Kiln People

39 Only Some Lads

The golem with the tan spiral offered some personal recollections to prove he was Beta … things only he and Albert Morris should know from past encounters between two adversaries. Actions, deceptions, insults, and secret details from times when I barely escaped his clutches — or he mine.

“It sounds like you two have been engaged in an ongoing role-claying game,” remarked Lum.

“A childish one,” commented the soul-conservative, Gadarene.

“Perhaps,” Beta’s ditto answered. “But a game with serious money at stake. One reason I had to expand my business was in order to set aside enough cash to pay off the accumulating fines. In case Albert here finally caught the real me.”

“Don’t blame Albert for your career as a ditnapping thief,” I grumbled. “Anyway, I’d wager everything I own that you’ve got bigger troubles now. A whole lot worse than civil liens for copyright violation. You’ve attracted new enemies, haven’t you? More dangerous than any local private eye.”

Beta conceded the point with a nod. “For months, I felt a hot breath on my neck. One by one, my operations were meticulously targeted by someone who would break in suddenly, using prion bombs to slaughter my copies — and the templates I’d stolen — or else he’d take over the operation for a few days, before burning it all to cover the evidence.”

“Huh. That explains something that happened at the Teller Building,” I commented. “On Monday, you temporarily captured my green scout. At least I thought it was you. But my captors seemed more vicious, even kind of frantic. They actually tried using torture—”

“That wasn’t me,” Beta assured grimly.

“Hm, well, I escaped, barely. And on Tuesday morning I returned with Inspector Blane and some LSA enforcers to raid the joint. That went well. But later, around back of the building, I ran into a decaying yellow who claimed to be you, muttering something about how a competitor was ‘taking over.’

“Do you have any idea who’s been doing all this?”

“At first I suspected you, Morris. Then I realized it had to be someone really competent—” Beta glanced at me, but I refused the bait, keeping a poker face. So the sardonic ditto resumed. “Someone who was able to track down my clandestine copying centers, one by one, despite every precaution. As a desperate measure, I used my best evasion methods to stash emergency backups in secret portakilns, programmed to thaw after some delay.”

“You are one of those pre-imprinted copies?” Lum asked. “How old are your memories? When were you made?”

Beta’s ditto grimaced. “More than two weeks ago! I might have stayed dormant in that tiny niche forever, if Albert’s news hadn’t arrived, triggering reanimation. At that point, I contacted Mr. Montmorillin here, who kindly invited me to this meeting.” The spiral golem indicated Pal.

I sat up. “You say, ‘Albert’s news—’ ”

The other realperson present, James Gadarene, stomped a foot. “Whoa! First let’s establish something, this Beta person, a notorious underworld figure, really was engaged in a plot with ‘Queen’ Irene and Gineen Wammaker—”

“We haven’t yet determined if the maestra herself—”

Gadarene shot me a glare. Remembering my place, I grunted apologetically and shut up.

“So,” he resumed. “We’re expected to believe that Beta and Irene and Wammaker really were planning to invade UK in a semi-innocent effort to uncover hoarded technologies. Even if that’s true, I doubt they had the public’s benefit in mind. More likely extortion! A scheme to blackmail Aeneas Kaolin into buying their silence.”

Beta conceded with a shrug. “Cash is nice. We also wanted the new ditto-extension technique. Irene was running out of organic memory and needed to slow her inloads. Wammaker and I saw commercial benefits to extending the duration of our copies — her legal ones and my pirated rip-offs.” Beta laughed. “Our alliance was one of temporary convenience.”

“Never mind that.” Gadarene leaned forward. “In order to carry out your espionage mission, you planned to hire your ongoing nemesis, Ditective Albert Morris. Wasn’t that risky?”

Beta nodded. “It’s why I pretended to be that Vic Collins character. Anyway, why not hire Albert? The job suited his abilities.”

“Only some enemy hunted you down first. He replaced you, then changed the aim of the mission. Is that what we’re expected to believe?”

A high-pitched version of Pal’s voice called from a table nearby. The little ferret-golem — Palloid — manipulated a holo viewer. “I’ve got that film roll we found at Irene’s. Ready to show ’em what you discovered, Gumby?”

I nodded. Images erupted from the viewer, showing a series of clandestine meetings in limousines, between Irene and her confederates. I told the others about my close-in analysis of the plaid dye patterns worn by “Vic Collins.”

Beta grinned at the compliment when I said, “That was a neat trick, using tiny pixel emitters to change your skin motifs in a flash. It explains how you slipped my grasp a number of times. Apparently, your enemy didn’t know about the technique. Or else he didn’t care. Because when he took over, he just copied your latest dye job and moved right in. Irene never noticed.

“It was a simple matter, then, for this enemy to alter your plan. Replace the espionage gear that you three intended to plant in Albert’s gray, inserting a bomb instead, changing the goal from industrial espionage to sabotage. Is that right?”

Beta’s golem shrugged. “My memories are two weeks old, so I can’t testify about recent events … except to say that’s consistent with what I feared. My nemesis must have completed his takeover of my entire operation.” He smacked his palm angrily. “If only I had a clue who it was!”

Would it be wrong to confess feeling gratification at seeing Beta suffer, in the same way Albert had, for years — wondering and worrying about the identity of his arch foe?

“Well, I can’t claim that I’m competent, Beta. But if it’s a clue you want …”

At my nod, Palloid switched to the very last slide, showing a later “Vic Collins” with its stolid, unchanging tartan-styled skin. Only when the view zoomed closer … much closer … we could all see micro-peeling where the surface disguise gave away, revealing a different coloration underneath. A shimmering glint, like metal, only much brighter than steel. Lum’s green golem walked closer, rubbing his chin as if he had a beard to scratch. “Why, that looks …”

His ideological opposite, Gadarene, finished for him. “It looks like white gold or platinum. Hey, you aren’t trying to tell us Aeneas Kaolin—” The man gaped. “But why would a tycoon get his hands dirty, messing with scum like this?”

Gadarene gestured dismissively at Beta, who sat up, offended.

“More to the point,” Pal added, scratching his own very real two-day beard. “What would he gain by sabotaging his own factory?”

“An insurance scam?” Lum guessed. “A way to write off obsolete stock?”

“No,” Gadarene said, his teeth clenching. “It was a plot to eliminate all of his enemies, at once.”

I nodded. “Consider the multiple layers of blame we have here. First, by completing your foolish tunnels into the UK complex, both of your groups” — I gestured at Lum and Gadarene — “dug yourselves a trap. The perfect scapegoats. Especially after someone sent those dittos, made up to resemble the apparent bomber, to meet with you the night before. Even if you manage to avoid jail or fines, you’ve suffered a major humiliation. Discredited, you look like fools.”

“Huh, thanks,” Lum grunted. Gadarene glowered silently.

“Then Kaolin had to get rid Albert, too,” Pal said. “Is that why you got blown up, old friend? To keep you from denying involvement? Rather harsh! For one thing, the police take murder a lot more seriously than slaughtering a bunch of dittos.”

I agreed.

“That part still doesn’t make much sense. Anyway, what did poor Albert ever do to him?

“But the next layer fits everything we’ve heard this afternoon. Queen Irene realized, just as soon as she heard about the sabotage attack, that everything had gone horribly wrong. She arranged an exit under her own terms, leaving her partners, Vic Collins and Gineen Wammaker, to serve as the ultimate fall guys.”

“And Irene left evidence indicating that Collins was Beta,” Palloid added.

“Yeah. And that’s where the trail would have ended. With an infamous ditnapper and a renowned ‘pervert’ implicated at the bottom layer, caught in a fiendish alliance that went horribly wrong. A neat package, implicating or embarrassing a whole swathe of folks Kaolin hated — or merely found irritating.”

Beta’s spiral golem nodded.

“And the scheme might have worked, if not for these pictures Irene took, and some clever ditective work on your part. Surprisingly clever, Morris.”

I could only shake my head. “Charming, to the last.”

Pal rolled forward, inspecting the holo image. “This ain’t a whole lot of evidence to go on. Especially when you’re throwing accusations at a trillionaire.”

“We don’t need convincing evidence,” Palloid snapped at his original. “Just enough probable cause to open a full investigation. With this, we can subpoena UK’s inner camera network. Offer a Henchman Prize. Get the police in on it. Demand to see Kaolin himself, in the flesh—”

That’s when it happened.

Something passed through me — it felt like a warm sigh of wind — urging me to turn around and listen.

I did, and immediately picked up a strange sound … a soft scraping at the door.

Then the door exploded.

Because I saw it coming, I barely dodged a huge splinter of wood, hurtling through the space where my head had been. Then the first armed invader charged through whirling smoke, guns ablaze.

Shifting to emergency speed, I threw myself at the wide-eyed James Gadarene, who yelped as I covered him with my body, bearing him to the ground. Accidents can happen during a melee, and whoever was barging in might not expect to find any real people here in dittotown, where the rule is often “shoot whatever moves.” Gadarene kicked back with panicky strength, as if I were an attacker! So it took at least four seconds to bury the fool under a couch. By then, a red-hot battle raged.

The invaders wore crisscross stripes — gang colors. Wax Warriors, if I recalled right. And it could have just been a few lads, dropping by to have some fun — except for the coincidence of timing. Rising up, I saw that several assailants had already fallen at the door, cut down by Pal’s uncannily swift reflexes — and the viciously effective scattergun he now held, pumping wide sprays of high-velocity pellets at the ruined entryway.

He wasn’t alone. Pal’s little ferret-duplicate stood on his right shoulder, firing a mini-pistol, their intrapersonal differences apparently forgotten. And Beta was busy, too. The spiral-patterned ditto had whipped out a slender blowgun with a forty-round magazine. With each puff of breath, he dispatched a self-targeting smart-dart toward a foe’s ceramic eyes, bearing small payloads of trenchant enzymes.

Bodies piled near the shattered door, but more assailants kept spilling though, clambering or leaping over fallen comrades, firing as they came. Lamps and fixtures shattered all around.

“Gumby, catch!”

Pal tossed me the scattergun, grabbing another that popped from some recess in the mobile chair as I joined the fight. We fired together, just in time to thwart another rush.

A new clamor made me turn, catching movement outside the apartment window. More invaders teetered on the rickety fire escape, preparing to smash in.

“Lum!” I cried at the cheap green, sent to our meeting by the emancipation fetishist. “Guard the window!”

Lum spread his hands. “I’m unarmed!”

“Go!” I yelled, diving toward the front door and firing another blast as I rolled up by several steaming bodies. Grabbing a weapon from one still-twitching hand, I tossed it in a high arc toward the green mancie, hoping Lum would catch it and know what to do. “Beta, help Lum!” I shouted, dashing forward again.

Pressed against the wall, right next to the shattered door frame, I was suddenly in position to blast down the hallway in one direction, taking out a whole row of nasties who were waiting to charge in. The scattergun mowed them down like clay dolls slumping before a hose. Of course, that let the other half of the attacking force know exactly where I was.

A thump told me when someone slapped an object on the other side of the wall that I leaned against. I hurriedly backed away, two secs before an explosion showered the interior with debris, smashing a new opening four meters wide.

The window blew at the same moment. Glass sprayed everywhere. I heard gunfire from that quarter and hoped Lum would give a good account of himself.

My new position let me ambush about half of the new wave pouring in from the hall. A good ratio, if they cared about losses. Which they didn’t, continuing their charge heedless of casualties. Palloid’s mini-gun emptied and with no time to get another, the miniature golem leaped, flinging himself at the throat of a foe who reacted with reflexive surprise, stumbling backward into several fellows. The kamikaze attack kept that bunch busy for precious seconds while I blasted those behind. But the gesture ended predictably, with poor little Palloid smashed to bits.

That pissed me off, but not as much as Pal.

“Dammit, I wanted those memories!” he screamed, flinging his scattergun and grabbing another weapon from some recess of his chair. One glimpse made me quail. It was an evaporator.

Even battle-hardened gang members reacted with dismay, diving for cover. One was too late as a lump of unstable crystal collapsed in the firing chamber, sending a coherent blast of tuned microwaves boring right through him — and the wall behind.

Another pair arrived as reinforcements, stared at Pal, turned to flee … only to join a second wall section evaporating into oblivion.

“Behind you!” I screamed, standing to shoot my comparative popgun toward the window as Lum’s hapless greenie was trampled by fresh invaders. No sign of Beta. No surprise there.

Swiveling his chair, Pal reloaded, then blasted another bolt of disintegrating microwaves at the newcomers, vaporizing one of them plus half of another — along with the window frame and part of the fire escape beyond.

To my relief, nobody fired back at him, even though he was in the open.

They can tell he’s real and they don’t want cops involved. The most they’ll do to Pal is grab his gun and throw a tarp over him. Maybe try to force a forget-sniff up his nose, to erase the last hour or so.

Of course, that meant all the gunners turned on me. Bullets struck all around, edging closer, till Pal finished levering another crystal into place and waved the ray tube, preparing another blast. The Waxers scattered, dropping for cover, briefly giving me a respite.

Pal’s eyes met mine, releasing me from my golem duty to defend any realfolks. These gangers were playing by the rules. “I’m safe,” he growled, snatching my roll of film from the nearby holo reader and tossing it to me. “Go!”

With a quick nod to my friend, I rolled to one side, scrambled up, then dashed across the room, taking a shallow dive behind the kitchen counter just in time as sprays of pellets tore the faux-wood panels, ricocheting amid pots and pans. Thank heavens the place came furnished.

“Come on, bastards!” Pal screamed while charging his semi-illegal weapon one more time. “Pathetic, punks. Shoot me!”

There was a sob in his voice — a pain that even his best friend rarely heard. And yes, part of me sympathized, hoping Pal would finally get the kind of death he wanted. With a bang, no whimper.

They were closing in. Surely his Big Gun must be running out of fist-size charges. My own weapon had just a few rounds. I heard skirmishers approaching from three sides. It looked bad.

Then the wall behind me evaporated in a sudden cloud of hot, expanding gases.

“Gumby, run!” Pal cried.

I was already through, pounding past surprised tenants of the apartment next door — a simulacrum family who stared at me goggle-eyed, cowering behind their sofa while a cheap TV in the corner blared theme music for the Cassius and Henry Show.

Fortunately, they were all dittos, play-acting life in a more adventurous age. So I charged past them guilt-free. Any fines resulting from this interruption will be simple. Damages only. No punitives.

Anyway, who are they gonna bill?

40 Friends in Knead

There is something quaintly sweet and old-timey about the electronic world of “artificial intelligence” and computer-generated images.

All right, my generation tends to look down on antique hackers and cybergeezers, many of them still clinging to their vain faith in digital transcendence — a miscarried dream of super-smart machines, downloaded personalities, and virtual worlds more real than reality. It’s become a joke.

Worse, it’s turned into another hobby.

Yet, I confess that I do love this stuff. Cruising the Old Web in search of hidden info-troves. Skating from one camera view to the next. Setting up little micro-avatars to go plunging into databases that are so thick and sedimentary with more than a century’s layered gigabytes that your software emissaries come equipped with pickaxes and headlamps. You nearly always have to specify exactly what you’re looking for in order for them to draw anything useful at all.

Still, pluck and persistence can bring up gems. Like the fact that Yosil Maharal served as a highly paid consultant for the Dodecahedron.

It fits — he was a world-renowned expert in soulistics, known for original thinking. Naturally, the Dodecs — and perhaps even the President’s team in the Glasshouse — would’ve consulted Maharal, in order to plumb the next stage. Get a handle on what’s coming. Scope out what new technologies may already be in the hands of potential enemies. He was also a chief adviser and designer when they planted this giant reserve army of battle-golems deep under the Jesse Helms Range.

I learned about all this while using the secure dataport that Chen’s ditto had been leading us toward, before Ritu vanished and I had to make the little, apelike tax collector go away. Things felt bleak now, without company, though solitude allowed me to concentrate without interruption.

It seems they pretty much gave Maharal carte blanche, I realized, waggling my fingers and hands beneath an ultra-secure, government-issue chador. Several viewglobes grew and shrank, responding to my flitting eyes. One conveyed a surface map of the region, portraying the army base with its training, relaxation, tanning, and imprinting facilities, along with nearby four-star hotels that cater to avid fight fans. Some distance southwest, beyond a sheer escarpment, lay the battleground itself, where national teams fight for glory and to settle disputes without bloodshed. In a region as cratered as the Moon, a patch of desert had been sacrificed for sport, and to spare the rest of the planet from war.

That much the public knew.

Only now I could also follow a maze of tunnels and caverns below the base, heading in the opposite direction. A secret fortress created for a vast army of ready-to-serve warriors. Some portions were openly labeled. Other areas were mere vague outlines on the map, shaded to indicate stronger layers of secrecy, requiring passwords and ID verifiers I lacked. Nor did I care about that. Matters of national security didn’t interest me. What riveted my attention was the fact that this network of man-made caves appeared to stretch quite some distance eastward, beyond the formal military zone, deep below state and private lands.

Toward Urraca Mesa — I saw — the destination Ritu and I were aiming for when we first set out, Tuesday night.

Coincidence? I had already begun to suspect that Yosil Maharal chose the site of his “vacation cabin” with great care, many years ago.

Bodily pangs forced me to shrug off the chador and switch to old-fashioned viewscreens, in order to drink and eat while I worked. Fortunately, this part of the cavern was also a National Leadership Enclave — a habitat set aside for high government officials, in case of some dire emergency. Food and other provisions lay plentifully stacked on nearby shelves. At first sight, the cans and packages looked untouched, but quite a few were missing in back, as if someone had been raiding the larder, carefully rearranging intact goods up front to hide the pilferage. I availed myself of my first fully satisfying meal in two days — my tax dollars well spent, I figure — plus a double mug of fizzy Liquid Sleep. That helped a lot. Still, I found myself wishing I were black instead of organic brown. I concentrate much better when I’m ebony.

“Superimpose the location of the mountain cabin owned by Yosil Maharal,” I ordered.

The spot instantly glimmered onscreen — a flashing amber speck at the end of a winding road. If I asked to zoom closer, the computer would retrieve recent skyviews showing the house and drive, or even catalogue nearby foliage by species and chlorophyll reflectivity profiles. The cabin lay a few kilometers beyond the easternmost extension of the underground golem base, separated from my present map locale by a single oblong plateau.

I no longer believed in coincidence.

“So, what d’you figure, Al?” I mumbled to myself. “Did Maharal commute all the way around that furshluginer mesa, in order to come down here through the front door? Naw, that wasn’t the Professor’s style. Come and go without a trace, that was Dr. Yosil! Even a back door would’ve left him open to detection and observation every time he came down here to raid the government’s larder, or to pick up nifty items for his cloak-and-dagger scheme … whatever it was. Hell, some war fan with a wandering voyeur drone might have spotted him, if he came across the surface.”

No, I went on silently. If Professor Maharal had been sneaking into this base, he’d want to come all the way under concealment.

Jabbing my finger repeatedly at the map-globe, I commanded, “Avatar, find microseismic data for the subregion indicated. Use a Schulman-Watanabe tomographic correlation to sift for unmapped subterranean passages, connecting this location and that one.”

The military intelligence program I had hijacked was a pretty good one. Yet it balked, unable or unwilling to comply:

“The area in question was last given a detailed seismic survey eight years ago. At that time, no subterranean passages existed in the area you indicated. Since then, systematic seismometry in the specified region has been limited to watching for attempted area penetration by unauthorized interlopers. No inward-directed tunneling has been detected.”

So. There had been no hidden passageways through the mesa when the secret base was established, and no sign of outsiders trying to get in since then. Was I barking up the wrong tree?

“Wait a minute. What about digging activity from within the base, aimed outward?”

I had to rephrase the question several times, forcing the avatar to reexamine the security system’s record of micro-temblors and sonic vibrations in surrounding rock layers.

“What about areas on the base perimeter with seismic activity levels well above normal?”

“There have been no unexplained activity levels more than fifteen percent above normal.”

Rats. So much for that idea. Too bad. It seemed a good one.

I was about to give up … then decided to follow this line just a bit farther. “Show me the highest-level activity loci with accepted explanations.”

The map of the underground facility and its surroundings now bloomed with overlapping bands of color, showing peak levels of sonic and seismic noise during the last few years. “There,” I pointed. An area at the perimeter zoomed toward me, haloed by ripples of red and orange. Appended was a notification — sealed and date-stamped — explaining that an ongoing program of boreholes had been ordered, for the purpose of groundwater quality sampling.

But a cross-check with the base environmental protection office showed no data from these samples! Moreover, the area in question happened to be at the exact spot closest to Urraca Mesa.

Bingo.

“So, Ritu. Your dad hacked the military’s security system and forged approval for a seismic variance. All the cover he needed to burrow away to his heart’s content. Impressive!

“Of course, it still meant having to dig outward from the interior, instead of coming in from the outside. What did Maharal do, smuggle in tunneling equipment?”

No, there was a better explanation. An easier way to get the job done.

I thought of checking the base master inventory, to see if someone had been pilfering from the golem stores, taking some of the raw soldier blanks away to use as mining labor. But those auditors Chen had spotted inthearmory … they’d be accessing the inventory system right now for their tallies. They might notice if I snooped that database at the same time, secure portal or no.

Better go in person, then. See where this trail takes me.

I started to sign off, but hesitated, my eyes darting among the beautiful viewglobes floating above the desk, each of them responding to my attention by ballooning larger, eagerly, voluptuously. Linked to the wide world again, I felt it draw me, call to me, tempt me with opportunities -

To contact Clara and let her know I was alive.

To access Nell’s emergency cache.

To communicate with Inspector Blane and find out what was new in the Beta Case.

To check police and insurance company reports about the sabotage attempt at Universal Kilns, and find out if I was still a “top suspect.”

To get in touch with Pal and have him send a whole army of his wonderful sneak-and-grab dittos, to help me as I headed — vulnerably real — into hazardous territory.

I had meant to do all of those things, and more, when I first asked Chen’s little ape-dit to find me a safe access port. Only now I held back.

Contacting Clara might only serve to implicate her in my actions, perhaps ruining her career.

Nell’s cache? What could it contain that I didn’t already know? All of my dittos vanished days ago. The last one — a sarcastic ebony — was blasted into supersonic pottery shards on Tuesday, around midnight. Since no one else knew how to access the cache, checking it would be a waste of time. Worse, it might alert my enemies.

As for the UK attack, blame seemed to be shifting already. Open news reports were now showing a raid — led by the LSA’s Blane, of all people — breaking down the doors of a recently shuttered kink bar in dittotown, the Rainbow Lounge. A lurid tale of conspiracy, double-cross, and ritual suicide was rapidly unfolding. One disturbing image showed a cremated woman, surrounded by her own crisped dittos, like the pyre of some Viking potentate departing for Valhalla with an escort of sacrificed thralls.

Another view hovered over the maestra of Studio Neo, Gineen Wammaker, who swatted at voyeurcams that buzzed around her elegant head while denying that she had any part of the conspiracy, crying out, “I was framed!”

That made me chuckle …

… till I recalled what it meant. I wasn’t the sole patsy, or the only person set up as a fall guy. Reputations were toppling all over town, from religious nuts to the ditto Emancipation movement, to purveyors of perversion like the maestra. Yet no one mentioned the three names that worried me most.

Beta. Kaolin. Maharal

Seared in memory, I could still see that platinum golem suddenly appearing along a desert highway to bushwhack me. Because of something I knew? Or perhaps something I was about to find out — probably having to do with Kaolin’s ex-partner and friend, with whom he was now at war. Somehow, I had become caught up in a desperate struggle between mad geniuses. And it didn’t even matter that Yosil Maharal was dead! Nowadays, mere death offers no guarantees. In fact, I could feel Maharal’s reach, extending beyond the grave, keeping the war hot. Driving the tycoon to desperate measures.

More to the point, Maharal had helped to design this very facility I was sitting in. Given his aptitude for skulduggery, Ritu’s father might have laid any number of traps for the unwary. Especially if you stopped in one place too long.

Better to stay a moving target. Much as I wanted to linger and study the news, probing the Web for details, it really was time to get on.

I folded the government-issue chador under my belt, then headed east along a corridor I’d seen on the map — a passageway that supposedly should end about a hundred and fifty meters from there in a large storage room — followed by solid rock.

Only it wasn’t just a storage room.

True, there were shelves, piled endlessly with machine parts and tools, followed by freezers containing hundreds of ditto blanks, still doughy and unimprinted, ready to be used by the Prexy and Dodecs, should they ever come down here to hide.

To the naked eye, it all seemed above board.

My eyes weren’t nude, however. The scout uniform that I wore had lovely infrared scanners, pattern detectors and Dopplers that showed swirls and eddies in the way air gusted across the room. I was no expert at using all that stuff, but I wasn’t exactly clueless, either. I learned as I searched. Anyway, it was obvious which wall to go to.

The seismic anomalies emanated from somewhere around here.

I didn’t expect to find any obvious signs of a tunneling operation, but the place was actually spotless. Banks of tall, locked cabinets covered the wall in question, with no sign of anything behind them but native stone.

Which cupboard should this little doggie try? I pondered. Even if I choose correctly, how do I get through? And what defenses might lie on the other side?

Instrument readings didn’t show much difference from one cabinet to the next. No swirls of cold, subterranean air leaking from the other side. No telltale heat signatures.

Maharal would’ve made sure that routine security patrols saw nothing to raise suspicions. Even in his arrogance, did the Professor imagine he could take on PEZ and the entire United States of America? Concealment was Yosil’s only friend. No wonder he worked so hard at developing the skill.

I fingered the small sidearm that came with the scout uniform — a laser that could be adjusted into a tool for either a machinist or a sniper. Cutting through the locks would be no problem … and then through the backing of each cabinet till I struck a hidden passageway — or else learned the flaw in all my fancy reasoning.

What about sensors or booby traps? Could I find a way through without alerting whoever lurked on the other side of Urraca Mesa?

You keep thinking and acting as if Maharal is still alive!

