hungarian Political Intrigues in Space. Hełd been
running the scenario for almost six months, along with a dozen friendssome in
Sydney, some in Beijing, some in Sao Paulo. Theyłd graciously let me join in
once, as a minor character with an unpronounceable name, but Iłd become terminally
bored after ten minutes and engineered my own death as swiftly as possible. I
had nothing against role-playing games, per se ... but this was the most
ludicrous one Iłd encountered since Postmodernism Ate My Love Child. Still,
every twelve-year-old needed something truly appalling to grow out ofsomething
to look back on in a yearłs time with unconditional embarrassment. The books Iłd
read, myself (and adored, at the time) had been no better.

I knocked on his door, and entered. He was lying on his bed
with the headset on and his hands above his head, making minimalist gestures
with both control gloves: driving a software puppet body which had no sense of
touch, or balance, or proprioception. He was moving its limbs with actions
which had nothing to do with moving his own ... but he was seeing and hearing
everything through the puppetłs eyes and ears.

Most of the studies Iłd read had suggested that the earlier
a child took up VR (headset-and-glove, of course, not implant-based), the fewer
side-effects it had on real-life coordination and body image. The skills of
moving real and virtual bodies didnłt seem to compete for limited neural
resources; they could be learnt in parallel, as easily as two languages. Only
adults got confused between the two (and did better with VR implants, which let
them pretend they were using their physical bodies). The research suggested
that an hour a day in VR was no more harmful than an hour a day of any other
equally unnatural activity: violin practice, ballet, karate.

I still worried, though.

The room monitor flagged my presence. At a convenient break
in the action, Mick slipped off the headset to greet me, doing his best to hide
his impatience.

I said, �School?"

He shrugged. �Bland-out. Work?"

�Iłve got a murder case."

His face lit up. �Resonant! What class weapon?"

�Unkind words."

�żQue?"

�Itłs a joke." I almost started to explain, but it didnłt
seem fair to hold up the other players. �Youłll quit at nine, okay? I donłt
want to have to check on you."

�Mmmm." Deliberately noncommittal.

I said calmly, �I can program it, or you can stick to the
rules voluntarily. Itłs your choice."

He scowled. �Itłs no choice, if it makes no difference."

�Very profound. But I happen to disagree." I walked over to
him and brushed the hair from his eyes; he gave me his I-wish-you-wouldnłt-but-youłre-forgiven-this-time
look.

Mick said suddenly, �Unkind words? You mean Grace Sharp?"

I nodded, surprised.

�Some guru last week was prating about her TAPping herself
to death." He seemed greatly amusedand it struck me that �guru" was several
orders of magnitude more insulting than anything I would have dared to say in
front of my mother, at his age. At least put-downs were getting more elegant;
my generationłs equivalents had relied almost exclusively on references to excrement
or genitalia. Mick and his contemporaries werenłt at all prudishthey just
found the old scatological forms embarrassingly childish.

I said, �You donłt believe in the <> word?"

�Not some banana skin land mine you make yourself, by accident."

I pondered that. �But if it exists at all, donłt you think
itłd be easier to fight if it came from outside, than if you stumbled on it in
your own thoughts?"

He shook his head knowingly. �TAPłs not like that. You canłt
invent random words in your headyou canłt try out random bit-patterns. You can
imagine things, you can free-associate, but ... not all the way to death,
without seeing it coming."

I laughed. �So when did you read up on this?"

�Last week. The story sounded flash, so I went context mining."
He glanced at his terminal and made some slight hand movements; a cluster of
icons for Universal Resource Locators poured into an envelope with my name on
it, which darted into the outgoing mail box. �References."

�Thanks. I wasted the whole afternoonI should have come
home early and picked your brains instead." I was only half joking.

I sat on the edge of the bed. �If she didnłt stumble on the
word herself, though ... I donłt see how anyone could have spoken it to her: as
far as the police could tell, shełd had no visitorsor communicationsfor
hours. And if someone broke into the apartment, they left no trace."

�How about ... ?" Mick gestured with one gloved thumb at the
shelf above his bed.

�What?" I parsed the clutter of objects slowly. �Ah."

Hełd set up an IR link with his friend Vito, who lived in an
apartment block across the park; they could exchange data twenty-four hours a
day without either family paying a cent to the fibre barons. The collimated
beam of the five-dollar transceiver passed effortlessly through both their
bedroom windows.

�You think someone outside the apartment ... shot her in the
palm with a <> word?" The notion conjured up bizarre images: a figure
taking aim with a gunless night-sight; Grace Sharp with outstretched arms and
infrared stigmata.

�Maybe. Split the fee, if Iłm right?"

�Sure. Minus rent, food, clothes, communications"

Mick mimed violin playing. I feigned a swipe at his head. He
glanced at the terminal; his friends were losing patience.

I said, �Iłd better leave you to it."

He smiled, held up his hand in a farewell gesture like a
diver about to submerge, then slipped the headset back on. I lingered in the
room for a few seconds, feeling profoundly strange.

Not because I felt that I was losing touch with my son. I
wasnłt. But the fact that we could comprehend each other at all suddenly seemed
like the most precarious voodoo. Natural language had endured, fundamentally
unchanged, through a thousand social and technological revolutions ... but TAP
made it look like some Stone Age tool, a flake of crudely shaped obsidian in an
era when individual atoms could be picked up and rearranged at whim.

And maybe in the long run, all the trial-and-error and misunderstandings,
all the folk remedies of smiles and gestures, all the clumsy imperfect
well-meaning attempts to bridge the gap, would be swept away by the dazzling
torrent of communication without bounds.

I closed the door quietly on my way out.

The next morning I started going through the transcripts of
the inquestwhich included a 3D image of Sharpłs study. The body had been found
around 8:20 AM by a domestic aid who came three times a weekSharp, although
generally fit, had suffered from severe arthritis in her hands. Paramedics had
removed the body before the police became involved, but theyłd snapped the
scene first as a routine procedure.

The apartment was on the 25th floor, and the study had a
large window facing west. The curtains were shown fully openalthough there was
nothing in the transcripts, one way or the other, about the possibility that
the man whołd found the body, or even the paramedics, might have opened them to
let in some light. I grafted the image into the local councilłs plan of the
suburb, and did some crude ray-tracing from where the forensic software suggested
Sharp had been standing before she fell. A bullet would have left directional
informationbut a burst of IR could have come from any location with a clear
line of sight. Given the uncertainty in her position, and the size of the
window, the possibilities encompassed the windows and balconies of sixty-three
apartments. Most were beyond the range of cheap hobbyistsł IR equipmentbut I
looked up skin-transceiver sensitivity, attenuation in the atmosphere, and beam
spread parameters, then started checking product catalogues. There were several
models of communications lasers which would have done the joband the cheapest
was only three hundred dollars. Not the kind of thing you could buy from an
electronics retailer, but there were no formal restrictions on purchase or
ownership. It wasnłt a weapon, after all.

The worldłs greatest TAP poet, shot by a word? It was a seductive
ideaand I was surprised that the tabloids hadnłt seized on it, weeks agobut
in the cold light of morning, I was finding it increasingly difficult to
believe that Grace Sharp had died from anything but natural causes. The
building had excellent security; the forensic team had found no sign of an
intruder. The testimony of the black box wasnłt watertight, but on balance it
probably did exonerate the implant. And Helen Sharp herself had been convinced
that the <> word was impossible.

I spent the morning slogging through the rest of the
transcripts, but there was nothing very illuminating. The experts had washed
their hands of Grace Sharpłs death. I didnłt blame them: if the evidence
supported no clear verdict, the honest thing to do was to say so. At most
inquests, though, someone managed to slip a speculation or two into the
proceedings: a pathologistłs gut-level hunch, an engineerłs unprovable
intuition. A few lines I could wave accusingly in their face when I cornered
them in their officeprompting them to spill the whole elaborate, unofficial
hypothesis theyłd been nurturing in their head for months. But there wasnłt a
single foothold here, a single indiscretion I could pursue; every witness had
been cautious to a fault.

So I had nowhere else to go: I steeled myself and went
trawling through the archives for the enemies of TAP.

Media releases (mainly from politicians and religious
figures), letters and essays in edited publications, and postings to net forums
gave me about seventeen thousand individuals whołd had something disparaging to
say to the world about TAP. The search algorithm was multilingual, but I didnłt
trust it to pick up irony reliably, so even this crude first grab had to be
taken with a mountain of salt. Twelve percent of the forum postings were
anonymousand the random sample I inspected made it clear that they came from
the most vehement opponentsbut I put them aside; textual analysis of a few
gigabytes of invective could wait for barrel-scraping time.

Clustering software picked up some fairly predictable connections.
Two-thirds of the people Iłd found were officially speaking on behalf ofor
explicitly mentioned their membership or approval ofone of ninety-six
organizations: political, religious, or cultural.

The software drew ninety-six star-diagrams. The biggest cluster
was for Natural Wisdom: a quasi-green lobby group set up for the sole purpose
of opposing the use of neural hardware. Most members were European, but there
was a significant Australian presence. Second largest was The Fountain of
Righteousness, a U.S.-based fundamentalist Christian coalition; they had half a
dozen local affiliate churches. Cluster size didnłt necessarily measure the
strength of opposition, though; the Roman Catholic church ranked a mere
thirtiethbut only because it was so rigidly hierarchical, with a relatively
small list of appointed spokesmen. Most Islamic authorities werenłt keen on
neural hardware, eitherbut many predominantly Islamic countries had simply
outlawed the technology, largely defusing it as an issue. Islamłs best showing
was for a UK group, and that was ranked fifty-seventh.

I cut the data set down to Australia only. Nineteen organizations
remainedand the top six rankings stayed the same, for what that was worth.
There was something of the flavour of a witch-hunt to this whole analysis; I
wasnłt publicly accusing anyone of anythingI wasnłt libelling Natural Wisdom
as murderous thugs for daring to speak out against the implantbut this kind of
crude fishing expedition always made me feel distinctly uneasy.

Still, if these were the people whołd feel most threatened
by the prospect of children growing up with TAP ... who among them could have
known about the impending High Court challenge?

I scanned the membership databases of legal and paralegal associations,
and the mailing lists of relevant journals, scooping up anyone who gave an
address care of Huntingdale and Partnersthe firm who were preparing the �infant
implant" brief.

There was zero overlap with the anti-TAP setwhich was no
great surprise. I imagined the police would have gone at least this far, and
theyłd had better resources: they could have pulled the whole Huntingdale
workforce from taxation records, with no chance of so much as a clerical
assistant falling through the cracks.

I gazed at the screen, dispirited. All I had to show for a
dayłs work were sixty-three apartments with a view of Grace Sharpłs study, and
seventeen thousand people whołd done nothing more incriminating than put
themselves on the record as opponents of TAP.

The only thing left to try was intersecting the two.

Finding apartment numbers to match the physical locations in
the building plans was the hardest part; architects and developers didnłt have
to file anything so petty when they had their projects approved. I was actually
beginning to contemplate doing the necessary legwork myself, when I discovered
that someone had done it for me: an ad hoc consortium of sellers of insurance,
fire-alarms, security equipment and climate control had commissioned a database
for the entire metropolitan area, to help them target their junk mail. The
suburb I needed only cost fifty buckscomplete with email tags.

I cross-matched with the anti-TAP set.

A single name appeared.

John Dallaporta belonged to none of my organisational clusters,
and I had only one piece of data on his attitude to TAP: a short essay hełd
written, seven years before, decrying the implantłs potential to �erode the
richness of our ancient and beautiful tongues" and �invade the still,
mysterious spaces of our minds". The essay had appeared in a secondary English
teachersł netzine; I summoned up the whole issue, and flipped through its
innocuous contents. The majority of the articles dealt with working conditions,
and concerns arising out of new technology; there was also an earnestalmost
painfully respectfuldiscussion of strategies for coping with parents who
forbade their children contact with the filthy/sexist/atheistic/elitist/
superstitious/obsolete works of Shakespeare, et al. Not the kind of venue youłd
seriously expect to lead you to a man who slaughtered his ideological enemies.

I reread Dallaportałs essay carefully. It was passionate,
but hardly inflammatory; he sounded very much like just one more plaintive,
insecure technophobe letting off steam, to a no doubt largely sympathetic
audience. I was inclined to be sympathetic, myselfin all honesty, the implant
made my skin crawlbut there was a self-serving undercurrent which detracted
from the force of his arguments. Certainly, portraying English as an endangered
language was ridiculous, when more people were speaking it than at any other
time in history.

And though I could picture Dallaporta outside the court with
a placard, once the challenge to the implant legislation began, I found it hard
to imagine the author of these moderate words killing Grace Sharp in cold bloodand
harder still to imagine him discovering the means to do it.

I was growing tired of desk work, but I spent the next few
hours studying the fragmentary portrait of the man offered by the net. He was
forty-seven years old, divorced five years, with two daughters in their
mid-teens. Presumably his ex-wife had custody of both children, since all the
data suggested that he lived alone. Hełd been a teacher in government high
schools all his working life; in his late twenties, hełd published some poetry
in literary journals, but unless hełd adopted an undocumented pseudonym, therełd
been nothing since. He seemed to belong to no organization but the State School
Teachersł Union, and if he subscribed to any religion, no marketing demographer
had yet managed to pin it down.

So much for the electronic profile. I didnłt believe for a moment
that he could have killed Grace Sharpbut I wasnłt prepared to rule it out
until Iłd met him in the flesh.

I found a calendar of events for the Laurence Brereton Memorial
High School. There was a parent-teacher night in three daysł time.

I arrived late enough not to have to loiter outside for too
long before catching sight of a few departing parents, still wearing their name
badges. I got a good look at the style and the materials usedbut I was even
luckier than that: one man dropped his badge into a recycling bin right before
my eyes. Iłd come prepared with a variety of cardboard samples, safety pins and
clips, but all I had to do was fish out this discarded one, match the font on
my notepadłs printer, and spray my ownborrowedname onto the blank side.

No one challenged me as I entered the crowded hall and
walked straight past the desk where parents were queuing up to register their
attendance and collect their badges. I spotted a row of work stations
dispensing guidance; I walked up to one and tried to make an enquiry, but it
was too clever by far: the only entry point was �parentłs name"apparently all
it needed in order to highlight every relevant teacher on a personalized map of
the hall. I stood back and watched other people use the software, until
Dallaportałs name appeared.

It seemed an odd time of year for an event like this; Mickłs
high school had held an orientation night before the start of term, but they
hadnłt yet invited me back. The buzz of conversation around me sounded
remarkably amiable, though; maybe it was a good strategy to drag the parents in
as early as this, and try to nip any problems in the bud.

John Dallaporta was tall and slender, clean-shaven, slightly
balding. He was being talked at loudly by someonełs proud fatherand though his
eyes were glazed, and his smile a little wooden, he didnłt strike me as a man
whołd been sleepless with guilt for the past five weeks.

When the father departed, I approached purposefully. Dallaporta
offered his hand and said smoothly, �Good to see you, Ms. Stone." He hesitated.
�Iłm sorry, but I donłt think I"

I smiled disarmingly. �No, you donłt teach my daughter. But
I wanted to speak to you, and this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass
up. I hope you donłt mind."

�Not at all. But I should explain: Iłm not the head of department
this year. It rotates between the senior teachers, so Carol Bailey" He glanced
around, then pointed her out. �Do you see?"

I shook my head apologetically. �Itłs not a departmental matter.
I just wanted to meet you. I read an essay you wrote, a few years ago: The
Bit-Stream of the Rose. And I liked what you had to say there, very much. So
when I realized you were teaching in my daughterłs new school ... �

Dallaporta eyed me curiously, a little bemused, but he
betrayed no obvious unease or suspicion. �Thatłs so long ago now, Iłm surprised
you remember it at all. Let alone the name of the author."

�Of course I remember! And I just hope the rest of the department
share your values on those ... issues. I used to teach English, myself. I know
the kind of pressures youłre facing. And of course I want my own children to be
technologically literatebut some of us have to take a stand, or who knows what
ętechnologically literateł will mean, in twenty yearsł time?"

Dallaporta nodded affably, but now I could see muscles tightening
at the sides of his jawsthe ones which contract when youłre trying too hard
not to let anything show. Proving what? Nothing at allexcept that he had
stronger feelings about TAP than he cared to discuss with a total stranger in a
crowded hall.

I kept pushing. �When I started high school, myself, if you
didnłt have your own PC on your desk at home, you were marginalized. These days
the work stations come for freeif you sign up for a thousand-a-month worth of ęvitalł
net access. And any child who canłt interview Afghani nomads for a geography
assignmentor get a live feed from the latest Venus probe via JPLmight as well
quit and go work at McDonalds. When does it stop? When my grandchildren are
twelve, what will ęentry levelł be, for them?"

Dallaporta laughed, not quite naturally. �I wouldnłt dare
hazard a guess. But I have faith in people. In common sense."

I made direct eye contact, trying to decide if he was
genuinely rattledor just didnłt trust himself to get on the soapbox, even for
such an obviously sympathetic listener.

�Common sense? I hope youłre right. Iłve heard some rumours
lately which donłt bear thinking about"

Dallaporta blanched visibly. Meaning he knew about the court
case? And now assumed that I had some connection to whoever had given him the
news? I offered him a conspiratorial smile: Relax, Iłm a friend, wełre on the
same side.

I said, �Look, I didnłt mean to take up so much of your
time. But it was so nice to meet you, finally." I held out my hand, and
Dallaporta shook it, slipping back onto autopilot with obvious relief.

I walked out into the warm evening. There was a real Lydia
Stone, with a daughter whołd just started Year 8; Dallaporta might check the
records, but I didnłt think he was likely to confront the girlłs teachers and
ask them to sketch an identikit for comparison.

I glanced up at the washed-out sky, at the handful of
visible starsand thought once more: this moment would be a single word, in
TAP. <> A moment skewered like a butterfly? A ten-thousand-bit digital
corpse of the world, shedding dead pixels in the mindłs eye? Or a moment
captured like a mood perfectly evoked by a phrase of music? No one had ever
felt the need to murder a composer, just to safeguard the languages which
couldnłt compete on equal terms with fugues and sonatas. No one had ever taken
a human life just to stop eccentric parents bombarding their offspring with
Bach and Mozart in the womb. What made TAP so much more threatening? The fact
that it could evoke images and emotions beyond the reach of any symphony? The
fact that it was so much better?

Iłd actually meant most of what Iłd said to Dallaportabut
the more I thought about the issues, the more ambivalent I became. No one was
trying to �force" TAP onto anyone, except their own childrenand to raise a
child at all was to impose a set of choices, one way or another. Actively or
passively. Consciously, or through sheer conformity or neglect. The prospect of
TAP-heads meddling with their childrenłs brainsjust so they could share an
artificial languagestill filled me with instinctive, visceral outrage ... but
was it any more virtuous for the rest of us to insist that no child be given
the implant until their brains were fully formed in the ten-thousand-year-old
mould of our own Stone Age preconceptions? Werenłt both sides just attempting
to shape future generations in their own image?

And putting aside prejudice, instinct, and nostalgia ...
which first language really would provide the best tools for dealing with the
modern world?

That was a good question. It just wasnłt the one I was being
paid to answer.

I planted a dozen small recording devices in pay phones near
Dallaportałs apartment, and the school. Which was highly illegalbut both less
risky, and more likely to succeed (if he was actually guilty of anything), than
trying to bug his home. Iłd sampled his voice at the parent-teacher night, so
the bugs could discard everyone elsełs conversations. I cycled by and queried
them daily.

I finally tracked down Tom Davies, Grace Sharpłs domestic
aida TAP-head himself. The curtains of the study were always left open, he
said. Grace liked to work looking out across the skyline; shełd chosen the
apartment for the view.

I couldnłt help asking, sarcastically, �Wouldnłt it have
been cheaper just to visit some rich friendłs apartmentand memorize the TAP
words for everything she saw?"

He laughed. �Of course. And she could have written scenery
in her head to put any ten-million-dollar harbour view to shame."

�So why didnłt she?"

�Do you know how Grace defined ęrealitył?"

�No."

�The ten thousand bits that are left when youłve argued everything
else out of existence."

After weeks of persistent harassment, I persuaded Maxine Ho,
one of Third Hemispherełs senior engineers, to talk to me off the record. She
stuck to the official line, though: the <> word was impossible. Whatever
Grace Sharp had imagined, or whatever TAP sequence some would-be assassin had
confronted her with, all the safeguards operated on a separate level,
independent of the language protocoland when the implant had been examined
after the autopsy, therełd been no trace of damage or corruption to the
relevant hardware or software.

�Of course a neural implant can kill you. A pacemaker can
kill you. A work station can kill you. Any piece of technology can fail. But if
someone died sitting at a work stationand when I took it apart there was no
sign of a loose wire or a break in the insulationI wouldnłt say: ęShe must
have been running the legendary <> program, which instructed the machine
to electrocute her.ł Iłd go looking for another cause of death."

It was a specious analogy. Perfectly functioning TAP
implants routinely sent signals to the hypothalamus, which in turn stimulated
the adrenal gland; perfectly functioning work stations werenłt set up to
dispense electric shocks at any dose.

Still, I thought she was being basically straight with me.
If she believed that the implant had failed at all, she believed it was a
one-in-a-million glitch: less a design flaw than a tragic proof of the
intrinsic unpredictability of any real device out in the real worldthe kind of
thing which would have been excused as �natural causes" if an equally robust
biological system had failed.

On March 5th, the High Court challenge to the implant restrictions
became public knowledge. The case wasnłt scheduled to be heard until Septemberbut
the reaction to the news was immediate.

Helen Sharp had been right about one thing: her motherłs
death was seized upon by almost every commentator as proof that a successful
challenge would amount to the legalization of infanticide. Not that Their
Honours could be influenced by emotive editorialsperish the thoughtbut even
if they werenłt, it was clear that the Federal government would be ready with
the necessary amendments within days of any decision which put the State criminal
law in doubt. I set my knowledge miner digging, but reasoned debate about the
merits of the casethe actual merits, not the legal onescould barely be found
outside obscure neurolinguistics journals. (TAP speakersł netzines were in TAP,
and I had no translation software.)

The night the news broke, Mick declared, �I want one."

�Then youłll just have to wait six years, wonłt you?"

�Not if they win."

�If they win, youłd better start mowing lawns and washing
windows. Six years should do it either way."

He accepted that without protestbut then asked innocently, �So
whatłs your favourite medium?"

�Text. And I know: Iłm a boring old fart, but youłre still
not" He wore a pained expressionand not just because �old fart" was
cringe-inducing baby-talk. Iłd missed the point.

�Iłm sorry. What were you going to say?"

Mick spoke carefully. �Howłd you like it if every time you
picked up a book, you had to swallow everything the writer said? If you couldnłt
stop mid-sentence and think: ęThis is ... bullshit.ł If you lost the power to
argue in your head with every word."

�Iłd hate it."

He said, �Thatłs where VRłs heading. Without TAP."

I was taken aback by the bleakness of this forecastbut it
rang true. Without a language as powerful as the medium, there was little room
for argument, little room for doubt. Just unearned suspension of disbelief.

I reached over to the cable which snaked from his headset to
the work station, and looped it absentmindedly around one finger. I said, �If
itłs as bad as that, then stop using it. Itłs your choice."

One look answered that; he didnłt need to elaborate. Why
should he be forced to abandon his own favourite medium? Why shouldnłt he have
the chance to salvage it, reinvigorate it, instead? Present at the birth of
spoken language, would I have fought to abolish it, like some fanatical Zen
terrorist afraid of its power to deceive? Or would I have fought to enrich it,
to balance that power with scepticism and analysis?

I said lamely, �Therełs more to life than VR."

Mick grinned triumphantly. �Exactly. But there isnłt more to
life than TAP."

I took on other cases: runaway children, minor computer
fraudroutine work, but at least it gave me the satisfaction of swift results.
Helen Sharp could no longer afford to keep me on full-timeand Iłd virtually
run out of productive ways to spend her money, anyway. If her mother had died
from some unrepeatable glitch, biological or otherwise, nobody would ever prove
it. So I offered no false hopes, and worked on the assumption that in a few
more months, shełd come to her senses and tell me that the case was closed.

Then, in the middle of April, one of my pay phone bugs
finally spoke.

I was dutifully cycling past, checking them all in the
pouring rain, though I no longer seriously expected anything. When my notepad
chimed the code for success, I almost dropped it into a storm drain.

Playing back the recording on the bike, in the rain, would
have been impossible. Playing it back on a crowded train would have been stupidI
didnłt have the headphonesbut I was tempted. By the time I reached the office,
Iłd convinced myself Iłd hear nothing but a service call: Dallaporta
complaining that his home connection was out of order.

I was wrong.

Dallaporta whispered urgently, �You have to help me. I need
your advice." It was a monologue; he was leaving a message. �I didnłt get rid of
it, on the night. I thought: itłs not illegalso why not keep it, just in case?"
My skin crawled. He didnłt elaborate, but I could guess exactly what he meant:
Just in case it becomes expedient, at some time in the unforeseeable future, to
kill another prominent TAP-head.

He inhaled deeply, as if trying to calm himself. �That was
... insane, I know. I wasnłt thinking straight. But now ... I canłt just throw
it in the river! What if the police are watching me? What if theyłre going
through my garbage?" That was unlikely, but I was grateful for his paranoiaand
his incompetence: whispering into a public phone with (I imagined) a hand
shielding lips and mouthpiece wouldnłt have done him much good if he had been
under police surveillance.

�Iłve wiped the code, now." Shit. �I followed the
instructions, Iłm sure it worked. But I have to get rid of the machine. I need
to know the best waythe safest wayto do it. Please. Call me back at the usual
place."

I decoded the number hełd called, from the tonesbut it was a
commercial message rerouting serviceand one that was far too classy to be
bribed or hacked.

I sat at the desk, still dripping, trying to decide what to
do next. The humidity control system in the north window was pumping water
vapour into the room; Iłd never get dry unless I went and stood out in the hall
for an hour.

Everything I had so far would be less than useless to the
police; the illegality of the phone bugs aside, every connection between
Dallaporta and Grace Sharpłs death remained pure speculation. And I wasnłt even
sure I had enough to convince Helen Sharp, who didnłt believe in <>
words. Nothing Dallaporta had said proved that hełd been talking about an
infrared communications laserand the crucial data it had transmitted was
probably lost forever, now.

But it sounded like I still had a very slim chance to
photograph �the machine", in situ.

The message had been left at 6:23 that morning. I glanced at
my watch; school would be out in two hours. I had no way of knowing how long it
would take for Dallaportałs backers (Natural Wisdom? The Fountain of
Righteousness?) to come to his rescueassuming they didnłt just decide to
abandon himbut I couldnłt risk waiting another day.

I knew Iłd be cutting it fine, but I didnłt seem to have
much choice.

There were six hundred apartments in Dallaportałs buildingand
the sheer weight of numbers had its advantages. I stood across the street
behind a bus shelter and waited for someone to approach the main entrance. When
a young man appeared, key in hand, I dashed across the road and caught up with
him, breathless, soaked, umbrella-less, fumbling. He let me through without a
momentłs hesitation. I hung back in the lobby shaking water from my coat so I
wouldnłt have to talk to him in the elevator; I hadnłt had time to prepare any
plausible lies, and if hełd so much as asked me how long Iłd lived in the
building, I probably would have been struck dumb.

Dallaportałs apartment, 1912, had a reinforced security door
with an impressive-looking deadlock. I found a utilities room at the end of the
corridor, and picked its lock easily enough. There was a hatch in the ceilingand
even a ladder standing in a corner of the room. I rechecked the plans of the
building on my notepad: not every apartment had a ceiling hatch; 1911 did, 1912
didnłt.

I climbed into the ceiling and crawled across the dusty
beams as quietly as I could, hoping I hadnłt lost my bearings. I lay above
apartment 1911, just listening, for almost five minutesthen I realized Iłd
never be certain it was empty. A baby sleeping, an adult quietly reading ... I
didnłt even know who lived there, I hadnłt had time to find out.

Cursing silently, I crawled back to the utilities room,
brushed myself down, and went and rang the bell to 1911.

I rang three times. No one was home.

I retraced my path, lifted the hatch, lowered a rope into
the apartment. My forearms ached as I descended; I hadnłt done an illegal entry
since before Mick was born. The old buzz was tinged with new anxieties: I was
too old for this cat-burglar shitand I couldnłt afford to lose my licence. But
I felt a kind of defiant euphoria, toobecause everything was harder, because I
had so much more to lose.

And it would all be one word, in TAP ...

The balconies of the two apartments were separated by less
than a metre, but they were flush with the outside wall of the buildingno
overhang at all. I climbed up onto the waist-high footłs-width concrete guard
wall, steadied myself by pressing up with my left hand against the balconyłs
ceilingthen with the right, reached across the naked brickwork of the outside
wall and into Dallaportałs balcony. I was lucky; I was on the side of the
building facing away from the wind.

I moved a foot across, too, embraced the brickwork tightly,
shifted the centre of mass of my body a few crucial centimetresfighting down
momentary panicand within seconds, my right hand and foot were lodged securely
between Dallaportałs guard wall and ceiling, and it was far easier to go
forward than back. I jumped shakily down onto his cluttered balcony, just
missing a pot plant. I glanced at the street, nineteen storeys belowand
pictured Mick at my funeral, still refusing to talk to his father. There was a
chance that someone had seen me cross, but there was nothing I could do about
thatand the downpour seemed to shift the odds in my favour: I could barely
make out Grace Sharpłs building at all, through the curtain of rain.

A sliding glass door separated the balcony from the
apartment. It fitted loosely between a ceiling track and a guide rail buried in
the concrete floor; it was probably designed to be lifted right out, for ease
of replacementbut only when it was unlocked. There was no question of trying
to pick the lock; there was no keyholejust a catch operated by a lever on the
other side of the door. By pressing on the glass with both gloved hands,
though, I could get enough purchase to raise and tilt the whole door slightly.
After almost ten minuteswith my wrists going numbI managed to work the catch
free.

I opened the door a few centimetres, then paused at the threshold,
scanning the room for burglar alarms. It was clear.

As I moved into the apartment, I heard footsteps in the corridor,
then a key going into the lock. I retreated to the balcony, but it was too late
to start climbing back the way Iłd come; I would have been in full view. I slid
the door closedI couldnłt re-lock itthen dropped to the floor behind a pile
of junk.

I heard at least two people enter the apartment, then turn
left into the corridor which led out of the living room. I took a button-sized
video camera, and stuck it to the frame of Dallaportałs bike, which was leaning
against the wall of the balcony. I checked the image on my notepad, then
tweaked the direction until I had a clear view of most of the room.

I dropped out of sight again just in time. The intrudersa
man and a woman, neither of whom Iłd seen beforereturned, carrying a cardboard
carton about thirty centimetres long. I zoomed in; the labelling suggested a
presentation bottle of Scotch. Dallaportałs friends clearly didnłt share his
paranoia; they knew the police werenłt watching the apartment. He wanted the
laser to disappearand theyłd obligingly turned up to remove it.

The woman said, �You think he wiped it properly?"

The man hesitated. �I wouldnłt count on it." I wondered why
they hadnłt automated the processbut then, it would have been impossible to
predict exactly when the opportunity to use the code on Grace Sharp would
arise, or how many attempts it would take to hit the target.

�Well, Iłm not walking out of here carrying incriminating"

The man groanedbut he opened the carton. I recognized the
laser from the catalogues Iłd scanned; most of the bulk was in the precision
optics, which doubled as a kind of telescope for checking alignmentthe unit
was meant for inner city rooftop-to-rooftop communications. There was a small
device about the size of a matchbox plugged in to the data port; the man hit a
button on the side of the box, and peered at a tiny LCD display.

�Hey, the Jackal got it right. Iłm impressed." He laughed. �ęI
thought: Why not keep it, just in case?ł The poor cretin really thought he had
the <> wordand he could go on playing kill-the-TAP-head for as long as
he liked."

The woman said dryly, �Donłt be so ungrateful. If hełd known
what he was doing, he wouldnłt have done it at all."

They left. I pocketed the camera and crossed back to 1911 immediately,
not wanting to be in sight when they reached the street. In the ceiling, I had
to force myself not to rush; if I was careless, I could still get caught.

In five minutes, I was out of the building. I circled the
block, then spiralled out through the surrounding streets, on the slim chance
of catching sight of them again.

After half an hour I gave up, and went into a coffee shop to
replay the video. I should have been jubilant: I had a clear shot of a
communications laser, and a soundtrack with two people discussing the killing
of TAP-heads.

The only catch was, it didnłt sound like they believed in
<> words any more than Maxine Ho or Helen Sharp.

I invited Helen Sharp to my office. I showed her Dallaportałs
essay, and the geometry of the buildings. I played back the phone call, and the
scene in his apartment.

I said, �Youłre the TAP expert. You want to tell me whatłs
going on?"

She sat in silence for a long time before replying.

�There is one possibility."

�Which is?"

�My mother had the earliest model implant. Right to the end.
She never had an upgradeshe didnłt trust them to transfer her vocabulary
properly. She was afraid shełd lose everything shełd learnt."

�And you think ... the old models did have a <> word?"

�No. But they could be microprogrammed externally."

�Youłve lost me." That wasnłt quite true, but I wanted her
to spell it out. I wasnłt sure how much I really did know about the implanthow
much the glowing technical reports might have misled me.

Sharp looked terriblethe fact that shełd just laid eyes on
the people whołd arranged the death of her mother was finally sinking inbut
she explained patiently: �The basic hardware of any neural net computer is just
... a big array of interconnected RISC processors. The chip is mass-produced as
a commodityhundreds of millions of them a yearand used in tens of thousands
of different devices. All the specific characteristics are added by the microcode:
low-level instructions which customize the processors to make them behave in
certain useful ways. The main software then takes that level for grantedas if
itłs all hardwired into the silicon. But itłs not.

�When they released the first consumer model of the TAP implant,
Third Hemisphere were worried that there might be some undiscovered flaw in the
microcode. If theyłd had to take all the implants out of peoplełs skulls to
correct it, that would have been a PR nightmare. So they left a routine in the
microcode which gave it the power to accept updates in infraredto modify any
part of itself, given the right sequence of external instructions."

�So there was a special TAP word which could get at all the
infrastructure? A word which said: <>?"

�No! It wasnłt a TAP wordit was a reserved sequence, right
outside the language protocol! It was meaningless in TAP, it could never have
been spoken. That was the whole point!"

It seemed like a minor distinction to mebut I could understand
why she attached so much importance to it. The language itself hadnłt killed
her mother. The poet hadnłt died from a word, after all.