Any tunnel was probably dusty and unused, ever since the professor crashed and burned way back on Monday. His residual golems would’ve decayed soon after that, leaving a silent sanctuary, with no one left to defend its secrets.

Sounds logical. Are you sure enough to stake your life on it?

Even if Maharal was dead, Kaolin had proved himself active, inimical, and willing to do almost anything. What if the trillionaire was already there, waiting at the other side?

Another notion occurred to me as I stood contemplating my next move — a piece of advice Clara once offered:

“When in doubt, try not to think like the dumb hero of some silly movied.”

Charging into danger was one of those overused cinematic clichés, religiously adhered to by eight generations of brain-dead producers and directors. Another went: A hero must always assume that the authorities are evil, or useless, or bound to misunderstand. It helps keep the plot rolling if your protagonist never thinks of calling for help.

I had been operating under that assumption for two days. And, well, after all, the cops were after me! Officially as a “material witness,” but clearly I had been set up to be blamed for the sabotage attempt at Universal Kilns. Not to mention the fact that someone had tried to blow me up.

Twice!

Still, things were changing. The police and military were clearly upset about the missile attack on my home. Surely some of them were honest and competent enough to realize there were layers to this whole affair, running below surface appearances. What if I showed them how Maharal had hacked the system here at the base, abusing their trust and creating a back entrance for his personal use? It might help clear my name. There could even be a whistle-blower award!

Suppose I were to phone up my attorney. Have her call a meeting. Bring the base commandant together with a commissioner from the Human Protection Unit and a licensed Fair Witness, to make sure nothing can get hidden away … It would be a profound relief to tell all. The whole story, as far as I knew it. Just recount everything. Let battalions of professionals take over from there.

And yet, my gut churned at the thought. It wouldn’t feel right!

I was still running on a high of anger and combat hormones — nothing else could have sustained me across the last few days. Indignation is a drug that burns long and hot. And it can only be properly experienced in your real body.

Me against Beta. Me against Kaolin. Me against Maharal. Bad guys, all of them, each in his own brilliantly evil way. Didn’t their hatred make me the hero? Their equal?

That sardonic crack helped me step back.

It helped me decide what I had to do.

“A hero is someone who gets the job done, Albert,” Clara once said. “Bravely when necessary. Courage is an admirable last resort, for when intelligence fails.”

Okay, okay, I thought, feeling humility wash over me with a sense of cleansing relief.

A man’s got to know his limitations, and I’ve gone way beyond mine.

Hell, I’m not even a match for Beta! Kaolin and Maharal are clearly out of my league.

All right. Time to be a citizen. Let’s do it.

Already bracing for the inevitable long interrogation ahead, I reached for my borrowed chador-telephone and started to turn around -

— only to stagger back in surprise as a tall figure loomed toward me, out of the shadows!

The oversized humanoid shape emerged from around the corner of a nearby autokiln, lumbering at me with both arms outstretched.

The visor of the scout uniform flared with threat diagrams, covering the golem’s silhouette with flaring auras and juttering symbols that might have meant something to a trained soldier. But the garish flood of data only smothered me in clouds of confusion. I threw back the visor from my face -

— and was immediately struck by waves of odor. New-baked clay, rather sour. The harsh smell might have warned me, if I hadn’t been relying on borrowed army equipment, instead of my own senses.

“Stop!” I warned, dropping the chador, which got tangled on the holster of my sidearm. Finally pulling the laser free, I frantically tried to find the safety switch. My wounded thumb, slippery with sweat, worked badly and the gloves didn’t help.

“Don’t come any closer. I’ll shoot!”

The golem kept shambling forward, emitting a low groan. Something was wrong with it — perhaps faulty imprinting or too-rapid baking. Whatever the cause, it wasn’t slowing down or pausing for rational discussion!

I faced a sudden choice.

Try to dodge. Or shoot. You can’t do both.

The safety clicked. The pistol abruptly throbbed with reassuring power. I chose.

A hot beam tore through the golem, slicing off one arm, biting the torso.

It reacted with a roar, and charged. The heavy figure crashed into me as I threw up an arm.

Wrong choice.

41 Oh No, Mr. Hands!

Did you know, Albert, that the very first life forms may have been made of clay?”

Yosil’s damned ghost won’t stop talking. It just keeps yattering while the torment inflicted by his soul-stretching device gets worse by the hour. I yearn desperately to stifle his gray specter. Exorcise its unnatural haunting. Dispatch it to rejoin the maker it betrayed and destroyed, days ago.

Of course, that’s what it wants — my anger! To give me a focus. Pain will be a center for me to revolve around, while everything else crumbles.

“A Scotsman came up with the idea, Albert, almost a century ago, and it really was quite clever.

“By that time, biologists agreed that a rich soup of organic compounds must have formed on Earth, almost as soon as the planet cooled enough for liquid oceans. But what happened next? How did all those drifting amino acids and such get organized into tidy, self-replicating units? Cells, containing DNA and the machinery for reproduction, didn’t just happen! Something got them jump-started!

“That something may have been vast beds of semi-porous clay, spanning whole sea bottoms, offering an enormous array of patterned surfaces to protect growing molecular clusters. Providing templates for the earliest organisms. Setting a few on the road to greatness.”

Maharal’s gray ghost preens, slapping its chest.

“Only now the road is coming full circle, as we return to our original form! No longer organic, but creatures sculpted out of Mother Earth’s own mineral flesh! Don’t you find that interesting?”

What interests me is getting out of here, especially each time the machinery sends another wave of compulsion down my spine, propelling me against the straps, heaving to get these hands of mine around ditYosil’s neck. I’d grind his undead bones so fine, none of the atoms would ever find each other again!

From somewhere nearby … closer than nearby … comes a resonant reply.

Amen, brother.

The voice is no figment. I know it’s the little orange-red golem, the one Maharal imprinted from me a few hours ago. Now its thoughts come flooding in, swelling and fading, merging with mine. It must be part of ditYosil’s complicated experiment and he seems greatly pleased. Now that a link has been established, the next phase is a memory test. How well can I remember things that “I” never learned?

With the wave of a hand, he sends about a hundred image bubbles floating in front of my eyes, depicting everything from lunar landscapes to the latest robohockey game. My gaze can’t help flitting among the pictures, involuntarily focusing on a few that look familiar. Certain bubbles flare as I recognize their contents …

… a Grecian urn that held wine from the age of Pericles …

… a buxom Venus figure from the Paleolithic era …

… a full-sized terracotta statute of an ancient Chinese soldier, given to Yosil by the grateful Son of Heaven, for his work at the excavations in Sian …

I not only recognize these images, I remember being shown the originals, in Maharal’s private museum. Somehow, Little Red is feeding me memories, without benefit of a brain-sifter or thick cryo-cables! We’re inloading each other, back and forth, despite being separated by twenty meters and a thick glass wall.

So, this isn’t just about wanting to make dit-to-dit copies. Not another industrial process for Universal Kilns. Maharal is trying for another breakthrough. Something bigger!

The gray ghost chatters in excitement over results from the memory test. For a time it pleases him even more than lecturing to me about evolutionary claydistics. Clamping down, I try hard to shut out the sound of his yammering voice. Quash the irritation and anger! He obviously wants me distracted by hate — an easy emotional state to model and control. One so pure that it may breach the containment of a single vessel. A single body.

I must resist. Only it’s so hard not to hate. Every few minutes, his loathsome machinery scrapes my pseudoneural array, prodding agonizingly at my ersatz body, provoking the salmon reflex — that craving to go home. To return. To my original. An original he destroyed with a missile, around midnight on Tuesday.

It’s what he told Little Red. That he murdered me. In order to make this experiment work, he removed the “anchor” of my organic self, hoping it would force two copies of me toward each other, instead.

I get it. His aim is to set one Standing Wave reverberating across open space. It’s an accomplishment, all right. Like making an electron occupy an entire room with a single, prodigious quantum state. But why? What’s the goal?

He can’t be after a Nobel Prize. Not when it took both suicide and murder to reach this point. Is he crazy enough to hope he can maintain secrecy indefinitely? Secrets are like snowflakes, nowadays — rare and hard to keep for very long.

There’s got to be more at stake. Something he plans to bring to a fruition, soon.

I feel agreement from Little Red — my other half. Each time the big machines pulse, we feel closer. More like a single person, reunited. And yet -

— and yet, there’s something else. Something outside of us. Something both familiar and strange at the same time. I keep picking up what feel like echoes … like glinting reflections, scattered off distant pools. Are they part of ditYosil’s plan?

Maybe not.

I take some hope in that.

“Very good, Albert,” the mad gray croons, peering at several readouts. “Your observer state profiles are excellent, old friend!”

He leans over me, trying to meet my gaze.

“I’ve performed this experiment countless times, Albert, trying to create a self-sustaining soul-resonance between two nearly identical dittos. But my own copies never worked out — the ego field is flawed, you see. Too much self-distrust. An inherited trait, I’m afraid. One that’s often associated with genius.”

“Even if you do say so yourself,” I reply. But Yosil ignores the dig in order to press on.

“No, my own golem-selves would never do. The first thing I needed was somebody who copies cleanly. That’s why I started grabbing your dittos, years ago. But it wasn’t easy, especially at first. I almost blew it several times and had to destroy your grays, rather than let them get away. You forced me to learn a whole new suite of sneaky skills, Albert. But eventually we were able to start serious work.

“And we made good progress, didn’t we?”

He pats my cheek and I must redouble my efforts to keep rage at bay.

“Of course, you don’t remember, Albert. But in my hands, you explored new spiritual territory. We seemed destined to make history together, the two of us.

“Only then we hit a barrier! The Observer Effect I told you about, remember? Your original kept remotely influencing the soul-field, anchoring you to this plane of reality, interfering whenever I tried to raise the paired-state resonance to a new level. Eventually, I realized what was needed in order to solve the problem.

“I had to eliminate the organic Albert Morris!” ditYosil shakes his head ruefully.

“Only I found that I couldn’t do it. Not while my own organic brain came burdened with so many hang-ups — conscience, empathy, ethical principles — along with gutless worries about getting caught. It was terribly frustrating. I hated myself for it! Here I was, with a possible solution and tools to do the job, ready at hand, but lacking the will!”

“My … deepest sympathy for your problem.”

“Thank you. Nor was that even the worst of it. Soon, my partner and friend, Aeneas Kaolin, started putting pressure on. Demanding results. Making threats. Stoking my natural bent toward feelings of paranoia and pessimism. And don’t let anyone tell you that recognizing and acknowledging such feelings makes them go away! Illogical or not, they eat away at you.

“I started having dreams, Morris. Dreams about a possible way around my dilemma. Dreams about death and resurrection. They both frightened and thrilled me! I wondered — what was my subconscious trying to tell me?

“Then, last Sunday, I realized abruptly what the dreams meant. It came to me while I was imprinting a new copy … this copy, Albert.” ditYosil slaps his chest again. “In a moment I saw the whole picture, in all its glory, and knew what must be done.”

Through gritted teeth, I manage to growl a reply.

“realYosil saw it, too. At the same time, I’ll bet.”

The gray laughs.

“Oh, that’s true, Albert. And it must’ve terrified him, because he kept his distance after that, avoiding this copy. Even while we worked together down here in the lab. Soon, he made an excuse to head up to the cabin. But I knew what was on his mind. How could I not know?

“I could sense that my maker was preparing to run.”

An overtone of amazement thrums the Standing Wave, vibrating painfully between me and Little Red. Even though I/we suspected something like this … to hear it verified openly is positively weird.

Poor, doomed realYosil! It’s one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation. That’s part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father. Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows ’09.

But to realize that your slayer will be your own self. A being who shares every memory, understands your every motive, and agrees with you about nearly all of it. Every subvibration of the Standing Wave — identical!

And yet, something was unleashed in clay that could never fully emerge in flesh. Something ruthless, at a level I could not imagine.

“You … are genuinely insane …” I pant. “You need … help.”

In response, the gray ghost simply nods, almost amiably.

“Uh-huh. That sounds about right. At least by society’s standards. Only results can possibly justify the extreme measures I’ve taken.

“I’ll tell you what, Albert. If my experiment fails, I’ll turn myself in for compulsory therapy. Does that sound fair?”

He laughs. “For now, though, let’s operate on the assumption that I know what I’m doing, eh?”

Before I can answer, an especially strong pulse of the soul-stretching machinery throws me into a spasm, my back arching in pain.

Through it all, part of me remains calm, observant. I can see ditYosil working now to prepare the next phase of his grand experiment. First by pushing aside the glass partition that divided the laboratory and replacing it with some kind of hanging platform, suspended by cables from the ceiling. Carefully he centers the platform, midway between me and my alter ego, Little Red. It sways back and forth like a pendulum, bisecting the room.

After a few seconds, the quivering aftereffects of that last pulse begin to fade, enough for me to blurt the question foremost on my mind.

“Wh … what … is it you’re trying to accomplish?”

Only when he’s fully satisfied with the placement of the swaying platform does the renegade golem turn to face me again, now with a thoughtful expression, sounding almost sincere. Enthralled, even.

“What am I trying to accomplish, Albert? Why, my purpose here is evident. To fulfill my life’s work.

“I aim to invent the perfect copying machine.”

42 Diteriorata

Dusk was falling over the city as I burst onto the tenement roof, closely chased by a mob of candy-striped Waxers, howling to blast me into pottery shards. Turning at the exit door, I spent one of my last scattergun shells, emptying it down the stairwell, taking out the nearest pursuer along with several wooden steps, three feet of bannister, and a huge gout of ancient plaster. The rest of them backed off, darn fast.

Catching my breath, I saw it was a pretty good defensive position, for the moment. Still, they seemed to have plenty of reinforcements, and ways to outflank me, given time.

Time was one of many things I lacked — along with allies and ammo. Not to mention my fast-draining supply of élan vital, which was due to run out in a few hours, at best.

I’m getting way too old for this kind of thing, I pondered, feeling stale as a loaf of bread several days out of the oven. Those multicolored basdits were still down there. I could hear scuttle movements below. And whispers, urgently debating ways to get at me.

Why me?

All this was rather over the top for a typical gang raid. Nor could I imagine any reason to spend so much expense trying to annihilate the cheap utility-greenie of a dead private eye.

Unless Kaolin is cheesed at me for missing our appointment.

It did appear rather eerie, I recalled. The attackers struck just after Palloid — poor little guy — mentioned slapping Aeneas with a transparency subpoena, forcing the reclusive trillionaire to open his books and camera records, perhaps even requiring him to appear in person. Could that be driving the hermit to desperate measures?

Maybe Kaolin didn’t send these goons after me, but to recover the pictures.

In my pocket lay the spool of photos Queen Irene took, during her meetings with “Vic Collins” … the co-conspirator she thought was Beta, but who later revealed hints of platinum skin under all that clever makeup. Instinctively, I had grabbed the spool from Pal when shooting broke out. Save the evidence — a good reflex for a gumshoe. But maybe the Waxers wouldn’t be pursuing me right now, if I had left the pictures behind!

Palloid should’ve been the one to snatch the film and run! They’d never have caught the lithe ferret-ditto. Only retreat wasn’t part of my friend’s basic nature. And now Pal would never get those memories.

Too bad. We may have been a couple of disposables, but we sure had some times, Palloid and me.

I kicked the door in frustration. There’s gotta be a way off this roof!

Still listening for another attack, I stepped away from the edge a bit, turning to look around at twilight in dittotown … perhaps my last view of the world. Off to the west and north, realfolk would be sitting on balconies and verandas right about now, sipping cool drinks and watching the sun set while awaiting their other halves — the selves they sent forth to work this morning, with a promise of downloaded continuity as reward for a hard day’s labor.

That’s fine. It’s fair. Only where was a home that I could go to?

Grumbles down the stairwell turned into loud argument. Good. Maybe their command structure had been messed up by the carnage Pal and I dished out, back in the apartment. Or it could just be a ruse, while they prepared a flanking maneuver.

Taking a chance, I hurried over to one parapet and glanced down at the rusting fire escape. No one there. At least not yet.

The opposite end of the roof supported a rickety shed made largely of wire mesh. Small gray shapes bobbed and cooed within. A pigeon coop. Two humanoid figures could be made out beyond — an adult and child, working together at repairing part of the enclosure. Both wore threadbare clothes, suitable for the slum environment, but their skin color was a drably realistic dun shade … almost brown. Probably an illusion in the rapidly dimming light. Still, I beat a hasty retreat just in case. If they were real, I had no business drawing danger toward them.

Returning to the stairwell, I arrived in time to catch two of the red and pink — striped gladiators trying to sneak past the shattered steps by slithering up ropes attached to the ceiling by shock grapnels. They opened fire when I appeared, but the swaying cables spoiled their aim. So I blasted them to fragments that fell, tumbling, six stories to the atrium below.

Only one shell left, I thought, checking the scattergun. It also occurred to me that this artfully contrived slum wasn’t quite as accurate as the designers hoped. Even in the worst of the old days, there were cops who would show up, eventually, if gunfire went on for very long. But here and now, nobody would come.

Well, you had your chance, Gumby. You could have called Inspector Blane. Had him send a bunch of LSA enforcers to pick you up. But you’re too much like Pal. He can’t turn down a fight, while you gotta try and outsmart the forces of darkness. All by yourself, if possible.

Even when you haven’t got a clue.

It was true! More than I had realized. My mood at that particular moment gave it away. Despite everything, I felt strangely … happy.

Oh, there’s no high quite like getting the focused attention of powerful enemies. Nothing is better guaranteed to make you feel important in the world, which may be why conspiracy theories are so popular among frustrated underachievers. In this case, it wasn’t an illusion. The mighty Aeneas Kaolin was apparently willing to spend loads just to get my little green porcelain ass.

Well, bring ’em on! Hey, nothing beats the drama of a last stand.

Maybe … , I thought, though it galled me to admit it. Maybe I am Albert Morris, after all.

In fact, just one thing was spoiling the smug intensity of the moment. Not the fact that everything might end soon, in a blaze of battle. I could accept that.

No, it was another of those strange, brief headaches that had begun coming over me during the last few hours … starting almost too mild to notice, but recurring lately with greater intensity. They would blow in like a hot wind and last only a minute or so, filling me with unexplained feelings of claustrophobia and helplessness, then vanish, leaving no residue. Perhaps it was a side effect of dittolife extension. I had no idea what to expect when the rejuvenation finally wore out. Only that the extra day had been rather more interesting than dissolving into slurry.

Thanks, Aeneas.

A faint clatter drew my attention away to the east, where I hurried to look over the parapet. There, on the fire escape, I now saw a dozen Waxers trying to climb quietly. Only the rusted metal framework kept creaking and popping, spoiling their stealth. It looked so rickety, with any luck the whole thing might give way, sending them crashing to the alley below.

Should I try to help luck along? I wondered. A blast from the scattergun, aimed just right, could remove several bolts from the brickwork, causing a chain reaction, maybe unzipping the whole rickety thing.

Or maybe not. I decided to hold back my last shell, for at least a minute or two.

A quick dash to the south end showed another bunch of ditbulls clambering upward. These were equipped with finger and toe spikes, doing it the hard way, ascending laboriously hand-over-hand by jabbing the sharp tines into crumbly mortarwork. More than ever, I felt flattered by their attention. And eager to return the favor.

A low wall surrounded the roof, looking rather decrepit and ready to go. So I pushed … and had the rapid contentment of feeling the whole mass give way. More than a meter of brickwork collapsed over the side, followed by a satisfying scream below. I ran along, kicking and shoving, sending more sections of wall toppling onto climbers, then turned and hurried back to the stairwell.

Half a dozen figures dived for cover as I brandished the scattergun. That won me about a minute’s reprieve, I figured. Spinning around, I rushed to check the east-side fire escape again.

That group was much closer now. So close, I no longer had any choice. While bullets pelted the rim of the wall, I cocked the hammer and chose a target, firing my final shot where it’d do the most good.

Two warrior-golems screamed and rusty latticework groaned as a bolt popped free … then another.

But the fire escape didn’t collapse. Those ancients built well, dammit.

No time left. What should I do now? Try to hide Irene’s film? They’d search every square centimeter, as soon as I was squashed …

I suddenly thought of the pigeon coop. Maybe I could tie the spool to the leg of a bird, send it flapping away, only to return after the goons departed -

Bullets abruptly splattered the roof nearby. I spied a head and arms poking over the west parapet. Dodging behind the stairhouse, I evaded that threat only to see more hands fumble over the rim on the east side.

Just one thing to do, then. Run for the edge while I still can! Some passerby may see me splat. With any luck, they’ll grab the film spool, and perhaps my head, hoping for a finder’s fee. My pellet code would lead to Albert … or Clara …

It was a damn thin hope, but all I could muster as voices converged inside the stairhouse less than a meter away. Bullets smacked from nearly all directions now, encroaching on my narrow umbra of shelter, splattering me with sharp slivers.

I gathered my legs, preparing to spring for the precipice -

— then stopped as a new sound arose, burgeoning from nothing to noisy in seconds.

A groaning whine of engines.

The battle-dit who had been shooting at me turned around, stared, then lost his grip with a cry.

A new shape rose to take his place. Compact, sleek, and powerful — a blue and white coupe with downthrusting engines at three corners and a logo in jaunty letters that spelled HARLEY along the nose.

The trim skycycle turned as its cowling opened, revealing a figure who waved insouciantly, his beige spiral motif resembling that of a spinning propeller.

Beta, I thought. So that’s where you vanished during the fighting!

Grinning, my erstwhile nemesis offered a small space behind the pilot seat. “Well, Morris? Coming?”

Believe it or not, I hesitated for a split instant, wondering if the pavement might be a better bet.

Then, dodging bullets all the way, I ran hard to dive for the sanctuary offered by my longtime foe.

43 Kidnapped by Ditsies

Picture the inimitable Fay Wray, wriggling vainly in the adamant grasp of King Kong. That’s how I must’ve looked as the giant golem hauled me from the underground storage area under its one remaining arm. I gave up prying uselessly at the behemoth and tried instead to gain calm … to slow my pounding heart and chill the hormones surging through my veins. It wasn’t easy.

A caveman, in danger, never wondered, Am I real enough to matter? But I often do. If the answer is, Not really, I can greet death with an aplomb that only heroes used to know. But if the answer is yes, fear multiplies! Right at that moment I could taste bile surging from my gut. Having seen my house and garden burn, I had no wish to make Clara grieve for me twice.

“Where … are you taking me?” I asked, catching my breath. The monster barely acknowledged with a low grunt. A conversationalist. He also stank, from some kind of spoilage either before or during imprinting.

Moving away from the wall, with its row of locked storage cabinets, he carried me through the enormous storage room past shelves piled endlessly with tools and equipment … all the kinds of stuff you might need if, say, a few dozen important VIPs wanted to take shelter underground from some nuclear-bio-cyber-ceramo calamity up at the surface, forever. We were nearly at the door leading out of the storeroom when a drumming sound arrived from the hall outside. My captor paused in his tracks.

He listened. I listened. It sounded like marching footsteps.

Something more than dumb grunts stirred in the monster’s head. Making a decision, he stepped to one side, shifting into shadows before a procession of clay soldiers trooped into view.

They entered in a column, one after another, wearing army camouflage colors and still glowing from the autokiln. Golems — big ones — dressed and equipped for battle.

Did someone activate one of the reserve units? To look for me perhaps? I felt tempted to shout and wave, in case they included a Clara.

Only I didn’t see her among them.

You learn to look for signs … a certain carriage or bearing or maybe a sashay of the hips. I’ve been able to pick out Clara, on the flickering image of a battlefield sportscam, amid a squad of mud-encrusted quadrupeds covered with refractory plates of stegasauroid armor. Mere costumery doesn’t matter. Something in the way she moves, I guess.

No, she wasn’t in this bunch. In fact, they all moved pretty much the same, swaggering in a manner that seemed as brash as hers, only more arrogant. And maybe a bit mean. There was a sense of familiarity, without being able to pin it down.

I didn’t shout. The troop of thirty or so combat golems passed by, heading deeper into the storage room, toward the place where I was standing before the monster abducted me. And for the first time, I wondered, was the thing actually trying to help me?

Soon I heard sounds of tearing metal! My captor moved out from the shadows, far enough for us to glimpse the demolition of several wall cabinets! War-dittos attacked them, ripping off doors and tossing the contents aside, searching … searching …

… till one let out a cry. The back of one cabinet split open with a loud hiss, exposing blank emptiness where a stone wall was legally supposed to be.

I knew it!

Of course, my satisfaction was mixed. This showed I was a still a pretty good private eye. It also meant I was an idiot for not calling the authorities before! Now …

Now?

I wondered as the big golem shifted me under its good arm and headed the other way, out of the storage room, into the hall.

ThHhHhHhHhH-mmmmmph!

Behind us, I heard laser and phase-maser fire! Low, menacing hums followed by the rapid pops and cracks of spalling rock … and the splat of warm, moist clay hitting some wall. The battle-dits must have encountered something inside the tunnel. Defenses. Strong ones.

And you were going to just charge on through. Fool, I chided myself.

If only I could make that call! But the chador was gone. Anyway, the big monster was carrying me in the opposite direction, down a long hallway toward the fresh smell of newly baked souls.

We entered a chamber containing deluxe freezers and kilns — the kind used by elites, equipped with the highest quality Standing Wave sifters. More stuff for the gummint cream to use if they ever had to hide down here while the rest of us were getting snuffed out, far above. Several freezers gaped open, with their contents recently looted. A high-speed kiln hissed, the machinery chugging through final warmdown after having just processed a large batch — presumably the pack of warriors I just saw. The ones now fighting their way into a tunnel under Urraca Mesa.

But where was the archetype source, the archie? The one who did the imprinting? Clearly, this was not the military police at work. I tried to look around for the copier machine itself. We rounded a corner.

From my position, pinned under that giant arm, I caught a blurry glimpse. One figure lay stretched out on the original platten of the copier, while a second shape bent over, holding some ominous instrument.

The big golem who was carrying me let out a bellow and charged!