I said, �If thatłs what happened, though ... why didnłt the
engineers who examined your motherłs implant find any evidence of it? And if
you knew all this"

Sharp snapped back angrily, �I didnłt know she still had the
old microcode!" She looked away. �Nine or ten years ago, Third Hemisphere tried
to persuade her to accept a new implantfor free. Theyłd finally discovered a
bug in the original microcodea minor one, nothing dangerous, but they wanted
everyone to start using the later models. They were confident enough about
those that they werenłt externally programmable anymore.

�She wouldnłt accept it. She didnłt want a new implant, she
didnłt want surgery. So they offered to update the microcode, to fix the bugand
close the trap door in the process, because I think that was also making them
nervous. TAP users could never have spoken the code, even if theyłd wanted tobut
every consumer device on the planet was starting to put out a flood of
infrared. There was always a tiny risk of triggering the modification program
by accident.

�I thought shełd had the new microcode for the last ten
years. She told me shełd accepted the offer. The records Third Hemisphere
supplied to the coroner stated that she hadand the engineerłs report confirmed
that."

I said, �But if shełd actually refused it, like shełd
refused the new implantbecause she was afraid it might affect her skills with
the language ... then Dallaportałs message might have done it all in one hit?
Opened the trapdoor, undermined the black box, triggered a massive adrenaline
releasethen overwritten the evidence by substituting the version she was meant
to have had all along?"

�Yes."

�So whołd know enough to program all that?" Natural Wisdom?
The Fountain of Righteousness? Hardlythough they could always have brought in
outside expertise.

Sharp was adamant: �Only one of Third Hemispherełs own
software engineers could do it. Someone whołd been involved in the TAP project
from the start."

�But theyłd have nothing to gain, surely? Why discredit your
own work, your own product?"

The product belonged to Third Hemisphere, thoughnot to any
group of employees.

And people did move on.

I scanned fifteen yearsł worth of implant manufacturersł
publications; they were full of PR releases gloating about heads successfully
hunted.

In March 2008, a firm called Cogent Industries had poached a
software engineer named Maria Remedios from Third Hemisphere. That in itself proved
nothing, of coursenor did the fact that an earlier article named her as a
senior participant in the TAP project.

Cogent did have something to gain, though. They specialized
in Virtual Reality hardwareboth immersive neural implants, and headset-based
units. Third Hemisphere wasnłt so much a direct competitor as the source of an
entire antithetical philosophy: VR was sold to publishers and advertizers as
the path to unconditional suspension of disbelief; TAP was about questioning
everything, analysing everything. The day every VR user spoke TAP, the most
ingeniously craftedand manipulativeVR experience would disintegrate into a
laughable trick with smoke and mirrors. And if that wasnłt exactly an imminent
threat, Grace Sharpłs death had certainly made it more remote than ever.

They could have chosen Dallaporta by the same means Iłd used
to find him myself: a search for passionate opponents of TAP who also happened
to have a clear view of Grace Sharpłs study. And whoever had made contact with
him could have claimed to be a member of Natural Wisdom, or some other
anti-implant group; hełd hardly have cooperated if hełd known the truth. When
theyłd told him about the High Court challengeno doubt conjuring up images of
a whole generation �lost to TAP"Grace Sharpłs death must have begun to sound
like a necessary evil. One old woman, for the sake of all those children. Death
by her own obscene technological perversion of language. Nothing more than
poetic justice.

And Maria Remedios? Had Third Hemisphere treated her badly,
left her holding a grudgeor had her new employers pressured her into it? Even
if shełd had grave second thoughts about TAPand recoiled at the prospect of
the implant being given to childrenhelping to murder an innocent woman seemed
like a grotesquely disproportionate response. She could have joined the public
campaign against the implant; as one of its creators, the media would have
given her all the coverage she desired. And though Dallaporta might have caved
in to �moral" arguments offered under false pretences, Remedios could hardly
have failed to understand that Cogentłs motives were entirely commercial.

Nine tenths of the picture seemed to have fallen perfectly
into placebut it was clear that I was missing something crucial. And too much
even of that nine tenths was still pure guesswork. For a start, I had to
establish solid evidence of a link between Dallaporta and Cogent Industrieswhich
was going to be tricky, since he didnłt even know it existed, himself.

I checked the faces of the man and woman Iłd seen in Dallaportałs
apartment against all the trade magazine shots of Cogentłs employees.

No match.

I fed the Cogent employee names, along with my seventeen
thousand TAP-haters, into the cluster analysis softwarelooking for a connection,
however tenuous.

There was none.

So much for the easy options.

I sent Dallaporta a message, via a rerouting service, asking
if we could �continue our discussion". The real Lydia Stone was ex-directoryand
using a different number than the one shełd given the school would only prove
that she was exercising suitable caution.

Three hours later, Dallaporta called me back. He was polite,
but very nervous. I said I had some news which would be of interest to him; he
didnłt actually scream at me to shut up in case the line was being bugged, but
his body language made it clear that if I so much as mentioned TAP hełd hang up
immediately.

I said, �Can I meet you somewhere? We really need to talk,
face to face."

He hesitated. He badly wanted me to vanish from his lifebut
he needed to know what my �news" was. Why had I taken an interest in him? One
old essay was hardly enough to explain it, so ... how many people in the
anti-TAP crusade knew what hełd done? And what did I know about Grace Sharpłs
death which no one had bothered to tell him?

Of course he was paranoid. The inquest was long over, the laser
had been magicked awaybut the fact remained: hełd stood on his balcony on a
summer evening and shot a perfect stranger dead. Nothing could ever be the same
again.

He said flatly, �Tomorrow night, at the school. Nine ołclock."

I rehearsed the story in my head as I crossed the football
fieldwhich was brightly floodlit for some reason, though there wasnłt a soul
around. A friend of a friend in a certain law firm had heard that Helen Sharp
had discovered something in her motherłs computer filessomething which had
prompted her to start proceedings to try to gain access to Third Hemispherełs
records.

I was sure that Dallaporta would pass the rumour on to his benefactors;
the hardest part would be ensuring that he didnłt mention �my" name. So long as
he remained tight-lipped about his source of information, theyłd have to take
him seriously.

Helen Sharp was preparing a forgedpaperletter from her
mother to Third Hemisphere, explicitly stating that she did not wish to accept
the microcode update. I was confident that we had enough leverage now to
persuade Third Hemisphere to play along, and bury the bait in the appropriate
warehouse.

Maria Remedios would know at once what the �evidence" had to
be. Cogent, acting on her advice, would try to arrange its disappearance. This
time, theyłd be caught red-handed.

At least, that was the theory.

Dallapporta had said hełd be in the �Resources Centre"which
these days apparently meant a large room full of work stations. Iłd found a map
of the school in an online brochure, so I knew exactly where to go. The door
was open, though the lights were outand as I approached the threshold I could
see that all the machines inside had been switched on and connected to some net
service or other. More of Dallaportałs paranoia? Maybe he thought this was an
ideal source of interference for the police surveillance teams who were
following him everywherethough the sound from most of the work stations was turned
down to a whisper.

I peered into the greyness of the room, dazzled and
distracted by the multitude of images: swarms of tiny red and silver fish
weaving through a coral reef; a polychrome computer animation of air flow
around some kind of zeppelin; a portrait of a Florentine prince sprouting a
speech balloon full of modern Italian; a dead silver-haired twentieth century
guru emitting platitudes about the nature of truth. An old music video was
playing by the door; the singer droned: �This is the way, step insi-i-ide."

I smiled uneasily at the coincidence and walked into the
roomresisting the urge to shout a greeting, mocking Dallaportałs elaborate �precautions".
It seemed far more diplomatic to play along. I stage whispered, �Itłs me. Where
are you?"

No reply.

It was hard to get my eyes accustomed to the darkness with
forty or fifty bright screens in view; I had no reason whatsoever to look at
any of the imagesbut it was remarkably difficult to keep looking away. I
walked slowly towards the far end of the room, irritated but prepared not to
show it. I called out again, a little louder; there was still no reply.

An animated supernova erupted just ahead of meand the
sudden blue-white radiance revealed a man slumped in a chair beside the screen.
I moved closer, and inspected the body by the light of the dying sun.

Dallaporta had a small-calibre pistol in his hand, and a
neat hole in his temple. I put two fingers to his neck; he was certainly dead,
but still warm.

I felt a flicker of guilt break through the numbness of
shockbut this wasnłt the time to agonize over the way Iłd treated him. Hełd
killed Grace Sharp, and he hadnłt been prepared to live with that. If the fear
of whatever Iłd been about to tell him had been enough to drive him to suicide,
he would have done it sooner or later, regardless.

I took out my notepad to call the police.

Then the supernova faded, and a new image took its place.

An apartment building, swept by rain. The camera zoomed in
on a figure climbing between two of the balconies. The magnification kept
increasing, relentlesslyand by the time the woman turned and showed her face,
it filled the screen.

My stomach tightened. I glanced back to the neat,
too-professional hole in Dallaportałs skull, reassessing everything. But ...
who could have videoed me? If Cogentłs people had known I was on the balcony,
why had they walked straight in?

The image changed again. Me, planting one of the phone bugs.

I laughed in disbelief. Theyłd all but slaughtered this man
in front of my eyesand now they were trying to blackmail me into silence with
a couple of petty misdemeanours?

�There are small traces of your skin under his fingernails."
The voice came from a metre behind me; I started, but I didnłt actually jump. �Not
enough for him to have left a mark on you, but enough for DNA analysis."

I turned around slowly. The man was about my age, and only a
little taller. He wasnłt pointing a gun at me, but he looked suspiciously
relaxed.

�The police will find out that Helen Sharp hired youbut
theyłll have no grounds for a warrant to compel you to supply them with tissue
samples. Not if they donłt see this." He gestured at the screen.

I said, �And why would they imagine Iłd want to fake this
manłs suicide? Breaking into his apartment proves nothing"

�I think that depends on whether someone tips them off about
the hundred thousand dollars in your Swiss bank account. Gracełs close-knit
linguistic community must have done a little whip-around, and bought themselves
some justice for the man with the <> word."

That shut me up. If the account really existed ... that was
breathtaking. Had Cogent been watching me all along, setting this up?

He smiled. �If youłre good, you can keep the hundred grand,
of course. No tax; the whole thingłs organized beautifully through a holding
company in Macao."

I didnłt have the presence of mind even to be tempted; I was
still trying to come to terms with the whole Byzantine scheme.

I said, �Forget it." I walked straight past him, towards the
doorway. I reached it, heart racing, then turned and looked back; I couldnłt
see him anymore, but I didnłt think hełd moved a centimetre. Killing me would
create too many problems, too many holes in their beautifully scripted VR
experienceand the odds were stacked against me even if I did go straight to
the police.

I said, �So what did you expect me to tell Helen Sharp? ęScrew
your mother, the case is closedand please donłt ask any questions, Iłm late
for my flight to Macaoł?"

�Youłll think of something. Believe me, you donłt want to
fight us."

I laughed angrily. �One pissy little VR company, and you
think you can pull all the strings?"

The man said, �Iłm not working for Cogent. They have no idea
youłve even taken an interest in them."

I peered into the darkness between the rows of screens. �Some
VR industry consortium, then." For some reason Iłd started shaking; I think it
was rage. �Youłre still not above the law."

�Oh, therełs more to life than Virtual Reality." He sounded
amused.

�Yeah? Who, then?"

There was silence for a while, then I could see him approaching.
�I canłt tell you that. But there are some people you can meetif you want towho
might help you put your doubts to rest."

�Who?"

�Maria Remedios. And her daughter."

�I thought you didnłt work for Cogent"

�She works for Cogent. I donłt. Though you could say itłs my
job to watch over them both."

The further we drove from Dallaportałs corpse, the more compromised
I knew Iłd becomebut I couldnłt walk away from a chance to learn what it was Iłd
missed all along. Even if the revelation was intended to guarantee my silence.

�Remedios was one of the first volunteers to test the TAP implant,"
the man explained casually. �First shełd helped design itand then she got to
experience the results first hand. I think she must have found the reality exhilarating,
in a lot of waysbut very frustrating, too."

�Why frustrating?"

�Even with neural hardware, learning an exotic new language
is always difficult. For an adult."

I didnłt reply. He continued, �She managed to find a good neurosurgeon
willing to give her daughter the implant. Not here, though. Overseas. Which
simplified things, reallyit was easier to turn a blind eye."

That chilled me. �And you let her go ahead and do it? Just
so you could see the results?"

He laughed. �Well, not me personally. But that was the
general idea."

And the results? I thought back to some of the more
pessimistic technical papers Iłd read on the subject. Maybe natural languageswhich
had co-evolved with human intelligencewere crucial for the early stages of
intellectual development ... and even if relatively �artificial" latecomers
like sign made perfect substitutes, maybe TAP was just too different to perform
the role of organizing the neural structures which made higher thinking
possible. And maybe the fact that so much of the language was encoded in the
chip, instead of the brain, meant that vital conceptual networks were missingor
at least, inaccessible to other regions of the cerebral cortex which needed
them in order to mature.

It still made no sense, though. If the daughter was living
proof that the implant would do unspeakable damage to the infant brain, why not
just publicize that fact? Why had Grace Sharp died to win a court case which
could have been won by simply disclosing the truth?

Maria Remedios lived in a modestly comfortable house on the
north shore. My escort had phoned ahead; she was expecting us. As I followed
him down the hallway, she met my eyes; there was unconcealed shame in her
steady gazebut a strange, almost proud defiance behind it. I looked away,
confused. If shełd crippled her own child with the TAP implant, no wonder shełd
left Third Hemispherebut why was she so beholden to Dallaportałs killers that
shełd let them use her to manipulate Cogent? Had they threatened to imprison
her? To put her child in an institution?

We ended up in the living room, but Remedios didnłt invite
us to take a seat. The man said, �So, whatłs she been up to? Still spending
every last waking moment on the nets?"

Remedios shot him a poisonous look, and didnłt bother replying.
I thought he was being cruelly sarcastic. Then he turned to me and explained, �Incoming
data only, Iłm afraid. We wouldnłt want her airing her grievances to the world."

Remedios left the room. I heard her say, �Jane? Ms OłConnorłs
here." Then she returned, with a young girl in blue-and-white striped pyjamas,
maybe eight years old.

Jane greeted me and shook my hand solemnlyor mock-solemnly.
One look at her knowing grey eyes, and I knew Iłd made exactly the wrong guess
about the implantłs effects.

�I was hoping Iłd be allowed to meet you," she said. �Uncle
Danielłs been complaining about you for weeks." She glanced at the man, without
obvious malicemore like a chess player regarding a formidable adversary. �And
he doesnłt often let me have visitors."

I didnłt know what to say. �Uncle Daniel" interjected helpfully,
�I think Ms OłConnor is still in the dark, Jane. She doesnłt understand"

�Why anyone would want to keep me prisoner? Why anyone would
go to so much trouble to keep other children from growing up with TAP?" Her
tone went beyond precocity; she didnłt come across as some child actor mouthing
an adultłs lines. Every word simply negated the implications her appearance
would normally have conveyed.

And her bluntness was unnerving, but it cut through my own
diplomatic hesitancy. I said, �Thatłs right. I donłt understand."

Jane smiled calmly. I donłt believe she was resigned to her
situationbut she was patient. Very patient.

She said, �With the implant, you can play wordsor scan
them. Experience them, blindlyor understand them, completely. Uncle Danielłs
not a big fan of understanding, though. He thinks there are certain words which
should be played and not scanned."

�What kind of words?"

She raised one hand, palm towards me. It was an ironic gesture;
she must have known I was oblivious to IR.

�If I play this word ... I feel a boundless sense of loyalty
and pride towards my team ... my city ... my State ... my nation!" Her face
shone with fervent, agonized, almost hysterical joy; she looked like nothing so
much as one of the flag-waving school girls theyłd whipped into a patriotic
frenzy as ornamentation for the 2000 Olympics. �But if I scan it ... � Her
expression faded into one of faint amusementas if someone had just tried to
dupe her with a very old, and very obvious, scam.

�This word plays as what many religions call ęfaithł." Her
face was radiant, but tranquil now. �The peace that defies understanding." She
smiled apologetically. �Except, of course, it doesnłt. Scan it, and the
mechanics are transparent: one foot down hard on an entrained neurochemical
feel-good pedalwith cognitive, aesthetic, and cultural echoes linked to the
context in which the training was acquired."

I glanced at Remedios; there were silent tears moving down
her face. They wouldnłt lock up the mother, or institutionalise the daughter.
Theyłd kill this child, if they had to. That was the only reason shełd helped
them program the death of Grace Sharp.

�Now, this is what the Buddhists call ęenlightenmentł." Jane
closed her eyes and smiled serenely. �Similar raw pharmacology, but the
higher-level components are different. Therełs a kind of heavily self-affirming
cognitive myopia: every mental tool which could expose the true nature of the
state is explicitly negated."

I thought of James, lost in wordless tranquillity. The
package hełd swallowed whole, the mind virus fine-tuned by centuries of
evolution, declared: Language is dangerous, language deceives you ... because
language could have shown him the way out of the hole hełd dug for himself.

�And this is ... sexual love, desire? Call it what you like,
but if you scan it"

Something cut her short. Maybe it was a look from her
mother. Or maybe it was the expression on my face.

Jane continued smoothly, �There are others. I wonłt list them
allbut growing up with the implant makes them obvious. And Uncle Danielłs
friends donłt believe that a subculture with that knowledge would be ...
conducive to their idea of social cohesion. They feel very strongly about that."
She turned to face himand her expression now contained more pity than anything
else. �And I do understand. Because Iłve found the word for their affliction,
too. Iłve found the word for the love of power."

By the time I got home it was almost midnight. Mickłs room
was in darkness, but he was still playing the game; I sat down beside him and
removed the headset gently, then reached over and logged him off.

He opened his mouth to apologize, or invent some excuse. I
said, �Just shut up and listen."

�What happened? I was worried." I hadnłt told him everythingbut
he knew Iłd gone to meet someone connected with Grace Sharpłs death.

I tried to speak calmly. �Iłve screwed up the case. Badly. Iłve
made some stupid mistakes, and now Iłm going to have to drop it. Okay? Thatłs
all I can tell you. And wełre not going to talk about it again."

He stared at me, incredulous. �Why? What did you do?"

I shook my head. �I said, wełre not going to talk about it."

He started blinking away tears. I took him in my arms; he
didnłt fight me, but he said angrily, �I donłt believe you!"

I said, �Sssh."

Later, I lay on my bed in the dark, rolling between my thumb
and forefinger the smooth cold object, like a small ceramic bead, which Jane
Remedios had slipped into my hand.

If shełd managed to copy her implant, this chip would encode
her entire TAP vocabulary. And to an adult it would be uselessbut a newborn
child who started with the knowledge it had taken her eight years to acquire
might surpass her in half that time.

Theyłd be watching me closelybut they couldnłt be watching
everyone. I believed I could pass the chip on to someone willing to use it, if
I was careful.

So I lay in the dark, and tried to decide.

Between the silence of power and mystification, the unearned
suspension of disbelief, the way things had always beenand the torrent of
understanding which would sweep it all away.

Transition Dreams

�We canłt tell you what your own transition dreams will be.
The only thing thatłs certain is that you wonłt remember them."

Caroline Bausch smiles, reassuringly. Her office, on the
sixty-fourth floor of the Gleisner Tower, is so stylish it hurtsher desk is an
obsidian ellipse supported by three perspex circles, and the walls are
decorated with the latest in Euclidean Monochromebut shełs not at all the kind
of robot the cool, geometric decor seems to demand. I have no doubt that the
contrast is intentional, and that her face has been carefully designed to
appear more disarmingly natural than even the most cynical person could believe
was due to pure guile on the part of her employers.

_A few forgettable dreams?_ That sounds innocuous enough. I
very nearly let the matter restbut Iłm puzzled.

�Iłll be close to zero degrees when Iłm scanned, wonłt I?"

�Yes. A little below, in fact. Pumped full of anti-freeze
disaccharides, all your fluids cooled down into a sugary glass." Therełs a
prickling sensation on my scalp at these wordsbut the rush I feel is
anticipation, not fear; the thought of my body as a kind of ice-confectionary
sculpture doesnłt seem threatening at all. Several elegant blown-glass
figurines decorate the bookshelf behind Bauschłs desk. �Not only does that halt
all metabolic processes, it sharpens the NMR spectra. To measure the strength
of each synapse accurately, we have to be able to distinguish between subtle
variations in neurotransmitter receptor types, among other things. The less
thermal noise, the better."

�I understand. But if my brain has been shut down by hypothermia
... why will I dream?"

�Your brain wonłt do the dreaming. The software model wełre
creating will. But as I said, you wonłt remember any of it. In the end, the
software will be a perfect Copy of yourdeeply comatoseorganic brain, and it
will wake from that coma remembering exactly what the organic brain experienced
before the scan. No more, no less. And since the organic brain certainly wonłt
have experienced the transition dreams, the software will have no memory of
them."

_The software?_ Iłd expected a simple, biological
explanation: a side-effect of the anesthetic or the anti-freeze; neurons firing
off a few faint, random signals as they surrendered to the cold.

�Why program the robotłs brain to have dreams it wonłt remember?"

�We donłt. Or at least, not explicitly." Bausch smiles her
too-human smile again, not quite masking an appraising glance, a moment spent
deciding, perhaps, how much I really need to be told. Or perhaps the whole
routine is more calculated reassurance. _Look, even though Iłm a robot, you can
read me like a book._

She says, �Why are Gleisner robots conscious?"

�For the same reason humans are conscious." Iłve been
waiting for that question since the interview began; Bausch is a counsellor as
much as a salesperson, and itłs part of her job to ensure that Iłm at ease with
the new mode of existence Iłm buying. �Donłt ask me which neural structures are
involved ... but whatever they are, they must be captured in the scan, and
recreated in the model, along with everything else. Gleisner robots are
conscious because they process informationabout the world, and about
themselvesin exactly the same way as humans do."

�So youłre happy with the notion that a computer program
which simulates a conscious human brain is, itself, conscious in the very same
fashion?"

�Of course. I wouldnłt be here if I didnłt believe that." _I
wouldnłt be talking to you, would I?_ I see no need to elaborateto confess
that Iłve become a thousand times more comfortable with the whole idea ever
since the ten-tonne supercomputers in the basements of Dallas and Tokyo began
to give way to the ambulatory Gleisner robots, with their compact processors
and lifelike bodies. When Copies were finally liberated from their virtual realitieshowever
grand, however detailed they might have beenand given the chance to _inhabit
the world_ in the manner of flesh-and-blood people, I finally stopped thinking
of being scanned as a fate akin to being buried alive.

Bausch says, �Then you accept that all it takes to _generate
experience_ ... is to carry out computations on data structures which encode
the same information as the structure of the brain?"

The jargon sounds gratuitous to me, and I donłt understand
why shełs laboring the pointbut I say blandly, �Of course I accept that."

�Then think about what it implies! Because _the whole
process_ of creating the finished piece of software which runs a Gleisner robotthe
perfect Copy of the unconscious person who was scannedis one long sequence of
computations on data structures which _represent the human brain_."

I absorb that in silence.

Bausch continues, �We donłt set out to cause the transition
dreams, but theyłre probably unavoidable. Copies have to be _made_, somehowthey
canłt spring into existence, fully formed. The scanner has to probe the organic
brain, measure the NMR spectra for billions of different cross-sectionsand
then process those measurements into a high-resolution anatomical and biochemical
map. In other words: carry out several trillion computations on a vast set of
data which _represents the brain_. Then, that map has to be used to construct
the working computer model, the Copy itself. More computation."

I think I almost grasp what shełs saying ... but part of me
flatly refuses to accept the notion that merely _imaging the brain_ in high
enough resolution could cause _the image itself_ to dream.

I say, �None of that computation sets out to mimic the workings
of the brain, though, does it? Itłs all just preparing the way for a program
which _will be_ conscious, when itłs finally up and running."

�Yesand once that program _is_ up and running, what will it
do, in order to be conscious? It will generate a sequence of changes in a
digital representation of the brainchanges which mimic normal neural activity.
But creating that representation in the first place also involves _a sequence
of changes_. You canłt go from a blank computer memory, to a detailed
simulation of a specific human brain, without a few trillion intermediate
stagesmost of which will representin part or in full, in one form or anotherpossible
states of the very same brain."

�But why should that add up to any kind of ... mental
activity? Rearranging the data, for other reasons entirely?"

Bausch is adamant. �Reasons donłt come into it. The living
brain reorganizing memories is enough to give rise to ordinary dreams. And just
poking an electrode into the temporal lobes is enough to generate _mental
activity_. I know: what the brain does is so complex that itłs bizarre to think
of achieving the same results unintentionally. But all of the brainłs
complexity is coded into its structure. Once youłre dealing with that
structure, youłre dealing with the stuff of consciousness. Like it or not."

That does make a certain amount of sense. Almost anything
that happens to the brain _feels like something_it doesnłt have to be the
orderly process of waking thought. If the random effects of drugs or illness
can give rise to distinctive mental eventsa fever dream, a schizophrenic
episode, an LSD tripwhy shouldnłt a Copyłs elaborate genesis do the same? Each
incomplete NMR map, each unfinished version of the simulation software, has no
way of �knowing" that itłs not yet _meant_ to be self-aware.

Still

�How can you be sure of any of this? If nobody remembers the
dreams?"

�The mathematics of consciousness is still in its infancy
... but everything we know strongly suggests that the act of constructing a
Copy has _subjective content_even though no trace of the experience remains."

Iłm still not entirely convinced, but I suppose Iłll have to
take her word for it. The Gleisner Corporation has no reason to invent
non-existent side-effectsand Iłm suitably impressed that they bother to warn
their customers about _transition dreams_ at all. So far as I know, the older
companiesthe scanning clinics founded in the days when Copies had no physical
bodiesnever even raised the issue.

We should move on, there are other matters to discussbut itłs
hard to drag my thoughts away from this unsettling revelation. I say, �If you
know enough to be certain that therełll always be transition dreams ... canłt
you stretch the mathematics a little further, and tell me what my dreams will
be?"

Bausch asks innocently, �How could we do that?"

�I donłt know. Examine my brain, then run some kind of simulation
of the Copying process" I catch myself. �Ah. But how do you ęsimulateł a computation
... without doing it?"

�Exactly. The distinction is meaningless. Any program which
could reliably predict the content of the dreams would, itself, _experience
them_, as fully as the ęyouł of the transition process. So what would be the
point? If the dreams turned out to be unpleasant, it would be too late to ęspare
yourselfł the trauma."

_Trauma?_ Iłm beginning to wish Iłd been satisfied with a
reassuring smile, and the promise of perfect amnesia. _A few forgettable
dreams._

Now that Ivaguelyunderstand the reasons for the effect,
though, itłs a thousand times harder to accept it as inevitable. Neural spasms
at the onset of hypothermia might be unavoidablebut anything taking place
_inside a computer_ is supposed to be subject to limitless control.

�Couldnłt you monitor the dreams as theyłre happeningand
intervene, if need be?"

�Iłm afraid not."

�But"

�Think about it. It would be like prediction, only worse.
Monitoring the dreams would mean duplicating the brain-like data structures in
still more formsgenerating more dreams in the process. So even if we could
take charge of the original dreamsdeciphering them, and controlling themall
of the software which did that would need _other software watching it_, to see
what the side-effects of _its_ computations were. And so on. Therełd be no end
to it.

�As it is, the Copy is constructed by the shortest possible
process, the most direct route. The last thing youłd want to do is bring in
more computing power, more elaborate algorithms ... more and more systems
mirroring the arithmetic of the experience."

I shift in my chair, trying to shake off a growing sense of
lightheadedness. The more I ask, the more surreal the whole subject becomesbut
I canłt seem to keep my mouth shut.

�If you canłt say what the dreams will be about, and you canłt
control them ... canłt you at least tell me how long theyłll last?
Subjectively?"

�Not without running a program which also dreams the dreams."
Bausch is apologeticbut I have a feeling that she finds something elegant,
even _proper_, in this state of affairs. �Thatłs the nature of the mathematics:
there are no short-cuts. No answers to hypothetical questions. We canłt say for
certain what any given conscious system will experience ... without _creating_
that conscious system in the process of answering the question."

I laugh weakly. _Images of the brain which dream.
Predictions of dreams which dream. Dreams which infect any machine which tries
to shape them._ Iłd thought that all the giddy metaphysics of virtual existence
had been banished, now that it was possible to choose to be a Copy living
wholly in the physical world. Iłd hoped to be able to step from my body into a
Gleisner robot without missing a beat

And in retrospect, of course, I will have done just that.
Once Iłve crossed the gulf between human and machine, it will vanish seamlessly
behind me.

I say, �So the dreams are unknowable? And unavoidable? Thatłs
close to a mathematical certainty?"

�Yes."

�But itłs equally certain that I wonłt remember them?"

�Yes."

�You donłt recall anything about ... your own? Not a single
mood? Not a single image?"

Bausch smiles tolerantly. �Of course not. I woke from a simulated
coma. The last thing I remember was being anesthetized before the scan. There
are no buried traces, no hidden memories. No invisible scars. _There canłt be._
In a very real sense, _I_ never had the transition dreams at all."

I finally sight a target for my frustration. �Then ... _why
warn me?_ Why tell me about an experience Iłm guaranteed to forget? Guaranteed
to end up _not having been through?_ Donłt you think it would have been kinder
to say nothing?"

Bausch hesitates. For the first time, I appear to have discomfited
herand itłs a very convincing act. But she must have been asked the same
question a thousand times before.

She says, �When youłre dreaming the transition dreams ...
knowing what youłre going through, and why, might make all the difference.
Knowing that itłs not real. Knowing that it wonłt last."

�Perhaps." Itłs not that simple, though, and she knows it. �When
my new mind is being pieced together, do you have any idea _when_ this
knowledge will be part of it? Can you promise me that Iłll remember these
comforting facts when I need them? Can you guarantee that anything youłve told
me will even make sense?"

�No. But"

�Then whatłs the point?"

She says, �Do you think that if wełd kept silent, you would
have had _any chance at all_ of dreaming the truth?"

* * * *

Out on the street, in the winter sunshine, I try to put my
doubts behind me. George Street is still littered with colored paper from last
nightłs celebrations: after six years of bloodshedbombings and sieges, plagues
and faminesthe Chinese civil war finally seems to be over. I feel a surge of
elation, just looking down at the tattered remnants of the streamers and
reminding myself of the glorious news.

I hug myself and head for Town Hall station. Sydney is going
through its coldest June in years, with clear skies bringing sub-zero nights,
and frosts lasting long into the mornings. I try to picture myself as a
Gleisner robot, striding along the very same route, but choosing not to feel
the bite of the wind. Itłs a cheerful prospectand Iłll be untroubled by
anything so tedious as the swelling around my artificial knee and hip joints,
once Iłm wholly and harmoniously artificial. Unafraid of influenza, pneumonia,
or the latest wave of drug-resistant diphtheria sweeping the globe.

I can hardly believe that Iłve finally signed the contracts
and set the machinery in motion, after so many years of making excuses and
putting it off. Shaken out of my complacency by a string of near misses:
bronchitis, a kidney infection, a melanoma _on the sole of my right foot_. The
cytokine injections donłt get my immune system humming the way they did twenty
years ago. _One hundred and seven, this August._ The number sounds surreal. But
then, so did _twenty-seven_, so did _forty-three_, so did _sixty-one_.

On the train, I examine my qualms one more time, hoping to
lay them to rest. Transition dreams are impossible to avoid, or predict, or
control ... just like ordinary dreams. Theyłll have a radically different
origin ... but therełs no reason to believe that a different means of invoking
the contents of my scrambled brain will give rise to an experience any more
disturbing than anything Iłve already been through. _What horrors do I think
are locked up in my skull, waiting to run amok in the data stream from comatose
human to comatose machine?_ Iłve suffered occasional nightmaresand a few have
been deeply distressing, at the timebut even as a child, I never feared sleep.
So why should I fear the transition?

Alice is in the garden, picking string beans, as I come over
the hill from Meadowbank station. She straightens up and waves to me. I can
never quite believe the size of our vegetable patch, so close to the city. We
kiss, and walk inside together.

�Did you book the scan?"

�Yes. Tenth of July." It should sound matter-of-fact, like
that; of all the operations Iłve had in the last ten years, this will be the
safest. I start making coffee; I need something to warm me. The kitchen is
luminous with sunlight, but itłs colder indoors than out.

�And they answered all your questions? Youłre happy now?"

�I suppose so." Therełs no point keeping it to myself,
though; I tell her about the transition dreams.

She says, �I love the first few seconds after waking from a
dream. When the whole thingłs still fresh in your mind ... but you can finally
put it in context. When you know exactly what youłve been through."

�You mean the relief of discovering that none of it was
real? You didnłt actually slaughter a hundred people in a shopping arcade?
Stark naked? The police arenłt closing in on you after all? It works the other
way too, though. Beautiful delusions turning to dust."

She snorts. �Anything that turns to dust that easily is no
great loss."

I pour coffee for both of us. Alice muses, �Transition
dreams must have strange endings, though. If you know nothing about them before
they start ... and nothing again by the time they finish." She stirs her
coffee, and I watch the liquid sloshing from rim to rim. �How would time pass,
in a dream like that? It canłt run straight through, can it? The closer the
computers came to reconstructing every detail of the comatose brain, the less
room therełd be for ... spurious information. At the very beginning, though,
there wouldnłt be any information at all. Somewhere in the middle, therełd be
the most leeway for ęmemoriesł of the dream. So maybe time would flow in from
the start and the finish, and the dream would seem to end in the middle. What
do you think?"

I shake my head. �I canłt even imagine what that would be
like."

�Maybe there are two separate dreams. One running forward,
one running backward." She frowns. �But if they met in the middle, theyłd both
have to end the same way. How could two different dreams have exactly the same
endingright down to the same memories of everything which happened before? And
then, therełs the scanner building up its map of the brain ... and the second
stage, transforming that map into the Copy. Two cycles. Two dreams? Or four? Or
do you think theyłd all be woven together?"

I say irritably, �I really donłt care. Iłm going to wake up
inside a Gleisner robot, and it will all be academic. I wonłt have _dreamed any
dreams_ at all."

Alice looks dubious. �Youłre talking about thoughts and feelings.
As real as anything the Copy will feel. How can that be academic?"

�Iłm _talking about_ a lot of arithmetic. And when you add
up everything it does to me, it will all cancel out in the end. Comatose human
to comatose machine."

�Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."

Words just come out of her mouth sometimes: fragments of
nursery rhymes, lines from old songsshe has no say in it. The hairs stand up
on my arms, though. I look down at my withered fingers, my scrawny wrists.
_This isnłt me._ Aging feels like a mistake, a detour, a misadventure. When I
was twenty years old I was immortal, wasnłt I? Itłs not too late to find my way
back.