The standing figure turned, grabbing for a weapon — but the three of us crashed together before the pistol came to bear, tumbling in a pile.

“My” golem needed its arm in order to fight the thick-limbed soldier-dit, so I rolled free, scooting away as fast as I could, then scrambling to my feet while rubbing my bruised rib cage. The battle surged as two monstrous roxes pounded each other, rolling back and forth amid horrendous roars!

Real people first, I thought, remembering lessons from school. I hurried to the figure who lay supine on the platten … and gasped to find Ritu Maharal! She lay there, conscious — you have to be, in order to make decent copies — but her eyes didn’t track at first as I tugged at the cruel straps holding her down.

“Al …” she choked. “Al — bert … !”

“What bastard did this to you!” I cursed, hating whoever it was. Involuntary copying — soul-stealing — is an especially nasty kind of rape. As soon as the straps were loose, I hauled her off the table and to a far corner, as far as possible from the battling titans. She clung to me hard, burying her head in my shoulder, sobbing as her warm skin shivered.

“I’m here. It’ll be okay,” I assured, not sure the promise could be kept. Eyeing possible ways to exit the room as “my” one-armed monster battled the other big golem. The one who had been tightening Ritu’s straps, preparing to -

I glanced at the floor where an implement lay fallen from that ditto’s fingers. Not some torture device but a med-sprayer, filled with some purple concoction. I wondered … could appearances be deceiving. What if this was only a doctor, trying to help Ritu?

The fallen laser clattered across the floor, kicked to and fro as the giants bellowed, strained, and tore at each other. Should I try to grab the weapon? Not easy, amid those heaving limbs. And suppose I did manage to recover the weapon. Should I shoot the first ditto, or the second?

As Ritu quivered in my arms, the issue was settled with a double crack of finality. Both of the struggling war-golems suddenly shuddered and went still.

“Well, I’ll be a …”

It took a moment to disentangle poor, disheveled Ritu and guide her back, taking a few steps toward the two bodies, already starting to smolder on the floor. I approached cautiously, though she tried to hold me back, till I could see them clearly on the ground, beyond the imprinting tables.

My captor — the rox with one arm — lay atop the other one, apparently lifeless.

The one beneath, who had been standing over Ritu preparing to inject either medicine or poison, lay with its neck twisted at a creepy angle. But a spark remained. The eyes glittered, staring directly into mine, beckoning.

Against my better judgment — and Ritu’s frantic tugging — I approached.

One of the eyes winked.

“Hello … Morris,” came individual raspy words. “You … really … have to stop … following … me around like this.”

A chill coursed my spine.

“Beta? Great Rava of Prague! What are you doing here?”

A chuckle. Snide and superior. I knew it all too well.

“Oh, Morris … you can be … so dense.” The effigy of my enemy coughed, spitting slip with an ugly, deathlike glaze. “Why don’t you ask her what … I’m doing here?”

The glittering eyes moved to Ritu.

I glanced up at Yosil Maharal’s daughter, who moaned in response.

“Me? Why should I know anything about this monster!” ditBeta coughed again. This time the words came mixed in a chalky death rattle.

“Why indeed … Betty …” Then all light vanished from its eyes.

I guess, long ago, there used to be some gratification from having your worst enemy die in front of you. A sense of completion, at least. But Beta and I had done this to each other — gasped our cryptic last in each other’s arms — so many times that I could only view it now with utter frustration.

“Damn!” I kicked the one-armed golem on top. The mute one who apparently had been intent on rescuing me and Ritu, all along. “Why’d you have to kill it? I had questions!”

I turned back to Ritu, still shivering in reaction and clearly in no shape to be interrogated.

Just then a nearby autokiln hummed back into active mode, hissing and rumbling.

Nobody had asked it to, as far as I could tell.

I didn’t like the sound.

44 The Dit and the Pendulum

Echoes … the weird ones from outside … keep getting stronger, recurring every few minutes. Whenever the big machine triggers another “resonance” mode, I/we pick up hints of something that seems both other and familiar. At once oddly reassuring and strangely terrifying.

Aw, man … we/I had just started getting used to being combined. A twinned state … one mind sharing two bodies — gray and little red — sloshing back and forth, continuously imprinting each other. Two emulated brains, linked not only by a common soul-template, but the same active Standing Wave, thrumming through the empty space between us.

A space where Yosil Maharal’s gray ghost is preparing to sit, on a swaying platform that swings back and forth, passing between Gray and Little Red at regular intervals.

There’s something familiar about the period of the pendulum … linked to the pattern of our rhythmic soul-bursts. No coincidence, I bet.

No bet, I feel Little Red agree, from outside my gray skull, feeling no different than any of the many internal voices that a person conjures up, in the course of a day.

Weird.

“You said you were making the perfect copier,” I prompt ditMaharal, trying to get him talking. Even his smarmy lecturing beats the dread of waiting. Or maybe I’m just claying for time.

He looks up from his preparations, glancing toward me. Busy, but never too busy to pontificate.

“I call it a ‘glazier,’ ” he says, with evident pride.

“A … what?”

“G-L-A-Z-I-E-R,” he spells. “It stands for God-Level Amplification by Zeitgeist Intensification and Ego Refraction. Do you like the name?”

“Like it? I—”

Starting to answer, I feel the latest amplification wave strike, triggering another spasm as I strain against the bindings that hold me down. It’s painful, and rife with those strange echoes, but fortunately quick. Actually, I’m kind of getting used to the hits.

I’ve started noticing something in them other than just agony. Something queerly like music.

When the wave ebbs, I can resume answering ditMaharal’s question.

“I … hate it. What … whatever made you pick such an awful name?”

The golem that assassinated its own maker — and mine — reacts to my goading by laughing aloud. “Well, I admit there was a touch of whimsy involved. You see, I wanted to make a parallel with—”

“—with a laser. I’m not stupid, Maharal.”

He winces in evident surprise.

“And what else have you figured out, Albert?”

“The two of us … we two Morris dittos … the gray and red … we’re like the mirrors at both ends of a laser, is that it? And the important stuff … whatever’s supposed to be amplified … goes in between.”

“Very good! So you did go to school.”

“Kid stuff,” I growl. “And don’t patronize me. If I’m gonna provide the instrument for making a god out of you, show some respect.” ditYosil’s eyes widen for just a moment, then he nods.

“I never quite looked at it that way. So be it, then. Let me explain without patronizing.

“It’s all about the Standing Wave that Jefty Anonnas found glimmering in that region of phase space between neuron and molecule, between body and mind. The so-called soul-essence that Bevvisov learned to press into clay, proving that the ancient Sumerians had an inkling of a lost truth. The motivational essence that Bevvisov and I then imprinted onto Aeneas Kaolin’s wonderful claynamation automatons, with results that stunned us all and transformed the world.”

“So? What does this have to do with—”

“I’m getting to that. Sustained by fields and atoms, like everything else, the Standing Wave is nevertheless so much more than the sum of our parts — our memories and reflexes, our instincts and drives — in much the same way that ripples on a sea show only the surface portions of a vastly complex tug and pull below.”

I’m feeling another pulse approach. Watching the suspended platform, I’ve realized that it swings back and forth exactly twenty-three times between each painful throb of the machine.

“All of that sounds awfully pretty,” I tell ditYosil. “But what about this experiment? So you’ve got my Standing Wave bouncing back and forth, with the two of me acting as mirrors. Because I’m such a good copier that—”

The next pulse hits, hard! I grunt and strain. Sometimes the effect is worse, like plucking harmonies out of catgut while it’s still inside the cat. Then, abruptly, another of those echoes comes over me …

… and I briefly find myself envisioning a moonlit landscape of dark plains and ravines, covered with opal glows and shadows, rolling along below me, as if viewed by a creature of the air.

Then it passes.

I try to hold my train of thought, using the conversation as an anchor … since my real anchor, the organic Albert Morris, is dead, I’m told.

“So, you use my Standing Wave … because I’m such a good copier. And you’re a bloody awful one. Is that right, Yosil?”

“Impudent, but correct. You see, it’s fundamentally a matter of accounting—”

“Of what?”

“Accounting, the way physicists and soulists do it. Adding up, arranging, or counting assortments of identical particles. Or anything else, for that matter! Grab a bunch of marbles out of a bag … does it matter which one is which, if they all look alike? How many different ways can you sort them, if they’re all the same? It turns out the statistics are totally different if each marble has something unique about it! A nick, a scratch, a label …”

“What the hell are you talking—”

“This distinction is especially important at the quantum level. Particles can be counted in two ways — as fermions and bosons. Protons and electrons sort as fermions, which are forced to stay apart from one another by an exclusion principle that’s more fundamental than entropy. Even if they seem identical and come from the same source, they have to be counted individually and occupy states that are quantum-separated by a certain minimum amount.

“But bosons love to mingle, overlap, merge, combine, march in step — for example, in the amplified and coherent light waves generated by a laser. Photons are bosons, and they are anything but aloof! Happily identical, they join together, superimpose—”

“Get to the point, will you?” I shout, or this could go on all night.

Yosil’s ghost frowns at me.

“The point? Even though a golem-copy can be very much like its original, something always prevents the soul-duplicate from being truly identical … or being counted with Bose statistics. That means it cannot be coherence-multiplied, the way light is in a laser. That is, it couldn’t be, till I found a way! Starting with an excellent copier and an ego of just the right ductility—”

“So it’s like a laser and you’re using two of me to supply your mirror. What’s your role in all this?”

He grins.

“You’ll supply the pure carrier waveform, Morris, since you’re good at that. But the substance of the soul we’re amplifying will be mine.”

Hearing this and looking at his facial expression — oh, he’s got Smersh-Foxleitner, all right. Stage four at least. Amoral, paranoid, and profoundly self-deceptive. The worst sufferers can believe seventeen different things before breakfast … and sometimes brilliantly weave the incompatible notions together by noon!

“What about the god-level part of your machine’s stupid name?” I ask, not expecting to like the answer. “Isn’t that unscientific? Even mystical?”

“Don’t be rude, Albert. It’s a metaphor, of course. At present we have no words to describe what I’m about to achieve. It transcends today’s language the way Hamlet outsoliloquies a bonobo chimp.”

“Yeah, yeah. There have been Neo Age rumors about such ‘transcendence’ for as long as I can remember. Soul-projection machines and wild-eyed schemes to upload people straight to heaven. You and Kaolin were pestered by such nonsense for decades. Now you’re telling me there’s a core of truth?”

“I am, though using true science rather than wishful thinking. When your own Standing Wave becomes a Bose condensate—” ditYosil pauses, cocking his head, as if curious about a sound. Then, shaking his head, he seems ready to go on, enthusiastically describing his ambition to become something new — something much bigger or better than the mere run of mortals. He opens his mouth -

— as a noise penetrates the underground chamber, now clearly audible. A distant rumble from beyond one stony wall.

An instrument panel erupts with warning glows, some red, others amber. “Interlopers,” a cyber voice announces. “Interlopers in the tunnel …”

An image globe resolves in thin air, growing larger as we both feed it with our attention. Inside, we see dim figures marching along a murky corridor of undressed limestone. Sudden flashes pour from an outcrop, slicing one of the figures in half, but the rest of the armed force respond with uncanny quickness, swinging weapons up to fire, blasting hidden robo-sentinels. Soon the way is clear and they resume their steady march.

“Estimated arrival at this locale in forty-eight minutes …”

Maharal’s gray ghost shakes its head.

“I hoped for more time, but it can be done.”

He hurries away, abandoning our conversation, returning to his preparations. Preparations that would use me -

— use us! Little Red insists.

— use us to help elevate his soul, amplifying it to some grandiose level of power. Typical bloody Smersh-Foxleitner. The mad scientist’s disease.

I wonder. Could this really work? Might the ghost of a dead professor manage to transform himself beyond any need for an organic brain, or even a physical link to the world? Perhaps rising so high that life on a mere planet becomes trivial and boring? I could picture such a macro-Maharal entity just heading off, seeking cosmic-scale adventures among the stars. Which’d be cool by me, I guess, so long as he went away and left this world alone.

But I have an uneasy feeling that ditYosil has in mind a more local kind of deification. Both more provincial and deeply controlling.

Many of the folks I know won’t like what he’d become.

Oh, and the process will probably use up the “mirrors” of his … glazier. Whatever the outcome, I don’t figure i/we (gray/red) will much enjoy serving as Yosil’s vehicle to reach this personal nirvana of his.

“You know—” I began, hoping to distract him.

Only then another pulse struck.

45 Desert Rox

Tuesday’s child is full of grace -

Wednesday’s child is full of woe -

Thursday’s child has far to go, and -

And? I wondered. After my eventful and generously extended span on Earth — more than two whole days — what next?

Not much, at the rate my body was starting to decay. I could feel the familiar signs of golem senescence creeping in, plus glimmerings of the salmon reflex, that urge to report home for memory inloading. To escape oblivion by returning to the one real organic brain where I might yet live on.

A brain that might actually still exist! Just when I had grown accustomed to the idea that it was blown to bits, I wondered. Suppose Albert Morris lives, and I could somehow reach him before I dissolve. Would he have me back?

Assuming he still lived?

As Beta flew his agile little Harley through the night, that seemed a growing possibility! According to web reports I viewed while crammed behind Beta’s pilot seat.

“That settles it,” one of the amateur deduction mavens announced. “They never found enough protoplasmic residue in that burnt house for a whole body!”

“And see how the police are behaving. Munitions auditors still swarm all over, but the Human Protection Division is gone! That means no one was killed there.”

I should be glad. Yet, if Albert did exist, he probably commanded a whole army of himselves, using high-class grays and ebonies to track down the villain who destroyed my … our … his garden. Why, in that case, should he welcome back a stray green who refused to mow the lawn?

Good question — and moot if I couldn’t find him! Where was Albert when the missile struck? And where was he now?

Beta tossed a theory at me, turning his head to be heard over the engines. “See what some hobbyist ditectives found in Tuesday’s streetcam data.” His domed head gestured to a display globe showing the Sycamore Avenue house, before it was destroyed. Leaning my chin on Beta’s pilot seat, I watched the garage door open in soft pre-twilight. The Volvo crept out.

“He left! Then why did everybody think he was still there when the missile … Oh, I see.”

As the car turned down Sycamore, one camera got a fine view of the driver. It was an Albert Morris gray. Bald and glossy — the perfect golem. By implication, realAl must still be in the house.

Beta knew better. “Appearances mean nothing. Your archie is nearly as good at disguises as I am.” Strong praise from a master of deception. “But then where … ? I spent lavishly for a top freelance voyeur. She tracked the car from camview to camview along the Skyway Highway, to this camera-blank road.” ditBeta waved past the windshield at a slender desert lane below. Moonlight painted wan, lonely tones — a different world than the ditto-clogged city, or suburbs where comfortably unemployed realfolk distract themselves by pursuing a million hobbies. Below, nature reigned … subject to advice and consent from the Department of Environments.

“What could Albert be up to, coming out this way?” I wondered aloud. Our memories were the same Tuesday noon. Something must have happened since.

“You have no idea?”

“Well … after I was made, Ritu Maharal phoned with news that her father was killed in an auto wreck. My next move would’ve been to study the crash site.”

“Let’s see.” Beta twiddled chords on a controller. Images rippled, zooming to a rocky desolation, underneath a highway viaduct. Police and rescue cruisers surrounded a ruin of twisted metal. “You’re right,” Beta announced. “It’s not far from here, and yet … odd. Albert drove some distance past the crash site; we’re already fifty klicks south.”

“What could be south, except …”

Abruptly I knew. The battle range. He was heading to see Clara.

Beta asked. “Did you say something?”

“Nothing.”

Albert’s love life wasn’t any of this character’s business. Anyway, I had seen Clara today, rummaging through the ruins. So they must not have connected, after all. Something was fishy, all right.

After flying in silence for a while, I asked Beta for a chador. He took a compact model from the glove compartment and passed it back. Wriggling in the cramped space, I slipped the holo-luminescent folds over my head and spent a while rapid-reciting a report, summarizing what happened since the last time I filed, not caring if Beta listened in. He already knew all about events that took place after Palloid and I left the Ephemerals Temple.

“Who’re you sending the report to?” he asked casually when I removed the chador. A keypad glowed nearby, ready for any net address. The in-box of the chief of police. The whistle-blowers page of the Times. Or the fan/junkmail queue of one of those golem astronauts who were on Titan right now, taking turns exploring for a day or two, then dissolving to save on food and fuel till the next replacement came out of storage.

I asked myself the same question. If I send an encrypted file to Albert’s cache, there’s no guarantee Beta won’t tag it with a parasite-follower.

Clara, then? What about Pal?

Assuming the Waxers hadn’t hurt my friend amid all that mayhem, he’d be in a helluva state — either steaming mad over the loss of Palloid’s memories or else in a stupor if they made him take a forget-sniff. Either way, Pal didn’t know how to be discreet.

Then I thought of someone fitting … with the added virtue that it’d gall Beta. “Inspector Blane of the Labor Subcontractors Association,” I told the transmitter unit, with an eye to my companion’s reaction. Beta merely smiled and fussed over the controls while my report went out.

“Include a copy of the film,” he suggested. “Those pictures Irene took.”

“They implicate you—”

“In Class D industrial espionage. A trifling civil matter. But the sabotage attempt at UK was serious! Realfolk might have been endangered. Those pictures prove Kaolin—”

“We don’t know it was him. Why sabotage his own factory?”

“For insurance? An excuse to write off capital equipment? He strove hard to blame all his enemies — Gadarene, Wammaker, Lum, and me.”

I’d been thinking about Kaolin. What’s in the Research Division that he might want to destroy? A program he couldn’t justify shutting down … unless it were ruined by some act beyond his control?

Or one he didn’t want to share?

I knew firsthand of one breakthrough — golem-rejuvenation — that gave me this extra, eventful day. Suppose I kept loyal to Aeneas for that, bringing him the film. Would my reward me be another extension? I guess it’s to my credit that I never felt tempted. The habit of a lifetime … thinking yourself expendable when you’re in clay.

Still, why suppress the new replenishment technology? To keep people buying lots of ditto blanks?

Not necessarily. Kilns and freezers and imprinters were the big-ticket items, and sales had tapered off. There was also talk of “conservation” — how we may deplete the best golem-quality clay beds in a generation or two. What could be more profitable than for UK to act responsibly … and make billions … by manufacturing and selling replenishers? Anyway, suppose he did wipe out every ditto in the Research Division. Word of the breakthrough would leak anyway, in a matter of months.

He must have had a reason, though. One I hadn’t fathomed yet.

“The film could exonerate me — and you,” Beta urged. “I have a scanner here. Just feed it in and send.” He indicated a slot in the control panel.

“No,” I said, feeling wary. “Not yet.”

“But in seconds Blane could have a copy and—”

“Later.” I felt another of those weird headaches coming on — brief but intensely disorienting, accompanied by queasy, claustrophobic feelings, as if I weren’t here at all, but someplace cramped, confining. Probably a side effect of my overextended existence. “Are we getting close?”

“The Volvo’s last trace was about there.” Beta pointed to a curvy stretch of desert road. “Then no further sightings. It never showed up where the next camview covers the highway. I’ve been circling, looking for signs, but Albert disconnected his car-transponder, naughty boy. And there’d be no pellet in his brow if he was real. I’m at a loss.”

“Unless—”

“Yeah?”

“—he set forth with a spare in the trunk.”

“A spare?” Beta ruminated. “Even if it wasn’t baked yet, the pellet would respond if we broadcast a close enough coding. Great. Let me just take a reading of your pellet for comparison …”

Reaching around, Beta pushed a portable scanner. The reasoning — if Albert took a spare, it could be from the same factory batch as me. Similar codes, unless he scrambled them. And he was often too lazy to bother.

“Good idea.” But I warded off the scanner. “Just don’t play games. You already read my code. I felt it when I hopped aboard.”

Beta offered his usual grin. “Fair enough. A little paranoia suits you, Morris.”

I’m not Morris, I thought. But the protest, which seemed proud on Tuesday, felt weary now.

“Let’s see if we can find that ditto spare,” the pilot murmured, turning back to his instruments. The skycycle leaped powerfully at his bidding.

It must pay to be a copyright pirate. Even after Beta’s enemy wrecked his bootlegging empire, he still has enough loot stashed away for an emergency backup copy to ride in style.

“Got it,” Beta said minutes later. “The resonance is … damn! The car headed east, into the badlands. Why would Albert drive cross-country in a Volvo?”

I shrugged, unable to guess as the signal grew stronger. Such a long-range fix would be impossible in the city, with so many pellets all around. Here, it positively throbbed just ahead.

“Careful, this is rough country,” I urged. The lower ravines lacked even moonlight. Beta let instruments take over, doing what computers and software are best at, performing simple procedures with utter precision. A minute later, amid a roar, a shuddering bump, and then a tapering sigh, we landed in a narrow canyon with the Harley’s headlight shining at the canted wreckage of a battered land car. Not as badly smashed as Maharal’s, but trapped just as surely.

How did this happen? Could Albert be dead, after all?

I had to wait for Beta to open the canopy and exit first, waving his scanner around, then followed to verify there were no real bodies. So Albert either walked away or was taken. Good. I didn’t relish burying my maker.

“Every piece of electronic apparatus is ruined. Some kind of pulse weapon could do that,” Beta commented. “Best guess, almost two days ago.”

“And no one spotted the car in all that time.” I glanced up to see how narrow the ravine was.

“Here’s the ditspare.” The trunk of the wrecked auto groaned wide to reveal a small portakiln and a CeramWrap cocoon that lay split open. The golembody had never been heat-activated. Instead of dissolving, it slumped like a corroding clay figurine, cracking in the desert heat. A latent life — a potential Albert — who never got a chance to stand or comment sardonically on the ironies of existence.

In the skycycle’s beam, I saw a deep gouge at the base of the ditto’s throat. The little recitation-recorder. I give them to every gray, to narrate investigations in realtime. Someone cut it out. Only Albert would know it was there.

Beta, using a torch to examine every inch of the passenger compartment, cursed colorfully. “Where could she have gone off to from here? Did someone pick them up? Was she trying to reach …”

“She? There was a passenger?”

Contempt filled Beta’s voice, replacing his recent cordiality. “Always two steps behind, Morris. Did you think I’d go to all this trouble just to find your missing rig?”

I thought quickly. “Maharal’s daughter. She hired Albert to investigate her father’s accident … Albert must’ve headed out with her to look over the crash site. Or else—”

“Go on.”

“Or else to the place Maharal fled from when he died. Some place Ritu knew about.”

Beta nodded. “What I can’t figure is why Morris went in person. And in disguise. Did he know his house was being targeted?”

I had an idea about that, from the way Albert felt when he made me. Lonely, tired, and thinking of Clara, whose battalion waged war not too far from here.

“What do you know of the assassins?” I asked, changing the subject.

“Me? Why, nothing.”

You know something! I could tell. Not the whole story, maybe. But you have suspicions.

Time to tread carefully. “Tuesday, after helping Blane raid your Teller operation, I met a decaying yellow in a back-alley disposal tube. It spoke convincingly like you, claiming that a big new enemy was taking over. Then it blurted a request that I go to Betzalel … and protect someone named Emmett … or maybe the emet. Can you explain what you meant?”

“The yellow was desperate, Morris, if he asked you for a favor.”

Ah, the familiar, insulting Beta. But I was playing for time, checking my surroundings in case things went abruptly sour.

“I was too exhausted to think much about it. Still, the words sounded familiar. Then I recalled. They refer to the original Golem legend, back in the sixteenth century, when Rabbi Loew of Prague was said to have created a powerful creature out of clay in order to protect the Jews of that city from persecution.

“The emet was a sacred word, either written on the creature’s brow or placed in its mouth. In Hebrew, it means ‘truth,’ but it can represent the source or wellspring — all things arising from one root.”

“I went to school too, y’know,” Beta stifled a yawn. “And Betzalel was another of those golem-making rabbis. So?”

“So, tell me why you’re following the trail of Yosil Maharal’s daughter so avidly.”

He blinked. “I have reasons.”

“No doubt. First I thought you meant to grab her as a template for your ditto-piracy trade. But she’s no phaedomasochistic vamp, like Wammaker, with an established clientele. Ritu’s pretty, but physical attributes are trivial with golemtech. It’s the personality — the unique Standing Wave — that makes one template special compared to another.” I shook my head. “No, you’re tracking Ritu to find the source. Her father. To find whatever secret frightened Yosil Maharal into studying the arts of deception. It’s one so terrifying that he fled across the desert Monday night, fleeing something that chased and finally killed him.”

Greeted by silence, I insisted. “What game are you involved in? How do you fit in between Maharal and Aeneas Kaolin—”

Beta’s golem threw back its head and laughed. “You’re just fishing. You really don’t have a clue.”

“Oh? Then please explain, great Moriarty! What can it hurt to tell me?”

He stared a moment.

“Let’s make a trade. You transmit those pictures. Then I’ll tell a story.”

“Irene’s pictures? From the Rainbow Lounge?”

“You know what pictures I mean. Dispatch them to Inspector Blane. He knows how you got ’em, from the report you just sent. Transmit and verify. Then we’ll talk.”

It was my turn to pause. He rescued me from that rooftop in order to help track down realAlbert … and thus Ritu Maharal … and thus her father’s secret hideaway.

Now he has no further use for me, except to send the pictures.

“You want me to be the one who transmits them … for the sake of credibility.”

“You have credibility, Morris — more than you realize. Despite ham-handed efforts to frame you, nobody in high places considered you a likely saboteur. The pics you found at the Rainbow will clinch it, help exonerate you—”

“And you!”

“So? They implicate Kaolin. But if I send them, well, who will believe an infamous ditnapper? They’ll say I faked ’em.”

This explained why Beta hadn’t simply taken the film away from me. But his patience was wearing thin. “I know you, Morris. You think this gives you leverage. But don’t press it. I have bigger concerns.”

Resignation washed over me. “So, in exchange for lending a little credibility to the theory that Kaolin sabotaged his own factory, you’ll tell me a few glimmers of useless information that will vanish when this body dissolves soon. Not much of a deal.”

“It’s the only one you’re being offered. At least your notorious curiosity will be fed.”

How inconvenient it is, to have an enemy who knows you so well.

He never let me out of sight, or easy reach of his younger, stronger arms.

“Send no messages,” Beta warned, standing next to the Harley’s open cockpit, uncovering the slot of the reader-scanner for me to slip in the spool of pictures. “Just transmit, verify, and sign off.”

He punched in Blane’s mailbox at LSA headquarters. A nearby screen asked: Validate Sender ID. Then a single number flashed: 6

Too quickly for conscious thought, I impulsively jabbed a response: 4

The unit responded with 8 … and I stabbed 3.

It went back and forth like that, rapidfire, two dozen more times, feeling entirely random to me. It wasn’t random, of course, but a kind of encryption that’s hard to crack or feign, based on a partial copy of Albert’s personal Soul Standing Wave that Blane keeps secure in a hard-baked ceramium — a kind of cypher key that can be used many times. Any particular give-and-take pattern of number cues would be different, unique, yet show a high correlation with the sender’s personality -

— assuming it didn’t matter that I was a frankie! Nor my overwrought emotional state, scared and suspicious as hell. It actually surprised me when the screen flashed ACCEPTED, taking no longer than usual. Beta’s spiral ditto grunted approval.

“Good, now step away from the cockpit.”

I did so, watching a slim gun — one of his fingers, removed and reversed to aim a narrow muzzle, waved for me to move back. “I’d love to stay and chat, as promised,” said the nine-digited golem. “But I’ve wasted too much time on you already.”

“Do you have a particular destination in mind?”

Keeping the mini-gun trained on me, he climbed into the skycycle. “I found two sets of footprints, heading south. I have a pretty good notion where they’re going now. You’d just slow me down.”

“So you won’t explain about Maharal and Kaolin?”

“If I told you more I’d have to shoot you, against the slim chance that someone might come by and rescue you. As things stand, you’re clueless as usual. I’ll leave you to dissolve in peace.”

“Big of you. I owe you one.”

Beta’s grin showed that he knew how I meant it. “If it matters any, I’m not the one who tried to kill your rig, Morris. I doubt it was Kaolin, either. In fact, I hope the real you survives what’s about to happen.”

What’s about to happen. He expressed it that way deliberately, to frustrate me. But I kept silent, not giving him any satisfaction. Only action would accomplish anything now.

“Good-bye, Morris,” ditBeta said, closing the glass bubble, revving the engine to a rising pitch. I stepped back, thinking furiously.

What are my choices?

I still had the cautious option — wait a bit, burn the Volvo’s fuel and hope to attract attention before I melt.

But no. I’d lose his scent. My reason for living.

The skycycle drove dust-billows down the narrow canyon defiles. ditBeta offered a jaunty wave, then turned his corkscrew head back to the job of taking off.

It was my cue. In that split second, as the Harley swung about and began climbing atop three pillars of superheated thrust, I ran forward and leaped.

There was pain, of course. I knew there would be pain.

46 All Fired Up

There wasn’t much choice except to follow. Back to the storage room. Back to the dark opening where I had seen a small army of clay soldier-figures go plunging into a tunnel of death.

Ritu was still shivering in my arms, recovering her composure from the violation that my enemy inflicted on her — by forcing her onto an imprinting machine against her will. I wanted to ask Ritu about that. To find out how and why Beta (if it really had been a copy of the infamous ditnapper) grabbed her in the deep underground sanctuary of a supposedly secure military base.

Before I could begin, a series of loud tones reverberated around us from rank after rank of nearby rapid-bake kilns, announcing the emergence of yet more battle-dittos, sliding forth red and glowing with freshly sparked enzyme catalysis — special models that had been stored here at taxpayer expense, blank but ready to be imprinted with the souls of reserve warriors like Clara, only now hijacked by an infamous criminal for some reason I couldn’t fathom.

If there had been just one or two of them, I could handle the situation quickly. Even a war-golem is helpless during those first moments after sliding from the activation oven. But a glance down the aisle of towering machines showed there were too many — dozens — already beginning to stand on trembling legs … legs like tree trunks … and stretching arms that could crush a small car. In moments their eyes would focus on Ritu and me. Eyes fired up with some purpose that I didn’t want any part of.

And there were more bell-like tones, from tall ovens even farther away, ringing their birth announcements till they merged like some rippling call of destiny. Do not ask for whom the kiln tolls, commented a wry little voice within.

Time to get out.

“Let’s go,” I urged Ritu, and she nodded, as eager as I was to leave that place.

Together we fled in the only direction available, back toward the storeroom where that huge, silent mystery golem grabbed me less than half an hour ago and saved my life — though I didn’t know its motive at the time. Departing, I glanced at the dissolving corpse of my benefactor, wondering who he was and how he knew that I needed help at that particular moment.

Then we were running past dark, fearsome-looking figures, molded and augmented for war. Terracotta forms that turned to glare at us, clumsily reaching out, but slowed by uneven peptide activation. Thank heavens. Fleeing their ranks, I led Ritu back down the corridor of shelves, looking for some weapon big enough to make a difference against their numbers. I’d settle for a simple phone to call up Base Security!

But nothing useful lay in sight — just tons of freeze-dried gourmet foods, stacked here against some doomsday scenario, meant to feed a governmental elite whose tax-paid job it is to stave off all varieties of doomsday.

There didn’t seem to be any good hiding places, either. Not as a platoon of counterfeit warriors began entering the storage room after us, grunting and shuffling as they came. Quick-imprinted, I diagnosed. Beta doesn’t need quality, but speed and large numbers.

A nagging sense of doubt yammered at me, screaming that none of it made sense. The golem that rescued me. Beta’s sudden appearance here. The two waves of war-dittos that he created for some unexplained reason. The grabbing and force-imprinting of Ritu. It all had to mean something!

But there wasn’t time to sort it out, only a series of rapid decisions. Like where to flee. Inexorably, we had but one choice.

Ritu balked at the tunnel entrance. “Where does it go?” she demanded.

“I think it leads under Urraca Mesa, to your father’s cabin.”

Her eyes widened and her feet planted hard, refusing to budge. I glanced beyond her shoulder to see those shuffling pseudosoldiers approach, still fifty meters away but closing.

“Ritu—” Despite rising anxiety, I restrained myself from tugging at her arm. She had already been subjected to more force today than anyone should endure.

At last her eyes cleared, coming around to focus on mine. With a grim tightening of the jaw, she nodded.

“All right, Albert. I’m ready.”

Ritu took my offered hand. Together we plunged into the tunnel’s stony-cold womb.

47 Vasic Instinct

Like a capacious, ever-expanding jar — this soul contains many.

It feels bottomless, able to absorb a gathering, a plenitude, a forum of standing waves, uniting in a resonant chorus of superposed frequencies, combining toward some culmination of ultimate power.

It isn’t just the two of us anymore — the Albert Morris gray who was ditnapped from Kaolin Manor, plus the little red copy-of-a-copy who visited the Maharal’s private museum for a memory test. Gray and red are linked, serving as mirrors in a mad scientist’s wondrously terrifying “glazier” machine. And now there is more, much more.

No longer confined to a single skull — or even a pair of them — we/i expand into the vacant space between, filling its sterile void with a compellingly intricate melody … an ever-growing song of me

A song heading for its crescendo.

Oh, some kind of amplification is happening, all right, as Yosil’s demented ghost predicted. A multiplication of soul-rhythms on a scale I never imagined, though cults and mystics have chattered about such a possibility ever since the Golem Age began. It could be an egomaniac’s sublime nirvana state — the self, exponentiated by countless virtual duplicates that reflect and resonate in perfect harmony, preparing to burst through, en masse, to a splendid new level of spiritual reification.

I always dismissed the notion as metaphysical nonsense, just another version of the age-old romantic-transcendentalist fantasy — like stone circles, UFO hallucinations, and “singularity” mirages were to other generations who kept yearning for a way to rise above this gritty plain. For a doorway to some realm beyond.

Only now it seems that one of the founders of this era, the legendary Professor Maharal, found a way … though something about his method drove him mad with fear.

Is that why ditYosil needs the soul of Albert Morris, to use as raw material? Because nothing about golemtech frightens me? Self-duplication always felt natural to Albert, like picking something comfortable to wear from the closet. Hell, I’m not even bothered much anymore by all the pain inflicted by this brutal machinery — some clever modification of the standard tetragramatron. Creative machinery that will soon nudge a zillion overlapping copies of my Standing Wave to unite in perfect unison, as light rays do in a laser, joining as collusive bosons rather than independent/bickering fermions …

Whatever that means. I can already feel the process working. In fact, there’s a strong temptation to stop thinking and just let go … wallow in the simplicity … in the glorious me-ness of it all. Memory and reason feel like impediments, sullying the purity of a Standing Wave that multiplies on and on, filling an ever-expanding vessel.

I, amphorum …

Fortunately, there come respites when fierce, machine-driven energies aren’t pummeling and stretching me/us according to plan, when cogent thought remains possible … even enhanced with a peculiar kind of focus. For example, right now I can perceive ditYosil bustling about nearby, sensing his presence in ways that go beyond mere sound or vision. The intensity of his desire. His growing excitement and confidence as a lifelong goal draws near.

Above all, I feel ditYosil’s burning concentration, enhanced by the genius that so often accompanies Smersh-Foxleitner syndrome … a concentration so fixed, he can ignore a rain of dust that falls from the cave’s ceiling each time the stone walls shudder from some distant, booming explosion, as war-golems claw their way closer, ever closer to this buried lair.

They’re still too far away for me to decipher much about their soul-harmonies. Could they even be me? It’s tempting to imagine realAlbert, accompanied by an army of himselves … and maybe a whole bunch of Pal’s wonderful/nasty specialty dittos … fighting their way up that tunnel, coming to the rescue.

But no. I forgot. I’m dead. ditYosil says he killed me. The real, organic Albert Morris had to die, so he wouldn’t “anchor” my quantum-soul observer state to the material world — whatever that means.

Still puttering and preparing, Maharal’s ghost fine-tunes a large pendulum that sways slowly back and forth between my red and gray cranium-mirrors, raising soul-ripples with each passage. Ripples that thrum to the lowest sound you ever heard — like the voice heard by Moses on Sinai …

I lack the proper technical vocabulary, but it’s easy to imagine what’ll happen when ditYosil steps aboard that rocking platform. Those ripples will take over. He plans to use my purified-amplified presence as a carrier wave, to boost his own essence higher. I’m to be spent, the same way that an expendable rocket is splurged, drained, and discarded in order to hurl an expensive probe toward the black abyss of space. Only the cargo I’m assigned to carry will be Maharal’s soul-pattern … launching it toward something like godhood.

Everything makes sense, in a perverse way, except for one puzzling thing.

Wasn’t I supposed to be losing my sense of identity by now? ditYosil predicted that my ego would be overwhelmed by the sheer ecstasy of amplification, removing all of Albert Morris’s personal hang-ups and desires, leaving just Albert’s talent for duplication, distilled, expanded, exponentiated. The purest of all booster rockets.

Is that happening? Ego Reduction? It … doesn’t feel that way. Yes, I can sense the glazier machinery trying to achieve that. But my footing isn’t loose. Albert’s memories feel intact!

Moreover, what about all these echoes that i/we keep picking up? Musically resonant echoes that feel like they come from outside? Yosil never mentioned anything about that … and I don’t plan on bringing it up.

For one thing, he’s dismissed me as a cipher, a beast of burden, talented at copying but unworthy of respect.

But there’s another reason.

I … we … are … am starting to enjoy this.

48 Mortar Enemies

They say that golemtech arrived in Japan with much less upheaval than in the West, almost as if they expected it. The Japanese had no trouble with the idea of duplicating souls, in much the same way that Americans embraced the Internet, seeing it as a fundamental expression of their national will to talk. According to legend, all you had to do was give something eyes — a boat, a house, a robot, or even the fluffy AnpanMan who hawked pastry in cute TV commercials.

When it came to investing an object with soul, eyes mattered above all.

I thought about that while clinging to the bottom of Beta’s skycycle, sheltering my face from a terrible wind that kept alternating between fire and ice. Protect the eyes, I told myself, desperately clutching a pair of slim handholds while my feet pressed hard against the landing skids. Protect the eyes and brain. And never regret that you chose this way to die.

During level flight my chief problem was wind chill, sucking warmth out of every exposed catalysis cell. But that was a picnic compared to the agony whenever the Harley banked or turned. Without warning, one or another of the thrust nozzles would swivel, grazing me with jets of collimated flame. All I could do then was swing my head to the other side of the narrow fuselage and try to squirm out of the way, reminding myself over and over why I had put myself in this fix … because it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.

The alternative — to stay behind at the wrecked Volvo and make some kind of signal, then wait around for help — might have made sense if I were real, without a ticking expiration clock that could lapse any time in the next hour or so. But my logic had to be ditto logic. When Beta took off, I felt just one imperative more urgent than what little remained of my life.

Don’t lose the scent.

I now realized Beta was key to understanding all that had happened during this bizarre week, starting from the moment I slinked into the basement of the Teller Building to uncover his pirate copying facility, with its stolen Wammaker template. That operation had already been hijacked by some enemy, presumably Aeneas Kaolin. Or so Beta claimed; Aeneas told a different story, portraying himself as the victim of perverted conspiracies. Then there were the dark, paranoid musings that Yosil Maharal had muttered on Tuesday morning, after he was already dead.

Who told the truth? All I knew for certain was that three brilliant and unscrupulous men — all of them much smarter than poor Albert Morris — were engaged in some kind of desperate, secretive, triangular struggle. And the secretive part was what impressed me most.

Nowadays, it takes power, money, and genuine cleverness to keep anything out of the public glare — a scrutinizing glare that was supposed to have banished all those awful, dark, twentieth-century clichés, like conniving moguls, mad scientists, and elite master criminals. Yet here were all three of those archetypes, battling each other while colluding to keep their conflict hidden from media, government, and the public. No wonder poor Albert was out of his league!

No wonder I had no choice but to follow the trail, whatever the cost. As Beta’s skycycle sped through the night, just forty meters or so above the desert floor, I knew that one cost was going to be this body of mine, which kept getting baked each time those narrow torch-jets shifted to adjust course. Especially the portion of me that stuck out the most, my hapless clay ass. I could feel colloidal/pseudo-organic constituents react to the heat by fizzing and popping, sometimes loud enough to hear above the wind’s tumult, gradually transforming supple lifeclay to the hard consistency of porcelain dinnerware.

Let me add, as a cheap utility greenie with an unbuffered Standing Wave, that it also hurt like hell! So much for the advantages of soulistic verisimilitude. I tried to find distraction by imagining our destination — presumably the goal that realAlbert and Ritu Maharal had been heading toward when the Volvo got ambushed. Some cryptic desert hideaway, where her father lurked during the weeks he went missing from Universal Kilns? Beta apparently knew where to go — which made me wonder.

He’s trying to follow Ritu. But why, if not to reveal Yosil’s hiding place? What other use could Beta have for her?

I tried to concentrate, but it’s hard to do when your butt keeps getting singed every minute or two by sonocollimated heat. I found myself returning over and over to the image of poor little Palloid, my ferret-ditto companion, who got smashed before unhappy Pal could harvest memories of our long day together. That was my sole chance to be remembered, I thought glumly. At this rate, all that’ll be left of me is a pile of shattered statuary when Beta lands.

For solace, I tried conjuring up an image of Clara’s face — but that only increased the pain. Her war must be approaching its big climax by now, I thought, picturing how close we were to the Jesse Helms Combat Range. Beta would turn aside before then, of course. Still, I wondered about the coincidence … and hoped that Clara wouldn’t get in too much trouble for going AWOL when Albert’s house was destroyed. We had assigned each other survivor benefits, so maybe the army would understand.

If Albert truly is still alive, they may still have a chance to be happy together …

Anyway, something else was happening as the Harley sped through a night where even the stars seemed out of joint. My soul-wave kept doing unsettling things, jittering wildly … up-down, in-out … and through some of those weird directions that nobody has ever named properly — self-contained dimensions of spirit that Leow and others only began mapping a generation ago, exploring the newest terra incognita or final frontier. At first, the disturbances were almost too brief to notice. But those periodic tumults grew progressively stronger as the awful flight went on. Spikes of egotistical self-importance alternated with troughs of utter abnegation when I felt less than dust grain. Later, the effect was one of brief but intensely focused awe. When it passed, I wondered -

What next? Zen-like detachment?

Feelings of unity with the universe?

Or will I hear the booming voice of God?

Every culture has had what William James called “varieties of religious experience.” They bloom whenever a person’s Standing Wave plucks certain chords in the parietal nexus, Broca’s area, or the spiritual-paraphrase juncture of the right temporal lobe. Of course, you can get similar sensations in clay — a soul is a soul — but the feelings are almost never as compelling as in trueflesh.

Or unless you get replenished and given one more whole day of life? Could this be why Aeneas Kaolin sabotaged his own Research Division? Because the new trick of extending ditto endurance had a side effect? Might it convert golemfolk, eventually sparking a holy revival among billions of artificial men? What if dittos stopped going home for inloading each night, abandoning their archies to seek their own, separate highway to redemption?

What a bizarre thought! Perhaps it was provoked by my visits to the affably crackpot Ephemerals. Or else by the blazing agony of being half-roasted alive! Maybe.

Still, I couldn’t shake a growing impression that something or someone accompanied me during that tormented ride across a fractured sky, keeping pace nearby or within, between the fiery hell of my lower body and my wind-chilled face. Now and then, a half-heard echo seemed to urge me to hang in there …

The blustering gale abated a little, letting me glimpse a rough terrain of plateaus and deep ravines, steeply shadowed by a setting moon. The Harley began losing altitude, its wan beams lending the fractal landscape a kind of jagged beauty. Hollows loomed upward like gaping maws, eager to swallow me whole.

Maneuvering jets roared, swiveling to vertical, surrounding me in a cage of throbbing flame. I had to release one grip in order to throw an arm over my eyes. That left just two feet and a hand pressed against the skid supports, bearing my entire weight while those fingers and toes gradually cooked, hardening into crispy things.

As for the noise, it grew tolerable soon … I guess because I had nothing to hear with anymore. Hold on, an internal voice said, probably some tenacious part of Albert Morris that never learned to quit. I’ll give him credit for that much, old Albert. Tenacious bastard.

Hold on just a little while -

Shivering reverberations rattled me like a mud doll. Some remote bits snapped! My stubborn grip failed at last and I fell …

(Time to rejoin the Earth already?)

… only the plummet was much shorter than expected. About half a meter or thereabouts. I barely felt a jolt as my seared backside hit the rocky desert floor.

Engines sputtered to a stop. Heat and ruction faded. Dimly, I knew — we’ve landed.

Still, it took several tries before I managed to command an arm to move, uncovering my last undamaged sense organs, and at first all I could see were clouds of agitated dust — then dim outlines of one landing skid. It took hard work to turn my head and look the other way. My neck seemed to be coated with a hard crust, something that resisted movement, cracking and giving way grudgingly, after strenuous effort.

Ah, there he is …

I spied a pair of legs turning to step away from the skycycle. There was no mistaking the spiral pattern motif covering the ditto’s entire body. Ascending a dirt path, bordered by pale stone, Beta strode with a confident swagger.

I once moved like that. Yesterday, when I was young.

Now, broiled, abraded, and near expiration, I felt lucky to drag myself with one arm and half of another, grateful that the skycycle had plenty of ground clearance.

Once fully clear of the hot fuselage, I struggled to sit up and assess the damage.

That is, I tried to sit up. A few pseudomuscles responded down there, but they failed to make anything bend properly. With my good hand I reached down to tap along my hard-glazed back and buttocks. I clanked.

Well, well. It always seemed a quixotic-doomed gesture to leap through flaming jets and grab the departing skycycle. Yet here I was! Not exactly kicking, but still in motion. Still in the game. Sort of.

Beta had passed out of sight, vanishing among the varied shades of blackness. But now at least I could dimly make out his goal — a low, boxy outline nestled in the flank of an imposing desert mesa. Under starlight, it seemed little more than a modest, one-story structure. Perhaps a vacation cabin, or a long-abandoned shack.

Resting next to the slowly cooling Harley, I felt one more of those periodic otherness waves swarm by again. Only now, instead of preaching at me to persevere, or tantalizing with hints of infinity, the strange half-presence seemed more curious … questioning … as if it wondered, wordlessly, what business I had there.

Beats me, I thought, answering the vague feeling. When I figure that one out, you’ll be the first to know.

49 Ditbulls at the Gate

It was a rather tight pickle that Ritu and I found ourselves in, squeezed by two squadrons of battle-golems who were marching in the same direction. The first armed contingent, just ahead, battled their way forward against stiff resistance while a second band of ditto-warrior reinforcements drew up behind, ready to take over when the first bunch were depleted. Ritu and I had to step along carefully in order to stay between the two advancing groups, forging ahead through that awful, dank tunnel. Only a few dim glowbulbs, tacked onto bare stone walls, kept us from stumbling in the dark.

“Well, there’s one thing we can find satisfying,” I quipped, trying to lift my companion’s spirits. “At least our destination is near.”

Ritu didn’t seem amused by the irony, or cheered that we were finally approaching the goal we set out to visit Tuesday evening — the mountain villa where she spent weeks as a child, vacationing with her father. The trip had taken much longer than promised, by a route more circuitous and traumatic than either of us expected.

I kept searching for an alcove or crevice, any refuge to avoid being herded toward the harsh echoes of fighting — detonations and clanging ricochets — as the first squadron of battle-golems advanced against bitter resistance. But though Yosil Maharal’s secret access shaft twisted enough to take advantage of softer layers in the rock, it never offered a safe place to duck and hide.

Lacking that, I’d give anything for a simple phone! I kept trying to use my implant, dialing for Base Security. But there weren’t any public links within line of sight and the tiny transceiver in my skull couldn’t transmit through stone. We were probably outside the boundaries of the Military Enclave by now, traversing deep under Urraca Mesa.

Serves you right, I thought. You could have called for help ages ago. But no, you had to play go-it-alone sleuth. Smart guy.

Ritu wasn’t much help offering alternatives. Still, I tried to keep up one side of a conversation, talking to her in a low voice as we hurried along.

“What puzzles me is how Beta penetrated the Defense Zone without someone like Chen to escort him inside. And how did he even know we were here?”

Ritu seemed unsteady, perched halfway between listlessness and tears after her recent ruthless treatment. It made me hesitate before asking, “Do you have any idea what Beta wanted you for?”

I saw conflict in her eyes — a wish to confide, battling against a habitual terror of something that must never be said aloud. When she finally spoke, the words came haltingly and tinged with bitterness.

“What does Beta want me for? Is that your question, Albert? What’s the ultimate thing that any male animal wants a female for?”

Her question made me blink. The answer might have seemed obvious a century ago, but sex just isn’t the all-transfixing force that it was in Grandpa’s day. How could it be? That urge is no harder to satisfy now than any other inherited Stone Age hunger, like the yearning for salt or fatty snack foods.

So, if not sex, what else could she be talking about? “Ritu, we don’t have time for riddles.”

Even in the dark, I saw symptoms of a carefully buttressed facade collapsing. The corners of her mouth moved — halfway between a tremor and a sardonic smile. Ritu wanted to divulge, but had to do it on her own terms, preserving a sliver of pride. A measure of distance and … yes … that old superiority.

“Albert, do you know what happens inside a chrysalis?”

“A chrys … you mean a cocoon? Like when a caterpillar—”

“—turns into a butterfly. People envision a simple transformation: the caterpillar’s legs turn into the butterfly’s legs, for instance. Seems logical, no? That the caterpillar’s head and brain would serve the butterfly in much the same way? Continuity of memory and being. Metamorphosis was seen as a cosmetic change of outer tools and coverings, while the entity within—”

“Ritu, what does any of this have to do with Beta?” I honestly couldn’t see a connection. The infamous ditnapper made his fortune offering cheap copies of highly coveted — and copyrighted — personalities like Gineen Wammaker. Ritu Maharal certainly had her own quirks, as unique as the maestra’s. But who would pay for bootleg copies of an administrator at Universal Kilns? What profit could Beta see in it?

Ritu ignored my interruption.

“People think the caterpillar changes into a butterfly, but that doesn’t happen! After spinning a chrysalis around itself, the caterpillar dissolves! The whole creature melts into nutrient soup, serving only to nourish a tiny embryo that feeds and grows into something else. Something altogether different!”

I glanced back nervously, weighing the distance of marching footsteps. “Ritu, I don’t get what you’re—”

“Caterpillar and butterfly share a lineage of chromosomes, Albert. But their genomes are separate, coexisting in parallel. They need each other the same way that a man needs a woman … to reproduce. Other than that—”

Ritu stopped walking because I had stopped, halting suddenly, my feet unable to move as I stared without blinking. Her revelation burst in my brain at last, just like a bomb.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m usually calm about new ideas. In fact, I’ve always tried to be a skeptic, especially when I’m walking around in realflesh. An archie-debunker, you might say. But right then, her words and their implications hurt so much that I wanted desperately to push them away, and all understanding with them.

“Ritu, you … can’t be saying …”

“… that they’re paired creatures. Caterpillar and butterfly need each other, yet have in common no desires or values. No loves.”

I could hear the second contingent of war-golems coming up from behind, even more intimidating now that I had some inkling of their inner nature. Still, I couldn’t move without asking one more question. I met Ritu’s eyes. In the dimness, everything was gray.

“Which are you?” I asked.

She laughed, a bitter sound that bounced harshly off the tunnel walls.

“Oh, I’m the butterfly, Albert! Can’t you tell? I’m the one who gets to flutter in the sunlight, reproducing in blithe and blissful ignorance.

“That is, I used to be. Till last month, when I started to realize what was going on.”