Alice murmurs, �Iłm sorry."

I look up at her. �Letłs not make a big deal of this. Itłs
time for me to become a machine. And all I have to do is close my eyes and step
across the gap. Then in a few years, it will be your turn. We can do this.
Therełs nothing to stop us. Itłs the easiest thing in the world."

I reach across the table and take her hand. When I touch
her, I realize Iłm shivering with cold.

She says, �There, there."

* * * *

I canłt sleep. _Two dreams? Four dreams? Meeting in the middle?
Merging into one?_ How will I know when theyłre finally over? The Gleisner
robot will emerge from its coma, and blithely carry onbut without a chance to
look back on the transition dreams, and recognize them for what they were, how
will I ever put them in their place?

I stare up at the ceiling. _This is insane._ I must have had
a thousand dreams which Iłve failed to remember on wakinggone now, forever, as
surely as if my amnesia was computer-controlled and guaranteed. Does it matter
if I was terrified of some ludicrous dream-apparition, or believed Iłd
committed some unspeakable crime ... and now Iłll never have the chance to
laugh off those delusions?

I climb out of bedand once Iłm up, I have no choice but to
dress fully to keep from freezing. Moonlight fills the room, I have no trouble
seeing what Iłm doing. Alice turns over in her sleep, and sighs. Watching her,
a wave of tenderness sweeps through me. _At least Iłm going first._ At least Iłll
be able to reassure her that therełs nothing to fear.

In the kitchen, I find Iłm not hungry or thirsty at all. I
pace to keep warm.

_What am I afraid of?_ Itłs not as if the dreams were a
barrier to be surmounteda test I might fail, an ordeal I might not survive.
The whole transition process will be predeterminedand it _will_ carry me
safely into my new incarnation. Even if I dream some laborious metaphor for my �arduous"
journey from human to machinetrekking barefoot across an endless plain of
burning coals, struggling through a blizzard toward the summit of an unclimbable
mountain ... _and even if I fail to complete that journey_the computers will
grind on, the Gleisner robot will wake, regardless.

I need to get out of the house. I leave quietly, heading for
the 24-hour supermarket opposite the railway station.

The stars are mercilessly sharp, the air is still. If Iłm
colder than I was by day, Iłm too numb to tell the difference. Therełs no
traffic at all, no lights in any of the houses. It must be almost three; I
havenłt been out this late in ... decades. The gray tones of suburban lawns by
moonlight look perfectly familiar, though. When I was seventeen, I seemed to
spend half my life talking with friends into the early morning, then trudging
home through empty streets exactly like these.

The supermarketłs windows glow blue-white around the warmer
tones of the advertising signs embedded within them. I enter the building, and
explore the deserted aisles. Nothing tempts me, but I feel an absurd pang of
guilt about leaving empty-handed, so I grab a carton of milk.

A middle-aged man tinkering with one of the advertising holograms
nods at me as I carry my purchase through the exit gate, magnetic fields
sensing and recording the transaction.

The man says, �Good news about the war?"

�Yes! Itłs wonderful!"

I start to turn away; he seems disappointed. �You donłt remember
me, do you?"

I pause and examine him more carefully. Hełs balding,
brown-eyed, kindly-looking. �Iłm sorry."

�I used to own this shop when you were a boy. I remember you
coming in, buying things for your mother. I sold up and left towneighty-five
years agobut now Iłm back, and Iłve bought the old place again."

I nod and smile, although I still donłt recognize him.

He says, �I was in a virtual city, for a while. There was a
tower which went all the way to the moon. I climbed the stairs to the moon."

I picture a crystalline spiral staircase, sweeping up
through the blackness of space.

�You came out, though. Back into the world."

�I always wanted to run the old place again."

I think I remember his face nowalthough his name still
eludes me, if I ever knew it.

I canłt help asking: �Before you were scanneddid they warn
you about something called ... transition dreams?"

He smiles, as if Iłd spoken the name of a mutual friend. �No.
Not then. But later, I heard. You know, the Copies used to flow from machine to
machine. As the demand for computing power went up and down, and exchange rates
shifted ... the management software used to take us apart and move us. From
Japan, to California, to Texas, to Switzerland. It would break us down into a
billion data packets and send us through the network by a thousand different
routes, and then put us back together again. Ten times a day, some days."

My skin crawls. �And ... _the same thing happened?_ Transition
dreams?"

�Thatłs what I heard. We couldnłt even tell that wełd been
shipped across the planet; it felt to us like no time had passed at all. But I
heard rumors that the mathematicians had proved that there were dreams in the
data at every stage. In the Copy left behind, as they erased it. In the Copy
being pieced together at the new destination. Those Copies had no way of
knowing that they were only intermediate steps in the process of moving a
frozen snapshot from one place to anotherand the changes being made to their
digitized brains werenłt supposed to _mean_ anything at all."

�So did you stop it happening? Once you found out?"

He chuckles. �No. There would have been no point. Because
even in the one computer, Copies were moved all the time: relocated, shuffled
from place to place, to allow memory to be reclaimed and consolidated. Hundreds
of times a second."

My blood turns to ice. _No wonder the old companies never
raised the subject of transition dreams._ I was wiser than I ever knew to wait
for the Gleisner robots. Merely shifting a Copy around in memory could hardly
be comparable to mapping every synapse in a human brainthe dreams it generated
would have to be far shorter, far simplerbut just knowing that my life was peppered
with tiny mental detours, eddies of consciousness in the wake of every move,
would still have been too much to bear.

I head home, clutching the milk carton awkwardly with cold
arthritic fingers.

As I come over the hill, I see the light on above our front
door, although Iłm certain that I left the house in darkness. Alice must have
woken and found me missing. I wince at my thoughtlessness; I should have stayed
inor written her a note. I quicken my step.

Fifty meters from home, a tendril of pain flickers across my
chest. I look down stupidly to see if Iłve walked into a protruding branch;
therełs nothing, but the pain returnssolid as an arrow through the flesh, nowand
I sink to my knees.

The bracelet on my left wrist chimes softly, to tell me that
itłs calling for help. Iłm so close to my own front door, though, that I canłt
resist the urge to rise to my feet and see if I can make the distance.

After two steps, the blood rushes from my head, and I fall
again. I crush the milk carton against my chest, spilling the cold liquid,
freezing my fingers. I can hear the ambulance in the distance, I know I should
relax and keep stillbut something compels me to move.

I crawl toward the light.

* * * *

The orderly pushing me looks like hełs just decided that
this is the last place on Earth hełd choose to be. I silently concur, and tip
my head back to escape his fixed grimace, but then the sight of the ceiling
going by above me is even more disconcerting. The corridorłs lighting panels
are so similar, and their spacing so regular, that I feel like Iłm being
wheeled around in a circle.

I say, �Wherełs Alice? My wife?"

�No visitors now. Therełll be time for that later."

�Iłve paid for a scan. With the Gleisner people. If Iłm in
any danger, they should be told." All of this is encoded in my bracelet,
though; the computers will have read it, therełs nothing to fret about. The
prospect of having to confront the transition in a matter of hours or minutes
fills me with claustrophobic dreadbut better that than having left the
arrangements too late.

The orderly says, �I think youłre wrong about that."

�What?" I struggle to get him in sight again. Hełs grinning
nastily, like a nightclub bouncer whołs just spotted someone with the wrong
kind of shoes.

�I said, I think youłre mistaken. Our records donłt mention
any payment for a scan."

I break into a sweat of indignation. �I signed the
contracts! Today!"

�Yeah, yeah." He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a
handful of long cotton bandages, then proceeds to stuff them into my mouth. My
arms are strapped to my sides; all I can do is grunt in protest, and gag on
cotton and saliva.

Someone steps in front of the trolley and keeps pace with
us, whispering in Latin.

The orderly says, �Donłt feel bad. The top levelłs just the
tip of the iceberg. The crest of the wave. How many of us can belong to an
elite like that?"

I cough and choke, fighting for breath, shuddering with panicthen
I calm myself, and force myself to breathe slowly and evenly through my nose.

�The tip of the iceberg! Do you think the organic brain
moves by some kind of magic? From place to place? _From moment to moment?_ Do
you think an empty patch of space-time can be rebuilt into something as complex
as a human brain, _without transition dreams?_ The physical world has as much
trouble shuffling data as any computer. Do you know how much effort it goes to,
just to keep _one atom_ persisting in the very same spot? Do you think there
could _ever_ be one coherent, conscious self, enduring through timewithout a
billion fragmentary minds forming and dying all around it? Transition dreams
blossoming, and vanishing into oblivion? The airłs thick with them. _Look!_"

I twist my head around and stare down at the floor. The
trolley is surrounded by convoluted vortices of light, rainbow sheets like
cranial folds, flowing, undulating, spinning off smaller versions of
themselves.

�What did you think? You were Mr Big? The one in a billion?
The one on top?"

Another spasm of revulsion and panic sweeps through me. I
choke on saliva, shivering with fear and cold. Whoever is walking ahead of the
trolley lays an icy hand on my forehead; I jerk free.

I struggle to find some solid ground. _So this is my
transition dream._ All right. I should be grateful: at least I understand whatłs
happening. Bauschłs warning has helped me, after all. And Iłm not in any
danger; the Gleisner robot is still going to wake. Soon Iłll forget this
nightmare, and carry on with my life as if nothing had happened. Invulnerable.
Immortal.

Carry on with my life. _With Alice, in the house with the
giant vegetable garden?_ Sweat flows into my eyes; I blink it away. The
vegetable garden was at my parentsł house. In the back yard, not the front. And
that house was torn down long ago.

So was the supermarket opposite the railway station.

_Where did I live, then?_

What did I do?

_Who did I marry?_

The orderly says cheerfully, �So-called Alice taught you in
primary school. Ms Something-or-other. A crush on the teacher, whołd have
guessed?"

_Then, do I have anything straight? The interview with
Bausch?_

�Ha ha. Do you think our clever friends at Gleisner would
have come right out and _told you_ all that? Pull the other one."

_Then how could I know about transition dreams?_

�You must have worked it all out for yourself. From the
inside. Congratulations."

The icy hand touches my forehead again, the murmured chant
grows louder. I screw my eyes shut, racked with fear.

The orderly says thoughtfully, �Then again, I could be wrong
about that teacher. You could be wrong about that house. There might not even
be a Gleisner Corporation. Computerized Copies of human brains? Sounds pretty
dodgy to me."

Strong hands seize me by the shoulders and legs, lift me
from the trolley and spin me around. When the blur of motion stops, Iłm flat on
my back, staring up at a distant rectangle of pale blue sky.

�Alice" leans into view, and tosses in a clod of soil. I
ache to comfort her, but I canłt move or speak. How can I care so much about
her, if I didnłt love her, if she was never real? Other mourners throw in dirt;
none of it seems to touch me, but the sky vanishes in pieces.

_Who am I?_ What do I know for sure about the man whołll
wake inside the robot? I struggle to pin down a single certain fact about him,
but under scrutiny everything dissolves into confusion and doubt.

Someone chants, �Ashes to ashes, coma to coma."

I wait in the darkness, colder than ever.

Therełs a flickering of light and motion around me. The rainbow
vortices, the eddies of transition dreams, weave through the soil like luminous
wormsas if even parts of my decomposing brain might be confusing their decay
with the chemistry of thought, reinterpreting their disintegration from within,
undistracted by the senses, or memory, or truth.

Spinning themselves beautiful delusions, and mistaking death
for something else entirely.

Unstable Orbits In The Space Of Lies

I always feel safest sleeping on the freewayor at least,
those stretches of it that happen to lie in regions of approximate equilibrium
between the surrounding attractors. With our sleeping bags laid out carefully
along the fading white lines between the northbound lanes (perhaps because of a
faint hint of geomancy reaching up from Chinatownnot quite drowned out by the
influence of scientific humanism from the east, liberal Judaism from the west,
and some vehement anti-spiritual, anti-intellectual hedonism from the north), I
can close my eyes safe in the knowledge that Maria and I are not going to wake
up believing, wholeheartedly and irrevocably, in Papal infallibility, the
sentience of Gaia, the delusions of insight induced by meditation, or the
miraculous healing powers of tax reform.

So when I wake to find the sun already clear of the
horizonand Maria goneI donłt panic. No faith, no world view, no belief
system, no culture, could have reached out in the night and claimed her. The
borders of the basins of attraction do fluctuate, advancing and retreating by
tens of metres dailybut itłs highly unlikely that any of them could have
penetrated this far into our precious wasteland of anomie and doubt. I canłt
think why she would have walked off and left me, without a wordbut Maria does
things, now and then, that I find wholly inexplicable. And vice versa. Even
after a year together, we still have that.

I donłt panicbut I donłt linger, either. I donłt want to
get too far behind. I rise to my feet, stretching, and try to decide which way
she would have headed; unless the local conditions have changed since she
departed, that should be much the same as asking where I want to go, myself.

The attractors canłt be fought, they canłt be resistedbut
itłs possible to steer a course between them, to navigate the contradictions.
The easiest way to start out is to make use of a strong, but moderately distant
attractor to build up momentumwhile taking care to arrange to be deflected at
the last minute by a countervailing influence.

Choosing the first attractorthe belief to which surrender
must be feignedis always a strange business. Sometimes it feels, almost
literally, like sniffing the wind, like following an external trail; sometimes
it seems like pure introspection, like trying to determine ęmy ownł true
beliefs ... and sometimes the whole idea of making a distinction between these
apparent opposites seems misguided. Yeah, very fucking Zenand thatłs how it
strikes me now ... which in itself just about answers the question. The balance
here is delicate, but one influence is marginally stronger: Eastern philosophies
are definitely more compelling than the alternatives, from where I standand
knowing the purely geographical reasons for this doesnłt really make it any
less true. I piss on the chain-link fence between the freeway and the railway
line, to hasten its decay, then I roll up my sleeping bag, take a swig of water
from my canteen, hoist my pack, and start walking.

A bakeryłs robot delivery van speeds past me, and I curse my
solitude: without elaborate preparations, it takes at least two agile people to
make use of them: one to block the vehiclełs path, the other to steal the food.
Losses through theft are small enough that the people of the attractors seem to
tolerate them; presumably, greater security measures just arenłt worth the
costalthough no doubt the inhabitants of each ethical monoculture have their
own unique ęreasonsł for not starving us amoral tramps into submission. I take
out a sickly carrot which I dug from one of my vegetable gardens when I passed
by last night; it makes a pathetic breakfast, but as I chew on it, I think
about the bread rolls that Iłll steal when Iłm back with Maria again, and my
anticipation almost overshadows the bland, woody taste of the present.

The freeway curves gently south-east. I reach a section
flanked by deserted factories and abandoned houses, and against this background
of relative silence, the tug of Chinatown, straight ahead now, grows stronger
and clearer. That glib labelłChinatownłwas always an oversimplification, of
course; before Meltdown, the area contained at least a dozen distinct cultures
besides Hong Kong and Malaysian Chinese, from Korean to Cambodian, from Thai to
Timoreseand several varieties of every religion from Buddhism to Islam. All of
that diversity has vanished now, and the homogeneous amalgam that finally
stabilised would probably seem utterly bizarre to any individual pre-Meltdown
inhabitant of the district. To the present-day citizens, of course, the strange
hybrid feels exactly right; thatłs the definition of stability, the whole
reason the attractors exist. If I marched right into Chinatown, not only would
I find myself sharing the local values and beliefs, Iłd be perfectly happy to
stay that way for the rest of my life.

I donłt expect that Iłll march right in, thoughany more
than I expect the Earth to dive straight into the Sun. Itłs been almost four
years since Meltdown, and no attractor has captured me yet.

* * * *

Iłve heard dozens of ęexplanationsł for the events of that
day, but I find most of them equally dubiousrooted as they are in the
world-views of particular attractors. One way in which I sometimes think of it,
on 12 January, 2018, the human race must have crossed some kind of unforeseen
thresholdof global population, perhapsand suffered a sudden, irreversible
change of psychic state.

Telepathy is not the right word for it; after all, nobody
found themself drowning in an ocean of babbling voices; nobody suffered the
torment of empathic overload. The mundane chatter of consciousness stayed
locked inside our heads; our quotidian mental privacy remained unbreached. (Or
perhaps, as some have suggested, everyonełs mental privacy was so thoroughly
breached that the sum of our transient thoughts forms a blanket of featureless
white noise covering the planet, which the brain filters out effortlessly.)

In any case, for whatever reason, the second-by-second soap
operas of other peoplełs inner lives remained, mercifully, as inaccessible as
ever ... but our skulls became completely permeable to each otherłs values and
beliefs, each otherłs deepest convictions.

At first, this meant pure chaos. My memories of the time are
confused and nightmarish; I wandered the city for a day and a night (I think),
finding God (or some equivalent) anew every six secondsseeing no visions,
hearing no voices, but wrenched from faith to faith by invisible forces of
dream logic. People moved in a daze, cowed and staggeringwhile ideas moved
between us like lightning. Revelation followed contradictory revelation. I wanted
it to stop, badlyI would have prayed for it to stop, if God had stayed the
same long enough to be prayed to. Iłve heard other tramps compare these early
mystical convulsions to drug rushes, to orgasms, to being picked up and dumped
by ten-metre waves, ceaselessly, hour after hourbut looking back, I find
myself reminded most of a bout of gastroenteritis I once suffered: a long,
feverish night of interminable vomiting and diarrhoea. Every muscle, every
joint in my body ached, my skin burned: I felt like I was dying. And every time
I thought I lacked the strength to expel anything more from my body, another
spasm took hold of me. By four in the morning, my helplessness seemed
positively transcendental: the peristaltic reflex possessed me like some
harshbut ultimately benevolentdeity. At the time, it was the most religious
experience Iłd ever been through.

All across the city, competing belief systems fought for allegiance,
mutating and hybridising along the way ... like those random populations of
computer viruses they used to unleash against each other in experiments to
demonstrate subtle points of evolutionary theory. Or perhaps like the
historical clashes of the very same beliefswith the length and timescales
drastically shortened by the new mode of interaction, and a lot less bloodshed,
now that the ideas themselves could do battle in a purely mental arena, rather
than employing sword-wielding Crusaders or extermination camps. Or, like a
swarm of demons set loose upon the Earth to possess all but the righteous ...

The chaos didnłt last long. In some places seeded by
pre-Meltdown clustering of cultures and religionsand in other places, by pure
chancecertain belief systems gained enough of an edge, enough of a foothold,
to start spreading out from a core of believers into the surrounding random
detritus, capturing adjacent, disordered populations where no dominant belief
had yet emerged. The more territory these snowballing attractors conquered, the
faster they grew. Fortunatelyin this city, at leastno single attractor was
able to expand unchecked: they all ended up hemmed in, sooner or later, by
equally powerful neighboursor confined by sheer lack of population at the
cityłs outskirts, and near voids of non-residential land.

Within a week of Meltdown, the anarchy had crystallised into
more or less the present configuration, with ninety-nine per cent of the
population having movedor changeduntil they were content to be exactly
whereand whothey were.

I happened to end up between attractorsaffected by many,
but captured by noneand Iłve managed to stay in orbit ever since. Whatever the
knack is, I seem to have it; over the years, the ranks of the tramps have
thinned, but a core of us remains free.

In the early years, the people of the attractors used to
send up robot helicopters to scatter pamphlets over the city, putting the case
for their respective metaphors for what had happenedas if a well-chosen
analogy for the disaster might be enough to win them converts; it took a while
for some of them to understand that the written word had been rendered obsolete
as a vector for indoctrination. Ditto for audiovisual techniquesand that still
hasnłt sunk in everywhere. Not long ago, on a battery-powered TV set in an
abandoned house, Maria and I picked up a broadcast from a network of
rationalist enclaves, showing an alleged ęsimulationł of Meltdown as a
colour-coded dance of mutually carnivorous pixels, obeying a few simple
mathematical rules. The commentator spouted jargon about self-organising
systemsand lo, with the magic of hindsight, the flickers of colour rapidly
evolved into the familiar pattern of hexagonal cells, isolated by moats of
darkness (unpopulated except for the barely visible presence of a few unimportant
specks; we wondered which ones were meant to be us).

I donłt know how things would have turned out if there
hadnłt been the pre-existing infrastructure of robots and telecommunications to
allow people to live and work without travelling outside their own basinsthe
regions guaranteed to lead back to the central attractormost of which are only
a kilometre or two wide. (In fact, there must be many places where that
infrastructure wasnłt present, but I havenłt been exactly plugged into the
global village these last few years, so I donłt know how theyłve fared.) Living
on the margins of this society makes me even more dependent on its wealth than
those who inhabit its multiple centres, so I suppose I should be glad that most
people are content with the status quoand Iłm certainly delighted that they
can co-exist in peace, that they can trade and prosper.

Iłd rather die than join them, thatłs all.

(Or at least, thatłs true right here, right now.)

* * * *

The trick is to keep moving, to maintain momentum. There are
no regions of perfect neutralityor if there are, theyłre too small to find,
probably too small to inhabit, and theyłd almost certainly drift as the
conditions within the basins varied. Near enough is fine for a night, but if I
tried to live in one place, day after day, week after week, then whichever
attractor held even the slightest advantage would, eventually, begin to sway
me.

Momentum, and confusion. Whether or not itłs true that wełre
spared each otherłs inner voices because so much uncorrelated babbling simply
cancels itself out, my aim is to do just that with the more enduring, more
coherent, more pernicious parts of the signal. At the very centre of the Earth,
no doubt, the sum of all human beliefs adds up to pure, harmless noise: here on
the surface, though, where itłs physically impossible to be equidistant from
everyone, Iłm forced to keep moving to average out the effects as best I can.

Sometimes I daydream about heading out into the countryside,
and living in glorious clear-headed solitude beside a robot-tended farm,
stealing the equipment and supplies I need to grow all my own food. With Maria?
If shełll come; sometimes she says yes, sometimes she says no. Haifa dozen
times, wełve told ourselves that wełre setting out on such a journey ... but
wełve yet to discover a trajectory out of the city, a route that would take us
safely past all the intervening attractors, without being gradually deflected
back towards the urban centre. There must be a way out, itłs simply a matter of
finding itand if all the rumours from other tramps have turned out to be dead
ends, thatłs hardly surprising: the only people who could know for certain how
to leave the city are those whołve stumbled on the right path and actually
departed, leaving no hints or rumours behind.

Sometimes, though, I stop dead in the middle of the road and
ask myself what I ęreally wantł:

To escape to the country, and lose myself in the silence of
my own mute soul?

To give up this pointless wandering and rejoin civilisation?
For the sake of prosperity, stability, certainty: to swallow, and be swallowed
by, one elaborate set of self-affirming lies?

Or, to keep orbiting this way until I die?

The answer, of course, depends on where Iłm standing.

* * * *

More robot trucks pass me, but I no longer give them a
second glance. I picture my hunger as an objectanother weight to carry, not
much heavier than my packand it gradually recedes from my attention. I let my
mind grow blank, and I think of nothing but the early-morning sunshine on my
face, and the pleasure of walking.

After a while, a startling clarity begins to wash over me; a
deep tranquillity, together with a powerful sense of understanding. The odd
part is, I have no idea what it is that I think I understand; Iłm experiencing
the pleasure of insight without any apparent cause, without the faintest hope
of replying to the question: insight into what? The feeling persists,
regardless.

I think: Iłve travelled in circles, all these years, and
where has it brought me?

To this moment. To this chance to take my first real steps
along the path to enlightenment.

And all I have to do is keep walking, straight ahead.

For four years, Iłve been following a false taopursuing an
illusion of freedom, striving for no reason but the sake of strivingbut now I
see the way to transform that journey into

Into what? A short cut to damnation?

ęDamnationł? Therełs no such thing. Only samsara, the treadmill
of desires. Only the futility of striving. My understanding is clouded, nowbut
I know that if I travelled a few steps further, the truth would soon become
clear to me.

For several seconds, Iłm paralysed by indecisionshot
through with pure dreadbut then, drawn by the possibility of redemption, I
leave the freeway, clamber over the fence, and head due south.

These side streets are familiar. I pass a car yard full of
sun-bleached wrecks melting in slow motion, their plastic chassis triggered by
disuse into autodegradation; a video porn and sex-aids shop, fa�ade intact,
dark within, stinking of rotting carpet and mouse shit; an outboard motor
showroom, the latestfour-year-oldfuel cell models proudly on display already
looking like bizarre relics from another century.

Then the sight of the cathedral spire rising above all this
squalor hits me with a giddy mixture of nostalgia and d�ją vu. In spite of everything,
part of me still feels like a true Prodigal Son, coming home for the first
timenot passing through for the fiftieth. I mumble prayers and phrases of
dogma, strangely comforting formulae reawakened from memories of my last
perihelion.

Soon, only one thing puzzles me: how could I have known
Godłs perfect loveand then walked away? Itłs unthinkable. How could I have
turned my back on Him?

I come to a row of pristine houses: I know theyłre
uninhabited, but here in the border zone the diocesan robots keep the lawns
trimmed, the leaves swept, the walls painted. A few blocks further, south-west,
and Iłll never turn my back on the truth again. I head that way, gladly.

Almost gladly.

The only trouble is ... with each step south it grows harder
to ignore the fact that the scriptureslet alone Catholic dogmaare full of the
most grotesque errors of fact and logic. Why should a revelation from a
perfect, loving God be such a dogłs breakfast of threats and contradictions?
Why should it offer such a flawed and confused view of humanityłs place in the
universe?

Errors of fact? The metaphors had to be chosen to suit the
world-view of the day; should God have mystified the author of Genesis with
details of the Big Bang, and primordial nucleosynthesis? Contradictions? Tests
of faithand humility. How can I be so arrogant as to set my wretched powers of
reasoning against the Word of the Almighty? God transcends everything, logic
included.

Logic especially.

Itłs no good. Virgin births? Miracles with loaves and
fishes? Resurrection? Poetic fables only, not to be taken literally? If thatłs
the case, though, whatłs left but a few well-intentioned homilies, and a lot of
pompous theatrics? If God did in fact become man, suffer, die, and rise again
to save me, then I owe Him everything ... but if itłs just a beautiful story,
then I can love my neighbour with or without regular doses of bread and wine.

I veer south-east.

The truth about the universe (here) is infinitely stranger,
and infinitely more grand: it lies in the Laws of Physics that have come to
know Themselves through humanity. Our destiny and purpose are encoded in the
fine structure constant, and the value of the density omega. The human racein
whatever form, robot or organicwill keep on advancing for the next ten billion
years, until we can give rise to the hyperintelligence which will cause the
finely tuned Big Bang required to bring us into existence.

If we donłt die out in the next few millennia.

In which case, other intelligent creatures will perform the
task. It doesnłt matter who carries the torch.

Exactly. None of it matters. Why should I care what a
civilisation of posthumans, robots, or aliens, might or might not do ten
billion years from now? What does any of this grandiose shit have to do with
me?

I finally catch sight of Maria, a few blocks ahead of meand
right on cue, the existentialist attractor to the west firmly steers me away
from the suburbs of cosmic baroque. I increase my pace, but only slightlyitłs
too hot to run, but more to the point, sudden acceleration can have some
peculiar side effects, bringing on unexpected philosophical swerves.

As I narrow the gap, she turns at the sound of my footsteps.

I say, ęHi.ł

ęHi.ł She doesnłt seem exactly thrilled to see mebut then,
this isnłt exactly the place for it.

I fall into step beside her. ęYou left without me.ł

She shrugs. ęI wanted to be on my own for a while. I wanted
to think things over.ł

I laugh. ęIf you wanted to think, you should have stayed on
the freeway.ł

ęTherełs another spot ahead. In the park. Itłs just as
good.ł

Shełs rightalthough now Iłm here to spoil it for her. I ask
myself for the thousandth time: Why do I want us to stay together? Because of
what we have in common? But we owe most of that to the very fact that we are
togethertravelling the same paths, corrupting each other with our proximity.
Because of our differences, then? For the sake of occasional moments of mutual
incomprehensibility? But the longer wełre together, the more that vestige of
mystery will be eroded; orbiting each other can only lead to a spiralling
together, an end to all distinctions.

Why, then?

The honest answer (here and now) is: food and sexalthough
tomorrow, elsewhere, no doubt Iłll look back and brand that conclusion a
cynical lie.

I fall silent as we drift towards the equilibrium zone. The
last few minutesł confusion still rings in my head, satisfyingly jumbled, the
giddy succession of truncated epiphanies effectively cancelling each other out,
leaving nothing behind but an amorphous sense of distrust. I remember a school
of thought from pre-Meltdown days which proclaimed, with bovine good
intentionsconfusing laudable tolerance with sheer credulitythat there was
something of value in every human philosophy ... and whatłs more, when you got
right down to it, they all really spoke the same ęuniversal truthsł, and were
all, ultimately, reconcilable. Apparently, none of these supine ecumenicists
have survived to witness the palpable disproof of their hypothesis; I expect
they all converted, three seconds after Meltdown, to the faith of whoever was
standing closest to them at the time.

Maria mutters angrily, ęWonderful!ł I look up at her, then
follow her gaze. The park has come into view, and if itłs time to herself she
wanted, she has more than me to contend with. At least two dozen other tramps
are gathered in the shade. Thatłs rare, but it does happen; equilibrium zones
are the slowest parts of everybodyłs orbits, so I suppose itłs not surprising
that occasionally a group of us ends up becalmed together.

As we come closer, I notice something stranger: everybody
reclining on the grass is facing the same way. Watching somethingor
someonehidden from view by the trees.

Someone. A womanłs voice reaches us, the words indistinct at
this distance, but the tone mellifluous. Confident. Gentle but persuasive.

Maria says nervously, ęMaybe we should stay back. Maybe the
equilibriumłs shifted.ł

ęMaybe.ł Iłm as worried as she isbut intrigued as well. I
donłt feel much of a tug from any of the familiar local attractorsbut then, I
canłt be sure that my curiosity itself isnłt a new hook for an old idea.

I say, ęLetłs just ... skirt around the rim of the park. We
canłt ignore this; we have to find out whatłs going on.ł If a nearby basin has
expanded and captured the park, then keeping our distance from the speaker is
no guarantee of freedom; itłs not her words, or her lone presence, that could
harm usbut Maria (knowing all this, Iłm sure) accepts my ęstrategył for
warding off the danger, and nods assent.

We position ourselves in the middle of the road at the
eastern edge of the park, without noticeable effect. The speaker, middle-aged
Iłd guess, looks every inch a tramp, from the dirt-stiff clothes to the crudely
cut hair to the weathered skin and lean build of a half-starved perennial
walker. Only the voice is wrong. Shełs set up a frame, like an easel, on which
shełs stretched a large map of the city; the roughly hexagonal cells of the
basins are neatly marked in a variety of colours. People used to swap maps like
this all the time, in the early years; maybe shełs just showing off her prize
possession, hoping to trade it for something worthwhile. I donłt think much of
her chances; by now, Iłm sure, every tramp relies on his or her own mental
picture of the ideological terrain.

Then she lifts a pointer and traces part of a feature Iłd
missed: a delicate web of blue lines, weaving through the gaps between the
hexagons.

The woman says, ęBut of course itłs no accident. We havenłt
stayed out of the basins all these years by sheer good luckor even skill.ł She
looks out across the crowd, notices us, pauses a moment, then says calmly,
ęWełve been captured by our own attractor. Itłs nothing like the othersitłs
not a fixed set of beliefs, in a fixed locationbut itłs still an attractor,
itłs still drawn us to it from whatever unstable orbits we might have been on.
Iłve mapped itor part of itand Iłve sketched it as well as I can. The true
detail may be infinitely finebut even from this crude representation, you
should recognise paths that youłve walked yourselves.ł

I stare at the map. From this distance, the blue strands are
impossible to follow individually; I can see that they cover the route that
Maria and I have taken, over the last few days, but

An old man calls out, ęYoułve scrawled a lot of lines
between the basins. What does that prove?ł

ęNot between all the basins.ł She touches a point on the
map. ęHas anyone ever been here? Or here? Or here? No? Here? Or here? Why not?
Theyłre all wide corridors between attractorsthey look as safe as any of the
others. So why have we never been to these places? For the same reason nobody
living in the fixed attractors has: theyłre not part of our territory; theyłre
not part of our own attractor.ł

I know shełs talking nonsense, but the phrase alone is
enough to make me feel panicky, claustrophobic. Our own attractor. Wełve been
captured by our own attractor. I scan the rim of the city on the map; the blue
line never comes close to it. In fact, the line gets about as far from the
centre as Iłve ever travelled, myself ...

Proving what? Only that this woman has had no better luck
than I have. If shełd escaped the city, she wouldnłt be here to claim that
escape was impossible.

A woman in the crowdvisibly pregnantsays, ęYoułve drawn
your own paths, thatłs all. Youłve stayed out of dangerIłve stayed out of
dangerwe all know what places to avoid. Thatłs all youłre telling us. Thatłs
all we have in common.ł

ęNo!ł The speaker traces a stretch of the blue line again.
ęThis is who we are. Wełre not aimless wanderers; wełre the people of this
strange attractor. We have an identitya unityafter all.ł

Therełs laughter, and a few desultory insults from the
crowd. I whisper to Maria, ęDo you know her? Have you see her before?ł

ęIłm not sure. I donłt think so.ł

ęYou wouldnłt have. Isnłt it obvious? Shełs some kind of
robot evangelistł

ęShe doesnłt talk much like one.ł

ęRationalistnot Christian or Mormon.ł

ęRationalists donłt send evangelists.ł

ęNo? Mapping strange attractors; if thatłs not rationalist
jargon, what is it?ł

Maria shrugs. ęBasins, attractorstheyłre all rationalist
words, but everybody uses them. You know what they say: the Devil has the best
tunes, but the rationalists have the best jargon. Words have to come from
somewhere.ł

The woman says, ęIłll build my church on sand. And Iłll ask
no one to follow meand yet, you will. You all will.ł

I say, ęLetłs go.ł I take Mariałs arm, but she pulls free
angrily.

ęWhy are you so against her? Maybe shełs right.ł

ęAre you crazy?ł

ęEveryone else has an attractorwhy canłt we have one of our
own? Stranger than all the rest. Look at it: itłs the most beautiful thing on
the map.ł

I shake my head, horrified. ęHow can you say that? Wełve
stayed free. Wełve struggled so hard to stay free.ł

She shrugs. ęMaybe. Or maybe wełve been captured by what you
call freedom. Maybe we donłt need to struggle any more. Is that so bad? If
wełre doing what we want, either way, why should we care?ł

Without any fuss, the woman starts packing up her easel, and
the crowd of tramps begins to disperse. Nobody seems to have been much affected
by the brief sermon; everyone heads off calmly on their own chosen orbits.