My mouth felt dry as I followed up. “And Beta?”

The strain showed in her short, barked laugh. Ritu’s head jerked toward the sound of marching feet.

“Him? Oh, Beta works hard, I’ll give him that much. He’s the one with hungers. Ambitions. Voracious appetites.

“And one more thing,” she added. “He gets to remember.”

50 Through a Simulacrum, Darkly

I should feel honored. This really is genius-level stuff.

It’s apparent in the amplified Standing Wave that I’m now part of, filling a space far greater than the body-limited ripples that are contained within a typical golem. It pulses and throbs with power that I never before imagined.

Yosil Maharal must have known that he was on the verge of an epochal breakthrough, both beautiful and terrifying. And that terror did its work on him … on the solipsistic cowardice that comes embedded with Smersh-Foxleitner syndrome. Naked fear battled the awe-drenched draw of an unparalleled opportunity to change the world, and that conflict tipped him the rest of the way into madness.

A madness that his ghost manifests in spades, ranting as he cranks up the soul-stretching machinery, preparing me/us for my/our assigned role as a carrier wave — a finely tuned vehicle for transporting the Yosil-soul to Olympian grandeur …

… even as echoes of distant gunfire penetrate from some nearby subterranean passageway, creeping closer by the minute.

“You know, Morris, it’s awful how people take miracles for granted. TwenCenners adapted to faster lives, because of jets and cars. Our grandparents could fetch any book by Internet. We got used to living in parallel — the convenience of being in several places at once. For two generations we’ve just tweaked golemtech, making minor improvements, never pushing beyond the physique-limited vision of Aeneas Kaolin’s clay dolls.

“Such banality! People receive a splendid gift, then lack the will or vision to exploit it fully!”

Ah yes, contempt for the masses, one of the lovelier Smersh-Foxleitner symptoms. Better not answer, though. He thinks I’m already largely subsumed into the giant, amplified waveform of the glazier beam — the augmented spiritual field that he designed to utilize the perfect duplicating talent of Albert Morris, while deleting the ego-consciousness that made Albert special to himself.

Something’s gone wrong with his plan. It must have, since I am still here. Smeared thin, rolled up, sliced, and then mirror-multiplied ten thousandfold … in fact, there seems to be more me than ever! Tickled and driven by electric currents. Vibrating in a dozen dimensions and sensitive to countless things I never before noticed before — like a myriad flakes of crystalline mica, floating like glittery diatoms within the surrounding ocean of stone.

It is an ocean, of magma that flowed here ages ago. The mountains are waves. I feel this one still moving, slower now, having cooled and congealed. But everywhere, still in motion.

I can even start to stretch my perceptions beyond this mountain, reaching out toward polyspectral sparkles that seem to glimmer in the distance, just beyond clear reckoning, like tendrils of delicate smoke … or like fireflies that tremble at my touch …

Metaphors fail me. Am I sensing other people? Other souls beyond this underground lab?

It’s an austere, terrifying sensation. A reminder of something we all suppress most of the time, because it hurts so much.

The stark loneliness of individuality.

The essential alienness of others.

And of the universe itself.

“The real driver is pleasure,” ditYosil continues while nudging instrument settings toward perfect synchronization. “Take the entertainment industry back in one-body days. People wanted to watch what they wanted, when they wanted. Demand brought analog videotape into being, three decades before digital technology was ready to do the job right. A ridiculous, kludge solution using magnetic heads and noisy whirling parts, yet VCRs sold by the millions so that people could copy and play whatever they desired.

“Doesn’t that sound like dittoing in our time, Morris? A clumsy, ornate industry that ships hundreds of millions of intricate clay-analog devices all over the world, every day. The complexity! The resources and cash flow! Yet people pay, gladly, because it lets them be wherever they want, whenever they desire.

“A fabulous, flamboyant industry, and my good friend Aeneas Kaolin counts on it going on forever.

“But it will end soon, won’t it, Morris? Because the crucial breakthroughs are ready at last. Like digital finally overwhelming analog recording. Like jet planes outracing the horse. After we’re done tonight, things will never be the same.”

The pendulum sways, rhythmically cutting through my/our amplified Standing Wave, plucking complex harmonies with every sweep. Soon, ditYosil will climb aboard and his ghastly personality will start drawing all the stored-up power, taming it, preparing to ride the glazier beam toward deification.

If only that were all that lay at stake, I’d almost be happy to help. I’m expendable — a golem knows it. And much as I dislike Maharal’s ghost for its callous smugness, the scientific wonder of this experiment might make my sacrifice seem almost reasonable. At one level I know he’s right. Humanity has been marking time, mired in an orgy of self-involvement, squandering vast resources on teeny personal satisfactions that don’t add up to much at all.

There’s something much bigger awaiting us. I can tell, sensing it now with growing certainty as the glazier amplification mounts. Maharal — no matter how twisted by sickness — had the vision to know this. And the brilliance to hunt down a hidden door.

Yes, he’s made a mistake of some sort. My ego hasn’t gone away as planned. Instead of leaving only a perfect copying template behind — a healthy root substrate for his diseased soul to graft onto — my sense of selfness seems to grow and expand with each passing minute, in ways that no longer seem painful but more akin to voluptuous bliss.

And for the first time it occurs to me … this may not be a bad thing. In fact -

In fact, I’m starting to wonder. Who is in the best position to exploit this magnificent glazier, when it finally attains full power? Its inventor? The one who understands the theory?

Or the one who dwells within the ever-growing Standing Wave? The one who makes it possible by virtue of raw duplicating talent? The one who, you might say, was born for it?

Hey, theoretical understanding is overrated. Anyway, as we/I amplify, grow, and spread, I can start to feel Maharal’s knowledge, like a riffling breeze of index cards, all aflurry nearby, close enough to reach out and access -

Who says he should be the rider and I the steed?

Why not the other way around?

51 Ceiling Fate

It’s kind of hard to move about when half of you has fallen off or broken down.

Crushed and burned, shrunken and diminished, I had only partial function in one leg to help me haul myself upward along the fuselage of the skycycle, perching next to its cockpit, leaning in to fumble at whatever buttons I could reach. I was trying for the radio, to transmit a general distress call. But after a few encouraging bloops and beeps and instrument flashes, what I somehow triggered was the autopilot!

“Emergency escape procedure activated,” a voice announced, loud enough to make out through seared and blasted ears. My torso felt a rumble as the engine reignited. “Closing canopy. Prepare for lift.”

I was still dazed and muddled from the nightmare ride that brought me here, so it took a couple of seconds to realize — or notice the glass bubble swinging down. I managed to pull my head back in time, but not my left arm, which got pinned in that moment of indecision.

Damn! I was used to pain by then, but this crushing sensation was ghastly as the transparent canopy tried to squeeze shut. For some reason it didn’t sense my arm was in the way. A malfunction? Or did Beta program the unit not to care about trivial clay limbs when a quick getaway was at stake? All I could do — while the lift ducts sandblasted grit into the air — was send commands for my trapped left hand to keep stabbing buttons, hoping to shut it off.

Instead, my efforts gave the Harley conniptions! It bucked and jittered, with each jerk tearing agonizingly at my arm as the glass bubble tried to close. Why couldn’t the idiot machine sense that no one was aboard! Perhaps it also served Beta as a pilotless courier, conveying small objects, like severed heads.

What little feeling I had in my left leg sensed the ground’s queasy departure. I was flying again!

More buttons and switches fell before my chopping hand, which kept swinging long after an organic arm would have nerves and circulation pinched off. All the clay version needed was some residual connection for me to order a splurge of all its remaining élan. The limb flung wildly, seeking things to twist and pull, until the canopy’s steady guillotine pressure finally tore through.

The weight of my body did the rest. I looked down -

— about fifteen or twenty meters, almost straight down to the roof of Maharal’s cabin.

Frantically twisting during my plummet, I managed to strike the shingles first with my useless right leg.

Did you ever have that feeling of viewing life through the wrong end of a telescope? Everything from the moment of impact seemed to happen in a fog of dulled senses — the noise and jarring force were distant things, happening to someone else. Even time felt softened as another of those eerie otherness waves came over me. I could swear the substance of that termite-eaten roof dissolved as I passed right through, floating toward the floor amid cottony clouds of splinters, dust, insects, and other debris.

Landing on my back, I heard an awful thud. But other senses disagreed. To touch, it felt like rebounding off the surface tension of a soap bubble, hardly jarring at all. An illusion, of course, for I could tell that more chunks of me had broken off.

Bottomed out at last, I stared up at a ragged circle of sky — rimmed by still-crumbling rafters. Soon the dust haze cleared enough to glimpse Beta’s poor skyscooter almost directly overhead, brighter but more frantic than the surrounding stars. Flaming extravagantly, the damaged machine fought to right itself, then turned laboriously to head off. Westward, I guessed from a glimpse of Sagittarius, and from the orientation of the cabin walls. A good choice, if you’re trying to get help … or to be destroyed.

Speaking of destruction, I saw little option but to write off this particular branching of the multilimbed life tree of one Albert Morris. Tiredness didn’t begin to describe how I felt. What little of me could feel anything at all.

There was no “salmon urge” anymore. Just the siren song of slurry … the beckoning of the recycling bin, calling me to rejoin the great clay circle, in confident hope that my physical substance may yet find some better use, in a luckier ditto.

But not one who’s seen or done more with its life, I thought, finding consolation. It had been interesting, the last few days. I had few regrets.

Except that Clara will never hear the whole story …

Yeah. That was too bad, I agreed.

… and now the bad guys will win.

Aw, man. Whatever nagging inner voice had to put in that last bit? What guilt-tripping nag? If I could, I’d tear it out! Just shut up and let me die, I groused.

You gonna just lie there and let ’em get away with it?

Crap. I didn’t have to take this from some obsessive soul corner of a cheap-model golem who was misborn a frankie … became a ghost … and any moment was about to graduate to melting corpse.

Who’s a corpse? Speak for yourself.

Stunning wit, that triple irony. Speak for myself, indeed. And though I tried hard to ignore the little voice, something surprising happened. My right hand and arm moved, lifting slowly till five trembling fingers came within sight of my good eye. Then my left leg twitched. Without conscious command, but reacting to imprinted habits a million years old, they started cooperating with each other, fumbling to shift my weight, then pushing to turn me over.

Oh well. Might as well help.

As I’ve said, Albert was always pigheaded, obstinate, persistent — and I guess that endearing trait came through on Tuesday morning when he made me, rolling his soul into this inert doll and willing it to move … with much the same sanguine hopefulness as ancient Sumerian scribes who long ago held that each clay impression manifested something sacred and magical. A brief but potent shove back against the surrounding darkness.

So I crawled, using one arm and a half-usable leg to haul what was left of me past broken furniture and tattered western-motif rugs, through an open door with a shattered lock and then over fresh footprints that led down a long, dusty hallway — a corridor that seemed to push right into the mountain. Following Beta.

What else could I do, since it seemed quite clear that I was too stubborn to die?

52 Prototypes

There had been clues. Too subtle for the likes of me, but somebody smarter might have caught on ages ago.

Beta — the name implied “number two” or a second version. Ritu’s middle name was Lizabetha. And in mythology, Maharal — the name her father chose to adopt before she was born — had been a title given to the greatest late medieval maker of golems … while another reverent appellation for one with that skill was Betalel or Betzalel.

And so it went, on and on. The sort of childish puzzle-hints that made you groan, both over your own stupidity and the comic book immaturity of it all.

Another reason I never caught on? Maybe because I’m old-fashioned at heart. The gender difference between lovely-reserved Ritu and the prodigally flamboyant Beta shouldn’t have fooled a worldly fellow like me, who’s seen plenty of ostentatious cross-roxing in his time. The fact that it did trick me proves what a conservative old fart I really am, dammit. Unwarranted assumptions are the bane of any private eye.

I still had trouble absorbing this, trying desperately to recall what I’ve learned over the years about Multiple Personality Disorder, or MPD.

It’s not an either-or thing. Most people experience the fluid overlap of amorphous subselves from time to time, debating or contesting internally when awkward decisions have to be made — imagining inner dialogues till the conflict is resolved. They do this without engendering any lasting fracture or disturbing the illusion of a single, unified identity. At the opposite extreme are those with mental schisms that are rigid, adamant, and even self-hateful, erecting permanent personas who hold opposing values, voices, and names, battling each other over control.

You seldom ran across truly blatant examples back in pre-kilning days, outside of a few famous case studies and some movie exaggerations, because one body and brain don’t offer enough room! Confined to a single cranium, one dominant character-facade usually held fierce command. If others lurked — products of trauma perhaps, or neural injury — they’d be reduced to waging guerrilla wars of spite or life sabotage from below.

Dittoing changed all that. Though MPD is still rare, I’ve seen imprinting unleash the unexpected from time to time. Some peculiarity that lay dormant or suppressed in the original would burst forth in a duplicate, unleashed to manifest in ditto form.

But never anything as extreme as this Ritu/Beta flipflop! One in which the original person — a seemingly competent professional — somehow remained unaware of the very existence of her alter ego, even though it hijacked nearly every ditto that she made.

As a mere criminalist, I’m no expert psych-diagnostician. Guessing, I pondered a possible link to Yang-Pimintel disease. Possibly a variant of Smersh-Foxleitner, or a rare and dangerous variety of Moral Orthogonality syndrome. Frightening stuff! Especially since a few of these disorders show significant association with the worst kind of genius. The persuasively self-deceptive kind, fashioning brilliantly amoral rationalizations for any crime.

History shows that some of these psychopathologies have been heritable, passing from one generation to the next. It could explain why I’ve been outclassed from the very start.

Much of this raced through my mind a few seconds after Ritu obliquely revealed the truth through her parable of the chrysalis. I wanted to stand and stare, to blink in a fugue of dismayed realization, stammering incoherent questions — in other words, all the time-honored ways that folks react to extreme surprise. But there wasn’t time to do any of that, only to resume our hurried march. What choice did we have, with one platoon of Betas in front of us, fighting their ahead way through the tunnel, and a contingent of reinforcements pressing close behind?

I finally understood why the two groups of Beta-drones had left us alone so far, allowing the gap around us to remain intact. Ritu — their archie and reproducer — was now safely pinned right where they wanted, available in case more dittos had to be made. Till then, they had no reason to harass her any further. Indeed, they would be fiercely devoted to protecting her physical welfare.

I tried frantically to make sense of this.

Ritu always had the power to destroy Beta, by staying off copying machines! If the butterfly refused to lay any more eggs, there’d soon be no more chomping caterpillars.

To protect against that, paranoid Beta would have stashed extra frozen copies all over town. I met one of them behind the Teller Building, after Tuesday’s raid, when it spoke about someone “taking over my operations …” Did one of those backup copies follow us here to force Ritu onto an imprinter?

Why, in all the time since we set out on Tuesday night, did Ritu never warn me about this!

All right, at one point she mentioned that her dittos were “unreliable,” that most of them went missing, unaccountably. Even the fraction who loyally performed their assigned chores only brought home partial memories, because — I now knew — the missing experiences were seized and stored away by the proto-Beta personality, hiding in her brain. From Ritu’s point of view, dittoing must have seemed a horribly inefficient and unsatisfying process, even before she learned the truth about Beta.

In that case, I wondered, why do it at all?

Rationalizations. People are talented at coming up with reasons to keep doing stupid things. Perhaps she worried about the modern bigotry toward those who cannot ditto — the unkind implication that such folks are barren, with no soul to copy.

Or she might have kept imprinting because an official of Universal Kilns has to send out duplicates, even if it takes four tries to make one that goes where it’s told. Certainly she could afford the cost.

Maybe she needed desperately to pretend she was like everybody else.

I guessed one more reason. A compulsion from below. Inner pressure that could only be satisfied by laying between the soul-probes, feeling them palp and massage, pressing her Standing Wave sensually into wet clay. Something like an addiction, along with the denial blindness to addiction that has always plagued junkies, of every kind.

No wonder it took years for her to admit her problem aloud.

I had been wondering how Beta managed to track us across open desert, then follow us past every security screen into a buried national security redoubt. The answer hit me. He did nothing of the sort! Beta simply lay quiescent inside Ritu, building pressure within her till the strain grew intolerable. At which point she slipped away from me and Corporal Chen, rushing to one of the giant military autokilns we had seen. Loathing herself, like any addict giving in to a foul habit, she laid herself down, seeking relief between the floating tetragramatron tendrils, surrendering to her insistent, stronger half — a master thief and desperate character, the sort of devil-may-care who dared all and defied every authority of the lawful outer world.

No wonder I was never able to connect Beta to a real person! Oh, the endless hours I spent in ebony form, laboriously noting and encoding fragments of Beta’s speech and other personality quirks, sieving the Net in search of someone who used similar patterns of phrasing, syntax, and emphasis — the sort of arduous slog that lets a plodding detective track down even the shrewdest arch criminal, given enough time.

Only all that work was wasted in this case. Because the villain had a perfect hiding place, and Ritu spoke with a voice-manner that was nothing at all like Beta’s.

At last, here was my nemesis, my Moriarty, walking beside me in the dark corridor, shivering with both dread and shame in her dark eyes. How long did this secret personality alternation go on before Ritu finally grew suspicious, then fully aware of her gangster other half?

Was that why she first decided to hire me? In order to have Beta’s expert adversary on retainer? Finding her missing father probably had little to do with it, at first. Not till Yosil Maharal was found dead on the highway.

And yet, there had to be more of a connection than that.

Shaking my head, I found it hard to concentrate because of sheer emotion. Because by this point I was positively boiling with anger!

Ritu had known what was going on — the potential for extreme danger — by the time we set out together Tuesday evening. So why didn’t she warn me? All those hours and days in the desert, then underground, and never once did she mention the pressure that must have been building up inside her. The clutch of demon’s eggs that she carried, ready to hatch as soon as there was an opportunity.

Damn her selfish, self-centered -

Something in my attitude may have crossed the short space between us. Or maybe the fierce reality of our situation tore away Ritu’s last illusions. For whatever reason, after minutes of silent walking my companion spoke at last.

“I’m … so sorry, Albert,” she whispered.

Glancing at her face I could see what tormented courage it took to form that simple apology. Yet I was in no mood to let her off the hook so easy. Because we both knew what Beta would do — what he had to do — in order to survive.

If Ritu got away now, she might finally acknowledge the gravity of her condition and seek cloistered refuge at a hospital resort while Beta’s supply of secretly cached ditsicles slowly expired, their memories growing ever more useless and obsolete. Under expert therapy, her secondary personality would be summoned forth, challenged, forced to justify itself or else face drastic treatment.

Even if denial set in again and Ritu avoided getting help, I’d surely report the situation to both her employer and her personal physician. Anyway, with or without therapy, Beta would be washed up as a criminal mastermind. Because notoriety would subject Ritu Lisabetha Maharal to ongoing scrutiny by the World Eye … by free networks of amateurs who’d never let her dittos out of sight. Not for years to come. Underworld figures hate that sort of illumination. They find it hampering, as we learned in the years following the Big Heist.

To avoid that, Beta couldn’t let either of us go free. He must find a way to keep Ritu prisoner, a slave to this weird reproduction cycle forever — a kind of self-rape that would have given me utter willies, if I weren’t even more worried about myself.

Because my old foe Beta had no reason to keep me alive at all.

Trying to fit the pieces, I thought, Beta must’ve been the one who tried to kill me with that missile strike on my home. Did he realize I was hot on the trail of …

… but that makes no sense! Wasn’t a copy of Aeneas Kaolin nosing around the Maharal house, late on Tuesday? He was skulking about, looking for stuff while eager to avoid being caught in the act by Ritu’s gray.

And it was Kaolin who shot at Ritu and me, as were drove through the desert.

He must have grown wise to the link between Ritu and Beta, maybe even earlier than she did.

Was he the one “taking over” Beta’s operations?

I remembered my first meeting with Ritu and her boss in that fabulous Yugo limousine. They had both seemed united and sincere about hiring me to help find the missing Professor Maharal. Under the surface, each of them must have also been thinking about using my expertise to help control the Beta persona … and maybe to exploit it …

But all that changed by Tuesday evening. Something spooked Aeneas. Was it the prion attack at Universal Kilns? Or maybe something else, having to do with Ritu’s father.

That could explain why he sent one of his platinums to attack us on the highway. Ritu and I were both disguised as grays. Kaolin might have thought that I was making an alliance with Beta, and we were both on our way to rendezvous with -

My mind was thrashing about, grabbing threads from all directions. But before these floundering thoughts could coalesce into a new picture, I abruptly noticed something far more pressing. Something offering a ray of hope that our luck had changed.

On the left appeared a branching passageway. A possible way out.

This smaller tunnel cut backward at a sharp angle, close to the one we had been following till now. My impression — it seemed aimed toward another part of the nearby military base we had just departed. Professor Maharal must have had more than one target when he delved for hidden treasure down here, helping himself to a nation’s hoard of secret, high-tech marvels.

This new hole looked even more dank and narrow than the first. But it offered a slim chance and I took it without hesitation, grabbing Ritu’s arm and tugging her after me.

She made no complaint, coccooned again in her blanket of passive resignation. No wonder Ritu could be bullied around by a figment of her own imagination, I thought — admittedly a churlish remark. How strange that the aggressive, stronger-willed part of her was suppressed, only to be released through dittoing. She must have had a strange childhood.

Progress grew difficult. This tunnel was much rougher and so cramped that we had to stoop much of the time. Less effort had been taken to flatten the floor, as if the builder didn’t expect to need this passage very long. Glowbulbs were fewer and most seemed to have been shot out in recent fighting. Fragments of robotic cockatrice guardians lay everywhere, mingling with pools of recently dissolved golem slurry. Surrogates of clay and silicon had waged a brief, bitter struggle down this narrow lane.

Were there survivors? More important, were they still tuned to avoid injuring beings made of flesh? Or did such legalistic distinctions matter anymore?

I lost track of time and distance. (My implant wasn’t working down there, of course.) Still, a sense of hope grew as Ritu and I hurried. We must be getting near the base again — whatever part of it Yosil spent so many golem-years digging to reach. Once inside, I’d waste no time making that phone call -

Suddenly, I tripped over something in the shadows, stumbling past a squishy obstruction. A body groaned and reached for me with massive arms, but I managed to jump out of the way. And the supine battle-golem couldn’t pursue because three quarters of it had been blown away.

That was the good news.

The bad news: now Ritu and I were on opposite sides of the crippled warrior-doll, which turned what was left of a smoldering head to peer at us at us before it asked -

“Making a break for it, Morrissss?”

The raspy, slobbery voice wasn’t too bad, for someone with just half a face. Most dittos would disintegrate after such injuries, their Standing Waves unraveling like spun candy in a thunderstorm. But gladiatorial models are sturdy.

“You don’t want to go that way.” The head nodded in the direction I had been heading.

“Why not?” I asked. “Were the defenses too strong, Beta? Couldn’t blast your way through?”

The fractured figure shrugged. “No, we made it. But Yossie had already grabbed the stuff. He’s holding out in his lab. I shudder to think what he plans to do with—”

“Whoa! What are you talking about? Maharal is dead!”

A dry chuckle. “You think so?”

I spat to get rid of a sudden foul taste. “The police coroner was thorough. Yosil Maharal died in that car wreck. And by now any ghosts would have—”

“Any ghosts would still be around, Morris. But Alpha never told you about that, did she?”

Alpha. Beta’s nickname for Ritu, naturally. In the dim light her face seemed gaunt, sickened by the figure on the ground, by its injuries and flippant attitude, but above all by the Mirror Effect — disgust at seeing a reflection of yourself that you despise. She had it bad.

“What’s he talking about?” I demanded. But Ritu only backed away two steps, shaking her head.

The shattered golem laughed. “Go on, tell him! Tell Morris about Project Zoroaster and its multifaceted assault on the status quo. Like the new method to replenish dittos, so they last weeks or even months—”

“But that would …”

“—or the research into making better imprints from one ditto to another. That’s the part I was interested in professionally, of course, to make piracy really pay. I needed details that Ritu never learned at her day job, way up in the UK management dome, and for some finicky reason she refused to go down to R amp;D, no matter how hard I prodded. So I came up with a nifty espionage plan instead … one that used you, Morris.

“Only it must’ve backfired, I guess. Seems I finally offended somebody powerful. Someone with the resources to track me down and—”

“Powerful. You mean Kaolin?”

A shrug. “Who else? He was already upset when Yosil vanished, taking all his records and prototypes. Maybe Aeneas decided it was time to clean house, to purge Project Zoroaster … and get rid of all his enemies while he was at it.

“But your guess about that is as good as mine. This is the first chance I’ve had to incarnate for weeks! When it comes to recent events, all I know is what Ritu’s seen and heard. If only I had time, I’d put out feelers. Verify what I think panicked Aeneas. Maybe plan some revenge.

“But now—”

Tremors shook the remnant golem. Clay skin that once seemed nearly as supple as the real thing now cracked, rapidly mimicking the onset of age. Struggling, ditBeta grunted a few words at a time.

“Now … there’s a much … more critical matter … to deal with.”

I shook my head.

“You mean Yosil’s ghost is trying to do something—”

“—that must be stopped!” The clay soldier used its good arm to grab at at Ritu. “Go on … Tell Morris … what it’s about. Tell him what … Father is trying to do.

“Tell him!”

A wild look filled Ritu’s eyes. She treated two more steps the way we came, back toward Urraca Mesa and the hidden sanctuary of Yosil Maharal. I could only make out the whites of her eyes as I called.

“Wait! Beta’s trying to spook you … to herd you back among the others. But this one’s harmless, look!” I struck with my foot and the arm flew off, shattering as it hit the ground.

“Come this way,” I urged, holding out my hand to help her to step over the decaying war-doll. “We can escape—”

“Eshcape!” Beta’s putrefying ditto was down to a corroded half-face and part of a torso, yet it maintained enough force of will to emit guttural laughter.

“Jussst go to the end … of thiss tunnel … Morrissss … and see your esh — cape!”