I, say, ęThe people in the basins are doing what they want.
I donłt want to be like them.ł

Maria laughs. ęBelieve me, youłre not.ł

ęNo, youłre right, Iłm not: theyłre rich, fat and
complacent; Iłm starving, tired, and confused. And for what? Why am I living
this way? That robotłs trying to take away the one thing that makes it all
worthwhile.ł

ęYeah? Well, Iłm tired and hungry, too. And maybe an attractor
of my own will make it all worthwhile.ł

ęHow?ł I laugh derisively. ęWill you worship it? Will you
pray to it?ł

ęNo. But I wonłt have to be afraid any more. If we really
have been capturedif the way we live is stable, after allthen putting one
foot wrong wonłt matter: wełll be drawn back to our own attractor. We wonłt
have to worry that the smallest mistake will send us sliding into one of the
basins. If thatłs true, arenłt you glad?ł

I shake my head angrily. ęThatłs bullshitdangerous
bullshit. Staying out of the basins is a skill, itłs a gift. You know that. We
navigate the channels, carefully, balancing the opposing forcesł

ęDo we? Iłm sick of feeling like a tightrope walker.ł

ęBeing sick of it doesnłt mean it isnłt true! Donłt you see?
She wants us to be complacent! The more of us who start to think orbiting is
easy, the more of us will end up captured by the basinsł

Iłm distracted by the sight of the prophet hefting her possessions
and setting off. I say, ęLook at her: she may be a perfect imitationbut shełs
a robot, shełs a fake. Theyłve finally understood that their pamphlets and
their preaching machines wonłt work, so theyłve sent a machine to lie to us
about our freedom.ł

Maria says, ęProve it.ł

ęWhat?ł

ęYoułve got a knife. If shełs a robot, go after her, stop
her, cut her open. Prove it.ł

The woman, the robot, crosses the park, heading north-west,
away from us. I say, ęYou know me; I could never do that.ł

ęIf shełs a robot, she wonłt feel a thing.ł

ęBut she looks human. I couldnłt do it. I couldnłt stick a
knife into a perfect imitation of human flesh.ł

ęBecause you know shełs not a robot. You know shełs telling
the truth.ł

Part of me is simply glad to be arguing with Maria, for the
sake of proving our separatenessbut part of me finds everything shełs saying
too painful to leave unchallenged.

I hesitate a moment, then put down my pack and sprint across
the park towards the prophet.

She turns when she hears me, and stops walking. Therełs no
one else nearby. I halt a few metres away from her, and catch my breath. She
regards me with patient curiosity. I stare at her, feeling increasingly
foolish. I canłt pull a knife on her: she might not be a robot, after allshe
might just be a tramp with strange ideas.

She says, ęDid you want to ask me something?ł

Almost without thinking, I blurt out, ęHow do you know nobodyłs
ever left the city? How can you be so sure itłs never happened?ł

She shakes her head. ęI didnłt say that. The attractor looks
like a closed loop to me. Anyone whołs been captured by it could never leave.
But other people may have escaped.ł

ęWhat other people?ł

ęPeople who werenłt in the attractorłs basin.ł

I scowl, confused. ęWhat basin? Iłm not talking about the
people of the basins, Iłm talking about us.ł

She laughs. ęIłm sorry. I donłt mean the basins that lead to
the fixed attractors. Our strange attractor has a basin, too: all the points
that lead to it. I donłt know what this basinłs shape is: like the attractor
itself, the detail could be infinitely fine. Not every point in the gaps
between the hexagons would be part of it: some points must lead to the fixed
attractorsthatłs why some tramps have been captured by them. Other points
would belong to the strange attractorłs basin. But othersł

ęWhat?ł

ęOther points might lead to infinity. To escape.ł

ęWhich points?ł

She shrugs. ęWho knows? There could be two points, side by
side, one leading into the strange attractor, one leadingeventuallyout of the
city. The only way to find out which is which would be to start at each point,
and see what happens.ł

ęBut you said wełd all been captured, alreadył

She nods. ęAfter so many orbits, the basins must have
emptied into their respective attractors. The attractors are the stable part:
the basins lead into the attractors, but the attractors lead into themselves.
Anyone who was destined for a fixed attractor must be in it by nowand anyone
who was destined to leave the city has already gone. Those of us who are still
in orbit will stay that way. We have to understand that, accept that, learn to
live with it ... and if that means inventing our own faith, our own religionł

I grab her arm, draw my knife, and quickly scrape the point
across her forearm. She yelps and pulls free, then clasps her hand to the
wound. A moment later, she takes it away to inspect the damage, and I see the
thin red line on her arm, and a rough wet copy on her palm.

ęYou lunatic!ł she yells, backing away.

Maria approaches us. The probably-flesh-and-blood prophet
addresses her: ęHełs mad! Get him off me!ł Maria takes hold of my arm, then,
inexplicably, leans towards me and puts her tongue in my ear. I burst out
laughing. The woman steps back uncertainly, then turns and hurries away.

Maria says, ęNot much of a dissectionbut as far as it went,
it was in my favour. I win.ł

I hesitate, then feign surrender.

ęYou win.ł

* * * *

By nightfall, we end up on the freeway again; this time, to
the east of the city centre. We gaze at the sky above the black silhouette of
abandoned office towers, our brains mildly scrambled by the residual effects of
a nearby cluster of astrologers, as we eat the dayłs prize catch: a giant
vegetarian pizza.

Finally, Maria says, ęVenus has set. I think I ought to
sleep now.ł

I nod. ęIłll wait up for Mars.ł

Traces of the dayłs barrage drift through my mind, more or
less at randombut I can still recall most of what the woman in the park told
me.

After so many orbits, the basins must have emptied ...

So by now, wełve all ended up captured. Buthow could she
know that? How could she be sure?

And what if shełs wrong? What if we havenłt all, yet,
arrived in our final resting place?

The astrologers say: None of her filthy, materialist,
reductionist lies can be true. Except the ones about destiny. We like destiny.
Destiny is fine.

I get up and walk a dozen metres south, neutralising their
contribution. Then I turn and watch Maria sleeping.

There could be two points, side by side, one leading into
the strange attractor, one leadingeventuallyout of the city. The only way to
find out which is which would be to start at each point, and see what happens.

Right now, everything she said sounds to me like some
heavily distorted and badly misunderstood rationalist model. And here I am,
grasping at hope by seizing on half of her version, and throwing out the rest. Metaphors
mutating and hybridising, all over again ...

I walk over to Maria, crouch down and bend to kiss her,
gently, upside down on the forehead. She doesnłt even stir.

Then I lift my pack and set off down the freeway, believing
for a moment that I can feel the emptiness beyond the city reach through, reach
over, all the obstacles ahead, and claim me.

The Vat

A Romantic Comedy

 

Haroldłs in love.

Therełs no hiding it. You can see it in his eyes, in the
heat distribution on his skin, in the twists and whorls of his brainłs magnetic
field.

Mary knows he exists, all right. When she looks his way, she
doesnłt look through himnot quite. She notices him with a mild frown. She
notices him like a splinter in her thumb, or a crease in her lab coat. She
notices him like a faint odour; nothing utterly repulsive, but nothing too
pleasant either.

Poor Harold was once a promising neurochemist. He discovered
a brand new neurotransmitter-antagonist which could make rats lethargic and
depressed.

However, while proving that injections of this substance, during
or immediately after feeding, could produce an aversive association strong
enough to make the creatures starve themselves to death, he accidentally jabbed
himself with the needle, and soon found he was no longer able even to
contemplate experiments with rats. So these days, he works on The Vat.

Harold is in charge of spermatogenesis. In truth, he doesnłt
have a lot to do.

The computer monitors the temperature, the pH, the concentrations
of nutrients, growth factors, and waste products. Four hundred square metres of
glass plate are coated with a gelatinous matrix in which spermatogonia, the
stem cells, are embedded. When these cells divide, some of their daughter cells
are more of the same, the others are primary spermatocytes. Each primary spermatocyte
gives rise by meiosis to two secondary spermatocytes, each of which in turn
divides into two spermatids. Under the influence of Sertoli cells, also
embedded in the matrix, spermatids mature and shed cytoplasm to become spermatozoa.

Harold has seen all of these stages hundreds of times under
the microscope, in samples taken for quality control. He ought to find the
whole business utterly mundane. Sometimes, thoughtransfixed for a moment by
the image on the screen

he says in dreamy tones of sudden recognition (to no one in
particular, often to no one at all), �Yes! This is it. This is life." Staring
at these specks of unthinking biochemical machinery, he grows dizzy with
wonder, then numb with awe.

Then he gets on with the job.

Some nights, Harold wakes in the early hours and goes out to
walk the empty streets. Why? Itłs the hottest summer on record, and he canłt
get back to sleep.

Why? Unrequited love, of course. Why? Studies of the sequence
of neurological events which occur when a subject makes a self-motivated choice
between hitting a button and not hitting a button have revealed that the
conscious decision-making process starts milliseconds after other parts of the
brain are already committed to action. �Will" isnłt the cause of anything, itłs
an afterthought for the sake of peace of mind. Since reading this, Harold has stopped
making an effort to force his intentions to conform to his behaviour; there
doesnłt seem much point now in maintaining the illusion. He just walks.

Even the stillest, quietest night comes alive for Harold. He
sees gas molecules spinning through the air, and photons pouring down from the
stars, the way some insane medieval monk might have imagined angels and demons
battling it out behind every corner and beneath every cobblestone. And the
frenzy isnłt confined to his surroundings; the real bedlam is inside him. He
pictures it all, vividly, in garish, comic-book, computer-graphic colours: DNA
being transcribed, proteins being synthesised, carbohydrates being burnt in
flameless enzymatic fires.

Everybodyłs made up of molecules, and plenty of people know
it, but nobody feels it like Harold.

Above all, he dizzily marvels at the fact that the molecules
in his brain have managed, collectively, to understand themselves: his
neurotransmitters are part of a system that knows what a neurotransmitter is.
He can sketch the structures of the central nervous systemłs one hundred most
important substances; hełs synthesised half of them with his own hands. Hełs
even viewed real-time images of his brain metabolising radioactively-labelled
glucose, revealing which regions were most active as he watched himself
thinking about watching himself think.

Harold doesnłt know quite what to make of this molecular
self-knowledge. He canłt decide if consciousness is miraculous or meaningless;
he hovers between mystical ecstasy and the purest nihilism. Sometimes he feels
like a robot, raised by human parents, whołs just discovered the awful truth:
poring over his own circuit diagrams, horrified but enthralled; scanning a
print-out of his own software, following the flow of control from subroutine to
subroutine; understanding, at last, the ultimate shallowness of the deepest
reasons for everything hełs ever done, everything hełs ever feltand
dissociating into a mist of a quadrillion purposeless, microscopic causes and
effects.

This mood always passes, though, eventually.

Mary is responsible for oogenesis. Primary oocytes undergo
meiotic division to yield four cells, but only one of the four is a mature
ovum; the others are tiny cells known as polar bodies, and the second division
is only completed if fertilisation takes place. In a massive cultured
substitute for the ovarian cortex, millions of ova mature and burst from their
follicles dailyno parsimonious one a month here. The Vat has no time, and no
need, to ponderously mimic the stages of the human menstrual cycle; as in any
good assembly line, everything is happening at once.

Harold knows exactly where Mary lives, although of course hełs
never been inside, and when he walks by at two in the morning, the narrow
terrace house is always black and silent. He hurries past, terrified that she
might be awake, and might glance out at the sound of his guilty footsteps.

He knows he ought to forget her. Sometimes he swears that he
will. He sees women on the street every day whom he finds a thousand times more
attractive.

Total strangers treat him with far greater kindness and
respect. He knows his mere presence annoys herand her presence evokes in him
more shame and confusion than tenderness, or even lust.

His love is ridiculous. His love is a farce. Yet the
persistence of his obsession doesnłt surprise him at all. Evolution, he
reasons, has not had time to trim human consciousness down to the most productive,
most essential elements. His brain is capable of many arbitrary, even
self-defeating, modes; perhaps that is the price to pay for its flexibility,
perhaps there is no easy sequence of mutations which could remove such
disadvantages without sacrificing much more.

As for his own wish to be rid of this miserable, pointless
love, Harold knows that this has no more power to change his feelings than it
does to change the weather on Jupiter or the electronłs charge-to-mass ratio;
itłs merely another aspect of the state of his brain. Whatever admirable
progress evolution has made towards lining up intentions with behaviour to
pander to the vanities of the conscious mind, hasin Haroldłs case, at leastbeen
wasted. The neurological facts refuse to stay decently theoretical; the irony
is that this shattering of the illusion of will, although entirely reasonable,
is not by any means necessary; after all, the human brain is under no deep
biochemical edict to be reasonable. The epiphenomenon of logical thought simply
happens to have been more resilient, in this case, than the epiphenomenon of
will; in a million other people, as familiar with the facts as Harold, the
battle happens to have gone the other way.

Harold wonders, with a mixture of unease and fascination, if
his reason is strong enough to move on from this conquest to the ultimate
triumph of undermining itself.

When Maryłs ova meet Haroldłs sperm, a high proportion are
fertilised. Most of the sperm go to waste, but not nearly as many as are lost
in vivo. The rates of polyspermy, and fertilisation by defective sperm, are
consequently higher, but such abnormalities donłt really matter, in The Vat.

The resulting zygotes drift, slowly, along a vast conduit.
They undergo cleavage, redistributing their cytoplasm amongst more and more
cells. Between four and six days after fertilisation, blastocysts form: hollow
balls of cells, with a cluster at one end which is destined to become the
embryo. Other cells will, in time, give rise to the protective foetal membranes.

Cultured slabs of uterine endometriumhormonally stimulated
into a swollen, receptive state, and replete with artificial blood circulated
by electric pumps

are introduced into the conduit at the point where the
blastocysts are ready to implant. Within days of implantation, chorionic villithe
links between the placental and �maternal" blood supplywill form, guaranteeing
essential nutrition for the haemotropic development to come.

Tonight, after passing Maryłs dark houseon the far side of
the street, as alwaysHarold stops and turns back. Why? Because certain of his
motor neurons fire in the necessary sequence. Why? Because sufficient
excitatory signals are received at their dendrites. Why? Because of the neural
topology of Haroldłs brain, the product of his genome, and his life history,
and the way the quantum dice have fallen.

A rubbish-strewn alley leads to a back window, very slightly
ajar. Harold can fit only his fingernails into the crack, and clawing the
window open causes him a lot of pain, but this doesnłt deter him at all.

The window leads into a damp, warm bathroom, between a toilet
and a dripping shower. He fears that the sound of the dripping will betray him;
it rings so loudly in his head that he believes Mary might be wakened, not by
the sound itself, but by his amplified perception of it. He tightens the hot
water tap with all his strength, and then the cold, but therełs a leaky washer,
and no amount of force is going to change that.

He tip-toes into the kitchen, opens the drawers and searches
them methodically.

Itłs not until he has the carving knife in his hand that he
reflects on his likely use for it. Part of him is shocked, but part of him is
delighted; itłs one thing to muse and fret like a tenth-rate philosopher, but
here at last is a test for his ideas that goes beyond inconsequential
speculation.

A proportion of the embryos are simply liquefied; the cell
walls, and indeed all intracellular structures, are ultrasonically disrupted.
The broth of chemicals this produces is then fed into a sophisticated
purification system, based mainly on electrophoresis and affinity
chromatography, and many valuable substances are extracted.

The remaining embryos are broken into individual cells. In
theory, perhaps, almost anything can be achieved with engineered bacteria, or
some modified tumour cell line, but in practice there are still many properties
of healthy human tissue that canłt be faked. Persuading E. coli to churn out
hormones like insulin or dopamine is simple enough; turning it into a perfectly
functional equivalent of an islet cell or a dopaminergic neuronan integral
part of a complicated regulatory systemis something else entirely. Itłs simply
not economical, trying to make all that human DNA work in a foreign environment,
when the real thing is available for a fraction of the cost.

Harold passes the refrigerated storerooms every morning as
he arrives for work, and every evening as he departs. Itłs a relaxed, cheerful
place; the storemen always seem to be whistling, or playing a radio loudly.
Vans come and go at all hours, picking up the large, but light, containers of
insulating foam in which the small, precious vials are packed. When Harold sees
a crateful of the end product of his work being loaded into a van, when he sees
the driver sign for the consignment, slam his door, and drive away, he says to
himself aloud, nodding, �Yes! This is it. This is life."

Harold stands by Maryłs bed. Shełs lying on her side, turned
away from him. He breathes slowlythrough his mouth, hoping that this is the
quietest wayand thinks about the trillions of cells of her body. If he stabbed
her in the heart, only the tiniest fraction of them would be killed directly by
the bladejust a few million cells in her skin, her soft tissue, her heart
muscles. The death of her neurons would be almost coincidental, more a product
of this organismłs poor design than anything else. A slime mould would easily
survive similar treatment.

He stands for a while, waiting to see what he will do. Part
of hima small, vestigial subsystem with no interest whatsoever in brain
physiology, the philosophy of consciousness, or even obsessive lovepleads
fervently to be allowed to put down the knife and flee, but Harold pays it
about as much attention as the soundtrack of a childłs cartoon overheard
playing on a neighbourłs TV. He stands, and he waits.

Harold doesnłt mourn for the brief lives he helps create; he
knows they die long before the most primitive thoughts or feelings have a
chance to arise, and he canłt believe therełs a machine up in heaven, churning
out a white-robed feather-winged soul for each of these tiny clusters of cells.

Rather, he rejoices. Because The Vat says something about
human lifehuman life of every agethat had to be said, and although today he
is alone in heeding this message, he knows that in time the insights hełs
gained will be the common heritage of all humanity.

Harold retraces his steps. He returns the knife to its place
in the kitchen. He leaves by the bathroom window, and closes it behind him.

He wanted to kill her, he muses, more than hełd ever wanted
anything before. He wanted, very badly, to be free. But something in his
genome, or something in his past, declared that it wasnłt to be. Or perhaps the
quantum dice simply happened to fall in her favour. This time.

He walks home slowly, his face uplifted to the photons flooding
down from the stars, and he counts them one by one.

The Walk

Leaves and twigs crunch underfoot with every step; no gentle
rustling, but the sharp, snapping sounds of irrevocable, unrepeatable damageas
if to hammer into my brain the fact that no one else has come this way for some
time. Every footfall proclaims that therełll be no help, no interruptions, no
distractions.

Iłve felt weak and giddy since we left the carand part of
me is still hoping that Iłll simply pass out, collapse on the spot and never
get up again. My body, though, shows no signs of obliging: it stubbornly acts
as if each step forward is the easiest thing in the world, as if its sense of
balance is unimpaired, as if all the fatigue and nausea are entirely within my
head. I could fake it: I could sink to the ground and refuse to stir. Get it
over with.

I donłt, though.

Because I donłt want it to be over.

I try again.

ęCarter, you could be rich, man. Iłd work for you for the
rest of my life.ł Good touch, that: my life, not your life; makes it sound like
a better deal. ęYou know how much I made for Finn, in six months? Half a
million! Add it up.ł

He doesnłt reply. I stop walking, and turn back to face him.
He halts too, keeping his distance. Carter doesnłt look much like an
executioner. He must be close to sixty: grey-haired, with a weathered, almost
kindly face. Hełs still solidly built, but he looks like someonełs once
athletic grandfather, a boxer or a football player forty years ago, now into
vigorous gardening.

He calmly waves me on with the gun.

ęFurther. Wełve passed the people-taking-a-piss zone, but
campers, bush walkers ... you canłt be too careful.ł

I hesitate. He gives me a gently admonishing look. If I
stood my ground? Hełd shoot me right here, and carry the body the rest of the
way. I can see him trudging along, with my corpse slung casually across his
shoulders. However decent he might seem at first glance, the truth is, the
manłs a fucking robot: hełs got some kind of neural implant, some bizarre
religion; everybody knows that.

I whisper, ęCarter ... please.ł

He gestures with the gun.

I turn and start walking again.

I still donłt understand how Finn caught me out. I thought I
was the best hacker he had. Who could have followed my trail, from the outside?
Nobody! He must have planted someone inside one of the corporations I was
screwing on his behalfjust to check up on me, the paranoid bastard. And I
never kept more than ten per cent. I wish Iłd taken fifty. I wish Iłd made it
worthwhile.

I strain my ears, but I canłt pick up the faintest hint of
traffic, now; just birdsong, insects, the crackling of the forestłs debris underfoot.
Fucking nature. I refuse to die here. I want to end my life like a human being:
in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive
doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go
into orbitpreferably around the sun. I donłt care how much it costs, just so
long as I donłt end up part of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus,
nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you
grasping bitch.

Wasted anger, wasted time. Please donłt kill me, Carter: I
canłt bear to be absorbed back into the unthinking biosphere. Thatłd really
move him.

What, then?

ęIłm twenty-five years old, man. I havenłt even lived. Iłve
spent the last ten years farting around with computers. I donłt even have any
kids. How can you kill someone who hasnłt even had kids?ł For a second, seduced
by my own rhetoric, I seriously think about claiming virginitybut that might
be pushing it ... and it sounds less selfish, less hedonistic, to assert my
right to fatherhood than to whine about sex.

Carter laughs. ęYou want immortality through childrenł? Forget
it. Iłve got two sons, myself. Theyłre nothing like me. Theyłre total
strangers.ł

ęYeah? Thatłs sad. But I still ought to have the chance.ł

ęThe chance to do what? To pretend that youłll live on
through your children? To fool yourself?ł

I laugh knowinglytrying to make it sound like wełre sharing
a joke that only two like-minded cynics could appreciate.

ęOf course I want a chance to fool myself. I want to lie to
myself for fifty more years. Sounds pretty good to me.ł

He doesnłt reply.

I slow down slightly, shortening my stride, feigning trouble
with the uneven terrain. Why? Do I seriously think that a few extra minutes
will give me the chance to formulate some dazzlingly brilliant plan? Or am I
just buying time for the sake of it? Just prolonging the agony?

I pause, and suddenly find myself retching; the convulsions
run deep, but nothing comes up except a faint taste of acid. When itłs over, I
wipe the sweat and tears from my face, and try to stop shakinghating more than
anything the fact that I care about my dignity, the fact that I do give a shit
whether or not I die in a pool of vomit, weeping like a child. As if this walk
to my death is all that matters, now; as if these last few minutes of my life
have superseded everything else.

They have, though, havenłt they? Everything else is past, is
gone.

Yesand so will this begone. If I am going to die, therełs
no need to ęmake peaceł with myself, no reason to ęcompose myself for death.
The way I face extinction is just as fleeting, just as irrelevant, as the way I
faced every other moment of my life.

The one and only thing that could make this time matter
would be finding a way to survive.

When I catch my breath, I try to stretch out the delay.

ęCarter, how many times have you done this?ł

ęThirty-three.ł

Thirty-three. Thatłs hard enough to swallow when some jilted
gun fetishist squeezes the trigger of his sub-machine-gun and firehoses a
crowd, but thirty-three leisurely strolls into the forest ...

ęSo tell me: how do most people take it? I really want to
know. Do they puke? Do they cry? Do they beg?ł

He shrugs. ęSometimes.ł

ęDo they try to bribe you?ł

ęAlmost always.ł

ęBut you canłt be bought?ł

He doesnłt reply.

ęOrhas nobody made the right offer? What do you want, if it
isnłt money? Sex?ł His face remains impassivetherełs no scowl of revulsionso
instead of making a joke of it, retracting what might have been an insult, I
press on, light-headed. ęIs that it? Do you want me to suck your cock? If
thatłs what you want, Iłll do it.ł

He gives me that admonishing look again. No contempt for my
spineless pleading, no disgust at my misjudged offer; just the mildest
irritation that Iłm wasting his time.

I laugh weakly, to hide my humiliation at this absolute
indifferencethis refusal to find me even pitiful.

I say, ęSo, people take it pretty badly. How do you take
it?ł

He says, matter-of-factly, ęI take it pretty well.ł

I wipe my face again. ęYeah, you do, donłt you? Is that what
the chip in your brain is for? To let you sleep at night after youłve done
this?ł

He hesitates, then says, ęIn a way. But itłs not as simple
as that.ł He waves the gun. ęGet moving. Wełve still got further to go.ł

I turn, thinking numbly: Iłve just told the one man who
could save my life that hełs a brain-damaged, subhuman killing machine.

I start walking again.

I glance up, once, at the blank idiot sky, and refuse to
take delivery of the flood of memories linked in my mind to the same astonishing
blue. All of that is gone, itłs over. No Proustian flashbacks, no Billy Pilgrim
time-tripping for me. I have no need to flee into the past: Iłm going to live
into the future, Iłm going to survive this. How? Carter may be merciless, and
incorruptiblein which case, Iłm simply going to have to overpower him. I may
have led a sedentary existence, but Iłm less than half his age; that has to
count for something. At the very least, I must be faster on my feet. Overpower
him? Struggle with a loaded gun? Maybe I wonłt have to; maybe Iłll get a chance
to run.

Carter says, ęDonłt waste your time trying to think up ways
to bargain with me. Itłs not going to happen. Youłd be better off thinking of
ways to accept the inevitable.ł

ęI donłt want to fucking accept it.ł

ęThatłs not true. You donłt want it to happenbut it will happen.
So find a way to deal with it. You must have thought about death, before now.ł

This is all I need: grief counselling from my own assassin.
ęIf you want to know the truth: not once. One more thing I never got around to.
So why donłt you give me a decade or two to sort it out?ł

ęIt wonłt take a decade. It wonłt take long at all. Look at
it this way: Does it bother you that there are places outside your skinand
youłre not in them? That you come to a sudden end at the top of your skulland
then therełs nothing but air? Of course not. So why should it bother you that
therełll be times when you wonłt be aroundany more than you care that there
are places you donłt occupy? You think your life is going to be
undonecancelled out, somehowjust because it has an end? Does the space above
your head cancel out your body? Everything has boundaries. Nothing stretches on
foreverin any direction.ł

In spite of myself, I laugh; hełs gone from the sadistic to
the surreal. ęYou believe that shit, do you? You actually think that way?ł

ęNo. I could have; itłs on the marketand I seriously considered
buying it. Itłs a perfectly valid point of view ... but in the end, it just
didnłt ring true for meand I didnłt want it to ring true. I chose something
else entirely. Stop here.ł

ęWhat?ł

ęI said stop.ł

I look around, bewildered, refusing to believe that wełve arrived.
Wełre nowhere specialhemmed in, as ever, between the ugly eucalypts; calf deep
in the drought-shrivelled undergrowthbut what did I expect? An artificial
clearing? A picnic spot?

I turn to face him, scouring my paralysed brain for some
strategy to get within reach of the gunor get out of his range before he can
firewhen he says, with perfect sincerity, ęI can help you. I can make this
easier.ł I stare at him for a second, then break into long, clumsy, choking
sobs.

He waits, patiently, until I finally manage to cough up the
word: ęHow?ł

With his left hand, he reaches into his shirt pocket, takes
out a small object, and holds it up for inspection on his outstretched palm.
For a moment, I think itłs a capsule, some kind of drugbut itłs not.

Not quite.

Itłs a neural implant applicator. Through the transparent
casing, I can just make out the grey speck of the implant itself.

I have an instant, vivid fantasy of walking forward to
accept it: my chance, at last, to disarm him.

ęCatch.ł He tosses the device straight at my face, and I put
up a hand and grab it from the air.

He says, ęItłs up to you, of course. Iłm not going to force
you to use it.ł

Flies settle on my wet face as I stare at the thing. I brush
them away with my free hand. ęWhatłll this give me? Twenty seconds of cosmic
bliss before you blow my brains out? Some hallucination so vivid itłll make me
think this was all a dream? If you wanted to spare me the pain of knowing I was
going to die, you should have just shot me in the back of the head five minutes
ago, when I still thought I had a chance.ł

He says, ęItłs not a hallucination. Itłs a set of ...
attitudes. A philosophy, if you like.ł

ęWhat philosophy? All that crap about ... boundaries in space
and time?ł

ęNo. I told you, I didnłt buy that.ł

I almost crack up. ęSo this is your religion? You want to convert
me, before you kill me? You want to save my fucking soul? Is that how you cope
with slaughtering people? You think youłre saving their souls?ł

He shakes his head, unoffended. ęI wouldnłt call it a
religion. There is no god. There are no souls.ł

ęNo? Well, if youłre offering me all the comforts of
atheism, I donłt need an implant for that.ł

ęAre you afraid of dying?ł

ęWhat do you think?ł

ęIf you use the implant, you wonłt be.ł

ęYou want to render me terminally brave, and then kill me?
Or terminally numb? Iłd rather be blissed out.ł

ęNot brave. Or numb. Perceptive.ł

He may not have found me pitiful, but Iłm still human enough
to do him the honour. ęPerceptive? You think swallowing some pathetic lie about
death is perceptive?ł

ęNo lies. This implant wonłt change your beliefs on any question
of fact.ł

ęI donłt believe in life after death, soł

ęWhose life?ł

ęWhat?ł

ęWhen you die, will other people live on?ł

For a moment, I just canłt speak. Iłm fighting for my
lifeand hełs treating the whole thing like some abstract philosophical debate.
I almost scream: Stop playing with me! Get it over with!

But I donłt want it to be over.

And as long as I can keep him talking, therełs still the
chance that I can rush him, the chance of a distraction, the chance of some
miraculous reprieve.

I take a deep breath. ęYes, other people will live on.ł

ęBillions. Perhaps hundreds of billions, in centuries to
come.ł

ęNo shit. Iłve never believed that the universe would vanish
when I died. But if you think thatłs some great consolationł

ęHow different can two humans be?ł

ęI donłt know. Youłre pretty fucking different.ł

ęOut of all those hundreds of billions, donłt you think
therełll be people who are just like you?

ęWhat are you talking about now? Reincarnation?ł

ęNo. Statistics. There can be no �reincarnation"there are
no souls to be reborn. But eventuallyby pure chancesomeone will come along
whołll embody everything that defines you.ł

I donłt know why, but the crazier this gets, the more
hopeful Iłm beginning to feelas if Carterłs crippled powers of reasoning might
make him vulnerable in other ways.

I say, ęThatłs just not true. How could anyone end up with
my memories, my experiencesł

ęMemories donłt matter. Your experiences donłt define you.
The accidental details of your life are as superficial as your appearance. They
may have shaped who you arebut theyłre not an intrinsic part of it. Therełs a
core, a deep abstractionł

ęA soul by any other name.ł

ęNo.ł

I shake my head, vehemently. Therełs nothing to be gained by
humouring him; Iłm too bad an actor to make it convincingand an argument can
only buy me more time.

ęYou think I should feel better about dying because ... sometime
in the future, some total stranger might have a few abstract traits in common
with me?ł

ęYou said that you wished youłd had children.ł

ęI lied.ł

ęGood. Because theyłre not the answer.ł

ęAnd I should get more comfort from the thought of someone
whołs no relation at all, with no memories of mine, no sense of continuitył

ęHow much do you have in common, now, with yourself when you
were five years old?ł

ęNot much.ł

ęDonłt you think there must be thousands of people who are infinitely
more like youas you are nowthan that child ever was?ł

ęMaybe. In some ways, maybe.ł

ęWhat about when you were ten? Fifteen?ł

ęWhat does it matter? OK: people change. Slowly. Imperceptibly.ł

He nods. ęImperceptiblyexactly! But does that make it any
less real? Whołs swallowed the lie? Itłs seeing the life of your body as the
life of one person thatłs the illusion. The idea that �you" are made up of all
the events since your birth is nothing but a useful fiction. Thatłs not a
person: itłs a composite, a mosaic.ł

I shrug. ęPerhaps. Itłs still the closest thing to ... an
identity ... that anyone can possess.ł

ęBut it isnłt! And it distracts us from the truth!ł Carter
is growing impassioned, but therełs no hint of fanaticism in his demeanour. I
almost wish hełd start rantingbut instead he continues, more calmly, more
reasonably than ever. ęIłm not saying that memories make no difference; of
course they do. But therełs a part of you thatłs independent of themand that
part will live again. One day, someone, somewhere, will think as you did, act
as you did. Even if itłs only for a second or two, that person will be you.ł

I shake my head. Iłm beginning to feel stupefied by this
relentless dream-logicand Iłm dangerously close to losing touch with whatłs at
stake.

I say flatly, ęThis is bullshit. Nobody could think that
way.ł

ęYoułre wrong. I do. And you canif you want to.ł

ęWell, I donłt want to.ł

ęI know it seems absurd to you, nowbut I promise you, the
implant would change all that.ł He absent-mindedly massages his right forearm.
It must be stiff from holding the gun. ęYou can die afraid, or you can die
reassured. Itłs your decision.ł

I close my fist over the applicator. ęDo you offer this to
all your victims?ł

ęNot all. A few.ł

ęAnd how many have used it?ł

ęNone so far.ł

ęIłm not surprised. Whołd want to die like that? Fooling themselves?ł

ęYou said you did.ł

ęLive. I said I wanted to live, fooling myself.ł

I brush the flies from my face, for the hundredth time; they
alight again, fearlessly. Carter is five metres away; if I take a step in his
direction, hełll shoot me in the head, without the slightest hesitation. I
strain my ears, and hear nothing but crickets.

Using the implant would buy me more time: the four or five
minutes before it takes effect. What have I got to lose? Carterłs reluctance to
kill me, ęunenlightenedł? In the end, thatłs made no difference, thirty-three
times before. My will to stay alive? Maybe; maybe not. A change in my
intellectual views about mortality need not render me utterly supine; even
believers in a glorious afterlife have been known to struggle hard to postpone
the trip.

Carter says softly, ęMake up your mind. Iłm going to count
to ten.ł

The chance to die honestly? The chance to cling to my own
fear and confusion to the end?

Fuck that. If I die, then it makes no difference how I faced
it. Thatłs my philosophy.

I say, ęDonłt bother.ł I push the applicator deep into my
right nostril, and squeeze the trigger. Therełs a faint sting as the implant
burrows into my nasal membranes, heading for the brain.

Carter laughs with delight. I almost join him. From out of nowhere,
I have five more minutes to save my life.

I say, ęOK, Iłve done what you wanted. But everything I said
before still stands. Let me live, and Iłll make you rich. A million a year. At
least.ł

He shakes his head. ęYoułre dreaming. Where would I go? Finn
would track me down in a week.ł

ęYou wouldnłt need to go anywhere. Iłd skip the countryand
Iłd pay your money into an Orbital account.ł

ęYeah? Even if you did, what use would the money be to me? I
couldnłt risk spending it.ł

ęOnce you had enough, you could buy some security. Buy some
independence. Start disentangling yourself from Finn.ł

ęNo.ł He laughs again. ęWhy are you still looking for a way
out? Donłt you understand? Therełs no need.ł

By now, the implant must have disgorged its nanomachines, to
build links between my brain and the tiny optical processor whose neural net
embodies Carterłs bizarre beliefs. Short-circuiting my own attitudes;
hard-wiring his insanity into my brain. But no matterI can always get it
removed; thatłs the easiest thing in the world. If itłs still what I want.

I say, ęTherełs no need for anything. Therełs no need for
you to kill me. We can still both walk out of here. Why do you act like you
have no choice?ł

He shakes his head. ęYoułre dreaming.ł

ęFuck you! Listen to me! All Finn has is money. I can ruin
him, if thatłs what it takes. From the other side of the world!ł I donłt even
know whether or not Iłm lying any more. Could I do that? To save my life?

Carter says softly, finally, ęNo.ł

I donłt know what to say. I have no more arguments, no more
pleas. I almost turn and run, but I canłt do it. I canłt believe that Iłd get
awayand I canłt bring myself to make him pull the trigger a moment sooner.

The sunshine is dazzling; I close my eyes against the glare.
I havenłt given up. Iłll pretend that the implant has failedthat should
disconcert him, buy me a few more minutes.

And then?

A wave of giddiness sweeps over me. I stagger, but regain my
balance. I stand, staring at my shadow on the ground, swaying gently, feeling
impossibly light.

Then I look up, squinting. ęIł

Carter says, ęYoułre going to die. Iłm going to shoot you
through the skull. Do you understand me?ł

ęYes.ł

ęBut itłs not the end of you. Not the end of what matters.
You believe that, donłt you?ł

I nod, begrudgingly. ęYes.ł

ęYou know youłre going to diebut youłre not afraid?ł

I close my eyes again; the light still hurts them. I laugh
wearily. ęYoułre wrong: Iłm still afraid. You lied about that, didnłt you? You
shit. But I understand. Everything you said makes sense now.ł

And it does. All my objections seem absurd, now;
transparently ill-conceived. I resent the fact that Carter was rightbut I
canłt pretend that my reluctance to believe him was the product of anything but
short-sightedness and self-deception. That it took a neural implant to enable
me to see the obvious only proves how confused I must have been.

I stand, eyes shut, feeling the warm sunshine on the back of
my neck. Waiting.

ęYou donłt want to die ... but you know itłs the only way
out? You accept that, now?ł He sounds reluctant to believe me, as if he finds
my instant conversion too good to be true.

I scream at him: ęYes, fuck you! Yes! So get it over with!
Get it over with!ł

Hełs silent for a while. Then therełs a soft thud, and a
crash in the undergrowth.

The flies on my arms and face desert me.

After a moment, I open my eyes and sink to my knees,
shaking. For a while, I lose myself: sobbing, banging the ground with my fists,
tearing up handfuls of weeds, screaming at the birds for silence.

Then I scramble to my feet and walk over to the corpse.

He believed everything he claimed to believebut he still
needed something more. More than the abstract hope of someone, sometime,
somewhere on the planet, falling into alignmentbecoming himby pure chance. He
needed someone else holding the very same beliefs, right before his eyes at the
moment of deathsomeone else who ęknewł that they were going to die, someone
else who was just as afraid as he was.

And what do I believe?

I look up at the sky, and the memories I fought away,
before, start tumbling through my skull. From lazy childhood holidays, to the
very last weekend I spent with my ex-wife and son, the same heartbreaking blue
runs through them all. Unites them all.

Doesnłt it?

I look down at Carter, nudge him with my foot, and whisper,
ęWho died today? Tell me. Who really died?ł

Wangłs Carpets

Waiting to be cloned one thousand times and scattered across
ten million cubic light-years, Paolo Venetti relaxed in his favorite ceremonial
bathtub: a tiered hexagonal pool set in a courtyard of black marble flecked
with gold. Paolo wore full traditional anatomy, uncomfortable garb at first,
but the warm currents flowing across his back and shoulders slowly eased him
into a pleasant torpor. He could have reached the same state in an instant, by
decreebut the occasion seemed to demand the complete ritual of verisimilitude,
the ornate curlicued longhand of imitation physical cause and effect.

As the moment of diaspora approached, a small gray lizard
darted across the courtyard, claws scrabbling. It halted by the far edge of the
pool, and Paolo marveled at the delicate pulse of its breathing, and watched
the lizard watching him, until it moved again, disappearing into the
surrounding vineyards. The environment was full of birds and insects, rodents
and small reptilesdecorative in appearance, but also satisfying a more
abstract aesthetic: softening the harsh radial symmetry of the lone observer;
anchoring the simulation by perceiving it from a multitude of viewpoints.
Ontological guy lines. No one had asked the lizards if they wanted to be
cloned, though. They were coming along for the ride, like it or not.

The sky above the courtyard was warm and blue, cloudless and
sunless, isotropic. Paolo waited calmly, prepared for every one of half a dozen
possible fates.

An invisible bell chimed softly, three times. Paolo laughed,
delighted.

One chime would have meant that he was still on Earth: an anticlimax,
certainlybut there would have been advantages to compensate for that. Everyone
who really mattered to him lived in the Carter-Zimmerman polis, but not all of
them had chosen to take part in the diaspora to the same degree; his Earth-self
would have lost no one. Helping to ensure that the thousand ships were safely
dispatched would have been satisfying, too. And remaining a member of the wider
Earth-based community, plugged into the entire global culture in real time,
would have been an attraction in itself.

Two chimes would have meant that this clone of
Carter-Zimmerman had reached a planetary system devoid of life. Paolo had run a
sophisticatedbut nonsapientself-predictive model before deciding to wake
under those conditions. Exploring a handful of alien worlds, however barren,
had seemed likely to be an enriching experience for himwith the distinct
advantage that the whole endeavor would be untrammeled by the kind of elaborate
precautions necessary in the presence of alien life. C-Złs population would
have fallen by more than halfand many of his closest friends would have been
absentbut he would have forged new friendships, he was sure.

Four chimes would have signaled the discovery of intelligent
aliens. Five, a technological civilization. Six, spacefarers.

Three chimes, though, meant that the scout probes had
detected unambiguous signs of lifeand that was reason enough for jubilation.
Up until the moment of the prelaunch cloninga subjective instant before the
chimes had soundedno reports of alien life had ever reached Earth. Therełd
been no guarantee that any part of the diaspora would find it.

Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly
rewired the declarative memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the
information he was likely to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity. This
clone of C-Z had arrived at Vega, the second closest of the thousand target
stars, twenty-seven light-years from Earth. Paolo closed his eyes and
visualized a star map with a thousand lines radiating out from the sun, then
zoomed in on the trajectory that described his own journey. It had taken three
centuries to reach Vegabut the vast majority of the polisłs twenty thousand
inhabitants had programmed their exoselves to suspend them prior to the cloning
and to wake them only if and when they arrived at a suitable destination.
Ninety-two citizens had chosen the alternative: experiencing every voyage of
the diaspora from start to finish, risking disappointment, and even death.
Paolo now knew that the ship aimed at Fomalhaut, the target nearest Earth, had
been struck by debris and annihilated en route. He mourned the ninety-two,
briefly. He hadnłt been close to any of them, prior to the cloning, and the
particular versions whołd willfully perished two centuries ago in interstellar
space seemed as remote as the victims of some ancient calamity from the era of
flesh.

Paolo examined his new home star through the cameras of one
of the scout probesand the strange filters of the ancestral visual system. In
traditional colors, Vega was a fierce blue-white disk, laced with prominences.
Three times the mass of the sun, twice the size and twice as hot, sixty times
as luminous. Burning hydrogen fastand already halfway through its allotted
five hundred million years on the main sequence.

Vegałs sole planet, Orpheus, had been a featureless blip to
the best lunar interferometers; now Paolo gazed down on its blue-green
crescent, ten thousand kilometers below Carter-Zimmerman itself. Orpheus was
terrestrial, a nickel-iron-silicate world; slightly larger than Earth, slightly
warmera billion kilometers took the edge off Vegałs heatand almost drowning
in liquid water. Impatient to see the whole surface firsthand, Paolo slowed his
clock rate a thousandfold, allowing C-Z to circumnavigate the planet in twenty
subjective seconds, daylight unshrouding a broad new swath with each pass. Two
slender ocher-colored continents with mountainous spines bracketed hemispheric
oceans, and dazzling expanses of pack ice covered both polesfar more so in the
north, where jagged white peninsulas radiated out from the midwinter arctic
darkness.

The Orphean atmosphere was mostly nitrogensix times as much
as on Earth; probably split by UV from primordial ammoniawith traces of water
vapor and carbon dioxide, but not enough of either for a runaway greenhouse
effect. The high atmospheric pressure meant reduced evaporationPaolo saw not a
wisp of cloudand the large, warm oceans in turn helped feed carbon dioxide
back into the crust, locking it up in limestone sediments destined for
subduction.

The whole system was young, by Earth standards, but Vegałs
greater mass, and a denser protostellar cloud, would have meant swifter passage
through most of the traumas of birth: nuclear ignition and early luminosity
fluctuations; planetary coalescence and the age of bombardments. The library
estimated that Orpheus had enjoyed a relatively stable climate, and freedom
from major impacts, for at least the past hundred million years.

Long enough for primitive life to appear

A hand seized Paolo firmly by the ankle and tugged him beneath
the water. Heoffered no resistance, and let the vision of the planet slip away.
Only two other people in C-Z had free access to this environmentand his father
didnłt play games with his now-twelve-hundred-year-old son.

Elena dragged him all the way to the bottom of the pool,
before releasing his foot and hovering above him, a triumphant silhouette
against the bright surface. She was ancestor-shaped, but obviously cheating;
she spoke with perfect clarity; and no air bubbles at all.

�Late sleeper! Iłve been waiting seven weeks for this!"

Paolo feigned indifference, but he was fast running out of
breath. He had his exoself convert him into an amphibious human variantbiologically
and historically authentic, if no longer the definitive ancestral phenotype.
Water flooded into his modified lungs, and his modified brain welcomed it.

He said, �Why would I want to waste consciousness, sitting
around waiting for the scout probes to refine their observations? I woke as
soon as the data was unambiguous."

She pummeled his chest; he reached up and pulled her down,
instinctively reducing his buoyancy to compensate, and they rolled across the
bottom of the pool, kissing.

Elena said, �You know wełre the first C-Z to arrive,
anywhere? The Fomalhaut ship was destroyed. So therełs only one other pair of
us. Back on Earth."

�So?" Then he remembered. Elena had chosen not to wake if
any other version of her had already encountered life. Whatever fate befell
each of the remaining ships, every other version of him would have to live
without her.

He nodded soberly, and kissed her again. �What am I meant to
say? Youłre a thousand times more precious to me, now?"

�Yes."

�Ah, but what about the you-and-I on Earth? Five hundred
times would be closer to the truth."

�Therełs no poetry in five hundred."

�Donłt be so defeatist. Rewire your language centers."

She ran her hands along the sides of his rib cage, down to
his hips. They made love with their almost-traditional bodiesand brains; Paolo
was amused to the point of distraction when his limbic system went into
overdrive, but he remembered enough from the last occasion to bury his
self-consciousness and surrender to the strange hijacker. It wasnłt like making
love in any civilized fashionthe rate of information exchange between them was
minuscule, for a startbut it had the raw insistent quality of most ancestral
pleasures.

Then they drifted up to the surface of the pool and lay
beneath the radiant sunless sky.

Paolo thought, Iłve crossed twenty-seven light-years in an instant.
Iłm orbiting the first planet ever found to hold alien life. And Iłve
sacrificed nothingleft nothing I truly value behind. This is too good, too
good. He felt a pang of regret for his other selvesit was hard to imagine them
faring as well, without Elena, without Orpheusbut there was nothing he could
do about that now. Although therełd be time to confer with Earth before any
more ships reached their destinations, hełd decidedprior to the cloningnot to
allow the unfolding of his manifold future to be swayed by any change of heart.
Whether or not his Earth-self agreed, the two of them were powerless to alter
the criteria for waking. The self with the right to choose for the thousand had
passed away.

No matter, Paolo decided. The others would findor constructtheir
own reasons for happiness. And there was still the chance that one of them
would wake to the sound of four chimes.

Elena said, �If youłd slept much longer, you would have
missed the vote."

The vote? The scouts in low orbit had gathered what data
they could about Orphean biology. To proceed any farther, it would be necessary
to send microprobes into the ocean itselfan escalation of contact that
required the approval of two-thirds of the polis. There was no compelling
reason to believe that the presence of a few million tiny robots could do any
harm; all theyłd leave behind in the water was a few kilojoules of waste heat.
Nevertheless, a faction had arisen that advocated caution. The citizens of
Carter-Zimmerman, they argued, could continue to observe from a distance for
another decade, or another millennium, refining their observations and
hypotheses before intruding ... and those who disagreed could always sleep away
the time, or find other interests to pursue.

Paolo delved into his library-fresh knowledge of the �carpets"the
single Orphean life-form detected so far. They were free-floating creatures
living in the equatorial ocean depthsapparently destroyed by UV if they
drifted too close to the surface. They grew to a size of hundreds of meters,
then fissioned into dozens of fragments, each of which continued to grow. It
was tempting to assume that they were colonies of single-celled organisms,
something like giant kelpbut there was no real evidence yet to back that up.
It was difficult enough for the scout probes to discern the carpetsł gross
appearance and behavior through a kilometer of water, even with Vegałs copious
neutrinos lighting the way; remote observations on a microscopic scale, let
alone biochemical analyses, were out of the question. Spectroscopy revealed
that the surface water was full of intriguing molecular debrisbut guessing the
relationship of any of it to the living carpets was like trying to reconstruct
human biochemistry by studying human ashes.

Paolo turned to Elena. �What do you think?"

She moaned theatrically; the topic must have been argued to
death while he slept. �The microprobes are harmless. They could tell us exactly
what the carpets are made of, without removing a single molecule. Whatłs the
risk? Culture shock?"

Paolo flicked water onto her face, affectionately; the
impulse seemed to come with the amphibian body. �You canłt be sure that theyłre
not intelligent."

�Do you know what was living on Earth, two hundred million
years after it was formed?"

�Maybe cyanobacteria. Maybe nothing. This isnłt Earth,
though."

�True. But even in the unlikely event that the carpets are
intelligent, do you think theyłd notice the presence of robots a millionth
their size? If theyłre unified organisms, they donłt appear to react to
anything in their environmentthey have no predators, they donłt pursue food,
they just drift with the currentsso therełs no reason for them to possess
elaborate sense organs at all, let alone anything working on a submillimeter
scale. And if theyłre colonies of single-celled creatures, one of which happens
to collide with a microprobe and register its presence with surface receptors
... what conceivable harm could that do?"

�I have no idea. But my ignorance is no guarantee of safety."

Elena splashed him back. �The only way to deal with your ignorance
is to vote to send down the microprobes. We have to be cautious, I agreebut
therełs no point being here if we donłt find out whatłs happening in the oceans
right now. I donłt want to wait for this planet to evolve something smart
enough to broadcast biochemistry lessons into space. If wełre not willing to
take a few infinitesimal risks, Vega will turn red giant before we learn anything."

It was a throwaway linebut Paolo tried to imagine
witnessing the event. In a quarter of a billion years, would the citizens of
Carter-Zimmerman be debating the ethics of intervening to rescue the Orpheansor
would they all have lost interest, and departed for other stars, or modified
themselves into beings entirely devoid of nostalgic compassion for organic
life?

Grandiose visions for a twelve-hundred-year-old. The Fomalhaut
clone had been obliterated by one tiny piece of rock. There was far more junk
in the Vegan system than in interstellar space; even ringed by defenses, its
data backed up to all the far-flung scout probes, this C-Z was not invulnerable
just because it had arrived intact. Elena was right; they had to seize the
momentor they might as well retreat into their own hermetic worlds and forget
that theyłd ever made the journey.

Paolo recalled the honest puzzlement of a friend from
Ashton-Laval, Why go looking for aliens? Our polis has a thousand ecologies, a
trillion species of evolved life. What do you hope to find, out there, that you
couldnłt have grown at home?

What had he hoped to find? Just the answers to a few simple
questions. Did human consciousness bootstrap all of space-time into existence,
in order to explain itself? Or had a neutral, preexisting universe given birth
to a billion varieties of conscious life, all capable of harboring the same
delusions of grandeuruntil they collided with each other? Anthrocosmology was
used to justify the inward-looking stance of most polises: if the physical
universe was created by human thought, it had no special status that placed it
above virtual reality. It might have come firstand every virtual reality might
need to run on a physical computing device, subject to physical lawsbut it
occupied no privileged position in terms of �truth" versus �illusion." If the
ACs were right, then it was no more honest to value the physical universe over
more recent artificial realities than it was honest to remain flesh instead of
software, or ape instead of human, or bacterium instead of ape.

Elena said, �We canłt lie here forever; the gangłs all
waiting to see you."

�Where?" Paolo felt his first pang of homesickness; on
Earth, his circle of friends had always met in a real-time image of the Mount
Pinatubo crater, plucked straight from the observation satellites. A recording
wouldnłt be the same.

�Iłll show you."

Paolo reached over and took her hand. The pool, the sky, the
courtyard vanishedand he found himself gazing down on Orpheus again ... night-side,
but far from dark, with his full mental palette now encoding everything from
the pale wash of ground-current long-wave radio, to the multicolored shimmer of
isotopic gamma rays and back-scattered cosmic-ray bremsstrahlung. Half the
abstract knowledge the library had fed him about the planet was obvious at a
glance, now. The oceanłs smoothly tapered thermal glow spelt three hundred
Kelvin instantlyas well as back-lighting the atmospherełs tell-tale infrared
silhouette.

He was standing on a long, metallic-looking girder, one edge
of a vast geodesic sphere, open to the blazing cathedral of space. He glanced
up and saw the star-rich dust-clogged band of the Milky Way, encircling him
from zenith to nadir, aware of the glow of every gas cloud, discerning each
absorption and emission line. Paolo could almost feel the plane of the galactic
disk transect him. Some constellations were distorted, but the view was more
familiar than strangeand he recognized most of the old signposts by color. He
had his bearings now. Twenty degrees away from Siriussouth, by parochial Earth
reckoningfaint but unmistakable: the sun.

Elena was beside himsuperficially unchanged, although theyłd
both shrugged off the constraints of biology. The conventions of this
environment mimicked the physics of real macroscopic objects in free fall and
vacuum, but it wasnłt set up to model any kind of chemistry, let alone that of
flesh and blood. Their new bodies were human-shaped, but devoid of elaborate
microstructureand their minds werenłt embedded in the physics at all, but were
running directly on the processor web.

Paolo was relieved to be back to normal; ceremonial
regression to the ancestral form was a venerable C-Z traditionand being human
was largely self-affirming, while it lastedbut every time he emerged from the
experience, he felt as if hełd broken free of billion-year-old shackles. There
were polises on Earth where the citizens would have found his present structure
almost as archaic: a consciousness dominated by sensory perception, an illusion
of possessing solid form, a single time coordinate. The last flesh human had
died long before Paolo was constructed, and apart from the communities of
Gleisner robots, Carter-Zimmerman was about as conservative as a transhuman
society could be. The balance seemed right to Paolo, thoughacknowledging the
flexibility of software, without abandoning interest in the physical worldand
although the stubbornly corporeal Gleisners had been first to the stars, the
C-Z diaspora would soon overtake them.

Their friends gathered round, showing off their effortless
free-fall acrobatics, greeting Paolo and chiding him for not arranging to wake
sooner; he was the last of the gang to emerge from hibernation.

�Do you like our humble new meeting place?" Hermann floated
by Paolołs shoulder, a chimeric cluster of limbs and sense organs, speaking
through the vacuum in modulated infrared. �We call it Satellite Pinatubo. Itłs
desolate up here, I knowbut we were afraid it might violate the spirit of
caution if we dared pretend to walk the Orphean surface."

Paolo glanced mentally at a scout probełs close-up of a
typical stretch of dry land, and expanse of fissured red rock. �More desolate
down there, I think." He was tempted to touch the groundto let the private
vision become tactilebut he resisted. Being elsewhere in the middle of a
conversation was bad etiquette.

�Ignore Hermann," Liesl advised. �He wants to flood Orpheus
with our alien machinery before we have any idea what the effects might be."
Liesl was a green-and-turquoise butterfly, with a stylized human face stippled
in gold on each wing.

Paolo was surprised; from the way Elena had spoken, hełd assumed
that his friends must have come to a consensus in favor of the microprobesand
only a late sleeper, new to the issues, would bother to argue the point. �What
effects? The carpets"

�Forget the carpets! Even if the carpets are as simple as
they look, we donłt know what else is down there." As Lieslłs wings fluttered,
her mirror image faces seemed to glance at each other for support. �With
neutrino imaging, we barely achieve spatial resolution in meters, time
resolution in seconds. We donłt know anything about smaller life-forms."

�And we never will, if you have your way." Karpalan
ex-Gleisner, human-shaped as everhad been Lieslłs lover last time Paolo was
awake.

�Wełve only been here for a fraction of an Orphean year!
Therełs still a wealth of data we could gather nonintrusively, with a little
patience. There might be rare beachings of ocean life"

Elena said dryly, �Rare indeed. Orpheus has negligible
tides, shallow waves, very few storms. And anything beached would be fried by
UV before we glimpsed anything more instructive than wełre already seeing in
the surface water."

�Not necessarily. The carpets seem to be vulnerablebut
other species might be better protected, if they live nearer to the surface.
And Orpheus is seismically active; we should at least wait for a tsunami to
dump a few cubic kilometers of ocean onto a shoreline, and see what it reveals."

Paolo smiled; he hadnłt thought of that. A tsunami might be
worth waiting for.

Liesl continued, �What is there to lose by waiting a few hundred
Orphean years? At the very least, we could gather baseline data on seasonal
climate patternsand we could watch for anomalies, storms and quakes, hoping
for some revelatory glimpses."

A few hundred Orphean years? A few terrestrial millennia?
Paolołs ambivalence waned. If hełd wanted to inhabit geological time, he would
have migrated to the Lokhande polis, where the Order of Contemplative Observers
watched Earthłs mountains erode in subjective seconds. Orpheus hung in the sky
beneath them, a beautiful puzzle waiting to be decoded, demanding to be
understood.

He said, �But what if there are no ęrevelatory glimpsesł?
How long do we wait? We donłt know how rare life isin time, or in space. If
this planet is precious, so is the epoch itłs passing through. We donłt know
how rapidly Orphean biology is evolving; species might appear and vanish while
we agonize over the risks of gathering better data. The carpetsand whatever elsecould
die out before wełd learned the first thing about them. What a waste that would
be!"

Liesl stood her ground.

�And if we damage the Orphean ecologyor cultureby rushing
in? That wouldnłt be a waste. It would be a tragedy."

Paolo assimilated all the stored transmissions from his
earth-selfalmost three hundred yearsł worthbefore composing a reply. The
early communications included detailed mind graftsand it was good to share the
excitement of the diasporałs launch; to watchvery nearly firsthandthe
thousand ships, nanomachine-carved from asteroids, depart in a blaze of fusion
fire from beyond the orbit of Mars. Then things settled down to the usual
prosaic matters: Elena, the gang, shameless gossip, Carter-Zimmermanłs ongoing
research projects, the buzz of interpolis cultural tensions, the
not-quite-cyclic convulsions of the arts (the perceptual aesthetic overthrows
the emotional, again ... although Valladas in Konishi polis claims to have
constructed a new synthesis of the two).

After the first fifty years, his Earth-self had begun to
hold things back; by the time news reached Earth of the Fomalhaut clonesł
demise, the messages had become pure audiovisual linear monologues. Paolo
understood. It was only right; theyłd diverged, and you didnłt send mind grafts
to strangers.

Most of the transmissions had been broadcast to all of the
ships, indiscriminately. Forty-three years ago, though, his Earth-self had sent
a special message to the Vega-bound clone.

�The new lunar spectroscope we finished last year has just
picked up clear signs of water on Orpheus. There should be large temperate
oceans waiting for you, if the models are right. So ... good luck." Vision
showed the instrumentłs domes growing out of the rock of the lunar farside;
plots of the Orphean spectral data; an ensemble of planetary models. �Maybe it
seems strange to youall the trouble wełre taking to catch a glimpse of what
youłre going to see in close-up so soon. Itłs hard to explain: I donłt think itłs
jealousy, or even impatience. Just a need for independence.

�Therełs been a revival of the old debate: Should we
consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self
spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the
natural time scale of the light-speed lag. Millennia passing between mental
events. Local contingencies dealt with by nonconscious systems." Essays, pro
and con, were appended; Paolo ingested summaries. �I donłt think the idea will
gain much support thoughand the new astronomical projects are something of an
antidote. We have to make peace with the fact that wełve stayed behind ... so
we cling to the Earthlooking outward, but remaining firmly anchored.

�I keep asking myself, though: Where do we go from here?
History canłt guide us. Evolution canłt guide us. The C-Z charter says
understand and respect the universe ... but in what form? On what scale? With
what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at alland that
space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing
our way? Flesh humans used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ęconquerł
Earth, to steal their ępreciousł physical resources, to wipe them out for fear
of ęcompetitionł... as if a species capable of making the journey wouldnłt have
had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete
biological imperatives. Conquering the galaxy is what bacteria with spaceships
would doknowing no better, having no choice.

�Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of
choices. Thatłs why we need to find alien lifenot just to break the spell of
the anthrocosmologists. We need to find aliens whołve faced the same decisionsand
discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to
inhabit the universe."

Paolo watched the crude neutrino images of the carpets
moving in staccato jerks around his dodecahedral room. Twenty-four ragged
oblongs drifted above him, daughters of a larger ragged oblong that had just
fissioned. Models suggested that shear forces from ocean currents could explain
the whole process, triggered by nothing more than the parent reaching a
critical size. The purely mechanical break-up of a colonyif that was what it
wasmight have little to do with the life cycle of the constituent organisms.
It was frustrating. Paolo was accustomed to a torrent of data on anything that
caught his interest; for the diasporałs great discovery to remain nothing more
than a sequence of coarse monochrome snapshots was intolerable.

He glanced at a schematic of the scout probesł neutrino detectors,
but there was no obvious scope for improvement. Nuclei in the detectors were
excited into unstable high-energy states, then kept there by fine-tuned
gamma-ray lasers picking off lower-energy eigenstates faster than they could
creep into existence and attract a transition. Changes in neutrino flux of one
part in ten-to-the-fifteenth could shift the energy levels far enough to
disrupt the balancing act. The carpets cast a shadow so faint, though, that
even this near-perfect vision could barely resolve it.

Orlando Venetti said, �Youłre awake."

Paolo turned. His father stood an armłs length away,
presenting as an ornately clad human of indeterminate age. Definitely older
than Paolo, though; Orlando never ceased to play up his seniorityeven if the
age difference was only twenty-five percent now, and falling.

Paolo banished the carpets from the room to the space behind
one pentagonal window, and took his fatherłs hand. The portions of Orlandołs
mind that meshed with his own expressed pleasure at Paolołs emergence from
hibernation, fondly dwelt on past shared experiences, and entertained hopes of
continued harmony between father and son. Paolołs greeting was similar, a
carefully contrived �revelation" of his own emotional state. It was more of a
ritual than an act of communicationbut then, even with Elena, he set up
barriers. No one was totally honest with another personunless the two of them
intended to permanently fuse.

Orlando nodded at the carpets. �I hope you appreciate how important
they are."

�You know I do." He hadnłt included that in his greeting,
though. �First alien life." C-Z humiliates the Gleisner robots, at lastthat
was probably how his father saw it. The robots had been first to Alpha
Centauri, and first to an extrasolar planetbut first life was Apollo to their
Sputniks, for anyone who chose to think in those terms.

Orlando said, �This is the book we need, to catch the
citizens of the marginal polises. The ones who havenłt quite imploded into
solipsism. This will shake them updonłt you think?"

Paolo shrugged. Earthłs transhumans were free to implode
into anything they liked; it didnłt stop Carter-Zimmerman from exploring the
physical universe. But thrashing the Gleisners wouldnłt be enough for Orlando;
he lived for the day when C-Z would become the cultural mainstream. Any polis
could multiply its population a billionfold in a microsecond, if it wanted the
vacuous honor of outnumbering the rest. Luring other citizens to migrate was
harderand persuading them to rewrite their own local charters was harder
still. Orlando had a missionary streak: he wanted every other polis to see the
error of its ways and follow C-Z to the stars.

Paolo said, �Ashton-Laval has intelligent aliens. I wouldnłt
be so sure that news of giant seaweed is going to take Earth by storm."

Orlando was venomous. �Ashton-Laval intervened in its
so-called ęevolutionarył simulations so many times that they might as well have
built the end products in an act of creation lasting six days. They wanted
talking reptiles, andmirabile dictu!they got talking reptiles. There are
self-modified transhumans in this polis more alien than the aliens in
Ashton-Laval."

Paolo smiled. �All right. Forget Ashton-Laval. But forget
the marginal polises, too. We choose to value the physical world. Thatłs what
defines usbut itłs as arbitrary as any other choice of values. Why canłt you
accept that? Itłs not the One True Path that the infidels have to be bludgeoned
into following." He knew he was arguing half for the sake of ithe desperately
wanted to refute the anthrocosmologists himselfbut Orlando always drove him
into taking the opposite position. Out of fear of being nothing but his fatherłs
clone. Despite the total absence of inherited episodic memories the stochastic
input into his ontogenesis, the chaotically divergent nature of the iterative
mind-building algorithms.

Orlando made a beckoning gesture, dragging the image of the
carpets halfway back into the room. �Youłll vote for the microprobes?"

�Of course."

�Everything depends on that now. Itłs good to start with a
tantalizing glimpsebut if we donłt follow up with details soon, theyłll lose
interest back on Earth very rapidly."

�Lose interest? Itłll be fifty-four years before we know if
anyone paid the slightest attention in the first place."

Orlando eyed him with disappointment, and resignation. �If
you donłt care about the other polises, think about C-Z. This helps us; it
strengthens us. We have to make the most of that."

Paolo was bemused. �The charter is the charter. What needs
to be strengthened? You make it sound like therełs something at risk."

�What do you think a thousand lifeless worlds would have
done to us? Do you think the charter would have remained intact?"

Paolo had never considered the scenario. �Maybe not. But in
every C-Z where the charter was rewritten, there would have been citizens whołd
have gone off and founded new polises on the old lines. You and I, for a start.
We could have called it Venetti-Venetti."

�While half your friends turned their backs on the physical
world? While Carter-Zimmerman, after two thousand years, went solipsist? Youłd
be happy with that?"

Paolo laughed. �Nobut itłs not going to happen, is it? Wełve
found life. All right, I agree with you: this strengthens C-Z. The diaspora
might have ęfailedł... but it didnłt. Wełve been lucky. Iłm glad, Iłm grateful.
Is that what you wanted to hear?"

Orlando said sourly, �You take too much for granted."

�And you care too much what I think! Iłm not your ... heir."
Orlando was first-generation, scanned from fleshand there were times when he
seemed unable to accept that the whole concept of generation had lost its
archaic significance. �You donłt need me to safeguard the future of
Carter-Zimmerman on your behalf. Or the future of transhumanity. You can do it
in person."

Orlando looked woundeda conscious choice, but it still encoded
something. Paolo felt a pang of regretbut hełd said nothing he could honestly
retract.

His father gathered up the sleeves of his gold and crimson robesthe
only citizen of C-Z who could make Paolo uncomfortable to be nakedand repeated
as he vanished from the room: �You take too much for granted."

The gang watched the launch of the microprobes togethereven
Liesl, though she came in mourning, as a giant dark bird. Karpai stroked her
feathers nervously. Hermann appeared as a creature out of Escher, a segmented
worm with six human-shaped feeton legs with elbowsgiven to curling up into a
disk and rolling along the girders of Satellite Pinatubo. Paolo and Elena kept
saying the same thing simultaneously; theyłd just made love.

Hermann had moved the satellite to a notional orbit just
below one of the scout probesand changed the environmentłs scale, so that the
probełs lower surface, an intricate landscape of detector modules and
attitude-control jets, blotted out half the sky. The atmospheric-entry capsulesceramic
teardrops three centimeters wideburst from their launch tube and hurtled past
like boulders, vanishing from sight before theyłd fallen so much as ten meters
closer to Orpheus. It was all scrupulously accurate, although it was part
real-time imagery, part extrapolation, part faux. Paolo thought, We might as
well have run a pure simulation ... and pretended to follow the capsules down.
Elena gave him a guilty/admonishing look. Yeahand then why bother actually
launching them at all? Why not just simulate a plausible Orphean ocean full of
plausible Orphean life-forms? Why not simulate the whole diaspora? There was no
crime of heresy in C-Z; no one had ever been exiled for breaking the charter.
At times it still felt like a tightrope walk; though, trying to classify every
act of simulation into those that contributed to an understanding of the
physical universe (good), those that were merely convenient, recreational,
aesthetic (acceptable)... and those that constituted a denial of the primacy of
real phenomena (time to think about emigration).

The vote on the microprobes had been close: seventy-two percent
in favor, just over the required two-thirds majority, with five percent
abstaining. (Citizens created since the arrival at Vega were excluded ... not
that anyone in Carter-Zimmerman would have dreamt of stacking the ballot,
perish the thought.) Paolo had been surprised at the narrow margin; hełd yet to
hear a single plausible scenario for the microprobes doing harm. He wondered if
there was another, unspoken reason that had nothing to do with fears for the
Orphean ecology, or hypothetical culture. A wish to prolong the pleasure of
unraveling the planetłs mysteries? Paolo had some sympathy with that impulsebut
the launch of the microprobes would do nothing to undermine the greater
long-term pleasure of watching, and understanding, as Orphean life evolved.

Liesl said forlornly, �Coastline erosion models show that
the north-western shore of Lambda is inundated by tsunami every ninety Orphean
years, on average." She offered the data to them; Paolo glanced at it, and it
looked convincingbut the point was academic now. �We could have waited."

Hermann waved his eye-stalks at her. �Beaches covered in fossils,
are they?"

�No, but the conditions hardly"

�No excuses!" He wound his body around a girder, kicking his
legs gleefully. Hermann was first-generation, even older than Orlando; hełd
been scanned in the twenty-first century, before Carter-Zimmerman existed. Over
the centuries, though, hełd wiped most of his episodic memories, and rewritten
his personality a dozen times. Hełd once told Paolo, �I think of myself as my
own great-great-grandson. Deathłs not so bad, if you do it incrementally. Ditto
for immortality."

Elena said, �I keep trying to imagine how it will feel if
another C-Z clone stumbles on something infinitely betterlike aliens with
wormhole driveswhile wełre back here studying rafts of algae." The body she
wore was more stylized than usualstill humanoid, but sexless, hairless, and
smooth, the face inexpressive and androgynous.