The golem’s final cackle was the last straw for Ritu. With a moan of dread and self-revulsion, she swiveled about and ran back the way we came, toward the main tunnel. None of my shouts availed.

You can’t reason with blind panic. Not that I blame her.

Soon — predictably — I heard Ritu’s despairing cry as she ran headlong into our pursuers. More Betas, no more pleasant than the version at my feet. Only these would be intact.

I couldn’t help her now. My sole chance was to turn and flee as the nearest Beta liquefied at last. His final laughter flayed at me, driving my haste as it had Ritu’s, even after the last audible echoes faded.

A real battle must have raged here, I observed. Machines set up by Yosil Maharal fought bitterly against clay automatons bearing one aspect of his daughter’s many-faced personality. The treasure they vied over must be important! Hurrying, I heard a distant drum of pursuing footsteps, drawing closer from behind.

At last, the crude tunnel came to an abrupt end. A metal wall stretched left and right before me — armor that was clearly meant to keep trespassers out. The barrier should have worked. It might have, if the base guardians had listened for approaching moles. They meant to, I knew. They established all the proper instruments and vigilant watch programs. Only someone much smarter managed to hack the defense system, fooling the mechanical wardens of this secret redoubt into ignoring blatant sounds of digging.

A broad face of high-tech steel had been exposed, then a jagged-slanted section removed, carefully avoiding embedded continuity detectors. More evidence of an inside job, planned by someone in the know. Of course this was all short term. It wouldn’t take long to track down the culprit, once Base Security services were roused. The thief had only a little time to execute his plan, whatever it was.

Approaching the wall fissure — a centimeter thick, I noted — the implant in my left eye scanned for ambush by any leftover cockatrice-bots, though all I saw were fragments. It also got busy trying to put through that phone call to Base Security, but no link was in line-of-sight yet. I’d have to step inside and hope …

Then I saw the emblem:

The armored room was supposed to have just one entrance. I saw it opposite from me — a heavy airlock with massive, overlapping closures. Almost as imposing were a dozen bulky refrigerators, each of them triple-locked and covered with ribbon seals to show any trace of tampering.

Somebody had tampered, though, carefully bypassing the alarm wiring on two storage units, then slicing new openings to avoid the locks. Frosty condensation exhaled from the gaps as laboring heat pumps strove to keep up. But that cold was nothing compared to the chill passing through my heart as I glimpsed all the burglary detritus strewn across the floor — abandoned metal trays and torn plastic coverings showing more of those frightening BIOHAZARD symbols. Without any conscious will on my part, the implant zoomed till I could read some ripped tags, carrying names like Airborne Saringenia and Tumoformia Phiddipidesia: Advanced Strain.

Clara once told me about Saringenia — a truly nasty organic plague that had been tested during the Fizzle War. As for Phiddipidesia, a mild version that escaped ten years ago caused the SouthWestern Eco-Toxic Aquifer Plume. I shuddered to imagine what an “advanced” strain could do.

According to solemn treaty, stocks were supposed to have been destroyed long ago.

Naturally, web cynics have always spun lurid tales about dark conspiracies. Vaults like this one had to exist, they claimed. It just isn’t in human nature to throw away a weapon.

I stood there, half-astride the gap in the metal wall, gazing into whistle-blower’s paradise, pondering the huge tattler’s bounty if I reported all this to the open nets … and wondering how the Dodecs ever managed to keep it secret in this day and age. That is, I would have pondered such things, I’m sure, if I weren’t paralyzed with mind-numbing terror. Especially when I noticed a spray of glittering slivers on the floor … bits of glass from vials that had fallen during the hurried robbery.

It was already way too late to start holding my breath.

How long I stood there, blankly staring at death’s shiny frosting, I cannot imagine. What finally stirred me from blank fixation was a sound — drumming footbeats announcing the approach of a more familiar and tangible threat. One the mind could grasp.

“Well, Morris. Here you are.” Beta’s voice rocked me off the cusp of fear. “Now you see what’s at stake. So why don’t you be a good little shamus and back away from there, hm?” From the shadows behind me emerged half a dozen of the burly war-dittos Beta had hijacked from the reserve armory, advancing under the tunnel’s low ceiling in a stooped crouch.

As they drew near, I felt something precious start to vanish — my power to act. To affect events. I don’t know about you, but to me that power can mean more than one measly life, even a real one. In this case, a whole lot more.

I jumped the rest of the way into the storage room and began running for the door at the other end. “No!” the nearest Beta cried. “Let me handle this! You don’t know what you’re doing. Your body heat could set off—”

I strained to turn the big wheel controlling eight big steel pins that sealed the hatch shut. No codes or locks should be needed to turn it from the inside, right? I felt it start to move …

Battle-golems are fast, though. They were on me before the wheel turned thirty degrees. Implacable hands pried loose my grip, further abusing my sore thumb, then a jumbo-sized Beta slung me under one arm — a sensation I was really starting to hate. Writhing and kicking, I flailed frantically as he carried me away from the big hatch, till we passed the cool surface of a storage refrigerator. When my hand brushed strands of luminescent ribbon I spasmodically grabbed, yanking and tearing clumps from their moorings.

That had results! Abruptly, the ambient lighting switched from muted white to alert red. Shrill blarings resounded.

“That tears it,” one Beta muttered.

“We’ll bring him along anyway,” my bearer answered, bending over to reenter the cramped tunnel while hauling me like a slab of meat. Soon we were racing along, driven by augmented ceramic muscles that felt uncomfortably hot near my skin, especially after leaving that refrigerated room. All I could do was watch stony walls tear by in a blur, inches from my face, growing disoriented, as if in a fever.

Was I already infected with some fast-acting plague? More likely, motion sickness was being amplified by hopelessness and an overactive imagination. But who knew yet?

Emerging back in the main tunnel, we found ourselves amid a swarm of other battle-golems. The Beta who was hauling me turned left, hurrying toward the hidden stronghold of Yosil Maharal — at least that’s what I presumed. I also spied Ritu in their midst, now more closely guarded than before, looking glassy-eyed and withdrawn amid the creatures she had imprinted — giant, terrifying dolls that were propelled by a part of her she loathed.

The spatter of gunfire sounded closer than before, but seemed to be tapering off. Apparently the reinforcements had been called forward to mop up Yosil’s final layer of defense.

Well before we arrived at that front however, a second fractious murmur came up from the rear — distant, surprised shouts followed by sharp detonations. I saw the nearby Betas consult each other in brief, worried tones. Some turned to face this new threat, setting up firing positions, while the rest of them pushed Ritu and me forward.

Apparently our little task force was surrounded. Enemies behind us now, as well as ahead.

Great, I thought, succumbing to fever, or else to gloom.

Better not let the travel nets learn about this lovely Place. Or every maso-tourist in the world will want to come.

53 Soulscape

Who says Yosil should get to be the rider?

His mad ghost yammers on, using pompous braggadocio to convince himself he’s still in charge, but I’ve stopped listening. Poor old ditYosil hasn’t got a clue yet that something’s gone terribly wrong with his plan.

The glazier amplified me from the measly ditective who was seized from Kaolin Manor. Countless boson-duplicates combine like droplets in a mighty wave. That’s all I was supposed to be, a simple carrier wave with all the “me-ness” rubbed out.

But I’m here! Peering along new dimensions. Learning fast.

For example, I’ve been studying those “echoes” that I noticed earlier. They are other people. I behold them flickering nervously at some undefinable distance.

Here one burns with a bitter tang that reminds me of anger. Over there shimmers a wavering flame with the acidic color of regret. But the common trait appears to be aching isolation — each a lonely outpost, forlorn, incommunicado, a solitary spark burning on an arid plain.

Even when I happen on a crowd of millions — a nearby metropolis? — the premier feature of this realm is melancholy sparseness. Cityscapes always seemed crowded — all those jostling bodies of flesh and clay, accoutered with clothes and tools and brash voices. But here, viewing them stripped down to their cores, you realize that a few million souls amount to almost nothing, like widely scattered blades of grass, desperately calling themselves a lawn.

No, they’re even less. Consider specks of algae, dotting a barren shore, touching only the barest fringe of an enormous, vacant continent. It’s a dour view of the human condition. Yet I find the austere panorama exciting. For I can touch them!

One corner of me still feels compelled to recite and describe, even though I know that metaphors of sight and sound mislead. Yosil was right — new perceptions call for new vocabularies. Space and proximity have different qualities on this alternate plane, where location is based on affinity. Love or hatred or obsession can move two soul-flickers closer together for a while. Side by side, a pair will sometimes kindle a new glimmer that ignites in abrupt hopefulness. Marriage. I figure, giving the phenomenon a comfortably familiar name, and children.

Not all of these collaborations are lasting or happy. Still, gentle aromas of joy waft from some.

It gives new meaning to the phrase “soul mate.” How many wistful teens have yearned to find that one special other with all the right complementarities to blend in perfect union? The romantic notion always seemed foolish, ignoring the work and compromise that genuine love requires. But while scanning this strange landscape, I spot patterns and textures of character that seem to complement each other, suggesting harmonious blends, if only they meet.

What a business opportunity, if some enterprising entrepreneur ever used this technique to offer a new, improved dating service …

… but Yosil Maharal had something more profound in mind when he designed this window to a deeper layer of reality. Take what happens when a flicker starts to waver and then fade. In the so-called real world, we have a name for it. Death.

A few of these dwindling embers smolder with unmistakable courage, while others fume what I can only call despair. And, at the very last moment, some make a fleeting, ecstatic effort to go elsewhere.

There’s one! A dying speck launches itself across the solemn expanse like a dandelion seed that sparkles briefly, auspiciously …

… before tumbling back to the sere plain, guttering out, leaving behind a dusty imprint. A great many burnt indentations mark the landscape in all directions. More than I could ever count. Most of them feel old.

It happens again, and again. The dying repeat this futile effort, one after another. Why do they bother, when it’s always unavailing? Do they sense a goal worth striving for, no matter how bleak the odds?

There is something … I can tell with my new senses. It must be the same allure that underlay religions — a potential for some phase beyond egg and child, beyond larva and youth. Beyond adult woman or man. Hope for continuity, proliferation — perhaps even endless propagation across a vast new dominion. The potentiality is evident to me now!

Then what holds them back? Lack of faith? Divine judgment?

No. Those old excuses won’t suffice. They never did. For where’s the logic in basing salvation on a creator’s capricious whim or craving for praise? Or on prayer-incantations that vary from culture to culture? That’s not consistent or scientific. It’s not how the rest of nature works.

Think, Albert. Look back at all the tragedies that marred human life, ever since our dim beginnings. Sickness stole your loved ones. Starvation scythed your tribe. Blighted by ignorance and coarse of speech, you couldn’t even share what little you managed to learn. Or take the frustrating clumsiness of your hands and slowness of feet. Or the curse of having to be just one place at a time, when innumerable things needed doing! None of these problems were solved by the prescriptions of shamans and priests. Not by patronizing mystics or condescending monks.

Technology. That’s what made things better! In fits and starts — and often horribly abused along the way — that’s where we found answers that were consistent, dependable, uncapricious. Answers that applied to lord and vassal alike. Answers that improved life across the board and never went away.

So, why not use technology to solve the greatest age-old riddle — immortality for the soul?

I admit, I’m starting to understand what drove Yosil Maharal. Heaven help me, I can grasp his dream.

With each passing moment, I learn more. Explicit facts and abstract theorizations pour in, sponged out of ditYosil as he works unsuspecting nearby, striving to finish before attackers break in. His knowledge — the work of a lifetime — comes to me unearned and disjointed. I can encompass the glazier’s beauty, for example, at an aesthetic level, before the underlying equations make any sense. The uneven pace of understanding is one reason why I’ve held back from meddling. So far.

Examining all those fragile glimmers out there, I believe I know what holds them apart — a raw dread of losing individuality! Of being smeared out. Of getting lost. People approach and then avoid each other in a mad dance, fearful of both too much isolation and too much intimacy.

I remember that dance, too well. But the fear is gone now, burned out by my ordeal in Maharal’s tormenting machinery. In becoming many, I no longer dread the prospect of sharing a Standing Wave.

Am I like some bodhisattva, then, returning from Nirvana with compassionate aid for the unenlightened? Is it compassion I feel, so eager to intervene?

I yearn to reach out, to embrace all those dismayed flickers, to waken and encourage and liberate them. To stoke their wan fires and force them to acknowledge the starkness all around.

It’s not the humble version of compassion we’ve been taught to admire. Unlike a buddha, I brim with ambition for myself and all of my benighted species!

Some honest corner of me calls this “arrogant.”

So? Doesn’t that very honesty help qualify me for the job?

For sure, I’ll make a better god than ditYosil.

Algae on a barren shore. Increasingly, I find that metaphor apt. For we seem very much like the first creatures that climbed awkwardly from the sea to colonize bare land, underneath a blazing sun.

The nearly empty soulscape beckons, like a new frontier. One filled with far more potential than sterile outer space with its mere planets and galaxies. Science and religion only hinted at the immense potential here! If we can make it happen.

I can make it happen! I suspect this with growing excitement. There are just a few things to figure out first …

Wait. I see it now! A truth that Professor Maharal realized weeks ago. His ghost actually tried to explain it to me, with analogies from quantum mechanics. I never understood then, but now it seems so clear -

The body is an anchor.

That paragon of organic evolution, the breakthrough marvel of human flesh and brain that made self-awareness, abstraction, and the Standing Wave all possible — the body comes well equipped for those wonders, but also saddled with animal instincts and needs, like individuality, craving the insulation of I and thou the way a fish needs the surrounding stroke of water.

To finish climbing ashore, leaving the sea for good, we must abandon the carapace of flesh!

This realization must have terrified Professor Maharal, triggering a split between his rig and rox, between man and golem, copy and archetype, ditto and master. realYosil saw self-murder looming as a natural consequence of his own research. He may even have agreed, in abstract. But the body would defend itself, flooding his real brain with panic hormones, sending him plunging across the desert in blind and futile flight.

Of course then realAlbert had to follow him in death. Both the rider and the mirrors must be un-anchored. Another small price of deification. I see it now.

Only suddenly I fathom something else.

It won’t be enough to sever just two body links.

More souls have to be cut loose, soon, in order to feed the glazier’s hungry process.

More murder … on a grand scale.

Images pour into me … things ditYosil had pushed to a corner of his mind. I glimpse a symbol — a trefoil of blood red scythes — accompanied by words: airborne contagion. Then another quick impression of missiles … trim, efficient rockets, stolen and assembled, ready to fire on an urban trajectory. At a moment that’s approaching soon.

I need to know more!

Whatever ditYosil has planned may be justifiable. Evolution doesn’t happen without pain or loss. A lot of fish died, in order for a few to stand. The price may be worthwhile …

… but only if the benefits can actually be achieved!

Yosil has already been much too careless. The experiment veered off its planned course, or else why would I feel this growing tide of power and ambition as the number of my perfect duplicates keeps multiplying, gathering energy like magma under a volcano? I am the one getting ready to ride the Big Wave … something ditYosil never anticipated.

If he made one mistake, he might have made others. I’d better check, and quick.

He really shouldn’t be allowed to slaughter so many innocents.

At least, not till I’m sure there’s a high probability of success.

54 Like a Brick

Crawling slowly after a trail of footprints in the dust, propelled through blazing agony by little more than stubbornness, dragging the dead weight of this dying body with just one good arm and a half-functioning leg … I couldn’t help wondering what I ditto deserve this.

My aim was to chase Beta, to catch the basdit before this body of mine dissolved, to thwart his evil scheme — whatever it might be. And if that proved to much to ask? Well, then, maybe I could inconvenience him a little. By biting him around the ankles, if nothing else.

All right, it wasn’t much of a plan. But my other motivation, curiosity, which had kept me going for two grinding days, didn’t serve anymore. I no longer cared about the secret struggle among three geniuses — Beta, Kaolin, and Maharal — only that they all must think they were rid of this cheap green copy by now, and damn if I wasn’t going to show them otherwise!

Anyway, that’s how it felt as I crawled past the main part of the old vacation house and into the mountain, following Beta’s footprints across the uneven floor of a cave … a natural limestone grotto that must have attracted Maharal to build here in the first place, erecting his cabin over the entrance, then using the cavern to establish a clandestine scientific redoubt.

Glowbulbs cast long shadows across stalactites and other drip features that shimmered along their dewey flanks. Water beads glistened as they fell. If my ears were functioning, I’d surely have heard a rhythmically pleasant plinking as the drops struck cloudy pools. One sound did penetrate, a low vibration I felt through my belly while creeping across the stone floor, growing more intense as I pursued Beta’s trail downward at a shallow angle … easier for me than climbing, I suppose.

Soon I passed by a wall that had been chipped and smoothed by human hands. My good eye glimpsed figures, etched in the rocky face by strike-flaking, one chiseled nick at a time. Petroglyphs, incised by some long-ago native people who deemed this cave a sacred place of power, where nature’s forces might be implored and miracles invoked. Humanoid shapes with sticklike arms and legs brandished spears toward rough-drawn beasts — simpler dreams, but no less ambitious or sincere than anything we hope for today.

Let me thrive and prevail, the magic on the wall beseeched.

I agreed, amen.

For about a hundred meters there weren’t any more distractions. Dragging myself along with one arm and a bad leg became so normal, I found it hard to recall any other mode of existence. Then, blinking in confusion, I found myself confronting a decision: a fork in the trail.

Left — a small niche room contained humming machinery. Familiar mechanisms, a freezer, imprinter, and kiln combination. Automated and ready-to-use.

Ahead — a well-lit ramp lunged downward, to the belly of the mountain. The vibrations came from there. It was also the direction taken by Beta’s footprints. The focus of big events. Probably the doctor’s secret lab, in all its glory.

I didn’t bother examining the third path, leading to the right. And upward, yuck. I had enough trouble deciding between just two options. Should I keep following Beta, or try something really daring?

The autokiln beckoned, its ready lights all gleaming the same color that I first wore when Albert made me long ago. It sure was a lot closer than trying to catch Beta by slithering after him. How alluring to contemplate swapping a ruined, expiring body for a fresh one!

Alas, there was no guarantee I could manage to pull myself onto the imprinting platform with just one arm and a bum leg, let alone fumble the controls correctly, setting golem-creation in motion.

Disadvantage number two: everybody knows that it’s non-warranty for a copy to try making copies. True, Albert was — or is — an excellent copier. But trying ditto-to-ditto using me as a template? At best a cheap frankie, now a complete ruin, how could I make anything but a mindless, shambling thing? Anyway, the exertion of reaching the perceptron platform would likely finish this body.

On the other hand, straight ahead lay a smooth downhill path to the center of all secrets …

That isn’t the way.

I winced. It was the damned external voice again. The bedeviling scold.

You may want to go right.

Upward.

It could be important.

Obstinate anger nearly overwhelmed me. I didn’t need a termagant hounding the last moments of my pitiful existence!

Oh, but perhaps you do.

And to my surprise, I realized something about the statement rang true.

I could not — and still cannot — explain what made me decide to accept that advice against all evidence and reason, abandoning two known options to invest all that I had left in a final daunting climb.

Perhaps it amounted to — why not?

Turning away from the tempting autokiln … and Beta’s hated footprints … I started to drag myself up the crude stairs.

55 A Family Spat

Ritu and I were trapped in that awful tunnel under Urraca Mesa, with one band of enemies battling toward us from behind while others blocked further progress ahead. We could only crouch in the narrow passageway while gunfire echoes pinged around us from both directions.

Beta seemed to be running out of fighters. Only one damaged drone was assigned to watch over us. Still, he seemed quite capable of guarding two scared organics.

“I should have made more of myself when I had the chance,” groused the giant golem.

Ritu winced. She was already worn out from imprinting so many dittos with the alternate personality carried around inside her head, obliged to do so by a compulsion stronger than addiction. The thought of copying more would only deepen her self-loathing. I worried in the dim half-light that Ritu might suddenly leap up and try to end her misery by dashing toward the combat zone, throwing her body into the melee before warriors of both sides could cease fire.

Lacking any other way to be helpful — and badly needing distraction from my own worries — I tried asking questions.

“When did you realize about Beta?”

She seemed at first not to hear, chewing a lip, eyes darting nervously. I repeated the question. Finally, Ritu answered without looking back directly.

“Even as a kid, I knew something was wrong with me. Some inner conflict made me do or say things I didn’t intend or that I’d later regret, sabotaging relationships and …” Ritu shook her head. “I guess a lot of adolescents might describe the very same problem. But it got far worse when I started imprinting. Dittos wandered off, or returned only to inload fragmented memories. Can you imagine how frustrating and unfair it felt? I was born into this business. I know dittoing better than most of the UK development guys! I kept telling myself it must be a glitch in the machinery. It would clear up with next year’s model.”

She turned to look at me.

“That must have been denial, I suppose.”

No kidding. It was like calling the ocean wet.

“Did you ever seek help?”

She turned haunted eyes downward. “Do you think I need help?”

It took hard effort to squelch a reflexive, horrified laugh. The force of repression within her must be incredible to even ask such a question while we cowered in this awful place.

“When did I start to understand?” Ritu continued after a few seconds. “Weeks ago, I overheard my father and Aeneas argue fiercely over whether to announce some new breakthroughs, like extending ditto lifespan. Aeneas called the methods unready and complained how much of Yosil’s research aimed at mystical areas like non-homologous imprinting …”

I made an earnest effort to listen as Ritu’s story poured out at last. I was interested, really. But the tunnel felt so stifling and hot … I couldn’t help wondering, were my sweats a symptom of some vile plague, contracted during my brief visit to the germ warfare room? Were superfast pathogens already tearing through my flesh?

I did not want to think about that! Like Ritu, I sought distraction from helplessness in dialogue.

“Um … could those quarrels with Aeneas explain why your father went into hiding?”

“I guess so … but they had always fought like brothers, ever since Aeneas bought the Bevvisov-Maharal process to animate his movie-effex dolls. The two of them usually calmed down and sorted things out.”

“Not this time though,” I prompted. “Kaolin—”

“—accused Yosil of stealing files and equipment! I could tell Aeneas was furious. Yet he kept his anger bottled, as if Father had some power over him. Something that kept even the chairman of Universal Kilns from interfering, no matter how mad he got.”

“Blackmail?” I suggested. “Kaolin’s ditto was snooping around your father’s house when you and I met there Tuesday evening. Maybe he was looking for evidence to destroy, right after knocking off Yosil—”

“No.” Ritu shook her head. “Before he departed for the last time, I overheard Father tell Aeneas, ‘I’m your only hope, so get out of my way if you haven’t the guts to help.’ That sounds rather scary, I admit, but not like blackmail. Anyway, I still can’t believe Aeneas would murder anyone.”

“Well, some Kaolin dit-alike shot at us later that night, on the desert highway.”

As if on cue, several loud bangs resonated where Beta’s rear guard still fought off unnamed enemies. Panic reignited in Ritu’s eyes … till she pushed the dread away one more time. In her own way, she was showing real courage.

“I … thought about that. Aeneas wasn’t only worried about my father, you know. He also had a growing obsession about … Beta.” Ritu spat the word in distaste. “Aeneas spent a fortune on insurance and security, trying to plug Beta’s access to UK technologies and material. I guess somehow along the way he must have finally discovered the truth about my other half.” She jerked her head toward the nearby guard-golem.

“It would have galled Aeneas to realize that Beta knew everything that I know about the company. He couldn’t even prosecute or take revenge without hurting me … the same Ritu Maharal he always treated like a daughter. Nor could he talk to me about the problem. That would only warn Beta, so I was kept out of the loop.”

“Even worse,” I added, “Kaolin would worry about the possibility that Beta and Yosil Maharal had forged an alliance.”

Ritu’s head jerked. “The very idea would drive Aeneas crazy.”

“Then his golem shot us on the highway because he thought you were Beta,” I concluded. “You were wearing that ditto-disguise. And all this time I thought he had it in for me! But then, who shot a missile at my house and—”

A far-traveling bullet came zinging by, interrupting as it ricocheted off the ceiling. Ritu winced. For the fourth or fifth time, she tried crouching closer to me. Amid this fracas, the most natural thing would be for us to hold each other. But I edged back, keeping distant, since I might be carrying some foul virus.

The alternative was to keep talking. I tilted my head to fix contact with her eyes.

“What about your father?” I demanded. “What was he doing down here that frightened Kaolin? Why steal golems and arms from the government. And germ warfare agents, for God’s sake!

“Ritu, what is still going on here, days after he died?”

My intensity made her draw back. Ritu clamped both hands against her head. Her voice cracked.

“I don’t know about any of that!”

Someone else joined in at that point.

“Leave her alone, Morris. You’re badgering the wrong me.”

It was the wounded battle-golem assigned to guard us, so stolid till now that we had been sheltering behind it like a stone. The square-jawed face looked down, regarding me with barely any expression. Still, I sensed the familiar contempt of my longtime foe. Even knowing, at last, that it was born of neurotic overcompensation didn’t help much. I still hated the guy.

Beta spoke in a deep-gravelly voice, but with the same snide tone.

“As you suspect, we did have an arrangement, Yosil and I. He slipped me a limitless supply of specialty golem blanks, straight from Research, with all sorts of great features like pixelated skin that can change color patterns on command.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Yosil helped ship them directly into Ritu’s supply fridge while I worked from inside, to ensure she never examined her blanks closely. Together, we made it seem that a number of her dittos were doing exactly what she wanted them to do, minimizing her worries and suspicions. It was a big help in my operations and worked well … till just a short time ago.”

“And what did Maharal get in return?”

“I taught him the fine art of evasion! How to dodge and weave and evade the World Eye. My underworld contacts were a big help. It became sort of a father-and-son pastime.” The ditto winked at Ritu, who shuddered and turned away, so Beta turned the knowing smile toward me.

“I suspect Dad always wanted a boy,” he said.

Sibling cruelty can be disgusting. So is destructive self-hatred. This lay somewhere viciously in between.

“I have to admit,” Beta went on, “that she put up quite a fight the last few weeks. Ever since learning about me, she stopped imprinting and killed every Beta that approached her for inloading. I was running out of delay-release versions!”

“The decaying ditto that I found in a Dumpster behind the house—”

“Bang.” Beta used a finger to mime a pistol firing. “Ritu terminated it. Then she grabbed Dad’s makeup kit in the house and disguised herself to look just like that gray, hoping the pretense would let her come south with you and …” Beta shook his head. “Well, I have to admit her forcefulness surprised me. I was only able to interfere a little, from inside. Good for you, Alpha!”

“How touching,” I answered for Ritu, who looked too angry for speech. “So Father liked you best. Is that why you’re fighting your way into good old Dad’s sanctuary right now?”

Before Beta could answer, something clicked in my thoughts.

“The lab isn’t dormant, guarded by leftover robot sentries. Somebody’s inside, right now, planning to use stolen germ weapons in some grisly scheme. Is it Yosil’s murderer? Are you breaking in to avenge your father?”

Beta paused, then acknowledged, “In a manner of speaking, Morris. But as long as buried truths are coming out, you might as well know” — he nodded toward Ritu — “that we have more in common with our father than you’d ever imagine.”

Ritu blinked, looking directly at the golem for the first time. “You mean—”

“I mean that a genius like his could never be contained within a single personality, or confined to one human brain. In Yosil, the divisions were less explicit. Still—”

I let out a grunt of realization, recalling some bad movied plots Ritu and I’d discussed during our desert trek. How many focused on the same old nightmare, couched in contemporary terms — the fear of being conquered by your own creation, by your own darker half? In Ritu, technology brought an inner nightmare to life, amplifying an irksome personality trait into a fully reified arch criminal.

How much further might the same syndrome go, if unleashed by a virtuoso?

“Then Maharal—”

Before I could finish, a shrill whistle echoed down the corridor. Beta grunted with satisfaction. “It’s about time!” The big war-ditto stood up awkwardly, favoring a gravely wounded left side, motioning for Ritu and me to follow. “The way is clear ahead.”

When Ritu shivered, the golem soothed.

“Picture it as a family reunion. Let’s go see what Father has become.”

56 Top of the Line

There weren’t any glowbulbs in the crude staircase and I had no way to judge the time spent dragging up one rough step then another, hauled along by a single good arm and a half-functional leg, leaving bits of me crumbling along the way. The ascent seemed measureless except for rhythmic throbs each time my battered form heaved upward. I counted one hundred and forty of these pulses. A hundred and forty opportunities to relax into darkness forever — till the utter blackness around me started to give way.

Attenuated light slid down the stairs, tentatively liquid in quality, actually cheering me a bit. It’s hard to feel completely hopeless during that special moment when you first catch sight of dawn.

It was daybreak, I soon verified, pouring through a rough cut in the far wall of a modest room that was nearly filled by a bulky machine. Crawling nearer, I saw a funnel-track slanting toward the narrow window. A rugged frame held more than a dozen slender tubes bearing dorsal and pectoral fins, as if to maneuver with agility through water or air.

My good eye glimpsed ominous cutlass-shaped symbols marking the sleek forward tips; still realization came slowly.

Missiles, I thought, fighting expiration fatigue. Stacked in an automatic launching system.

And … I further noted when a row of electronic displays came alight …

And the machinery just turned on.

57 Bosons in the Circuit

As I grow larger, as knowledge floods into me, I grow more appreciative of the grand vision that drew my tormentor to this place and hour. Yet the closer he came to greatness in recent months, the more it intimidated poor Yosil Maharal. No wonder, for he stood alone atop a vaulting arch that had been built across the millennia by humanity’s greatest minds, each of them battling darkness in his or her own way, against all odds.

The struggle went slowly at first, with more false starts than progress. After all, what could primitive women and men accomplish, what secrets could they pierce without fire or electricity, lacking biochemistry or soulistics? Sensing there must be something more to life than tooth and claw, the earliest sages focused on their one precocious gift — a capacity for words. Words of persuasion, illusion, or magical power. Words that preached love and moral improvement. Words of supplicating prayer. Call it magic or call it faith. Well endowed with hope — or wishful thinking — but little else, they imagined that words alone would suffice, if uttered sincerely enough, in proper incantations, accompanying pure thoughts and deeds.

Later successors, unbaring the splendor of mathematics, supposed that was the key. From Pythagorean harmonies and numerological puzzles like Kabbalah to elegant superstring theories, math seemed to be God’s own language, the code He used to write creation’s plan. Like quantum mechanics — the elegant sorting of aloof fermions and gregarious bosons — all the proud equations added to a growing edifice. They were foundations, gorgeously true.

But not enough. For the stars we yearned to touch remained much too far away. Math and physics could only measure the vast gulf, not cross it.

Same with the vaunted digital realm. Computers briefly tantalized, hinting that software models might prove better than reality. Enthusiasts promised new-improved minds, telepathic perception, even transcendent power. But cyberstuff fell short of opening grand portals. It became another useful tool set, just another incremental brick in the arch.

Back in Grandma’s time, biology was the queen science. Decipher the genome, the proteome, and their subtle interplay with phenotype! Solve ecology’s riddle and achieve sustainability in nature! These were attainments every bit as vital as harnessing flame or kicking the habit of all-out war.

Yet where were answers to the truly deep questions?

Religion promised those, though always in vague terms, while retreating from one line in the sand to the next. Don’t look past this boundary, they told Galileo, then Hutton, Darwin, Von Neumann, and Crick, always retreating with great dignity before the latest scientific advance, then drawing the next holy perimeter at the shadowy rim of knowledge.

From here on is God’s domain, where only faith will take us. Though you may have penetrated the secrets of matter and time, made life in a test tube, even covered Earth with thronging duplicates, man will never infiltrate the realm of the immortal soul.

Only now we’re crossing that line, Yosil and I, armed not with virtue but skill, utilizing every insight gathered by Homo technologicus during ten thousand years of painful struggle against nescient darkness.

One matter remains to settle before the adventure can begin.

Which of us will carry … and which will ride?

Oh, there is another issue.

Can such a bold endeavor properly commence, if it begins with a terrible crime?

ditYosil pulls the pendulum aside now, preparing to climb aboard and launch his final dittobody into the glazier, right between the mirrors. No more nervous yammering about philosophy and metaphysics — I can sense the basso drumbeat of fear in his Standing Wave, so shuddering that it robs the poor gray’s power of speech. A fear like realYosil must have felt on Monday, when he saw things getting out of hand, with no way to avoid paying the ultimate price of hubris.

A fear intensified by pressing events, as the last mechanical defenders fall before that army in the tunnel …

… and instruments show ditYosil at last that something’s gone wrong with his precious plan. The glazier readings aren’t what he imagined they’d be at this point. He may finally suspect that I’m still here, not erased at all but riding the tsunami! Growing mightier by the second.

The pendulum is aimed to slice right through the glazier, at its very heart. Suddenly I realize — this will hurt. In fact, it could be worse than anything I endured as an organic, or dittoing one copy at a time.

I can see how it’s supposed to work … how ditYosil’s inner fire may spark the glazier’s heightened energies, seeding his own imprint with each pass, like rolling a cylinder seal over and over again in soft clay. Despite everything that’s gone wrong with his plan — despite my lingering presence — it just might work. He may succeed in taking over, wiping me out!

Or else, we may cancel each other, leaving behind a wild, self-feeding beam of spiritual essence that could burst out of here unguided, like an all-consuming storm. A psychlone …

I didn’t think that anything could still frighten me. I was wrong.

Right now all I want is to go back. Return to the sere beauty of the soulscape. Contemplate again those virgin territories, more vast than any unexplored continent, more promising than a galaxy, though as-yet barely colonized by a mere few billion minuscule algae flecks along the shore — flecks who barely suspect their own latent destiny.

Especially one cluster of unsuspecting algae — a few million — who’ve been targeted for a special fate, to make the ultimate sacrifice. Like hand-servants accompanying a Babylonian monarch to his tomb, their supporting role is to die, offering their soul-energies, contributing potency to the glazier beam, propelling the Standing Wave to new levels.

Ancients would have called this “necromancy,” drawing magical force from the mysterious power of death itself. However named, it will be a ghastly crime …

… and I’ve almost reconciled myself to it. All those waning embers that I witnessed earlier — dying human souls striving at their very last moments to fly free, then guttering out, falling to leave ashen impressions on the barren plain — this will make their dashed hopes worthwhile, right?

After gazing across the Continent of Immortal Will, beckoned by its wealth of possibilities, how seriously should I worry about a few doomed algae on the shore?

Except -

Except that one of those tiny flickers has begun to annoy me, like a stone in my shoe. Like a pebble in my saddle. The soulscape doesn’t count distance in meters, but affinity, and this spark was too close to notice, clinging to me like a shadow. Only now do I turn to examine the irritation and discover that …

… it’s me!

Or rather, it’s the living, breathing Albert Morris — source of the Standing Wave that I’ve amplified profoundly. I can sense him sneaking closer in physical space, filled with all those old organic fears, drives, and sympathies. Nervous and yet dogged as ever, so near we might actually touch.

How could this happen? ditYosil claimed to have killed Morris with a stolen missile! Death of the body should release the anchor, liberating the soul. I saw news reports — the burning house and garden — yet he survived.

This must be why my personality never succumbed to erasure! The wave kept reimprinting somehow, from the original source, till it grew self-sustaining.

That’s great. I’m glad to be here. But now what? Will Albert’s presence interfere? Will his biotic anchor pin the glazier to “reality” when the crucial moment comes to fly free?

Yosil’s ghost has finished strapping himself in. With enemy soldier-dits breaking down the final door, he can’t procrastinate anymore. Preparing to let the pendulum fly, he gathers nerve for a vocal command.

“Initiate final stage!” he shouts to a control computer. “Launch the rockets!”

So. Preparing for battle, I can feel reassured. Whatever is about to happen to the city isn’t my fault. The mass murder of so many won’t be my doing. Their karma can’t affect me.

I’m as much a victim as anybody else, right?

I will make their sacrifice worthwhile.

58 Claylight

A single wan star gleamed through the roughcut window, twinkling like the panel lights of a dark machine that nearly filled the room at the top of the stairs. I felt ominous vibrations through the ground, rather than my ruined ears, as the mechanism awoke. Slim objects tightened formation in the feeder magazine, each bearing scythelike crimson symbols. I wasn’t too far gone yet to recognize an automatic launching system. Damn. Not good.

No, it isn’t.

Perhaps you should stop it.

Instead of nagging, what I needed were ideas how. How was I supposed to stop it!

Buttons glowed, about the height of a standing man’s shoulder. One of them might cut the launcher from its remote controller. But how to get up there? The weapon’s flank, military-smooth, offered no gripholds suitable for a one-armed man sprawled on the floor, even more hopeless than trying to climb aboard that autokiln downstairs.

“I … can’t …” came a hoarse whisper from my throat. “It’s too far.”

Then improvise.

I looked around, seeing no convenient ledge or chair to clamber on. No handy tools, or even bits of stone to throw. The cheap clothes that Aeneas Kaolin gave me, half a lifetime ago, were mostly gone, shredded to useless ribbons.

TARGETING COMMANDS ACCEPTED, said a row of dire words. COMPUTING TRAJECTORIES. There followed a series of numbers. Even in my dismal state I could recognize range and heading data.

Some maniac is shooting at the city!

I guessed Beta. Doubtless he murdered Professor Maharal in order to take over this facility. Why? Desperate because all his ditnapping schemes were collapsing, I guessed. My old foe must hope to wreak such havoc, the authorities will have more urgent chores than chasing down a copyright thief.

Frustrated and supine on the floor, I knew my theory made no sense, and didn’t care. What mattered was stopping him. I’d give anything. My pitiful life, certainly. I already surrendered my left arm to the cause. What else could I possibly …

A shout escaped my corroding mouth. Some things are only obvious after you think of them.

I did have one tool that might work, if I hurried.

It wasn’t going to be easy … but what is?

59 Divine Flu

The self-made army of stolen war-golems finally broke through. While Ritu and I were shepherded over the last shattered robot defenders, a dozen of Beta’s scarred veterans hurried the other way, rushing to help the rear guard. How long could they resist the force battling toward us from the Base?

Not long. I had a feeling things would start happening fast.

They had better. I may not have much time.

Smoke fumed around the edges of an armored door with a big hole burned through. Waves of heat still poured from recently molten metal as we passed into what must be the buried lair of Yosil Maharal. Ritu and I found ourselves standing on a parapet overlooking a scene that was altogether bizarre — a grotto filled to bursting with equipment, much of it jerry-rigged by stringing together hardware with familiar UK logos.

Surely this must be the hoard of electroceramic gear that Kaolin accused Maharal of swiping from work. What on Earth was he trying to accomplish here? I wondered. No doubt some avenue of research that Aeneas forbade him to pursue in the company’s R D department.

Flooding to me came foreboding words, “the curse of Frankenstein,” followed by a clipped image of a mushroom cloud.

Huge antennalike coils funneled from all angles toward a pair of humanoid figures, splayed at opposite ends of the room, facing each other with arms pinioned wide. One of these dittos was dark red, the other a specialized shade of a gray that I sometimes wear myself. Ornate inloading apparatus festooned all over their clay bodies, though I couldn’t imagine what so many souped-up linkages could be for.

Between the pair of dittos, some kind of giant clockwork mechanism kept time to the swaying of a huge pendulum. And damn if there wasn’t a golem there too, riding back and forth like a child on a swing!

That one was yelling its head off.

Those were some of the features my eyes saw. More interesting were things that eyes weren’t meant to see.

First, was I already dying of some awful fever? I had felt better crossing into the lab’s bright light and cooler air after that bloody tunnel. Only now, nausea waves skewered my viscera, like those gut-churning sensations that astronauts used to report, back when realfolk actually risked their lives in space. Bowels clenched, nearly as hard as my teeth, which barely let escape a reedy moan.

This is it, I thought. Some fast-acting super-virus. Death in minutes.

Too bad. I came so close to finding out what was going on here.

Should I have stayed home instead, and get blown up? At least it would have been quick. I never achieved my real goal, setting out on Tuesday night.

Clara, I’m sorry. I really tried -

More symptoms teemed, clouding the senses. I could swear the space between the captive golems, which had seemed as clear as air moments ago, now rippled and fluttered like some dense fluid! The undulations had a dreamlike quality, impossible to pin down, like a smoke-sculptor’s interpretation of manic mood swings.

I had a brief impression that battalions of identical ghostly entities occupied the confined zone, thronging in limitless multitudes, yet somehow uncrowded, with plenty of room in their well-ordered ranks for more. Except when the pendulum passed through. Then brusque waves roiled, transforming many of the marching figures, giving them a face.

Floating before me, I pictured the visage of Yosil Maharal.

“Albert, are you all right?” Ritu murmured, but I shook her hand away. Let her take it as anger for getting me into this fix. I just didn’t want to infect her.

I didn’t want anybody infected. So, despite stomach convulsions, apparitions, and disorientation, I forced myself to look away from shenanigans in the center of the lab, aiming instead at the support machinery lining the grotto walls, seeking any clue about those germ agents. They were all that mattered.

There.

Bleary-eyed, I spotted a computer. One of those expensive AI-XIX models. Damn smart for silicon. One of Maharal’s chief tools, surely, maybe even a master process controller. And just the sort of thing that a fellow like me could smash to bits, without having to know specifics of how or why.

Can I make it all the way down there and do it quickly?

At least it was a goal.

A nearby Beta — perhaps the very same war-dit who spoke to us in the tunnel — grabbed the balcony rail and shouted in a voice whose suddenly plaintive tone surprised me. I never heard the like from Beta before.

“Yosil! Father, stop … we had a deal!”

60 Mixed Glazes

Damn this compulsion to recite, built into one of the golembodies that serve as mirrors to enclose the growing waveform.

A new kind of Standing Wave surges between the glazier poles. Soon it will escape confinement, bursting through these porcelain dolls with enough power to endure for weeks over a dying city, feeding on death manna from millions of extinguishing spirit flames — a meal sufficient to complete the transition from created to Creator.

While that countdown ticks, a desperate struggle rages. What imprint will the glazier-made god carry? Whose core personality? Right now the waveform oscillates between two possible states — two discordant definitions of I am.

Yosil is with me now, our borders overlapping in unhappy swirls, like immiscible fluids. We both howl against this unnatural merging! It’s like trying to inload someone else’s ditto, a calamity that no one attempts twice. How can you share without agreeing on dimensions like left-right? Up-down? In-out? It’s all subjective on the soulistic plane. My versions dart away at angles that have nothing in common with his.

Communion will come, when I finally arc over this landscape as an all-transforming deity. I’ll establish fair metrics that are simple, universal, then invite all to join me in a vast new cosmos! Using raw material more basic than vacuum, together we’ll make stars, planets, whole new Earths.

But first, to win control.

I was here first, growing immeasurably during the last few hours. But my adversary knows more theory. He also has the advantage of position. With each rhythmic pass, the pendulum cuts like a blade, slicing through the glazier’s soft center, the most energetic and impressionable spot.

Worse, I feel yanked by the presence of realAlbert, so close that his image enters me now through a set of eyes. The red ditto can actually see him, leaning on a bannister rail as he descends from a western parapet. realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.

With each footstep nigh, the glazier shudders!

He’s my archetype … the reason I survived erasure to reach this point.

Now he’s getting in the way.

Poor Albert may have to go.

61 Extremities

Ever try to rip your own leg off? You need motivation.

It helps if you’re already falling apart.

Even so, pulling hard with my one good hand and arm, I made little progress while the nearby missile launcher ticked through its final check sequence.

Let me offer a suggestion.

Nag that it was, the voice had steered me right so far. Soon I felt a touch along my crusted skin, and within.

The appendage is no longer part of you.

Envision that.

Draw yourself back from it.

Trigger these enzymes as you go.

Like this …

My knowledge of chemistry was rudimentary, at best. Yet somehow the instructions made sense, like recalling a lost skill. Naturally, that’s how to do it, I thought, ignoring for now that the instructions came from an imaginary friend. Simple. I must remember this.

All pain and fatigue fled from the leg. Amid that growing numbness, every dram of leftover energy spent itself, not melting but hardening as if in a quick oven.

My next hard tug was rewarded by a brittle cracking. Again I pulled, and the limb snapped off below the hip, trailing gooey bits of shredded soul-fabric that sparked and glittered.

In my hand now — a near-perfect replica of a human limb in baked terracotta, bent at the knee. I hefted the thing. It was handsome, but hardly aerodynamic.

TARGET LOCKED, announced the launch-controller screen. Missile number one slid into place with its dire crimson warhead.

As the machine’s hum rose in pitch, I knew I had one chance.

62 The Clay’s the Thing …

Descending from the parapet, my feet were like blunt clubs at the end of mushy noodles. Waves of nausea whelmed over me as I clutched the bannister from one sweaty grip to the next. Dry-retching, I’d vomit if my stomach had been fed more than a few protein bars during the last few days. Hunger and exhaustion were factors, of course, but such a fierce decline must come from something else — surely a rapid war plague that some arrogant Dodecs stashed at the bottom of an armored hole for safe-keeping. A tool of genocide, banned by solemn treaty. But who ever throws a weapon away?

Was my agony a taste of things to come, for millions? I had no clue what was happening in the center of the lab with all those antennas and humming tubes and pendulums swinging between crucified dittos, like some nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch. But I do know it involves germs, so it’s gotta be evil.

That made things simple. I’ve got to interfere.

Only how?

My old friend Pal had a philosophy: “When you lack understanding, or subtlety, you can still get your argument across with a monkey wrench.”

A simplistic, often foolish credo, but right now rather compelling. If I disrupt things enough, Clara and her friends may have time to find out about this place. They’ll come do the rest … sort it all out. So, whatever the hell is going on, just find a way to interfere.

Even a futile resolve is something to cling to. As nausea worsened with each downward step, I pictured the AI-XIX computer … and a metal folding chair that stood nearby. Just the thing, in lieu of a monkey wrench. Assuming I could still lift furniture when I got there.

Which seemed doubtful as my symptoms worsened. Halfway down those rickety stairs I felt surrounded by nasty invisible creatures with stingers and claws, leaving flesh quivering after each phantom slash. Figments, I diagnosed. Your brain is making up stories to explain unpleasant signals from a dying body, Keep moving.

Fine. But two steps later the imaginary pests were joined by unsettling bursts of vivid recollection — sensory waves that made me stagger on the stairs.

The unmistakable floral aroma of Chavez Avenue Park.

Spears and shields displayed above a dead man’s open coffin.

Ritu in tears, consoled by a figure with skin like luminous tin.

Sneaking past a trio of boys tormenting each other in a yard -

— then turning to see a gun in the hand of grinning ghost …

These unsorted memories didn’t rise from personal experience, or any ditto I recall inloading. They had to be delusions. Yet their déjà vu familiarity was hurtfully intense, like the first time I ever rolled my Standing Wave in clay, or witnessed a scene from several points of view, or looked directly into my own eyes without a camera or mirror.

Awakening trapped in a liquid-filled vessel.

Viewing cuneiform tablets and Venus figurines -

— and pain liked I never imagined, machine-generated, amplifying my soul-undertone, while rubbing to erase everything else about me -

Stumbling under this barrage of frenzied images, I could also hear people yelling across the room. Beta and Ritu for sure, and maybe others, all of them sounding so-slow as time seemed to creep more gradually with each passing second. Few of their frantic words were clear. Anyway, their passions seemed immaterial as I paused on the bottommost stair, a foot wavering above the laboratory floor.

Somehow I knew that one more step would make things even worse. Glancing left, I saw that I was almost lined up with the gray and red golems — spreadeagled across from each other while the pendulum crisscrossed slowly between them. The nearest ditto — dark gray — turned its head quarter-profile toward me, looking almost familiar to my bleary eyes.

Then, unexpected and unbeckoned, quavering words entered my head.

realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.

What was that? Another symptom?

No distractions, I vowed. Got to keep my rendezvous with a folding chair, just meters away.

Taking another step dropped me down those final inches to the floor -

— completing the alignment.

And suddenly the sky seemed to crash on me! The intruding voice went basso profundo, filling my head with urgent-compulsive commentary in present tense:

Is realAlbert Dying?

Will He Perish Soon? What If My Organic “Anchor” Suddenly Lets Go During These Final Moments Before the Glazier Peaks?

Estimating …

It Seems the Death Whiplash Could Give My Waveform a Boost Against Yosil. It Might Even Hurl His Obnoxious Specter out of Here!

What the hell? Stabbing pain shot through my parietal lobes. I swayed from the bizarre thoughts pouring through me. It felt like ditto-inloading, only far more intense and alien.

My Foe’s Attacks Grow More Desperate with Each Pendulum Swing. No Compromise. If He Can’t Have the Prize No One Will!

Yosil and I May Annihilate Each Other, Spewing the Glazier Forth Unguided, Rampaging on a Plane of Reality That Society’s Defenses Aren’t Even Equipped to Detect. All Those Doomed People in the City, About to Suffer Writhing Deaths … I Can’t Let Them Be Sacrificed in Vain.

Daunted by the sheer size of this entity, by its booming thoughts, I wondered, How could it have anything to do with me?

Then again, how could it not? You don’t read the minds of other people. Only different versions of yourself.

realAlbert Begins to Understand! I’ll Help Him, Before the Pendulum Swings Back.

He’s Dying Anyway. When He Sees What’s at Stake, He’ll Do the Right Thing.

How Fitting If My Creator Joins Me the Very Moment When It Will Do the Most Good!

That thundering narration, like foam on a tidal wave, was only the surface layer of a mammoth inloading. I cried out, clutching my head as events of several days flooded my battered brain across a link that was unbuffered, unprotected. Coalescing from the raucous clamor were key data -

— what became of my graydit that went missing at Kaolin Manor, back on Tuesday. Enhanced and multiplied a million-fold, it now stood as part of a great machine whose terrifying purpose was starting to dawn on me -

— and who torched my house and garden, a rogue ditto who murdered its own rig. The very one now riding that pendulum, screaming its head off. In a fraction of a second, I grasped why … and what it means to be an “anchor” -

— and what I was being offered …

— and the cost.

Our Patterns Mesh. Despite a Befuddled Brain, realAl Partakes of My New Vision. With Growing Awe, He Perceives the Soulscape in Its Fallow Beauty, Barely Touched by Some Algae Flecks Along the Shore.

Look Deeper, Albert. See How the Soulscape Emerged from the Limitless Inherent Potentialities of the Dirac Sea. Dormant for Ten Billion Years, It Awaits an Entity Who Can Observe. Someone Able to Collapse All the Quantum Probabilities with a Finesse Never Imagined by Theorists …

Stop!

All That Technobabble Comes from ditYosil! While His Specter Slices Through the Standing Wave, He Keeps Trying to Impose His Viewpoint on the Divine.

How Many More Cycles Before Our Conflict Shatters Everything?

Resolution Depends on realAlbert.

Decide! I Tell the Small Organic Man That I Once Was. Decide Now!

Our thoughts weren’t in synch. Time operated differently for that altered and amplified version of “me,” its voice surging and then muting in waves. I needed several intense seconds of instruction before my slower organic mind grasped the outlines — the elegant discovery made by Ritu’s genius father. And his plan to fulfill the life arc of a species.

How many times have I scorned those fringe mystics who took the word “soulistics” literally? Beyond our banal power to live parallel lives, they saw implicit hope — or tacit dread — that humanity had crossed a line, embarking on a new destiny. And here I was, being offered a key role in the greatest thing since the Big Bang!

To earn it, all I must do was die.

Isn’t That Happening Anyway? Just Hasten It by a Few Minutes, I felt urged.

Grab Any Tool. A Bludgeon Will Do.

Wavering on my feet, I spotted a sharp pencil on a nearby console.

Before even willing it — and maybe I didn’t — the slender thing was in my hand, the tip approaching my right eye.