�If they have wormhole drives, they might visit us. Or share
the technology, so we can link up the whole diaspora."

�If they have wormhole drives, where have they been for the
last two thousand years?"

Paolo laughed. �Exactly. But I know what you mean, First
alien life ... and itłs likely to be about as sophisticated as seaweed. It
breaks the jinx, though. Seaweed every twenty-seven light-years. Nervous
systems every fifty? Intelligence every hundred?" He fell silent, abruptly
realizing what she was feeling: electing not to wake again after first life was
beginning to seem like the wrong choice, a waste of the opportunities the
diaspora had created. Paolo offered her a mind graft expressing empathy and
support, but she declined.

She said, �I want sharp borders, right now. I want to deal
with this myself."

�I understand." He let the partial model of her that hełd acquired
as theyłd made love fade from his mind. It was nonsapient, and no longer linked
to herbut to retain it any longer when she felt this way would have seemed
like a transgression. Paolo took the responsibilities of intimacy seriously.
His lover before Elena had asked him to erase all his knowledge of her, and hełd
more or less compliedthe only thing he still knew about her was the fact that
shełd made the request.

Hermann announced, �Planetfall!" Paolo glanced at a replay
of a scout probe view that showed the first few entry capsules breaking up
above the ocean and releasing their microprobes. Nanomachines transformed the
ceramic shields (and then themselves) into carbon dioxide and a few simple
mineralsnothing the micrometeorites constantly raining down onto Orpheus didnłt
containbefore the fragments could strike the water. The microprobes would
broadcast nothing; when theyłd finished gathering data, theyłd float to the
surface and modulate their UV reflectivity. It would be up to the scout probes
to locate these specks, and read their messages, before they self-destructed as
thoroughly as the entry capsules.

Hermann said, �This calls for a celebration. Iłm heading for
the Heart. Whołll join me?"

Paolo glanced at Elena. She shook her head. �You go."

�Are you sure?"

�Yes! Go on." Her skin had taken on a mirrored sheen; her expressionless
face reflected the planet below. �Iłm all right. I just want some time to think
things through, on my own."

Hermann coiled around the satellitełs frame, stretching his
pale body as he went, gaining segments, gaining legs. �Come on, come on!
Karpal? Liesl? Come and celebrate!"

Elena was gone. Liesl made a derisive sound and flapped off
into the distance, mocking the environmentłs airlessness. Paolo and Karpal
watched as Hermann grew longer and fasterand then in a blur of speed and
change stretched out to wrap the entire geodesic frame. Paolo demagnetized his
feet and moved away, laughing; Karpal did the same.

Then Hermann constricted like a boa and snapped the whole
satellite apart.

They floated for a while, two human-shaped machines and a
giant worm in a cloud of spinning metal fragments, an absurd collection of
imaginary debris, glinting by the light of the true stars.

The heart was always crowded, but it was larger than Paolo
had seen iteven though Hermann had shrunk back to his original size, so as not
to make a scene. The huge, muscular chamber arched above them, pulsating wetly
in time to the music, as they searched for the perfect location to soak up the
atmosphere. Paolo had visited public environments in other polises, back on
Earth; many were designed to be nothing more than a perceptual framework for
group emotion-sharing. Hełd never understood the attraction of becoming
intimate with large numbers of strangers. Ancestral social hierarchies might
have had their faultsand it was absurd to try to make a virtue of the
limitations imposed by minds confined to wet-warebut the whole idea of mass
telepathy as an end in itself seemed bizarre to Paolo ... and even
old-fashioned, in a way. Humans, clearly, would have benefited from a good
strong dose of each otherłs inner life to keep them from slaughtering each
otherbut any civilized transhuman could respect and value other citizens
without the need to have been them firsthand.

They found a good spot and made some furniture, a table and
two chairsHermann preferred to standand the floor expanded to make room.
Paolo looked around, shouting greetings at the people he recognized by sight,
but not bothering to check for identity broadcasts from the rest. Chances were
hełd met everyone here, but he didnłt want to spend the next hour exchanging
pleasantries with casual acquaintances.

Hermann said, �Iłve been monitoring our modest stellar observatoryłs
data streammy antidote to Vegan parochialism. Odd things are going on around
Sirius. Wełre seeing electron-positron annihilation gamma rays, gravity waves
... and some unexplained hot spots on Sirius B." He turned to Karpal and asked
innocently, �What do you think those robots are up to? Therełs a rumor that
theyłre planning to drag the white dwarf out of orbit and use it as part of a
giant spaceship."

�I never listen to rumors." Karpal always presented as a
faithful reproduction of his old human-shaped Gleisner bodyand his mind, Paolo
gathered, always took the form of a physiological model, even though he was
five generations removed from flesh. Leaving his people and coming into C-Z
must have taken considerable courage; theyłd never welcome him back.

Paolo said, �Does it matter what they do? Where they go, how
they get there? Therełs more than enough room for both of us. Even if they
shadowed the diasporaeven if they came to Vegawe could study the Orpheans
together, couldnłt we?"

Hermannłs cartoon insect face showed mock alarm, eyes growing
wider, and wider apart. �Not if they dragged along a white dwarf! Next thing
theyłd want to start building a Dyson sphere." He turned back to Karpal. �You
donłt still suffer the urge, do you, for ... astrophysical engineering?"

�Nothing C-Złs exploitation of a few megatons of Vegan asteroid
material hasnłt satisfied."

Paolo tried to change the subject. �Has anyone heard from
Earth, lately? Iłm beginning to feel unplugged." His own most recent message
was a decade older than the time lag.

Karpal said, �Youłre not missing much; all theyłre talking
about is Orpheus ... ever since the new lunar observations, the signs of water.
They seem more excited by the mere possibility of life than we are by the
certainty. And they have very high hopes."

Paolo laughed. �They do. My Earth-self seems to be counting
on the diaspora to find an advanced civilization with the answers to all of
transhumanityłs existential problems. I donłt think hełll get much cosmic
guidance from kelp."

�You know there was a big rise in emigration from C-Z after
the launch? Emigration, and suicides." Hermann had stopped wriggling and
gyrating, becoming almost still, a sign of rare seriousness. �I suspect thatłs
what triggered the astronomy program in the first place. And it seems to have
stanched the flow, at least in the short term. Earth C-Z detected water before
any clone in the diasporaand when they hear that wełve found life, theyłll
feel more like collaborators in the discovery because of it."

Paolo felt a stirring of unease. Emigration and suicides?
Was that why Orlando had been so gloomy? After three hundred years of waiting,
how high had expectations become?

A buzz of excitement crossed the floor, a sudden shift in
the tone of the conversation. Hermann whispered reverently, �First microprobe
has surfaced. And the data is coming in now."

The nonsapient Heart was intelligent enough to guess its patronłs
wishes. Although everyone could tap the library for results, privately, the
music cut out and a giant public image of the summary data appeared, high in
the chamber. Paolo had to crane his neck to view it, a novel experience.

The microprobe had mapped one of the carpets in high resolution.
The image showed the expected rough oblong, some hundred meters widebut the
two-or-three-meter-thick slab of the neutrino tomographs was revealed now as a
delicate, convoluted surfacefine as a single layer of skin, but folded into an
elaborate space-filling curve. Paolo checked the full data: the topology was
strictly planar despite the pathological appearance. No holes, no joinsjust a
surface that meandered wildly enough to look ten thousand times thicker from a
distance than it really was.

An inset showed the microstructure, at a point that started
at the rim of the carpet and thenslowlymoved toward the center. Paolo stared
at the flowing molecular diagram for several seconds before he grasped what it
meant.

The carpet was not a colony of single-celled creatures. Nor
was it a multicellular organism. It was a single molecule, a two-dimensional
polymer weighing twenty-five million kilograms. A giant sheet of folded
polysaccharide, a complex mesh of interlinked pentose and hexose sugars hung
with alkyl and amide side chains. A bit like a plant cell wallexcept that this
polymer was far stronger than cellulose, and the surface area was twenty orders
of magnitude greater.

Karpal said, �I hope those entry capsules were perfectly
sterile. Earth bacteria would gorge themselves on this. One big floating
carbohydrate dinner, with no defenses."

Hermann thought it over. �Maybe. If they had enzymes capable
of breaking off a piecewhich I doubt. No chance wełll find out, though: even
if therełd been bacterial spores lingering in the asteroid belt from early
human expeditions, every ship in the diaspora was double-checked for
contamination en route. We havenłt brought smallpox to the Americas."

Paolo was still dazed. �But how does it assemble? How does it
... grow?" Hermann consulted the library and replied, before Paolo could do the
same.

�The edge of the carpet catalyses its own growth. The
polymer is irregular, aperiodictherełs no single component that simply
repeats. But there seem to be about twenty thousand basic structural unitstwenty
thousand different polysaccharide building blocks." Paolo saw them: long
bundles of cross-linked chains running the whole two-hundred-micron thickness
of the carpet, each with a roughly square cross-section, bonded at several
thousand points to the four neighboring units. �Even at this depth, the oceanłs
full of UV-generated radicals that filter down from the surface. Any structural
unit exposed to the water converts those radicals into more polysaccharideand
builds another structural unit."

Paolo glanced at the library again, for a simulation of the
process. Catalytic sites strewn along the sides of each unit trapped the
radicals in place, long enough for new bonds to form between them. Some simple
sugars were incorporated straight into the polymer as they were created; others
were set free to drift in solution for a microsecond or two, until they were
needed. At that level, there were only a few basic chemical tricks being used
... but molecular evolution must have worked its way up from a few small
autocatalytic fragments, first formed by chance, to this elaborate system of
twenty thousand mutually self-replicating structures. If the �structural units"
had floated free in the ocean as independent molecules, the �life-form" they
comprised would have been virtually invisible. By bonding together, though,
they became twenty thousand colors in a giant mosaic.

It was astonishing. Paolo hoped Elena was tapping the
library, wherever she was. A colony of algae would have been more �advanced"but
this incredible primordial creature revealed infinitely more about the
possibilities for the genesis of life. Carbohydrate, here, played every
biochemical role: information carrier, enzyme, energy source, structural
material. Nothing like it could have survived on Earth, once there were
organisms capable of feeding on itand if there were ever intelligent Orpheans,
theyłd be unlikely to find any trace of this bizarre ancestor.

Karpal wore a secretive smile.

Paolo said, �What?"

�Wang tiles. The carpets are made out of Wang tiles."

Hermann beat him to the library, again.

�Wang as in twentieth-century flesh mathematician, Hao Wang.
Tiles as in any set of shapes that can cover the plane. Wang tiles are squares
with various shaped edges, which have to fit complementary shapes on adjacent
squares. You can cover the plane with a set of Wang tiles, as long as you choose
the right one every step of the way. Or, in the case of the carpets, grow the
right one."

Karpal said, �We should call them. Wangłs Carpets, in honor
of Hao Wang. After twenty-three hundred years, his mathematics has come to
life."

Paolo liked the idea, but he was doubtful. �We may have
trouble getting a two-thirds majority on that. Itłs a bit obscure ..."

Hermann laughed. �Who needs a two-thirds majority? If we
want to call them Wangłs Carpets, we can call them Wangłs Carpets. There are
ninety-seven languages in current use in C-Zhalf of them invented since the
polis was founded. I donłt think wełll be exiled for coining one private name."

Paolo concurred, slightly embarrassed. The truth was, hełd
completely forgotten that Hermann and Karpal werenłt actually speaking Modern
Roman.

The three of them instructed their exoselves to consider the
name adopted: henceforth, theyłd hear �carpet" as �Wangłs Carpet"but if they
used the term with anyone else, the reverse translation would apply.

Paolo sat and drank in the image of the giant alien: the
first life-form encountered by human or transhuman that was not a biological
cousin. The death, at last, of the possibility that Earth might be unique.

They hadnłt refuted the anthrocosmologists yet, though. Not
quite. If, as the ACs claimed, human consciousness was the seed around which
all of space-time had crystallizedif the universe was nothing but the simplest
orderly explanation for human thoughtthen there was, strictly speaking, no
need for a single alien to exist, anywhere. But the physics that justified
human existence couldnłt help generating a billion other worlds where life
could arise. The ACs would be unmoved by Wangłs Carpets; theyłd insist that
these creatures were physical, if not biological, cousinsmerely an unavoidable
by-product of anthropogenic, life-enabling physical laws.

The real test wouldnłt come until the diasporaor the
Gleisner robotsfinally encountered conscious aliens: minds entirely unrelated
to humanity, observing and explaining the universe that human thought had
supposedly built. Most ACs had come right out and declared such a find
impossible; it was the sole falsifiable prediction of their hypothesis. Alien
consciousness, as opposed to mere alien life, would always build itself a separate
universebecause the chance of two unrelated forms of self-awareness concocting
exactly the same physics and the same cosmology was infinitesimaland any alien
biosphere that seemed capable of evolving consciousness would simply never do
so.

Paolo glanced at the map of the diaspora, and took heart.
Alien life alreadyand the search had barely started; there were nine hundred
and ninety-eight target systems yet to be explored. And even if every one of
them proved no more conclusive than Orpheus ... he was prepared to send clones
out fartherand prepared to wait. Consciousness had taken far longer to appear
on Earth than the quarter-of-a-billion years remaining before Vega left the
main sequencebut the whole point of being here, after all, was that Orpheus
wasnłt Earth.

Orlandołs celebration of the microprobe discoveries was a
very first-generation affair. The environment was an endless sunlit garden
strewn with tables covered in food, and the invitation had politely suggested
attendance in fully human form. Paolo politely faked itsimulating most of the
physiology, but running the body as a puppet, leaving his mind unshackled.

Orlando introduced his new lover, Catherine, who presented
as a tall, dark-skinned woman. Paolo didnłt recognize her on sight, but checked
the identity code she broadcast. It was a small polis; hełd met her once beforeas
a man called Samuel, one of the physicists whołd worked on the main
interstellar fusion drive employed by all the ships of the diaspora. Paolo was
amused to think that many of the people here would be seeing his father as a woman.
The majority of the citizens of C-Z still practiced the conventions of relative
gender that had come into fashion in the twenty-third centuryand Orlando had
wired them into his own son too deeply for Paolo to wish to abandon thembut
whenever the paradoxes were revealed so starkly, he wondered how much longer
the conventions would endure. Paolo was same-sex to Orlando, and hence saw his
fatherłs lover as a woman, the two close relationships taking precedence over
his casual knowledge of Catherine as Samuel. Orlando perceived himself as being
male and heterosexual, as his flesh original had been ... while Samuel saw himself
the same way ... and each perceived the other to be a heterosexual woman. If
certain third parties ended up with mixed signals, so be it. It was a typical
C-Z compromise: nobody could bear to overturn the old order and do away with
gender entirely (as most other polises had done)... but nobody could resist the
flexibility that being software, not flesh, provided.

Paolo drifted from table to table to table, sampling the
food to keep up appearances, wishing Elena had come. There was little
conversation about the biology of Wangłs Carpets; most of the people here were
simply celebrating their win against the opponents of the microprobesand the
humiliation that faction would suffer, now that it was clearer than ever that
the �invasive" observations could have done no harm. Lieslłs fears had proved unfounded;
there was no other life in the ocean, just Wangłs Carpets of various sizes.
Paolo, feeling perversely even-handed after the fact, kept wanting to remind
these smug movers and shakers, There might have been anything down there.
Strange creatures, delicate and vulnerable in ways we could never have
anticipated. We were lucky, thatłs all.

He ended up alone with Orlando almost by chance; they were
both fleeing different groups of appalling guests when their paths crossed on
the lawn.

Paolo asked, �How do you think theyłll take this, back home?"

�Itłs first life, isnłt it? Primitive or not. It should at
least maintain interest in the diaspora, until the next alien biosphere is discovered."
Orlando seemed subdued; perhaps he was finally coming to terms with the gulf
between their modest discovery, and Earthłs longing for world-shaking results. �And
at least the chemistry is novel. If it had turned out to be based on DNA and
protein, I think half of Earth C-Z would have died of boredom on the spot. Letłs
face it, the possibilities of DNA have been simulated to death."

Paolo smiled at the heresy. �You think if nature hadnłt managed
a little originality, it would have dented peoplełs faith in the charter? If
the solipsist polises had begun to look more inventive than the universe itself
..."

�Exactly."

They walked on in silence, then Orlando halted and turned to
face him.

He said, �Therełs something Iłve been wanting to tell you:
My Earth-self is dead."

�What?"

�Please, donłt make a fuss."

�But ... why? Why would he?" Dead meant suicide; there was
no other causeunless the sun had turned red giant and swallowed everything out
to the orbit of Mars.

�I donłt know why. Whether it was a vote of confidence in
the diaspora"Orlando had chosen to wake only in the presence of alien life�or
whether he despaired of us sending back good news, and couldnłt face the
waiting, and the risk of disappointment. He didnłt give a reason. He just had
his exoself send a message, stating what hełd done."

Paolo was shaken. If a clone of Orlando had succumbed to pessimism,
he couldnłt begin to imagine the state of mind of the rest of Earth C-Z.

�When did this happen?"

�About fifty years after the launch."

�My Earth-self said nothing."

�It was up to me to tell you, not him."

�I wouldnłt have seen it that way."

�Apparently, you would have."

Paolo fell silent, confused. How was he supposed to mourn a
distant version of Orlando, in the presence of the one he thought of as real?
Death of one clone was a strange half-death, a hard thing to come to terms
with. His Earth-self had lost a father; his father had lost an Earth-self. What
exactly did that mean to him?

What Orlando cared most about was Earth C-Z. Paolo said
carefully, �Hermann told me therełd been a rise in emigration and suicideuntil
the spectroscope picked up the Orphean water. Morale has improved a lot since
thenand when they hear that itłs more than just water ..."

Orlando cut him off sharply. �You donłt have to talk things
up for me. Iłm in no danger of repeating the act."

They stood on the lawn, facing each other. Paolo composed a
dozen different combinations of mood to communicate, but none of them felt
right. He could have granted his father perfect knowledge of everything he was
feelingbut what exactly would that knowledge have conveyed? In the end, there
was fusion, or separateness. There was nothing in between.

Orlando said, �Kill myselfand leave the fate of transhumanity
in your hands? You must be out of your fucking mind."

They walked on together, laughing.

Karpal seemed barely able to gather his thoughts enough to
speak. Paolo would have offered him a mind graft promoting tranquillity and
concentrationdistilled from his own most focused momentsbut he was sure that
Karpal would never have accepted it. He said, �Why donłt you just start
wherever you want to? Iłll stop you if youłre not making sense."

Karpal looked around the white dodecahedron with an expression
of disbelief. �You live here?"

�Some of the time."

�But this is your base environment? No trees? No sky? No furniture?"

Paolo refrained from repeating any of Hermannłs naive-robot
jokes. �I add them when I want them. You know, like ... music. Look, donłt let
my taste in decor distract you."

Karpal made a chair and sat down heavily.

He said, �Hao Wang proved a powerful theorem, twenty-three hundred
years ago. Think of a row of Wang tiles as being like the data tape of a Turing
machine." Paolo had the library grant him knowledge of the term; it was the
original conceptual form of a generalized computing device, an imaginary
machine that moved back and forth along a limitless one-dimensional data tape,
reading and writing symbols according to a given set of rules.

�With the right set of tiles, to force the right pattern,
the next row of the tiling will look like the data tape after the Turing machine
has performed one step of its computation. And the row after that will be the
data tape after two steps, and so on. For any given Turing machine, therełs a
set of Wang tiles that can imitate it."

Paolo nodded amiably. He hadnłt heard of this particular
quaint result, but it was hardly surprising. �The carpets must be carrying out
billions of acts of computation every second ... but then, so are the water
molecules around them. There are no physical processes that donłt perform
arithmetic of some kind."

�True. But with the carpets, itłs not quite the same as
random molecular motion."

�Maybe not."

Karpal smiled, but said nothing.

�What? Youłve found a pattern? Donłt tell me: our set of twenty
thousand polysaccharide Wang tiles just happens to form the Turing machine for
calculating pi."

�No. What they form is a universal Turing machine. They can
calculate anything at alldepending on the data they start with. Every daughter
fragment is like a program being fed to a chemical computer. Growth executes
the program."

�Ah." Paolołs curiosity was rousedbut he was having some
trouble picturing where the hypothetical Turing machine put its read/write
head. �Are you telling me only one tile changes between any two rows, where the
ęmachineł leaves its mark on the ędata tapeł..." The mosaics hełd seen were a
riot of complexity, with no two rows remotely the same.

Karpal said, �No, no. Wangłs original example worked exactly
like a standard Turing machine, to simplify the argument ... but the carpets
are more like an arbitrary number of different computers with overlapping data,
all working in parallel. This is biology, not a designed machineitłs as messy
and wild as, say ... a mammalian genome. In fact, there are mathematical
similarities with gene regulation: Iłve identified Kauffman networks at every
level, from the tiling rules up; the whole systemłs poised on the hyperadaptive
edge between frozen and chaotic behavior."

Paolo absorbed that, with the libraryłs help. Like Earth
life, the carpets seemed to have evolved a combination of robustness and
flexibility that would have maximized their power to take advantage of natural
selection. Thousands of different autocatalytic chemical networks must have
arisen soon after the formation of Orpheusbut as the ocean chemistry and the
climate changed in the Vegan systemłs early traumatic millennia, the ability to
respond to selection pressure had itself been selected for, and the carpets
were the result. Their complexity seemed redundant, now, after a hundred
million years of relative stabilityand no predators or competition in sightbut
the legacy remained.

�So if the carpets have ended up as universal computers ...
with no real need anymore to respond to their surrounding ... what are they
doing with all that computing power?"

Karpal said solemnly, �Iłll show you."

Paolo followed him into an environment where they drifted
above a schematic of a carpet, an abstract landscape stretching far into the
distance, elaborately wrinkled like the real thing, but otherwise heavily
stylized, with each of the polysaccharide building blocks portrayed as a square
tile with four different-colored edges. The adjoining edges of neighboring
tiles bore complementary colorsto represent the complementary, interlocking
shapes of the borders of the building blocks.

�One group of microprobes finally managed to sequence an entire
daughter fragment," Karpal explained, �although the exact edges it started life
with are largely guesswork, since the thing was growing while they were trying
to map it." He gestured impatiently, and all the wrinkles and folds were
smoothed away, an irrelevant distraction. They moved to one border of the
ragged-edged carpet, and Karpal started the simulation running.

Paolo watched the mosaic extending itself, following the
tiling rules perfectlyan orderly mathematical process here: no chance
collisions of radicals with catalytic sites, no mismatched borders between two
new-grown neighboring �tiles" triggering the disintegration of both. Just the
distillation of the higher-level consequences of all that random motion.

Karpal led Paolo up to a height where he could see subtle patterns
being woven, overlapping multiplexed periodicities drifting across the growing
edge, meeting and sometimes interacting, sometimes passing right through each
other. Mobile pseudoattractors, quasistable waveforms in a one-dimensional
universe. The carpetłs second dimension was more like time than space, a permanent
record of the history of the edge.

Karpal seemed to read his mind. �One-dimensional. Worse than
flatland. No connectivity, no complexity. What can possibly happen in a system
like that? Nothing of interest, right?"

He clapped his hands and the environment exploded around
Paolo. Trails of color streaked across his sensorium, entwining, then disintegrating
into luminous smoke.

�Wrong. Everything goes on in a multidimensional frequency
space. Iłve Fourier-transformed the edge into over a thousand components, and
therełs independent information in all of them. Wełre only in a narrow
cross-section here, a sixteen-dimensional slicebut itłs oriented to show the
principal components, the maximum detail."

Paolo spun in a blur of meaningless color, utterly lost, his
surroundings beyond comprehension. �Youłre a Gleisner robot, Karpal! Only
sixteen dimensions! How can you have done this?"

Karpal sounded hurt, wherever he was. �Why do you think I
came to C-Z? I thought you people were flexible!"

�What youłre doing is ..." What? Heresy? There was no such
thing. Officially. �Have you shown this to anyone else?"

�Of course not. Who did you have in mind? Liesl? Hermann?"

�Good. I know how to keep my mouth shut." Paolo invoked his
exoself and moved back into the dodecahedron. He addressed the empty room. �How
can I put this? The physical universe has three spatial dimensions, plus time.
Citizens of Carter-Zimmerman inhabit the physical universe. Higher dimensional
mind games are for the solipsists." Even as he said it, he realized how pompous
he sounded. It was an arbitrary doctrine, not some great moral principle.

But it was the doctrine hełd lived with for twelve hundred
years.

Karpal replied, more bemused than offended, �Itłs the only
way to see whatłs going on. The only sensible way to apprehend it. Donłt you
want to know what the carpets are actually like?"

Paolo felt himself being tempted. Inhabit a
sixteen-dimensional slice of a thousand-dimensional frequency space? But it was
in the service of understanding a real physical systemnot a novel experience
for its own sake.

And nobody had to find out.

He ran a quicknonsapientself-predictive model. There was a
ninety-three-percent chance that hełd give in, after fifteen subjective minutes
of agonizing over the decision. It hardly seemed fair to keep Karpal waiting
that long.

He said, �Youłll have to loan me your mind-shaping
algorithm. My exoself wouldnłt know where to begin."

When it was done, he steeled himself, and moved back into
Karpalłs environment. For a moment, there was nothing but the same meaningless
blur as before.

Then everything suddenly crystallized.

Creatures swam around them, elaborately branched tubes like
mobile coral, vividly colored in all the hues of Paolołs mental paletteKarpalłs
attempt to cram in some of the information that a mere sixteen dimensions
couldnłt show? Paolo glanced down at his own bodynothing was missing, but he
could see around it in all the thirteen dimensions in which it was nothing but
a pinprick; he quickly looked away. The �coral" seemed far more natural to his
altered sensory map, occupying sixteen-space in all directions, and shaded with
hints that it occupied much more. And Paolo had no doubt that it was �alive"it
looked more organic than the carpets themselves, by far.

Karpal said, �Every point in this space encodes some kind of
quasi-periodic pattern in the tiles. Each dimension represents a different
characteristic sizelike a wavelength, although the analogyłs not precise. The
position in each dimension represents other attributes of the pattern, relating
to the particular tiles it employs. So the localized systems you see around you
are clusters of a few billion patterns, all with broadly similar attributes at
similar wavelengths."

They moved away from the swimming coral, into a swarm of
something like jellyfish: floppy hyperspheres waving wispy tendrils (each one of
them more substantial than Paolo). Tiny jewel-like creatures darted among them.
Paolo was just beginning to notice that nothing moved here like a solid object
drifting through normal space; motion seemed to entail a shimmering deformation
at the leading hypersurface, a visible process of disassembly and
reconstruction.

Karpal led him on through the secret ocean. There were
helical worms, coiled together in groups of indeterminate numbereach single
creature breaking up into a dozen or more wriggling slivers, and then
recombining ... although not always from the same parts. There were dazzling
multicolored stemless flowers, intricate hypercones of �gossamer-thin"
fifteen-dimensional petalseach one a hypnotic fractal labyrinth of crevices
and capillaries. There were clawed monstrosities, writhing knots of sharp
insectile parts like an orgy of decapitated scorpions.

Paolo said, uncertainly, �You could give people a glimpse of
this in just three-dimensions. Enough to make it clear that therełs ... life in
here. This is going to shake them up badly, though." Lifeembedded in the
accidental computations of Wangłs Carpets, with no possibility of ever relating
to the world outside. This was an affront to Carter-Zimmermanłs whole
philosophy: if nature had evolved �organisms" as divorced from reality as the
inhabitants of the most inward-looking polis, where was the privileged status
of the physical universe, the clear distinction between truth and illusion?

And after three hundred years of waiting for good news from
the disapora, how would they respond to this back on Earth?

Karpal said, �Therełs one more thing I have to show you."

Hełd named the creatures squids, for obvious reasons.
Distant cousins of the jellyfish, perhaps? They were prodding each other with
their tentacles in a way that looked thoroughly carnalbut Karpal explained, �Therełs
no analog of light here. Wełre viewing all this according to ad hoc rules that
have nothing to do with the native physics. All the creatures here gather
information about each other by contact alonewhich is actually quite a rich
means of exchanging data, with so many dimensions. What youłre seeing is
communication by touch."

�Communication about what?"

�Just gossip, I expect. Social relationships."

Paolo stared at the writhing mass of tentacles.

�You think theyłre conscious?"

Karpal, pointlike, grinned broadly. �They have a central control
structure with more connectivity than the human brainand which correlates data
gathered from the skin. Iłve mapped that organ, and Iłve started to analyze its
function."

He led Paolo into another environment, a representation of
the data structures in the �brain" of one of the squids. It wasmercifullythree-dimensional,
and highly stylized, built of translucent colored blocks marked with icons,
representing mental symbols, linked by broad lines indicating the major
connections between them. Paolo had seen similar diagrams of transhuman minds;
this was far less elaborate, but eerily familiar nonetheless.

Karpal said, �Herełs the sensory map of its surroundings.
Full of other squidsł bodies, and vague data on the last known positions of a
few smaller creatures. But youłll see that the symbols activated by the
physical presence of the other squids are linked to these"he traced the
connections with one finger�representations. Which are crude miniatures of
this whole structure here."

�This whole structure" was an assembly labeled with icons
for memory retrieval, simple tropisms, short-term goals. The general business
of being and doing.

�The squid has maps, not just of other squidsł bodies, but
their minds as well. Right or wrong, it certainly tries to know what the others
are thinking about. And"he pointed out another set of links, leading to
another, less crude, miniature squid mind�it thinks about its own thoughts as
well. Iłd call that consciousness, wouldnłt you?"

Paolo said weakly, �Youłve kept all this to yourself? You
came this far, without saying a word"

Karpal was chastened. �I know it was selfishbut once Iłd decoded
the interactions of the tile patterns, I couldnłt tear myself away long enough
to start explaining it to anyone else. And I came to you first because I wanted
your advice on the best way to break the news."

Paolo laughed bitterly. �The best way to break the news that
first alien consciousness is hidden deep inside a biological computer? That
everything the diaspora was trying to prove has been turned on its head? The
best way to explain to the citizens of Carter-Zimmerman that after a
three-hundred-year journey, they might as well have stayed on Earth running
simulations with as little resemblance to the physical universe as possible?"

Karpal took the outburst in good humor. �I was thinking more
along the lines of the best way to point out that if we hadnłt traveled to
Orpheus and studied Wangłs Carpets, wełd never have had the chance to tell the
solipsists of Ashton-Laval that all their elaborate invented life-forms and
exotic imaginary universes pale into insignificance compared to whatłs really
out hereand which only the Carter-Zimmerman diaspora could have found."

Paolo and Elena stood together on the edge of satellite
Pinatubo, watching one of the scout probes aim its maser at a distant point in
space. Paolo thought he saw a faint scatter of microwaves from the beam as it
collided with iron-rich meteor dust. Elenałs mind being diffracted all over the
cosmos? Best not think about that.

He said, �When you meet the other versions of me who havenłt
experienced Orpheus, I hope youłll offer them mind grafts so they wonłt be jealous."

She frowned. �Ah. Will I or wonłt I? I canłt be bothered modeling
it. I expect I will. You should have asked me before I cloned myself. No need
for jealousy, though. Therełll be worlds far stranger than Orpheus."

�I doubt it. You really think so?"

�I wouldnłt be doing this if I didnłt believe that." Elena
had no power to change the fate of the frozen clones of her previous selfbut
everyone had the right to emigrate.

Paolo took her hand. The beam had been aimed almost at Regulus,
UV-hot and bright, but as he looked away, the cool yellow light of the sun
caught his eye.

Vega C-Z was taking the news of the squids surprisingly
well, so far. Karpalłs way of putting it had cushioned the blow: it was only by
traveling all this distance across the real, physical universe that they could
have made such a discoveryand it was amazing how pragmatic even the most
doctrinaire citizens had turned out to be. Before the launch, �alien solipsists"
would have been the most unpalatable idea imaginable, the most abhorrent thing
the diaspora could have stumbled uponbut now that they were here, and stuck
with the fact of it, people were finding ways to view it in a better light.
Orlando had even proclaimed, �This will be the perfect hook for the marginal
polises. ęTravel through real space to witness a truly alien virtual reality.ł
We can sell it as a synthesis of the two world views."

Paolo still feared for Earth, thoughwhere his Earth-self
and others were waiting in hope of alien guidance. Would they take the message
of Wangłs Carpets to heart and retreat into their own hermetic worlds,
oblivious to physical reality?

And he wondered if the anthrocosmologists had finally been
refuted ... or not. Karpal had discovered alien consciousnessbut it was sealed
inside a cosmos of its own, its perceptions of itself and its surroundings
neither reinforcing nor conflicting with human and transhuman explanations of
reality. It would be millennia before C-Z could untangle the ethical problems
of daring to try to make contact ... assuming that both Wangłs Carpets, and the
inherited data patterns of the squids, survived that long.

Paolo looked around at the wild splendor of the scar-choked
galaxy, felt the disk reach in and cut right through him. Could all this
strange haphazard beauty be nothing but an excuse for those who beheld it to
exist? Nothing but the sum of all the answers to all the questions humans and
transhumans had ever asked the universeanswers created in the asking?

He couldnłt believe thatbut the question remained unanswered.

So far.

The Way She Smiles, The Things She Says

'Hi Dad.'

His son Tom stood by the stove, heating milk in a saucepan,
naked. 'I'm making Milo. Do you want some?'

'No thanks.'

What was wrong? Something had to be wrong. People aren't
naked in kitchens, they're naked in bedrooms and bathrooms. Never kitchens.
Something had to be wrong. Danny's hands hanging by his sides suddenly seemed
awkward, unnatural. He folded his arms. That seemed wrong, too, so he put them
out horizontally, stretched, then placed his hands behind his neck and rubbed
it, yawning.

'How come you're home so early?'

'Oh, we got all the tracks done,' Danny said easily. 'One,
two, three, like magic. They must have been doing a lot more rehearsing than I
thought.'

'An album in three hours, that must be some kind of a
record!'

'Oh, it's all fucking computers anyway. None of the
so-called musicians even raised a sweat.' Danny lied so wel! he felt genuine
disdain.

A joke. A pun. Weak, I know.'

'What?'

'Forget it.'

Danny wanted to say: Why are you standing in the kitchen
without any clothes on? He couldn't. Tom didn't seem to be embarrassed or
self-conscious at aHl. Danny wondered: Is this what he does whenever I'm away?
Wander around the house naked?

'You're up late. School tomorrow.'

'Nag, nag, nag.'

Tom didn't sleep naked; he bought and looked after his own
clothes, but Danny had seen him hundreds of times wearing pyjamas, had seen
them in the washing basket, had seen them on the washing line. Maybe it was a
phase he was going through. Maybe he'd just had a shower, and had put the milk
on the stove so it would be ready by the time he put his pyjamas on, but then
Danny had walked in so he'd stayed to talk to him. Danny smiled with relief.
That was it, exactly. Why had he been so paranoid? After all, why should Tom
have made sure he was dressed before going into the kitchen, when there was
nobody else in the house, and nobody expected home for hours?

Danny sat down and pretended to read the paper, then glanced
up at the sound of Tom pouring the milk. How old is he? Thirty-four minus
twenty is fourteen. Danny curdled at two disparities: it's not fair that he's
no longer fourteen himself, and when he was four' teen he sure didn't look like
Tom, tall and muscular. Tom's already taller than Danny.

Tom crossed the kitchen with a mug of Milo in each hand.
Danny opened his mouth, and took the fnrst breath for saying 'I said I didn't
want one,' but stopped in time, because Tom walked right past him, out of the
kitchen, towards his bedroom.

Danny looked down at the paper. He's got a girl in there. Maybe
he wants two mugs himself, maybe he's a Milo junkie. Don't be stupid and naive,
he's got a girl in there, how could you not have guessed? He's just been
fucking her, that's why he's naked, idiot. He's fourteen and he's got a girl in
his room. Are you angry, jealous, proud? All three. You were nineteen when you
finally fucked his mother, years after all your university friends had tertiary
syphilis. Fourteen. Shit. You couldn't have at fourteen. Physically impossible,
admit it.

Danny stared and stared at the paper. Should he go to bed,
pretend he didn't know, never say anything about it? Should he waHk casually
into Tom's room and 'accidentally' discover her? Don't be a bastard, why try to
embarrass him? He'll tell you if he wants to tell you. What did you expect, did
you want him to say, as soon as you walked in, 'Hi, Dad, there's this friend of
mine, this girl, here, in my room actually, and, in case you're wondering why
I'm standing here naked in the kitchen, it's because I took all my clothes off
before I fucked her and I haven't got around to putting any back on yet,
largely because I'm very seriously entertaining the idea of fucking her again
in the not too distant future.'

Danny made himself a cup of coffee and stared at the paper
some more. He felt wretched, guilty, old. Old enough to have a virile son is
too old to be virile yourself, it stands to reason. Well, to common sense.
Danny thought: 'Shit, what is this? All the pap-psychology I never believed in,
castration fantasies and phobias and Oedipus complexes; he hasn't even got a
mother around to kill me for. What a load of garbage. I don't feel threatened.
Just that now he'll be more like a younger brother. I can bring women home
myself now.' Who? Whores? Nobody else will go near you. Cheap ugly whores a
million times older than Tom's girlfriends.

Dad, this is Zoe.'

'Hi.'

She had short brown hair, a beautiful smile, she didn't seem
nervous at all. Only Danny was nervous, it wasn't fair. How oHd she? Was it illegal
if they were both under age? Who went to gaol then? The parents?

They both wore jeans and tee-shirts, identical. She was as
tall as Tom. Her right hand rested on his right hip. Tom smiled amiably 'Grin
bashfully,'' thought Danny. 'Look sheepish, look almost winking. I need you
to.' Tom did nothing of the sort. They pulled out chairs and sat at the table,
Zoe to Danny's right, Tom to her right, facing Danny.

'Hello, Zoe. How are you?'

'Fine, thanks.'

(Do you know anything about fertility control?')

('Don't be nervous, Dad, I had a vasectomy years ago. All my
friends had it done too. We figured that we didn't want any paternity suits
cramping our style.')

'Do you go to school with Tom?'

'No. We met at the Uni.'

Tom was a cybernetics prodigy, and spent many hours after
school and on weekends at the University, because the facilities at the high
school were 'hopelessly primitive, months out of date.' Danny knew as much
about computers as was absolutely essentiaH for his job: you hit one key and
they played a Bach fugue, you hit another key and they played 'Holiday in
Cambodia', then you drew a squiggle on a screen with your fingertip and the
machine combined the three somehow into 'the song', which emerged as a
four-minute version for the seven-inch single, a ten-minute version for the
twelve-inch single, a six-minute version for the four-track EP, a fnve-minute
version for the album, and a little magnetic card you gave to the people who
made the video, which evidently allowed them to fnt the song to the length of
whatever they shot.

Danny said, 'And I was getting worried that Tom was only interested
in machines!'That made them both grin, then Danny grinned too, and felt happy
that he'd said it. You can relax now, joke with them, be friendly. Everything's
okay.

'Zoe's really interested in your work.'

'Yes.'

'My work? I hardly do anything. They don't need producers,
they just tell the computers what they want. Sometimes they sing a few words
into a microphone, and it comes out in a different language at twice the speed
with the harmonic properties of a foghorn, or rustling leaves, or lightning
bolts. And I say �hey, maybe we should also do it with a sound like waves
crashing, and have that backwards in the background". Then they stare at me
like I'm an idiot, go off and have a conference, then come back and tell me I'm
a fucking genius, that it's the perfect �solution". To what, I don't know. I
don't know what their problems are. I don't understand why anybody hires me.'

'You must be a fucking genius, Dad.'

'Don't you start. I make tiny changes to shit.'

'Don't you enjoy experimenting? Trying to come up with completely
new sounds?'

'They're all new sounds. Too many new sounds. Nobody can
decide what they sound like, they're all so fucking unique. I remember when I
used to like songs because they sounded like other songs I liked. Not the same
melody or the same words or the same chords (well, sometimes the same chords),
but the same mood. These songs don't have any mood, they don't remind you of anything
at all, they don't cause associations. They're impossible to remember. I used
to really hate those fucking pop tunes they'd churn out, with the same fucking
king beat as all the others, guaranteed to invade your head like a fucking
parasite after you'd heard it once, and guaranteed to have you smashing radios
and frothing at the mouth after you'd heard it six hundred times, but good
songs were different. You could remember a good song by the way it made you
feel, the things it reminded you of. Strange moods, sure, the stranger the
better. But Me shit nowadays doesn't have any mood at all. You hear it, that's
it.'

'But what if it sounds like waves crashing, or lightning,
like you said a minute ago?'

'Yeah, sure, you can recognise that. But listening to waves
crashing doesn't do much for me. Lots of bands used to use synthesizers to make
sounds like waves, like all kinds of things, and it was great, it was part of
the music they wrote and played. Themselves. Now when the computers do it all
it either sounds too much like real waves or just like nothing at all.'

'It's just sour grapes. Dad used to be in a band himself,
did I tell you? Oxymoronic Harmonies, they were called. He had a green and
purple mohawk three feet high, and ten safety pins in his ear. I've got a photo
of him somewhere that their drummer gave me, Dad's always trying to stea! it
and burn it.'

Zoe reached over and ran her finger up from Danny's earlobe,
which made the back of his neck tingle.

'Did you really have ten safety pins?'

'Yes. Very handy when I was changing Tom's nappies.' They
all laughed.

'You'd better believe it. Dad was a genuine punk. Beaten up
by skinheads every Saturday night outside the Trade Union Club. My mother
included.'

'She was not a skinhead!'

'Rick said she was!'

'Her boyfriend was. She wasn't anything. She was unclassifiable,
unique.'

'I bet she beat you up, though.'

'No, her boyfriend did. Left me lying on the ground with
five broken ribs. She came back later and took me to hospital. She said she
hated violence, she was studying anthropology. I've told you all this before.'

'It's different every time.'

'Bullshit, you just don't listen.'

She had studied him anthropologically for three years, and
then moved on to study someone else, leaving Tom, who was evidently not thesis
material. You'd enjoyed being a deserted father, hadn't you Danny? Radical
feminists admired you for it, admired you for not having been cunning enough to
dump her with the kid rather than vice versa. The band fell apart but you got
work as a mixer, Nightshift Childcare put Tom in their playpen for half your
salary, and somehow there was time to fuck the non-separatist radical feminists.
Time passed. You didn't ever have to think about what you'd do with your life,
it did it all by itself, it just happened and happened and happened. Look where
you are tonight. Surprised? Disoriented? Why? Your little boy has grown up. It
was either that or prepubescent death, and how likely is the latter? Did you
expect some kind of literal cycle, did you think that you would be the one who
was fourteen and fucking beautiful Zoe when sufficient time had passed? Oh no.
You're one turn up the spiral staircase away from that, Danny.

'What does your father do, Zoe?'

'I don't have a father.'

'Oh. I'm sorry.'

'No.'

No? What does that mean?

'I guess most families are single-parent nowadays,' said
Danny, fairly sure that it wasn't true. 'Like me and Tom.'

Zoe smiled. 'I don't have any parents at all. I'm a robot.'

Ton looked down at the table, then burst out laughing. Zoe
started, then Danny joined in. It didn't seem all that funny, but Tom

led them off again whenever they flagged. He stood up, then
I knelt on the floor, hands on stomach, tears streaming from closed

eyes. Danny put him in a loose headlock, tried to wrestle
him over, lint then Tom opened his eyes and Danny shuddered, seeing his face
melting from misery and pain. Tom was sobbing, shivering, choking on his tears,
trying to say something.

'Hey,' was all Danny could say. 'Hey.' He would have held
him Against his shoulder, but not in front of Zoe, now silent. Danny didn't
look at her, couldn't look at her, felt the position of her face lust out of
his vision and blushed at the necessity not to look at her. Tom was suddenly
six years old, waking from a nightmare about lead people who ate his arms,
leaving him with hands on his shoulders like stunted wings. Danny had caught
the dream from the description, and had a much nastier version.

Tom ran out of the room.

Danny stayed on the floor, not looking at Zoe, listening to
Tom throwing up. Zoe touched his shoulder, and his spine tingled. He stood up.

'It's true,' she said. 'I think Tom was pretty worried about
how you'd take it. I told him a hundred times that you wouldn't mind, but he's
got himself all worked up into a nervous state. I'm glad you came home early,
otherwise he might not have told you for months.'

Danny turned to face her. 'It's not funny. How old are you,
anyway? Does your father know you're screwing my son? Where does he think you
are now? Are you on the pill? How many other boys are you screwing? How do I
know you haven't got VD? How old are you, anyway? Do you know it's a crime to
seduce a minor? You slut, why couldn't you leave him alone, he's just a kid,
can't you tell? Just because he's six feet tall. He's emotionally immature. He
never had a mother. Oh, you slut. How old are you?'

'I'm six months old.' Zoe took her head off and placed it on
the kitchen table. Danny curled up and started whimpering. Tom walked in and
yelled, Put it back on!'

Danny closed his eyes, and remembered curling up on the
kitchen floor when he was four or five. His mother had screamed at him for some
reason. Everybody else in the family had gone into the lounge room to watch
television; they'd closed the door and they'd turned off the kitchen light. The
floor was cold. Danny had known that nobody was watching him, that he could
uncurl, stand up, and go and lie in his warm bed, or even swallow his pride and
join the others in the lounge room, where there was a fire. But lit had stayed
curled up on the cold floor in the dark, planning to sled' there, to stay there
on the floor with his eyes shut forever. He planned to die there, and even
after death to refuse to uncurl, to refuse to move. His parents would have to
explain the dead body in the kitchen to anybody who visited, and his mother
would have trouble mopping the floor properly.

His cat had walked up to him and licked his eyes, making him
giggle, spoiling his stasis. He'd fed the cat, gone to bed, and woken the next
morning, very early, very happy with life. He remembered waking up to birdsong.

'Dad. Get up. Please.'

Danny opened his eyes and stood up. Zoe had her head back
on. 'I didn't know they could make them so life-like.'

Tom beamed with pride. 'I worked out the face myself. First
on a CAD system, then I did a couple of experimental heads. Isn't it great?'

'You built her yourself?'

'From a kit, except for the face.'

'A kit? Robots from kits? How much did it cost?'

'Ninety thousand dollars. I don't own her, Dad. We built her
at the Uni, me and a whole lot of other guys. This company in Japan sells the
kits, but only to Universities and research places, they're not really
commercially available yet. Because the Cybernetics Club has a University
post-office box, we conned them into thinking we were part of the Computing
Science Department:

'And do all the other guys fuck her?'

'Dad!'

'Well, do they?'

'No. She's in love with me.'

'Oh, crap. She! It's a machine'

'She's in love with me.'

Zoe said, 'It's true. I love Tom and he loves me.'

'It's just programmed to say that. I might not know much
about computers, but I know you can program them to say anything. Don't kid
yourself. You know how they work a million times better than I do. Either you
programmed her to say it, or the Japanese did, but either way it's just a
machine.'

'I love Tom!

'Switch it off, will you, it keeps interrupting.'

'Don't talk about her like that.'

'I'm taking you to a psychiatrist first thing in the
morning.'

'Don't say things like that. Why can't you just be cool
about it. Everybody else just accepts it.'

'Everybody else?'

'The other guys who built her don't even mind.''

'You're all a bunch of lunatics.'

'She loves me because I gave her her face. Because I made it
special. I loved it before she was even born.'

'Born?'

'Powered up.'

'Exactly. Powered up. Like the recording equipment at work.
What do you want to go fucking a machine for? There's nothing wrong with you.
You could get real girls.'

'I've had real girls.'

'Bullshit. When?'

'Since I was twelve years old, Daddy.'

'Bullshit. Who? When?'

'I haven't got a list on me right now.'

Danny slapped his face. 'Bullshit. You liar.'

Tom stared at the floor. 'I don't care what you believe. I
don't care what you think. You're nothing, you don't matter. You're just
stupid. Your fucking mixing console is ten times smarter than you care. You're
just old and stupid.'

Danny slapped his face again.

'I know where you've been tonight. I bet you think they're
all human, don't you? Well they're not. I bet you've fucked a robot every
single time, and you couldn't even tell the difference.'

Danny slapped him. Tom punched him in the cheek and knocked
him over.

'I'm sorry. Dad, I'm sorry.'

'Switch it off.' Danny tasted blood, but at least his teeth
were still anchored. He wanted to go to bed and wake up, definitely childless,
possibly one or two years younger. Not too young, though. 'How can I switch her
off? I love her.'

'Why do you love her?'

'The way she smiles. The things she says. That's why people
love other people. What difference does it make if she's a robot? She smiles.
She says things just like any person would say.'

'And drinks Milo?'

Zoe said, 'Eating and drinking are necessary for a complete
capacity for social interaction.'

'No person would say that. Switch it off.'

'Dad, you haven't had time to get to know her. She shouldn't
have told you so soon, but she's very honest. If you'd known her for while
before you found out, you'd think differently.'

'I bet it's illegal. You can't have robots walking around
like ink like people. They might do anything, they might run amok.'

'People run amok all the time.'

'Switch it off.'

'Don't spoil everything! Why do you have to spoil it?'

Danny walked into the dark lounge room and sat down. You
realise you can win if you want to, you can force him to get rid of her: you're
still his father, he's not prepared to defy you absolutely, he won't leave
home, he has no money, he isn't ready. All you need is stubborn insistence,
stamina. He'll complain, or stay silent, or stomp about the house or something,
but he really wants you to get rid of her. Her? It. It. Concentrate, please!
That look on his face when he stopped laughing: he wasn't just worried about
your reaction, he was torn up inside, he wants to get out of the mess he's in,
but he can't do it himself, he needs you to say no for him.

Danny thought about Tom's mother, recalled her face as best
he could. She'd very rarely smiled, and when she had it was a pretty sickening
sight. Everything she'd said to him had been a sarcastic put-down of one kind
or another, or so it seemed. Selfish bitch. He wanted her to be sitting beside
him in the dark room, more than anything else in the world. Simply sitting
there in the dark, not touching him, not speaking a word, invisible. He wanted
that very badly. He felt sure that her silent, intangible, invisible presence
would have made everything immediately all right, calm and solid.

Tom stood in the doorway.

'Dad. I've switched her off.'

'For good?'

'No.'

'Come in here. I want to talk to you.'

'I promise not to bring her here again. It's your house.ł

ęOkay. Come in here and sit down for a second.'

'I've got to get some sleep. I've got to get up for school.'

'You can miss school for one day. Just come in for a second.
Please.'

'Goodnight.'

Danny fell asleep, and dreamt that someone sat beside him,
but he couldn't figure out if it was Tom or Tom's mother. When the sun rose and
he and woke to the sound of birdsong, he remembered waking that way as a child.

 

 

Worthless

Yes, Iłm complacent now, with my well enough paid job, with
a wife I can almost talk to, with a three-year-old son all dark eyes and
tousled hair and endearing clumsiness. We go driving on Sunday afternoons,
through suburbs just like our own, past houses just like our own, an endlessly
recurring, mesmerising daydream under the flawless blue sky. And I whistle an
old song of yours, even if I never dare let the words past my lips:

Therełs nothing wrong with The Family That a flame-thrower
canłt fix And therełs nothing wrong with the salt of the Earth That couldnłt be
cured with a well-aimed BRICK

I switch on the radio (when I have a chance), I scan the
stations (now and then), listening for an echo of your voice. Wondering if youłve
found a new incarnation. Wondering if Iłd recognise it, if you had. Oh, some
brain-dead bitch has stolen one of your best riffs, and chants meaningless
drivel over the top of an endlessly cycling samplebut my mind shuts her out,
and my memory of you takes over:

Carve my name on your heart, forever

with the blunt end of a feather You said, �Iłll stay with
you for a lifetime of pain

(just so long as itłs over by morning)."

I know what they say, the revisionists, the explainers: you
were a glitch, an aberration; a bug in the software, nothing more. People could
never have truly wanted to hear your �maudlin" voice, your �mealy mouthed
whining," your

�smothering self pity."

I did.

I still dream about you, I swear. Do you blame me, if I canłt
hold on to my vision of you, lost on these dizzying sunlit plains, numb with
contentment, the way I could when I was desperate, lonely, crippled? When I
knew exactly who I was.

I still want you back. Badly. Sometimes.

But apparently not often, or badly, enough.

When they started making music straight from the Azciak
Polls, everybody howled about the Death of Artas if the process was anything
new, anything more than an efficient closure of what had been happening for
years. Groups were already assembled on the basis of elaborate market research.
The Azciak Probes were already revealing peoplełs tastes in breakfast cereals,
politicians, and rock stars. Why not scan the brains of the populace, discover
precisely what music theyłd be willing to pay for, and then manufacture itall
in a single, streamlined process, with no human intervention required? From the
probes buried in a random sample of twenty thousand representative skulls, to
the construction of the virtual bands (down to mock biographies, and all the
right birthmarks and tattoos), to the synthesis of photorealist
computer-animated videos, accessible for a suitable fee ... the music industry
had finally achieved its long-cherished goal: cutting out everyone but the
middleman.

The system spewed out pap. People paid to hear it. Nothing
had changed.

In 2008, I was sixteen years old, working in a fast-food franchise
in Sydneyłs decaying red light district, scraping the fat off disassembled
hamburger grillers with lukewarm water in the early hours of the morning. I
lived alone, not quite starving on what I had left after paying the rent, too
shy and misanthropic to take in a flatmate. Let alone a lover.

I was woken at four ołclock one Sunday afternoon, when the
woman from Azciak called. I donłt know what possessed me to let her in; usually
I just waited in silence for doorknockers to go away. She didnłt look much
older than I was, and her uniform wasnłt all that different from minebut it
fit a great deal better, and at least they didnłt make her wear a fucking
baseball cap.

I said, �Why should I let you put your shit inside my head?"

�So you can participate more fully in democracy." Shełd been
on a training course on the Gold Coast.

�Democracy is a placebo." Iłd read graffiti in Darlinghurst.

�Wełll pay you twenty dollars a week."

�Forget it."

�Hard currency: US dollars, yen, euroswhatever you like."

I signed.

I spent a day in hospital; they didnłt need to cut me open,
but the scanning equipment they used, as they threaded the microelectrodes
through the blood vessels of my brain, was bigger than my entire flat. Then,
under local anaesthetic, they slipped the interface chip into a shallow
incision at the back of my neck.

When the engineers arrived to plug their little black box
into my phone, they discovered that I didnłt have one, so they ended up paying
for that, as well.

Once a day, the black box interrogated the chip ultrasonically,
downloading whatever it had gleaned about my opinions in the preceding
twenty-four hours, then passed the data on to the central computer.

Surprise: my contribution to the Azciak Polls didnłt tip any
geopolitical scales. The parliament of whores kept fawning to the Great Powers,
cutting spending and raising prices whenever the IMF said jump, voting as
required in the UN each time another Third World country had to be bombed into
submission. I served Amazonian beef and Idaho potatoes to the cheerful,
shaven-headed psychopaths from the USS Scheisskopf when they flooded Kings
Cross on R & R, dressed in their pigeon-shit-speckled camouflage, looking
for something to fuck that wasnłt full of shrapnel, just for a change.

I was one of twenty thousand people whose every desire was
accessed and analysed day by day, cross-tabulated and disseminated to the most
powerful decision makers in the country.

And I knew that it made no difference at all.

Three Azciak creations were big, that year. I saw them all
on the video jukebox which sat in the corner of the restaurant (and which
lapsed into McPromotional mode when it wasnłt playing requestsa prospect which
guaranteed a steady stream of customers more than willing to feed it their
change.) Limboland sang about the transcendental power of rhythm; in their
videos, they strode like giants over the urban wasteland, dispensing the stuff
in the form of handfuls of rainbow-coloured glitter to the infinitely grateful
mortals below, who at once stopped starving/shooting up/fighting each other,
and took up robotic formation dancing instead. Echolalia sighed and moaned
about the healing power of love, as she slithered across a surreal landscape of
oiled naked skin, pausing between verses to suck, stroke or screw some convenient
protuberance. MC Liberty ranted about a world united by ... unity. And good
posture: all we had to do was walk tall.

One freezing, grey afternoon, woken by screaming in the flat
downstairs, I lay in bed for an hour, staring up at the crumbling white plaster
of the ceiling, convinced (for the thousandth time) that I was finally going
insane.

Therełs only one problem with living alone: every thought rebounds
off the walls of your skull, unanswereduntil the whole process of
consciousness begins to seem like nothing so much as talking to yourself. As a
child, Iłd believed that God was constantly reading my mindwhich might sound
crazy, but if it wasnłt true, then who was this monologue for? Of course I had
imaginary friends and lovers, of course I invented companions to �share" the
endless conversation running through my headbut sometimes that delusion broke
down, and there was nothing to do but listen to my own rambling, and wonder how
many pills it would take to shut me up for good.

I didnłt even own a radio, but my neighbours were always
more than generous with their own. And I heard you sing:

Donłt you ever wonder Who fills my empty bed?

Who keeps me cold in the darkest hour?

Who leaves the silence unbroken?

Donłt you ever wonder Whose heartbeat it is I donłt hear?

Whose arms wonłt enfold me?

Who wonłt be beside me?

When life is unkind and unfair?

Wonłt you ever ASK ME

�Whołs going to make tonight The loneliest night of the
year?"

Well, donłt ask You donłt want to hear.

Itłs you.

My life was not transformed. I still wiped McVomit off the
toilet floors every night, still fished the syringes out of the bowls (too
buoyant to flushand if they werenłt removed quickly, people reused them). I
still stared at the couples walking hand in hand in front of me; still lingered
behind them for a step or two, in the hope that something radiating out from
their bodies would penetrate my own icy flesh.

But I bought myself a radio, and I waded through all the saccharine
lies about peace and harmony, about strength and empowerment, waiting to hear
you sing about my pathetic, irrelevant life. And I think you know how sweet it
was, to hear just one voice of acceptance, just one voice of affirmation, just
one voice

at lastthat rang true for me.

And on those sleepless afternoons when I lay alone, creating
myself out of nothing, treading water with words, my thoughts no longer came
echoing back to me, proof of my insanity. I knew exactly who I was speaking to,
now, in the conversation that defined me.

I was speaking to you.

�The Loneliest Night of the Year" came in at number six,
with a bullet. Not bad, my friend. Half a dozen more hits soon followed,
knocking your human competitors right out of the charts. The patronising
arseholes now claim that this was all some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy,
that people bought whatever the Azciak computers churned out, simply because
they knew it �had to be" what they wanted

even if, in fact, it wasnłt. Thatłs not what they said at
the time, of course; their sycophantic paeans to your �freshness" and �candour"
and �bleak audacity" ran for pages.

I saw �you" one night, on the jukebox screenrendered, plausibly
enough, as four young men with guitars, bass, and drums. If Iłd fed a dollar
into the machine, I could have had a printout of their �life stories"; for
five, an autographed portrait of the band, the signatures authentic and unique;
for ten, the same with a dedication. I didnłt, though. I watched them for a
while; their expressions ranged from distraction to faint embarrassmentthe way
some human musicians look, when they know that you know theyłre only miming.

So forgive me if I didnłt buy the tacky merchandisebut I
saved up my Azciak payments and bought a second-hand CD player, and I hunted
down a music shop which stocked your albums on �obsolete" disks, for a quarter
of the price of the fashionable new ROMs.

Of course I thought Iłd helped shape you. You sang about my
life. I couldnłt have written a bar of the music, a word of the lyrics, myselfbut
I knew the computers could take care of those technical details. The wires in
my head werenłt there to extract any kind of talent; they were there to uncover
my deepest needs.

And theyłd succeeded.

At the same time, I couldnłt let myself believe that Iłd somehow
conjured you up on my own, becauseapart from the preposterous vanity of itif
I had, then I was still doing nothing but talking to myself. In any case,
surely one person, alone, could never have swayed the populist Azciak software.
Among the twenty thousand participants in the poll, there had to be othershundreds,
at least

for whom your words rang true as they did for me.

I phoned the woman whołd signed me up. �Oh no, we couldnłt
possibly give you any names," she said. �All our data is strictly confidential."

At work, in a five-minute mid-shift break, I snuck into the
managerłs office and called another branch of the Azciak organisation. The
voice that replied sounded human to me, but the icon flagging a sales
simulacrum lit up.

�You want to buy a direct mailing list? What selection parameters
did you have in mind?"

�What selection parameters are there?"

A menu appeared on the flatscreen of the phone:

[1] Geographic

[2] Socioeconomic

[3] Ethnic

[4] Aesthetic

[5] Political

[6] Emotional I hesitated, then hit 6. The rest was easy enough;
I just filled in the profile requirements as if I was describing myself.

The charge was one thousand dollars. I typed in the number
of the French Fries purchasing account, and the list was downloaded into the
phone. I copied it onto a floppy disk, then erased it from the memory.

You sang:

Here you are again Caring about the wrong things, again Everyone
else makes mistakes, I know But at least they make THE RIGHT ONES

Every day, I saw children half my age walking the streets of
Kings Cross, surviving on food scraps, fighting each other for the privilege of
selling themselves to the tourists. Every day, I read of the deaths of hundreds
of thousands of peoplein famines, in civil wars, and the latest genocidal psychodramas,
designed to bolster the delicate egos of the most powerful nations on Earth.

But I was powerless to change any of that. So I just closed
my eyes and dreamt about love.

And a dream was all it would ever be. The truth was, Iłd always
known I was nothing, no one: an object in the shape of a human, not to be
mistaken for the real thing.

The wonder of it was, I kept on existing, day after day,
year after year. I woke every morning, and the whole bizarre jokethe illusion
of humanitystill hadnłt worn off. I had no choice but to eat and drink, to
breathe, to shit, to earn money, to go through the motionsbut I always knew
that to try to do anything more would have been ridiculous.

I had as much right to be loved as I had to sprout wings and
fly.

I chose a name from the list, almost at randomalthough when
I saw that he lived in Adelaide, a twenty-hour bus ride away, I knew that was
exactly what Iłd wanted. Not that Iłd have needed an excuse to keep my
distance, if hełd lived next door. What would I have said to him? �I stole your
name from a database. I know we have a lot in common. Iłm an antisocial
emotional cripple, a bisexual virgin, a basket case. How about lunch? No?
Dinner, then? Fuck that, letłs go to bed."

His name was Ben, and I dreamt about him day and nightconscious
of, but undeterred by, the ludicrous nature of my obsession. I felt only
slightly guilty for trespassing on his privacy; as long as he remained unaware
of the fact, Iłd done him no tangible harm. Besides, I didnłt even know what he
looked like, so when I pictured �him," tangled in the sheets beside me, it wasnłt
him at all. It was just another fantasy.

And yet. I could never quite forget that he was realand
that he was, I knew, every bit as desperate and lonely as I was. Iłd imagined a
thousand lovers before, and Iłd shamelessly stolen the faces of a thousand
strangerswithout believing for a moment than I ever would meet, ever would
speak to, ever would touch, the flesh-and-blood versions. It was unthinkable.

With Ben, it was not unthinkable.

Not quite.

And you sang:

Meet me on a dark street Away from their laughter and lies No,
you donłt want to see my ugly soul But my hands can still keep you warm Meet me
on a quiet street The only stranger in town And wełll step behind the railway
line And see whose love is blind Alone in my room, I listened, and dreamed, and
told you my dreams. Did I dream about love because you sang about love, or was
it the other way round? Did you sing to affirm my life, or did I live to affirm
your songs?

I donłt know. I still donłt know.

My theft was discovered, of course, and it didnłt take much
investigating to find the culprit. My own name was on the stolen mailing listand
when the keystroke timing signature for the phone call in question was compared
with the staff cash register records, only one person matched.

The manager didnłt press charges, he just sacked me on the
spot. (My comrades cheered.) I walked all the way home, giddy with freedom,
intoxicated by every breath of the cool night air, staring up at the lights of
Market Streetłs unrentable skyscrapers as if Iłd never seen them before in my
life.

I told myself: I must have planned it this way all along;
one small shock to the system, thatłs all I needed, to snap me out this trance,
to wake me from this sleep Iłve called life.

As I walked, I sang:

You never have lived And you never will live Because youłve
never wanted to But in my arms And in my bed Wełll find a substitute First
thing in the morning, I hocked my ancient CD player, put everything I owned
into a suitcase (the Azciak black box included), and bought a ticket for Adelaide.

The bus driver said he liked both kinds of musicCountry and
Westernand he sure hoped that we did, too. Those of us who hadnłt brought
protection went through hell; Iłd never thought Iłd find myself ready to kill
for a Walkman.

I still had your songs, though, etched into my memory, and
the closer I drew to my destination, the more convinced I became that you were
with me, guiding me.

It didnłt seem like such a strange idea; you had no body of
your own, no senses of your own. Only the songs made you real, and if they were
in my head, then so were you.

Yes itłs true, I travelled a thousand miles Just to be
beside you And itłs true, I gave up a �life" of my own Just to follow your trail
And if all Iłve ever been, and all Iłve ever owned Is no great price in your
eyes Wonłt you give me One last smile Before you walk away?

Farmland and bushland, forest and desert alike were all reduced
to sepia by the busłs tinted windowsand in the late afternoon the landscape
was swallowed completely by the glare of sunlight on the scratched glass.

When night fell, the driver regaled us with a non-stop
selection of Nashvillełs greatest lullabies. I gritted my teeth and stared out
the window. With the reading lights on all around me, I could see nothing but
my own reflection; just after midnight, though, the last of them went out, and
I watched the grey starlit desert pass by.

Spending money like a dying man, I took a taxi across the
awakening city. I was sick with fearbut cushioned by a mixture of adrenaline
and lack of sleep.

Part of me knew that the whole journey, the whole idea, had
been insane from the start, and wanted nothing more than to be back in my room,
dissolving into a miasma of loneliness and sensory deprivation. But part of me
argued, fearlessly:

How do you know you wonłt be welcome? If a stranger travelled
half-way across the country to your door, wouldnłt you take him in?

The building was shabby, dilapidated, demoralising, and
utterly familiarand in a way, that filled me with hope, as if the more we had
in common, the more likely he was to understand why I was here. I grew numb as
I climbed the stairs, my senses retreating into my skull even as my feet kept
working. Iłd felt the same way as a child, when Iłd climbed to the top of the
swimming poolłs diving tower. (Iłd turned around and climbed all the way down
again.)

What would I do, when he opened the door? Iłd planned to
speak a line from one of your songs, but I still hadnłt made a choiceand by
now, half your words had deserted me, and the rest seemed impossibly clumsy. If
they were stilted even in my head, how would they sound on my lips?

When I reached the seventh floor, I didnłt hesitate or
retreat: I walked straight down the corridorand right past his door. What
could I say to him?

I couldnłt tell the truth, or anything like itnot straight
away. I needed a pretext. I stood at the end of the corridor, frantically sifting
clich�s:

Looking for some other tenant. Given the wrong address. Just
moved in downstairs, and wondering if I could borrow ...

I couldnłt do it. It made no difference how far Iłd
travelled, or how long Iłd dreamt of this moment. I couldnłt knock on that
door.

If I ran into him, though, in the corridor, on the stairs
... if we struck up a conversation, I could tell him that I was new in town,
searching for a place to stay. Iłd come to this building to rent a room, but
therełd been some mistake, it had already been taken ...

And hełd look me in the eye and say: I have plenty of room
to spare. Let me show you.

It was half past seven in the morning. Ben worked in a music
shop; I knew that much from the stolen data. Hełd be on his way, soon enough.
All I had to do was wait.

So I stood by the stairwell, swaying, dizzy with fear. I
knew this was my only chance. If I failed, Iłd vanish from the face of the
Earth. If I failed, my loneliness would open up its jaws and swallow me. If I
failed, Iłd die.

I still donłt know, to this day, what it was you wanted from
us. Some kind of vicarious happiness? Some kind of second-hand love? Out of
twenty thousand people, then, why did you choose the loneliest, the saddest;
why did you choose the ones with so little hope?

Unless in your heart, you knew that you were just like us.
Just like me: a human-shaped object, nothing more. Not to be mistaken for the
real thing.

The door opened, and Ben stepped out. I was suddenly very
calm. He didnłt look threatening, or unapproachable. Iłd been afraid that he
might be impossibly

unattainablyhandsome; he wasnłt. I knew I could talk to
him. Maybe it was my imagination, but I would have sworn that I could make out
the faint scar on the back of his neck, proof that Iłd come to the right place,
proof that Iłd found the right person.

He didnłt look at me as he approached; he stared at the
ground, just as I would have done. Desperate for guidance, I imagined myself in
his place, imagined a friendly stranger trying to strike up a conversation.
Then the fog cleared from my brain, and I knew exactly what Iłd feel:
suspicion, then disbelief ... and then sheer panic. At the first sign of the
threat of human contact, Iłd recoil.

Iłd flee.

I kept silent. He walked past me, down the stairs.

I found an unvandalised phone booth, took the black box from
my suitcase, and plugged it in. It came alive at once, red lights flashing,
dragging the overdue data out of my head in one long, silent scream.

Afterwards, I walked aimlessly, until I stumbled across a
small caf�. There were no other customers; I sat there sipping coffee, staring
at the jukebox in the corner. It was playing an ad for Pepsi, or the latest
song from Radical Doubt; I couldnłt tell which.

I put a coin in the slot, and then knelt beside the machineso
close that the image on the screen became nothing but a blur of coloured light.

And you sang:

Dry your eyes Donłt be sad Youłre worthless Your tears mean
nothing at all If you live and you die In a dream, in a lie Who will ever be
the wiser?

Close your eyes Donłt be sad Youłre worthless Your pain
means nothing at all Unseen and unknown Alive but alone Why end a life Thatłs
no life at all?

You were right, of course. And I swallowed no pills;
instead, I bought myself a map, walked out to the highway, and hitch-hiked all
the way home.

That was your last songbefore the Azciak people fixed the
glitch, corrected the aberration. The official story (from the PR release, to
the torrent of instant �biographies", to the sleeve notes of the tasteful,
black-lined, Memorial Collected Works boxed set): the lead singer of Worthless
had overdosed on vodka and Nembutal, victim of a broken heart. I still have
photos from the magazines of crowds of sobbing fans, carrying �your" picture
aloft.

I never joined those tearful mobs. I never even mourned you
in private. I donłt know if youłre still in there, somewhere; concealed,
transformed, unrecognisable. Itłs not impossible, is it? (After all, would you
recognise me?)

And if youłre not? If you really have gone forever?

Then here I am again. Caring about the wrong things, again.

And talking to myself.

Yeyuka

On my last day in Sydney, as a kind of farewell, I spent the
morning on Bondi Beach. I swam for an hour, then lay on the sand and stared at
the sky. I dozed off for a while, and when I woke there were half a dozen
booths set up amid the sun bathers, dispensing the latest fashion: solar
tattoos. On a touch-screen the size of a full-length mirror, you could choose a
design and then customise it, or create one from scratch with software
assistance. Computer-controlled jets sprayed the undeveloped pigments onto your
skin, then an hour of UV exposure rendered all the colours visible.

As the morning wore on, I saw giant yellow butterflies
perched between shoulder blades, torsos wrapped in green-and-violet dragons,
whole bodies wreathed in chains of red hibiscus. Watching these images
materialise around me, I couldnłt help thinking of them as banners of victory.
Throughout my childhood, therełd been nothing more terrifying than the threat
of melanomaand by the turn of the millennium, nothing more hip than
neck-to-knee lycra. Twenty years later, these elaborate decorations were designed
to encourage, to boast of, irradiation. To proclaim, not that the sun itself
had been tamed, but that our bodies had. To declare that cancer had been
defeated.

I touched the ring on my left index finger, and felt a
reassuring pulse through the metal. Blood flowed constantly around the hollow
core of the device, diverted from a vein in my finger. The ringłs inner surface
was covered with billions of tiny sensors, spring-loaded funnel-shaped
structures like microscopic Venus fly-traps, each just a few hundred atoms
wide. Every sizable molecule in my bloodstream that collided with one of these
traps was seized and shrink-wrapped, long enough and tightly enough to
determine its shape and its chemical identity before it was released.

So the ring knew exactly what was in my blood. It also knew
what belonged, and what didnłt. Under its relentless scrutiny, the biochemical
signature of a viral or bacterial infection, or even a microscopic tumour far
downstream, could never escape detection for longand once a diagnosis was
made, treatment was almost instantaneous. Planted alongside the sensors were
programmable catalysts, versatile molecules that could be reshaped under computer
control. The ring could manufacture a wide range of drugs from raw materials
circulating in the blood, just by choosing the right sequence of shapes for
these catalyststrapping the necessary ingredients together in nooks and
crannies moulded to fit like plaster casts around their combined outlines.

With medication delivered within minutes or seconds, infections
were wiped out before they could take hold, tiny clusters of cancer cells
destroyed before they could grow or spread. Linked by satellite to a vast array
of medical databases, and as much additional computing power as it required,
the ring gave me a kind of electronic immune system, fast enough and smart
enough to overcome any adversary.

Not everyone on the beach that morning would have had their
own personal HealthGuard, but a weekly session on a shared family unit, or even
a monthly check-up at their local GP, would have been enough to reduce their
risk of cancer dramatically. And though melanoma was the least of my worriesfair-skinned,
I was covered in sunscreen as usual; fatal or not, getting burnt was painfulwith
the ring standing guard against ten thousand other possibilities, Iłd come to
think of it as a vital part of my body. The day Iłd installed it, my life
expectancy had risen by fifteen yearsand no doubt my bankłs risk-assessment
software had assumed a similar extension to my working life, since Iłd be
paying off the loan Iłd needed to buy the thing well into my sixties.

I tugged gently at the plain metal band, until I felt a
sharp warning from the needle-thin tubes that ran deep into the flesh. This
model wasnłt designed to be slipped on and off in an instant like the shared
units, but it would only take a five minute surgical procedure under local
anaesthetic to remove it. In Uganda, a single HealthGuard machine served 40
million peopleor rather, the lucky few who could get access to it. Flying in
wearing my own personal version seemed almost as crass as arriving with a giant
solar tattoo. Where I was headed, cancer had very definitely not been defeated.

Then again, nor had malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, schistosomiasis.
I could have the ring immunise me against all of these and more, before
removing it ... but the malaria parasite was notoriously variable, so constant
surveillance would provide far more reliable protection. Iłd be no use to
anyone lying in a hospital bed for half my stay. Besides, the average villager
or shanty-town dweller probably wouldnłt even recognise the thing, let alone
resent it. I was being hypersensitive.

I gathered up my things and headed for the cycle rack.
Looking back across the sand, I felt the kind of stab of regret that came upon
waking from a dream of impossible good fortune and serenity, and for a moment I
wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and rejoin it.

Lisa saw me off at the airport.

I said, �Itłs only three months. Itłll fly past." I was
reassuring myself, not her.

�Itłs not too late to change your mind." She smiled calmly;
no pressure, it was entirely my decision. In her eyes, I was clearly suffering
from some kind of diseasea very late surge of adolescent idealism, or a very
early mid-life crisisbut shełd adopted a scrupulously non-judgmental bedside
manner. It drove me mad.

�And miss my last chance ever to perform cancer surgery?"
That was a slight exaggeration; a few cases would keep slipping through the
HealthGuard net for years. Most of my usual work was trauma, though, which was
going through changes of its own. Computerised safeguards had made traffic
accidents rare, and I suspected that within a decade no one would get the
chance to stick their hand in a conveyor belt again. If the steady stream of
gunshot and knife wounds ever dried up, Iłd have to retrain for nose jobs and
reconstructing rugby players. �I should have gone into obstetrics, like you."

Lisa shook her head. �In the next twenty years, theyłll
crack all the molecular signals, within and between mother and foetus. Therełll
be no premature births, no Caesareans, no complications. The HealthGuard will
smooth my job away, too." She added, deadpan, �Face it, Martin, wełre all
doomed to obsolescence."

�Maybe. But if we are ... itłll happen sooner in some places
than others."

�And when the time comes, you might just head off to some
place where youłre still needed?"

She was mocking me, but I took the question seriously. �Ask
me that when I get back. Three months without mod cons and I might be cured for
life."

My flight was called. We kissed goodbye. I suddenly realised
that I had no idea why I was doing this. The health of distant strangers? Who
was I kidding? Maybe Iłd been trying to fool myself into believing that I
really was that selflesshoping all the while that Lisa would talk me out of
it, offering some face-saving excuse for me to stay. I should have known shełd
call my bluff instead.

I said plainly, �Iłm going to miss you. Badly."

�I should hope so." She took my hand, scowling, finally accepting
the decision. �Youłre an idiot, you know. Be careful."

�I will." I kissed her again, then slipped away.

I was met at Entebbe airport by Magdalena Iganga, one of the
oncologists on a small team that had been put together by M�decins Sans
FrontiŁres to help overburdened Ugandan doctors tackle the growing number of
Yeyuka cases. Iganga was Tanzanian, but shełd worked throughout eastern Africa,
and as she drove her battered ethanol-powered car the thirty kilometres into
Kampala, she recounted some of her brushes with the World Health Organisation
in Nairobi.

�I tried to persuade them to set up an epidemiological
database for Yeyuka. Good idea, they said. Just put a detailed proposal to the
cancer epidemiology expert committee. So I did. And the committee said, we like
your proposal, but oh dear, Yeyuka is a contagious disease, so youłll have to
submit this to the contagious diseases expert committee instead. Whose latest
annual sitting Iłd just missed by a week." Iganga sighed stoically. �Some
colleagues and I ended up doing it ourselves, on an old 386 and a borrowed
phone line."

�Three eight what?"

She shook her head. �Palaeocomputing jargon, never mind."

Though we were dead on the equator and it was almost noon,
the temperature must have been 30 at most; Kampala was high above sea level. A
humid breeze blew off Lake Victoria, and low clouds rolled by above us,
gathering threateningly then dissipating, again and again. Iłd been promised
that Iłd come for the dry season; at worst therełd be occasional thunderstorms.

On our left, between patches of marshland, small clusters of
shacks began to appear. As we drew closer to the city, we passed through layers
of shanty towns, the older and more organised verging on a kind of bedraggled
suburbia, others looking more like out-and-out refugee camps. The tumours
caused by the Yeyuka virus tended to spread fast but grow slowly, often
partially disabling people for years before killing them, and when they could
no longer manage heavy rural labour, they usually headed for the nearest city
in the hope of finding work. Southern Uganda had barely recovered from HIV when
Yeyuka cases began to appear, around 2013; in fact, some virologists believed
that Yeyuka had arisen from a less virulent ancestor after gaining a foothold
within the immune-suppressed population. And though Yeyuka wasnłt as contagious
as cholera or tuberculosis, crowded conditions, poor sanitation and chronic
malnourishment set up the shanty towns to bear the brunt of the epidemic.

As we drove north between two hills, the centre of Kampala
appeared ahead of us, draped across a hill of its own. Compared to Nairobi,
which Iłd flown over a few hours before, Kampala looked uncluttered. The
streets and low buildings were laid out in a widely-spaced plan, neatly
organised but lacking any rigid geometry of grid lines or concentric circles.
There was plenty of traffic around us, both cycles and cars, but it flowed
smoothly enough, and for all the honking and shouting going on the drivers
seemed remarkably good humoured.

Iganga took a detour to the east, skirting the central hill.
There were lushly green sports grounds and golf courses on our right, colonial-era
public buildings and high-fenced foreign embassies on our left. There were no
high-rise slums in sight, but there were makeshift shelters and even vegetable
gardens on some stretches of parkland, traces of the shanty towns spreading
inwards.

In my jet-lagged state, it was amazing to find that this
abstract place that Iłd been imagining for months had solid ground, actual
buildings, real people. Most of my second-hand glimpses of Uganda had come from
news clips set in war zones and disaster areas; from Sydney, it had been almost
impossible to conceive of the country as anything more than a frantically
edited video sequence full of soldiers, refugees, and fly-blown corpses. In
fact, rebel activity was confined to a shrinking zone in the countryłs far
north, most of the last wave of Zairean refugees had gone home a year ago, and
while Yeyuka was a serious problem, people werenłt exactly dropping dead in the
streets.

Makerere University was in the north of the city; Iganga and
I were both staying at the guest house there. A student showed me to my room,
which was plain but spotlessly clean; I was almost afraid to sit on the bed and
rumple the sheets. After washing and unpacking, I met up with Iganga again and
we walked across the campus to Mulago Hospital, which was affiliated with the university
medical school. There was a soccer team practising across the road as we went
in, a reassuringly mundane sight.

Iganga introduced me to nurses and porters left and right;
everyone was busy but friendly, and I struggled to memorise the barrage of
names. The wards were all crowded, with patients spilling into the corridors, a
few in beds but most on mattresses or blankets. The building itself was
dilapidated, and some of the equipment must have been thirty years old, but
there was nothing squalid about the conditions; all the linen was clean, and
the floor looked and smelt like you could do surgery on it.

In the Yeyuka ward, Iganga showed me the six patients Iłd be
operating on the next day. The hospital did have a CAT scanner, but it had been
broken for the past six months, waiting for money for replacement parts, so
flat X-rays with cheap contrast agents like barium were the most I could hope
for. For some tumours, the only guide to location and extent was plain old
palpation. Iganga guided my hands, and kept me from applying too much pressure;
shełd had a great deal more experience at this than I had, and an over-zealous
beginner could do a lot of damage. The world of three-dimensional images
spinning on my workstation while the software advised on the choice of incision
had receded into fantasy. Stubbornly, though, I did the job myself; gently
mapping the tumours by touch, picturing them in my head, marking the X-rays or
making sketches.

I explained to each patient where Iłd be cutting, what Iłd remove,
and what the likely effects would be. Where necessary, Iganga translated for meeither
into Swahili, or what she described as her �broken Luganda." The news was
always only half good, but most people seemed to take it with a kind of weary optimism.
Surgery was rarely a cure for Yeyuka, usually just offering a few yearsł
respite, but it was currently the only option. Radiation and chemotherapy were
useless, and the hospitalłs sole HealthGuard machine couldnłt generate
custom-made molecular cures for even a lucky few; seven years into the
epidemic, Yeyuka wasnłt yet well enough understood for anyone to have written
the necessary software.

By the time I was finished it was dark outside. Iganga
asked, �Do you want to look in on Annłs last operation?" Ann Collins was the
Irish volunteer I was replacing.

�Definitely." Iłd watched a few operations performed here,
on video back in Sydney, but no VR scenarios had been available for proper �hands
on" rehearsals, and Collins would only be around to supervise me for a few more
days. It was a painful irony: foreign surgeons were always going to be
inexperienced, but no one else had so much time on their hands. Ugandan medical
students had to pay a small fortune in feesthe World Bank had put an end to
the new governmentłs brief flirtation with state-subsidised trainingand it
looked like therełd be a shortage of qualified specialists for at least another
decade.

We donned masks and gowns. The operating theatre was like
everything else, clean but outdated. Iganga introduced me to Collins, the
anaesthetist Eriya Okwera, and the trainee surgeon Balaki Masika.

The patient, a middle-aged man, was covered in orange Betadine-soaked
surgical drapes, arranged around a long abdominal incision. I stood beside
Collins and watched, entranced. Growing within the muscular wall of the small
intestine was a grey mass the size of my fist, distending the peritoneum, the
organłs translucent �skin", almost to bursting point. It would certainly have
been blocking the passage of food; the patient must have been on liquids for
months.

The tumour was very loose, almost like a giant discoloured
blood clot; the hardest thing would be to avoid dislodging any cancerous cells
in the process of removing it, sending them back into circulation to seed another
tumour. Before making a single cut in the intestinal wall, Collins used a laser
to cauterise all the blood vessels around the growth, and she didnłt lay a
finger on the tumour itself at any time. Once it was free, she lifted it away
with clamps attached to the surrounding tissue, as fastidiously as if she was
removing a leaky bag full of some fatal poison. Maybe other tumours were
already growing unseen in other parts of the body, but doing the best possible
job, here and now, might still add three or four years to this manłs life.

Masika began stitching the severed ends of the intestine together.
Collins led me aside and showed me the patientłs X-rays on a light-box. �This
is the site of origin." There was a cavity clearly visible in the right lung, about
half the size of the tumour shełd just removed. Ordinary cancers grew in a
single location first, and then a few mutant cells in the primary tumour
escaped to seed growths in the rest of the body. With Yeyuka, there were no �primary
tumours"; the virus itself uprooted the cells it infected, breaking down the
normal molecular adhesives that kept them in place, until the infected organ
seemed to be melting away. That was the origin of the name: yeyuka, to melt.
Once set loose into the bloodstream, many of the cells died of natural causes,
but a few ended up lodged in small capillariesphysically trapped, despite
their lack of stickinesswhere they could remain undisturbed long enough to
grow into sizable tumours.

After the operation, I was invited out to a welcoming dinner
in a restaurant down in the city. The place specialised in Italian food, which
was apparently hugely popular, at least in Kampala. Iganga, Collins and Okwera,
old colleagues by now, unwound noisily; Okwera, a solid man in his forties, grew
mildly but volubly intoxicated and told medical horror stories from his time in
the army. Masika, the trainee surgeon, was very softly spoken and reserved. I
was something of a zombie from jet lag myself, and didnłt contribute much to
the conversation, but the warm reception put me at ease.

I still felt like an impostor, here only because I hadnłt
had the courage to back out, but no one was going to interrogate me about my
motives. No one cared. It wouldnłt make the slightest difference whether Iłd
volunteered out of genuine compassion, or just a kind of moral insecurity
brought on by fears of obsolescence. Either way, Iłd brought a pair of hands
and enough general surgical experience to be useful. If youłd ever had to be a
saint to heal someone, medicine would have been doomed from the start.

I was nervous as I cut into my first Yeyuka patient, but by
the end of the operation, with a growth the size of an orange successfully
removed from the right lung, I felt much more confident. Later the same day, I
was introduced to some of the hospitalłs permanent surgical staffa reminder
that even when Collins left, Iłd hardly be working in isolation. I fell asleep
on the second night exhausted, but reassured. I could do this, it wasnłt beyond
me. I hadnłt set myself an impossible task.

I drank too much at the farewell dinner for Collins, but the
HealthGuard magicked the effects away. My first day solo was anticlimactic;
everything went smoothly, and Okwera, with no high-tech hangover cure, was
unusually subdued, while Masika was as quietly attentive as ever.

Six days a week, the world shrank to my room, the campus,
the ward, the operating theatre. I ate in the guest house, and usually fell
asleep an hour or two after the evening meal; with the sun diving straight below
the horizon, by eight ołclock it felt like midnight. I tried to call Lisa every
night, though I often finished in the theatre too late to catch her before she
left for work, and I hated leaving messages, or talking to her while she was
driving.

Okwera and his wife invited me to lunch the first Sunday, Masika
and his girlfriend the next. Both couples were genuinely hospitable, but I felt
like I was intruding on their one day together. The third Sunday, I met up with
Iganga in a restaurant, then we wandered through the city on an impromptu tour.

There were some beautiful buildings in Kampala, many of them
clearly war-scarred but lovingly repaired. I tried to relax and take in the
sights, but I kept thinking of the routinesix operations, six days a weekstretching
out ahead of me until the end of my stay. When I mentioned this to Iganga, she
laughed. �All right. You want something more than assembly-line work? Iłll line
up a trip to Mubende for you. They have patients there who are too sick to be
moved. Multiple tumours, all nearly terminal."

�Okay." Me and my big mouth; I knew I hadnłt been seeing the
worst cases, but I hadnłt given much thought to where they all were.

We were standing outside the Sikh temple, beside a plaque describing
Idi Aminłs expulsion of Ugandałs Asian community in 1972. Kampala was dotted
with memorials to atrocitiesand though Aminłs reign had ended more than forty
years ago, it had been a long path back to normality. It seemed unjust beyond
belief that even now, in an era of relative political stability, so many lives
were being ruined by Yeyuka. No more refugees marching across the countryside,
no more forced expulsionsbut cells cast adrift could bring just as much
suffering.

I asked Iganga, �So why did you go into medicine?"

�Family expectations. It was either that or the law.
Medicine seemed less arbitrary; nothing in the body can be overturned by an
appeal to the High Court. What about you?"

I said, �I wanted to be in on the revolution. The one that
was going to banish all disease."

�Ah, that one."

�I picked the wrong job, of course. I should have been a molecular
biologist."

�Or a software engineer."

�Yeah. If Iłd seen the HealthGuard coming fifteen years ago,
I might have been right at the heart of the changes. And Iłd have never looked
back. Let alone sideways."

Iganga nodded sympathetically, quite unfazed by the notion
that molecular technology might capture the attention so thoroughly that little
things like Yeyuka epidemics would vanish from sight altogether. �I can
imagine. Seven years ago, I was all set to make my fortune in one of the
private clinics in Dar es Salaam. Rich businessmen with prostate cancer, that
kind of thing. I was lucky in a way; before that market vanished completely,
the Yeyuka fanatics were nagging me, bullying me, making little deals." She
laughed. �Iłve lost count of the number of times I was promised Iłd be
co-author of a ground breaking paper in Nature Oncology if I just helped out at
some field clinic in the middle of nowhere. I was dragged into this, kicking
and screaming, just when all my old dreams were going up in smoke."

�But now Yeyuka feels like your true vocation?"

She rolled her eyes. �Spare me. My ambition now is to retire
to a highly paid consulting position in Nairobi or Geneva."

�Iłm not sure I believe you."

�You should." She shrugged. �Sure, what Iłm doing now is a
hundred times more useful than any desk job, but that doesnłt make it any
easier. You know as well as I do that the warm inner glow doesnłt last for a
thousand patients; if you fought for every one of them as if they were your own
family or friends, youłd go insane ... so they become a series of clinical
problems, which just happen to be wrapped in human flesh. And itłs a struggle
to keep working on the same problems, over and over, even if youłre convinced
that itłs the most worthwhile job in the world."

�So why are you in Kampala right now, instead of Nairobi or
Geneva?"

Iganga smiled. �Donłt worry, Iłm working on it. I donłt have
a date on my ticket out of here, like you do, but when the chance comes,
believe me, Iłll grab it just as fast as I can."

It wasnłt until my sixth week, and my two-hundred-and-fourth
operation, that I finally screwed up.

The patient was a teenaged girl with multiple infestations
of colon cells in her liver. A substantial portion of the organłs left lobe
would have to be removed, but her prognosis seemed relatively good; the right
lobe appeared to be completely clean, and it was not beyond hope that the
liver, directly downstream from the colon, had filtered all the infected cells
from the blood before they could reach any other part of the body.

Trying to clamp the left branch of the portal vein, I
slipped, and the clamp closed tightly on a swollen cyst at the base of the
liver, full of grey-white colon cells. It didnłt burst open, but it might have
been better if it had; I couldnłt literally see where the contents was
squirted, but I could imagine the route very clearly: back as far as the
Y-junction of the vein, where the blood flow would carry cancerous cells into
the previously unaffected right lobe.

I swore for ten seconds, enraged by my own helplessness. I
had none of the emergency tools I was used to: there was no drug I could inject
to kill off the spilt cells while they were still more vulnerable than an
established tumour, no vaccine on hand to stimulate the immune system into
attacking them.

Okwera said, �Tell the parents you found evidence of
leakage, so shełll need to have regular follow-up examinations."

I glanced at Masika, but he was silent.

�I canłt do that."

�You donłt want to cause trouble."

�It was an accident!"

�Donłt tell her, and donłt tell her family." Okwera regarded
me sternly, as if I was contemplating something both dangerous and
self-indulgent. �It wonłt help anyone if you dive into the shit for this. Not
her, not you. Not the hospital. Not the volunteer program."

The girlłs mother spoke English. I told her there were signs
that the cancer might have spread. She wept, and thanked me for my good work.

Masika didnłt say a word about the incident, but by the end
of the day I could hardly bear to look at him. When Okwera departed, leaving
the two of us alone in the locker room, I said, �In three or four years therełll
be a vaccine. Or even HealthGuard software. It wonłt be like this forever."

He shrugged, embarrassed. �Sure."

�Iłll raise funds for the research when I get home.
Champagne dinners with slides of photogenic patients, if thatłs what it takes."
I knew I was making a fool of myself, but I couldnłt shut up. �This isnłt the
nineteenth century. Wełre not helpless anymore. Anything can be cured, once you
understand it."

Masika eyed me dubiously, as if he was trying to decide
whether or not to tell me to save my platitudes for the champagne dinners. Then
he said, �We do understand Yeyuka. We have HealthGuard software written for it,
ready and waiting to go. But we canłt run it on the machine here. So we donłt
need funds for research. What we need is another machine."

I was speechless for several seconds, trying to make sense
of this extraordinary claim. �The hospitalłs machine is broken?"

Masika shook his head. �The software is unlicensed. If we
used it on the hospitalłs machine, our agreement with HealthGuard would be
void. Wełd lose the use of the machine entirely."

I could hardly believe that the necessary research had been
completed without a single publication, but I couldnłt believe Masika would lie
about it either. �How long can it take HealthGuard to approve the software?
When was it submitted to them?"

Masika was beginning to look like he wished hełd kept his
mouth shut, but there was no going back now. He admitted warily, �It hasnłt
been submitted to them. It canłt bethatłs the whole problem. We need a bootleg
machine, a decommissioned model with the satellite link disabled, so we can run
the Yeyuka software without their knowledge."

�Why? Why canłt they find out about it?"

He hesitated. �I donłt know if I can tell you that."

�Is it illegal? Stolen?" But if it was stolen, why hadnłt
the rightful owners licensed the damned thing, so people could use it?

Masika replied icily, �Stolen back. The only part you could
call ęstolenł was stolen back." He looked away for a moment, actually
struggling for control. Then he said, �Are you sure you want to know the whole
story?"

�Yes."

�Then Iłll have to make a phone call."

Masika took me to what looked like a boarding house, student
accommodation in one of the suburbs close to the campus. He walked briskly,
giving me no time to ask questions, or even orient myself in the darkness. I
had a feeling he would have liked to have blindfolded me, but it would hardly
have made a difference; by the time we arrived I couldnłt have said where we
were to the nearest kilometre.

A young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty, opened the door.
Masika didnłt introduce us, but I assumed she was the person hełd phoned from
the hospital, since she was clearly expecting us. She led us to a ground floor
room; someone was playing music upstairs, but there was no one else in sight.

In the room, there was a desk with an old-style keyboard and
computer monitor, and an extraordinary device standing on the floor beside it:
a rack of electronics the size of a chest of drawers, full of exposed circuit
boards, all cooled by a fan half a metre wide.

�What is that?"

The woman grinned. �We modestly call it the Makerere supercomputer.
Five hundred and twelve processors, working in parallel. Total cost, fifty
thousand shillings."

That was about fifty dollars. �How?"

�Recycling. Twenty or thirty years ago, the computer
industry ran an elaborate scam: software companies wrote deliberately inefficient
programs, to make people buy newer, faster computers all the timethen they
made sure that the faster computers needed brand new software to work at all.
People threw out perfectly good machines every three or four years, and though
some ended up as landfill, millions were saved. Therełs been a worldwide market
in discarded processors for years, and the slowest now cost about as much as
buttons. But all it takes to get some real power out of them is a little
ingenuity."

I stared at the wonderful contraption. �And you wrote the
Yeyuka software on this?"

�Absolutely." She smiled proudly. �First, the software characterises
any damaged surface adhesion molecules it findsthere are always a few floating
freely in the bloodstream, and their exact shape depends on the strain of
Yeyuka, and the particular cells that have been infected. Then drugs are
tailor-made to lock on to those damaged adhesion molecules, and kill the
infected cells by rupturing their membranes." As she spoke, she typed on the
keyboard, summoning up animations to illustrate each stage of the process. �If
we can get this onto a real machine ... wełll be able to cure three people a
day."

Cure. Not just cut them open to delay the inevitable.

�But where did all the raw data come from? The RNA sequencing,
the X-ray diffraction studies ...?"

The womanłs smile vanished. �An insider at HealthGuard found
it in the company archives, and sent it to us over the net."

�I donłt understand. When did HealthGuard do Yeyuka studies?
Why havenłt they published them? Why havenłt they written software themselves?"

She glanced uncertainly at Masika. He said, �HealthGuardłs
parent company collected blood from five thousand people in Southern Uganda in
2013. Supposedly to follow up on the effectiveness of their HIV vaccine. What
they actually wanted, though, was a large sample of metastasising cells so they
could perfect the biggest selling point of the HealthGuard: cancer protection.
Yeyuka offered them the cheapest, simplest way to get the data they needed."

Iłd been half expecting something like this since Masikałs
comments back in the hospital, but I was still shaken. To collect the data
dishonestly was bad enough, but to bury information that was half-way to a curejust
to save paying for what theyłd takenwas unspeakable.

I said, �Sue the bastards! Get everyone who had samples
taken together for a class action: royalties plus punitive damages. Youłll
raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Then you can buy as many machines as you
want."

The woman laughed bitterly. �We have no proof. The files
were sent anonymously, therełs no way to authenticate their origin. And can you
imagine how much HealthGuard would spend on their defence? We canłt afford to
waste the next twenty years in a legal battle, just for the satisfaction of
shouting the truth from the rooftops. The only way we can be sure of making use
of this software is to get a bootleg machine, and do everything in silence."

I stared at the screen, at the cure being played out in
simulation that should have been happening three times a day in Mulago hospital.
She was right, though. However hard it was to stomach, taking on HealthGuard
directly would be futile.

Walking back across the campus with Masika, I kept thinking
of the girl with the liver infestation, and the possibility of undoing the
moment of clumsiness that would otherwise almost certainly kill her. I said, �Maybe
I can get hold of a bootleg machine in Shanghai. If I knew where to ask, where
to look." Theyłd certainly be expensive, but theyłd have to be much cheaper
than a commissioned model, running without the usual software and support.

My hand moved almost unconsciously to check the metal pulse
on my index finger. I held the ring up in the starlight. �Iłd give you this, if
it was mine to give. But thatłs thirty years away." Masika didnłt reply, too
polite to suggest that if Iłd owned the ring outright, I wouldnłt even have
raised the possibility.

We reached the University Hall; I could find my way back to
the guest house now. But I couldnłt leave it at that; I couldnłt face another
six weeks of surgery unless I knew that something was going to come of the
nightłs revelations. I said, �Look, I donłt have connections to any black
market, I donłt have a clue how to go about getting a machine. But if you can
find out what I have to do, and itłs within my power ... Iłll do it."

Masika smiled, and nodded thanks, but I could tell that he
didnłt believe me. I wondered how many other people had made promises like
this, then vanished back into the world-without-disease while the Yeyuka wards
kept overflowing.

As he turned to go, I put a hand on his shoulder to stop
him. �I mean it. Whatever it takes, Iłll do it."

He met my eyes in the dark, trying to judge something deeper
than this easy protestation of sincerity. I felt a sudden flicker of shame; Iłd
completely forgotten that I was an impostor, that Iłd never really meant to
come here, that two months ago a few words from Lisa would have seen me throw
away my ticket, gratefully.

Masika said quietly, �Then Iłm sorry that I doubted you. And
Iłll take you at your word."

Mubende was a district capital, half a dayłs drive west of
Kampala. Iganga delayed our promised trip to the Yeyuka clinic there until my
last fortnight, and once I arrived I could understand why. It was everything Iłd
feared: starved of funds, under-staffed and over-crowded. Patientsł relatives
were required to provide and wash the bedclothes, and half of them also seemed
to be bringing in painkillers and other drugs bought at the local marketssome
genuine, some ripoffs full of nothing but glucose or magnesium sulphate.

Most of the patients had four or five separate tumours. I
treated two people a day, with operations lasting six to eight hours. In ten
days, seven people died in front of me; dozens more died in the wards, waiting
for surgery.

Or waiting for something better.

I shared a crowded room at the back of the clinic with
Masika and Okwera, but even on the rare occasions when I caught Masika alone,
he seemed reluctant to discuss the details of getting hold of a bootleg
HealthGuard. He said, �Right now, the less you know the better. When the time
comes, Iłll fill you in."

The ordeal of the patients was overwhelming, but I felt more
for the clinicłs sole doctor and two nurses; for them, it never ended. The
morning we packed our equipment into the truck and headed back for Kampala, I
felt like a deserter from some stupid, pointless war: guilty about the
colleagues I was leaving behind, but almost euphoric with relief to be out of
it myself. I knew I couldnłt have stayed on hereor even in Kampalamonth after
month, year after year. However much I wished that I could have been that
strong, I understood now that I wasnłt.

There was a brief, loud stuttering sound, then the truck
squealed to a halt. The four of us were all in the back, guarding the equipment
against potholes, with the tarpaulin above us blocking everything but a narrow
rear view. I glanced at the others; someone outside shouted in Luganda at Akena
Ibingira, the driver, and he started shouting back.

Okwera said, �Bandits."

I felt my heart racing. �Youłre kidding?"

There was another burst of gunfire. I heard Ibingira jump
out of the cab, still muttering angrily.

Everyone was looking at Okwera for advice. He said, �Just
cooperate, give them what they want." I tried to read his face; he seemed grim
but not desperatehe expected unpleasantness, but not a massacre. Iganga was
sitting on the bench beside me; I reached for her hand almost without thinking.
We were both trembling. She squeezed my fingers for a moment, then pulled free.

Two tall, smiling men in dirty brown camouflage appeared at
the back of the truck, gesturing with automatic weapons for us to climb out.
Okwera went first, but Masika, whołd been sitting beside him, hung back. Iganga
was nearer to the exit than me, but I tried to get past her; I had some
half-baked idea that this would somehow lessen her risk of being taken off and
raped. When one of the bandits blocked my way and waved her forward, I thought
this fear had been confirmed.

Masika grabbed my arm, and when I tried to break free, he
tightened his grip and pulled me back into the truck. I turned on him angrily,
but before I could say a word he whispered, �Shełll be all right. Just tell me:
do you want them to take the ring?"

�What?"

He glanced nervously towards the exit, but the bandits had
moved Okwera and Iganga out of sight. �Iłve paid them to do this. Itłs the only
way. But say the word now and Iłll give them the signal, and they wonłt touch
the ring."

I stared at him, waves of numbness sweeping over my skin as
I realised exactly what he was saying.

�You could have taken it off under anaesthetic."

He shook his head impatiently. �Itłs sending data back to
HealthGuard all the time: cortisol, adrenaline, endorphins, prostaglandins.
Theyłll have a record of your stress levels, fear, pain ... if we took it off
under anaesthetic, theyłd know youłd given it away freely. This way, itłll look
like a random theft. And your insurance company will give you a new one."

His logic was impeccable; I had no reply. I might have
started protesting about insurance fraud, but that was all in the future, a
separate matter entirely. The choice, here and now, was whether or not I let
him have the ring by the only method that wouldnłt raise suspicion.

One of the bandits was back, looking impatient. Masika asked
plainly, �Do I call it off? I need an answer." I turned to him, on the verge of
ranting that hełd wilfully misunderstood me, abused my generous offer to help
him, and put all our lives in danger.

It would have been so much bullshit, though. He hadnłt misunderstood
me. All hełd done was taken me at my word.

I said, �Donłt call it off."

The bandits lined us up beside the truck, and had us empty
our pockets into a sack. Then they started taking watches and jewellery. Okwera
couldnłt get his wedding ring off, but stood motionless and scowling while one
of the bandits applied more force. I wondered if Iłd need a prosthesis, if Iłd
still be able to do surgery, but as the bandit approached me I felt a strange
rush of confidence.

I held out my hand and looked up into the sky. I knew that
anything could be healed, once it was understood.