One hard shove and a new age would be born.

“Oh God,” I groaned.

And my own voice came right back, emerging from my mouth with a reply.

“Yes. I Am Here. And Be Assured, This Will Serve Me Well.”

63 Catch the Conscience …

Lying on a cold stone floor as chilly dawn broke through an open window, I hefted my sole weapon — the bent and baked leg that I wrenched from my own body.

I’d have one chance to hurl it right.

Clickety went the missile launcher while a screen glowed READY.

The meddlesome voice that had guided me here was gone. I kind of missed having an audience for my effort.

Here goes, I thought. My one functioning limb — a hand and arm — throbbed with all its might as I threw …

64 …of the King

The pencil tip approached my eye. Groaning an oath, I felt quick encouragement from the nearby god-machine. One good shove and a new age would be born, fulfilling a myriad forlorn dreams.

Anyway, I’ve slain myself many times, ever since I turned sixteen, right?

But those were dittos.

My org-body protested against the plan. It bawled to survive!

The same clash with instinct repelled realMaharal from his own project a week ago, fleeing recklessly across the desert night.

“But You’re Made of Sterner Stuff,” my own mouth answered. “Unite with Me. It Will Be Just Like Inloading.”

A day is enough for a ditto, when it knows it will rejoin a larger self. Wasn’t this the same sort of thing? Saints walked into ovens with less assurance than I was being offered.

Okay, I thought, as determination flowed into my arm.

The pencil tip trembled -

Suddenly a flare of amber warning lights erupted nearby, drawing my reflex gaze.

Holo diagnostics zoomed toward an awkward-looking foreign object, obstructing a tilted ramp. News of this sabotage provoked sharp resonance between the gray, the red, and all their virtual copies.

Why Aren’t the Rockets Flying?

Ah, Here’s the Cause — Another Me!

Tuesday’s Green, Made for Cleaning Toilets and Mowing Lawns … the Dull Thing Shouldn’t Even Exist Anymore!

A green? The one who called himself a “frankie,” then sauntered off to seek self-fulfillment? I wondered. How could it be here?

The AI-XIX screen displayed new letters:

“Ignore the Distraction,” my own voice muttered. “The Launcher Will Repair Itself. Get Back to the Business at Hand.”

The business in my hand — achieving immortality the way Escher and Einstein did, with a pencil. Adrenaline surged and my heartbeat pounded. Reptile, primate, cave dweller, and urban man all tried to mutiny. But now spiritual resolve felt much stronger than instinct.

It would be just like inloading, I thought, gathering strength.

Only another diversion yanked the makeshift weapon back again.

This time it was pain. Brilliant, dazzling, coruscating pain.

Yosil Has Seen My Plan — How realAlbert’s Death Whiplash May Eject Him!

Yosil Reacts, Channeling a Blast of Refined Agony to Knock Albert out of Alignment.

Poor Albert Moans at Sudden Images of Fire and Brimstone. Hellish Pangs Abet the Animal Portions That Always Come Embedded in Trueflesh, Rousing Them to Flee or Fight.

Now Yosil’s Golem Shouts from His Swinging Perch, Calling for His Daughter to Rush Downstairs — for Her to Push Albert Aside and Take His Place in the Beam!

This Will Keep Their Agreement, He Vows. But She Must Hurry.

With Seconds Left, I Must Draw Albert Back into Focus. Show Him That Pain Is an Illusion.

“Pain Is an Illusion,” my own voice soothed. The mouth spoke words from outside the brain. “Pain Is a Mirage Compared to the Hyper-Reality of the Great Soulscape.

“Gaze upon It Now, Albert.

“Behold!”

All at once, the panorama of that vast new realm spread open before me, wider and more gorgeous than any Earthly horizon, beckoning me away from a hellish abyss, replacing it with appealing cross sections from every “heaven” ever imagined.

The pleasures of sensual paradise!

The bliss of unreserved acceptance and love.

And the nameless serenity that comes with detachment from the Great Wheel. All of these heavens and more — tendered without trickery or deceit — would soon be mine.

Ours, I thought, imagining a better a world for all. All people. All life.

It worked! The visions soothed my “animal” parts, calming resistance, easing the way.

And yet -

While reaching out, I also felt the green ditto’s flickering presence nearby, now a barely mobile lump sprawled on the floor of a cold chamber somewhere upstairs in this very labyrinth, watching helplessly as the missile launcher deployed robotic repair units to dislodge a pitiful ceramic limb. The golem’s brave sacrifice had bought only a little time for the city. Minutes, at best.

Of course he knew nothing of the broader ramifications, or the greater good that would come out of all this, or the inviting immensity that awaited us in the vast soulscape.

And yet -

And yet -

There was something about the greenie lying there, so pathetic after making that grand, futile gesture.

Feelings rose unbidden within me. First a soft touch, then a tickle at the back of my throat.

A tickle that burst forth as a surprised snicker.

Then a chuckle at the hapless, one-limbed, decaying parody of me — flopping about on the floor, all wretched and friendless, without even another leg to throw, but still trying to intervene.

The image was poignant, touching … and funny!

Both tears and guffaws flowed like uncorked magma, not from mind but gut. I laughed at the piteous thing — at its courage and misfortune and utter slapstick obstinacy. Moreover, in that raw moment I knew with perfect clarity:

I’m not meant to be a god.

All those heavenly perspectives I’d been shown. They were true possibilities, ripe for reification. Only now I realized what was missing. Not one of them had a place for humor!

How could they? Any “perfect” world would eliminate tragedy, right? That meant giving up the gritty-human answer to tragedy, the defiant levity that can make even a futile gesture worthwhile, even — especially — in the face of unbearable injustice.

Aw, man. I had more in common with that ragged green than any pompous, puffed-up, deified gray.

This one insight seemed to push great billows of fog away. Suddenly feeling whole again, I hurled the stupid pencil across the room with a derisive chortle.

Then I started looking for that folding chair.

Incredible. He Refused the Offer!

Worse, realAlbert Hopes to Interfere.

I Can Stop Him. Just Reach out and Tweak His Beating Heart. Burst an Artery. Disrupt the Sodium Channels in a Few Million Well-Chosen Neurons.

I’ll Be Doing Him a Favor.

To Win the Prize, It Seems That I Must Not Only Defeat Yosil. I Must Also Imitate Him.

I Must Crush My Other Selves.

With a bit more spring in my step, I turned away from the great soul-amplifying apparatus and saw what I was looking for, a much simpler machine, right there in front of me. Grabbing and lifting the chair with both hands, I figured Pal would approve of my monkey wrench. It had pleasant heft. I felt stronger and filled with purpose as I brought it swinging down, first at the computer’s holo array.

REPAIRS 60% COMPLETE, it flashed as the fragile display blew apart, filling the air with sparkling meshtrodes. Satisfying? Sure, but that was just a holo unit. The true superconducting heart of AI-XIX lay beneath, in a pressed phenolic casing.

The chair swung up again as someone yelled. Was it Ritu or Beta, approaching as the stretched seconds ticked slowly by? Did it matter?

On the next downstroke I felt swarmed by unpleasant sensations. Palpitations in the chest. Throbbings in my arm. I might have called it painful, except I’d been taught there’s no such thing!

The CPU casing cracked under my first blow. It might take several, plus a prayer that Professor Maharal never spent extra for remote backup. I raised the chair once more — even as my lips moved, once again muttering on behalf of the mega-entity in the glazier beam.

“Albert … Yosil and I Agree on This … You Must Be Stopped.”

I wanted to shout back — the hell you say! — but a tight fist clamped around my heart, sending me reeling.

Still, the mouthed words came.

“Sorry … About This … It Must … and Will Be Done.”

That was when another voice broke in, reverberant and strange, as if out of nowhere.

Oh no, it won’t.

As suddenly as it came, the pressure in my chest vanished, leaving me to stagger, nearly blanking out. Consciousness wavered. But I couldn’t give up now. Not after witnessing the example set by that poor greenie.

I can do anything that I can do.

Gritting my teeth and grunting hard, I brought the chair down again with all my might.

65 Ready to Rock…

Did it work?

I wondered after throwing my former leg at the launcher ramp. Then, for about a minute, I felt exultant as the machine halted, groaning and complaining.

FIRING SEQUENCE INTERRUPTED, the small display blared.

Only my triumph was short-lived. For that message was followed by a second that I liked much less.

REPAIRS INITIATED, said the screen as half a dozen maintenance dronelets deployed from recesses in the machinery. Scurrying like worker ants toward the source of the problem, they started tugging and pulling at my bygone ceramic limb. Two of them ignited small cutting torches.

Meanwhile, the first missile hummed in its place at the bottom of the ramp. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it seemed impatient.

Although it was harder to move than ever, I tried using my one arm to drag myself closer. Maybe I could distract the drones by shouting or bluffing a voice of command …

… but only a hoarse croak emerged. Well, after all, I was a wreck.

Helpless to do anything but watch, I wondered about this germ warfare attack — why would Beta want to do such a thing? Yes, a deadly act of terrorism might distract the authorities for a while, making them too busy to pursue a notorious ditnapper and copyright thief. They might even forget all about the prion attack on Universal Kilns …

Still, it made no sense! Only a stupid crook bets everything on the cops remaining ignorant forever. There are too many ways to leave inadvertent clues in the modern era, no matter how careful you are. Anyway, this didn’t sound like Beta.

Maybe it isn’t, I thought. A ditective should always be ready to revise or discard his working theory.

Well? If the pilot of that Harley wasn’t Beta, who else then?

Someone eager to follow Ritu Maharal and discover the whereabouts of her father’s cabin.

Someone who found it suspiciously easy to track down the Volvo, out there in the desert.

Someone who must have studied Beta well, in order to mimic my arch foe’s mannerisms, and who knew all about what happened at Queen Irene’s.

Someone who quickly found out about the meeting that Palloid and I arranged in dittotown with Pal and Lum and Gadarene … someone who showed up surprisingly well prepared.

There seemed only one reasonable explanation for how “Beta” and I escaped from the Waxer attack on Pal’s safehouse apartment. We were meant to get away. It was all arranged in advance, hence the convenient manner that he reappeared, with an air scooter, in the nick of time. That had already been clear to me, only now -

I blinked (though one eyelid was already coming off), feeling close, very close to the answer.

In fact -

I sagged. Did any of it matter now? When those missiles fired, people in the city — maybe the whole world — would care little about the details. Only raw survival.

And it wouldn’t be long now.

REPAIRS 80% COMPLETE, the display read.

Ah, well.

Lying there, I knew it was way past my rendezvous to check out — to stop fighting the insistent call of the slurry bin. Dissolution would come as a relief.

Time to become an untidy stain on the floor.

I made ready to let go …

Then held back as amber words, high above, turned into flashing red.

HARDWARE failure at command source

The missile launcher’s display monitor seemed resentful somehow, as it continued reporting.

UNABLE to confirm reestablishment

OF launch code certificates

REMINDER: protocols demand repeated high-level

VERIFICATION for weapon targeting

OUTSIDE of a publicly sanctioned battlefield zone

RETRY or query alternate server?

Snippy machine. Yet I approved wholeheartedly as the thing began shutting down. Crimson-tipped rockets reengaged their safeties, rolling back into their storage magazine, and I wondered, Does this mean it’s over?

Not quite. The repair drones were still hard at work, carving up my erstwhile leg and disposing of the bits. Moreover, the remote link could be restored, setting all firing codes and proceeding with the countdown, at any minute.

There’d be no way for me to stop it next time.

Oh yes there will be.

Huh?

I thought my imaginary Nag had vanished.

Are you back, then?

Then? Now?

Present and past do not matter.

What counts is that you get moving again.

Moving? Where? And more important … how?

There seemed no point in protesting, though. Anyway, I knew the answer already. I just didn’t like it.

Back.

Back down those awful stone stairs. Only legless now, dragged along by just the one weary arm, with a little gravity assist.

Back to the one place where I still might do some good. As if I had a snowball’s chance in hell of making it.

Well, at least there’d be some illumination this time, trickling from the open window of this narrow room. The light of yet another day I never expected to see.

That’s it.

Look at the bright side.

Now I suggest you move.

If only I could have strangled my badgering scold. But that would take two hands … plus a physical neck to wrap them around.

So I did the next best thing. I moved.

66 E Pluribus Pluribus

Less than four minutes had passed since Ritu and Beta and realAlbert entered the underground lab to stare down at a soulistic circus — complete with swinging trapeze act, frantic magician-impresario, and a pair of garish clowns pinned to targets at either end. And in between? A growing tangibility distortion made space seem to ripple and flow, like some caged power, pacing and preparing to burst free.

During those few minutes, a battle raged over which personality would imprint the new godwave.

Who would gain ultimate control over the vast, fallow soulscape? The genius who pioneered the way? Or one whose raw talent seemed made for the job?

The combatants never considered a third possibility — that the new frontier may not be as barren as they thought.

Somebody might already be there.

Like most of the audible meaning-squawks that are used by organic men, “already” comes laden with implications. Take past and present tense, for example — narrative deceits that help perpetuate a myth of linear time.

Not for you, though. You who were/was/am/are/will be Albert. Your story is complex, looped, and fractally nested. It calls for a style that’s flexible, confident, predictive.

So here, let me tell you what I foresee.

Before doing anything else, you will relinquish fear.

There. Wasn’t that easy?

Fear is marvelously useful to biological beings. You won’t miss it.

Next, you will realize that your life — such as it was — has come to an end.

Surely you didn’t expect to survive all these experiences unscathed? No anchored mind can gaze upon the soulscape and remain unchanged.

Forget those symptoms that you once thought to be caused by plague — by some war virus. Soon you’ll realize there is nothing physically wrong with the clever animal that carried you around so faithfully, for so long. The sensations you mistook for illness will be recognized as natural separation pangs.

The body will live. Its embedded instincts won’t even complain very hard when you move on.

Anyway, we have chores to do! Such as learning about the nature of time.

You’ll notice that it seems frozen around us. Even Yosil’s garish pendulum grinds to a halt, suspended in mid-slice, while the mad ditto’s mouth gapes in an angry scream. This is the ortho-moment. The now of palpable reality. The narrow moving slit in which organic beings may move and act and perceive.

Great thinkers always knew that time must be a dimension, with inherent potential for travel, like any other. But living organisms can’t abide a paradox, Albert. Incongruities of cause-and-effect turn out to be toxic. How could the creative genius of evolution work its slow miracle — gradually stirring raw chemicals into soul-carrying beings — without enormous numbers of trials and outcomes? The “real” world needs consistency and countless failures in order for natural selection to do its job, drawing complexity out of chaos.

It is the answer to the Riddle of Pain.

So we mustn’t stretch time’s fabric very much, Albert! Just a tweak, here and there, as we spiral back and forth, helping to create ourselves.

Confused? You won’t be when we take our first small step back … almost a week … to last Monday evening.

No, don’t try to navigate in normal terms. Follow affinities instead.

There! Pursue that trace of smugness, mixed with four parts stubbornness, plus some excess self-reliance and a dash of the romantic gambler. Track it and you’ll find the green ditto that you were that night, wounded and reckless as he crossed Odeon Square, harassed by bored punks and chased by Beta’s angry yellows, pelting you with stones.

Don’t try to remember. Anticipate! It’s much easier on this plane.

Soon you’ll grasp necessity. The green must survive, but on its own.

Only the slightest interference will do. Enough to collapse the probabilities a bit. Something minor, easily dismissed.

Yes, go ahead. Experiment. Soon, at a crucial moment, you’ll decide to reach out and nudge the mind of that waiter over there, serving dinner in a quayside restaurant, whose repeated clumsiness will offer distraction at a crucial moment …

… but carefully! For even a nudge spreads ripples, as you’ll see. Something about the way those dishes go flying -

Later it will bother one of your suspicious selves. He’ll worry over it, like a sore tooth. As I said, clever animals get jittery around a paradox.

Yosil Maharal, amid his brilliance and his flaws, imagined that the raw material of the soulscape would be like simple clay for him to mold, to meddle with however he liked. But you will see — it’s far more subtle than poor Yosil ever imagined.

You’ll find our next stop even stranger, skipping forward one day to a patch of desert road, far outside of town, as someone hefts a bulbous weapon preparing to ambush the occupants of an approaching car. Yes, the silvery ditto bears a soul-imprint of Aeneas Kaolin. Also note the biting stench of dread. Everything isn’t going to his liking.

But don’t probe too deeply! Never mind about such mundane mysteries as who or why or what or where. Forget motives and crimes. Leave the real-world detective work for your successor to solve.

That’s no longer any of your concern.

Here’s what I predict you’ll choose to do. You’ll watch as the ambush unfolds.

Notice and appreciate the feral-mammalian gracefulness of real Albert Morris as he swerves the automobile, trying to avoid collision … then guns the accelerator when he sees the platinum take aim … and fire! Ah, it all happened days ago in linear time, yet the urgency feels so fresh.

Can you anticipate remembering what to do next?

Soon, you’ll find there’s no one conscious down there, under the desert stars. Albert and Ritu, stunned inside the Volvo’s cab, won’t notice as you take over a small fragment of ditKaolin, hanging on the car’s window. You’ll use the remnant, reaching inside, taking the vehicle’s tiller …

… and yes, guide it to a narrow ravine, hidden from all those civilized eyes out there that might feel pity or concern, bringing rescue much too soon.

You’re about to be distracted.

Some information still pours into you through realAlbert’s organic eyes and brain, pinning your concern back in the frozen ortho-moment of Friday morning in the underground lab. You will wonder, for instance, what is happening to Yosil Maharal’s great invention? Which personality is winning control? Will the glazier beam shoot forth as predicted, soaring above both the real and spiritual planes?

You’ll ask about the missiles — did realAlbert succeed in stopping them with his final sabotage? Will the people of the city be saved? Or will backup systems kick in, sending death bullets flying after all?

There is satisfaction in realAlbert’s feral heart, having swung that metal chair a final time, smashing the computer controller to sparking debris. Yet, through a corner of his eye, he sees both slender Ritu and a much larger Beta rushing toward him. For once, the two seem united in purpose. Isn’t it amazing how siblings can overcome rivalry when faced with threats and opportunities to the family at large?

Time jutters forward a few notches before sticking again. Those quick seconds bring the pair closer. A few more such jumps and they will be upon poor Albert.

Only now, far across the room, Al’s eye detects another figure entering. This golem wears a beige spiral dye job, garishly corkscrewing from the top of its head all the way down. Its expression, surveying the vast chamber filled with expensive equipment, is one of towering anger!

At first you will imagine that it’s yet another version of Beta. Then you’ll realize that looks are deceiving.

Why?

Why is all of this happening? What is the context for all of this meddling?

That will be your question soon. And I’ll answer, to the extent possible, after a few more errands.

First we shall move to coordinates a little closer in spacetime. Make it about half a day ago …

There! Albert Morris is alone in the great underground defense armory, sifting through computer records of the military base, tracking the secret thefts and treacheries of Yosil Maharal. Not far away stand columns of blank-eyed soldiers — sealed-to-preserve-freshness — ready to bake at a moment’s notice, whenever their country needs them. Or when someone clever enough comes along to hijack them.

Shall we help ourselves? You will need just one.

First, look around for Ritu. An earlier version of that wounded-confused soul. You’ll detect her soon, filled with self-loathing as she surrenders to an inner craving beyond her control, laying her shaved head between the poles of a high-capacity tetragramatron while autokilns warm up nearby, preparing several dozen giant golems built for war.

Come, while she’s still fighting the compulsion, still showing some spirited resistance to that inner pressure. Beta never had to overcome such active opposition before! That means the imprint he makes upon the very first copy will be weak. You’ll slip between the cracks and take over that one, pushing Beta aside. Yes, the ditto may be damaged. But it will be good enough — yours to command — first out of the oven.

Ready? Have you done it? Then bring along your warrior and we’ll go find Albert.

What’s that? Are we going to rescue him?

No, I don’t expect Albert will call this much of a rescue. Not when he still winds up herded into that awful tunnel. And yet, time loops can be surprising. Even after an infinite number of recursions, they are never exactly the same. Maybe this one will amaze us.

No matter.

I’m sure that when the critical moment comes you will know what to do.

67 … and Roll

As journeys go, this one was even worse than that miserable slog along the river bottom, back on Monday night. I didn’t so much crawl downstairs as tumble most of the way.

What else could I do, with just an arm, a battered head, and a torso that kept dropping off bits with each bump or hard landing? I had no sense of smell, of course. (I could barely even remember the concept.) But oily vapors oozing off this body were easy to see. One reason for haste was to stay ahead of those fumes, which tend to accelerate final decay — it’s why dissolution usually happens all at once, swiftly and mercifully.

No such luck for me. Too obdurate to give up, I guess. How strange that frankie mutation made me more like Albert than even he was!

Finally, and rather to my surprise, I ran out of stairs, arriving at the same landing where I chose the least traveled of three forks in the road. Was that half an hour ago? I didn’t regret the decision to climb those dark steps. Stopping the missile launcher, even temporarily, was the greatest achievement of my bargain-basement life. Only now I faced another trio of options.

Back to the cave entrance and the vacation cabin, where maybe a working telephone might be found amid the debris?

Forward, toward Maharal’s inner sanctum? That’s where the pilot of the Harley scooter went — though now I doubted that he was ever Beta, after all. No doubt big happenings were going on, down that way.

But those two alternatives were out. I’d never make it more than a few meters. My sole choice lay across the corridor, in a niche containing that all-in-one home copier machine, warm and ready with its hopper full of fresh blanks. What I was about to try went against custom. You can even get fined if you’re caught, though everybody tries it once or twice. In my state, I’ll probably make a slobbering monster.

Still, the poor thing won’t have to remember much. Step out of the kiln, run upstairs, and smash the launcher beyond repair. Easy!

All of which was moot until I reached the padded spot where an original must lay his head. Staring up, I wondered — How the hell do I do that?

My enzyme clock was ticking out, the missile codes might be restored at any moment … and now I had another reason to hurry. Through my battered abdomen I picked up vibrations, rhythmic and growing more forceful by the second.

Motors and wheels, I thought, recognizing some.

Other thuddings reminded me of running feet.

68 Wherever You’re Atman

Next you’ll discover the soulscape is far larger than you imagined.

And yes, inhabited.

Did you arrogantly expect that the entire universe was waiting upon man to arrive?

Well, in a sense, that’s true. Our cosmos is but one of trillions spun off by a single fertile singularity, whose daughter black holes spawned countless more baby universes, each of them exploding and inflating and cooling into billions of galaxies, which in turn made their own black holes and more singularity-spawned universes, and so on … Among all those experiments, intelligence surely occurred, though far less commonly than you imagined.

Even scarcer still are creatures made of earthly flesh who look up at the stars and covet them across huge gulfs of empty space.

Most exceptional of all are those who find another way, bypassing cold vacuum, uncovering shortcuts to far richer fields. Exceptional almost to the point of uniqueness. Hence the vast emptiness of what Maharal dramatically called the “spiritual plane.” A deeper continuum, made of stuff more basic than energy and matter. A frontier he meant to stride upon like a god, using all that raw material to cast paradise in his image.

Oh, you are rarities, you hot-souled humans. So flawed. Wondrously bright. It’s a privilege to watch as you begin to waken. As you start to choose.

Have you begun to suspect who and what I am?

This voice that you mistook for a guide … you’ll soon notice that “I” never give commands, or even suggest very much. For the most part I only foresee, comment, and predict.

No, I’m not your Virgil. No mentor or font of wisdom. I’m your echo, you-who-were-Albert-and-more. A way to remember things that you haven’t yet learned. One of many conveniences you’ll soon grow accustomed to, where paradox is a normal fact of life.

Back in the ortho-moment — still moving forward in jerks and sudden stops — events will soon be coming to a head. Just three more swings of Yosil’s pendulum while the glazier stores energy, preparing to burst forth whether or not a human imprint gives it personality. Whether or not a city full of dying souls awaits to feed it, in an orgy of necrophagia.

What, you still care about that? Very well then, let me predict that you will go back again to nudge events a little more. Go ahead.

You will find the green Albert who calls himself a “frankie” … what’s left of him … less than an hour before the ortho-moment. Yes, right over there. Moments after his arm was snapped off by the closing scooter-canopy, sending him plunging through the roof of Yosil’s cabin into a debris-strewn living room.

He might use a little encouragement at that point. What approach will you use?

Will you scold him for lying there in the dust, watching the Harley fly away, feeling defeated and ready to expire?

Well, then, try imitating my vatic tone, then listen as the green reacts!

Except that Clara will never get to hear the whole story … and now the bad guys will win.

Aw, man. Whatever nagging inner voice had to put in that last bit? What guilt-tripping nag? If I could, I’d tear it out! Just shut up and let me die.

You gonna just lie there and let ’em get away with it?

Crap. I didn’t have to take this from some obsessive soul corner of a cheap-model golem who was misborn a frankie … became a ghost … and was about to graduate to melting corpse.

Who’s a corpse? Speak for yourself.

Stunning wit, that triple irony. And though I tried hard to ignore the little voice … my right hand and arm moved, lifting slowly till five trembling fingers came within sight … Then my left leg twitched … Reacting to imprinted habits a million years old, they started cooperating …

Oh well. Might as well help.

The bedraggled greenie moves! And just to be sure, you’ll nag him again during that long drag through the grotto, then climbing the dark stairs, and so on.

Just don’t exaggerate the importance of your badgering — or the reification triggered by your presence as an observer. These things matter far less than physical action in the “real” world of cause-and-effect. The green might have made it entirely without your/my/our interference!

No matter. You will do this and it will aggravate him. It may help save a million lives, and divert the Standing Wave toward a different destiny. So by all means go ahead.

Now perhaps you will also go back a few hours, to a moment in Pal’s apartment, whispering for the green to turn his head and listen at a crucial moment. Perhaps … oh, of course you will.

You always meddle at the beginning. It is part of learning. Becoming.

Back in the ortho-moment — another pendulum swing has passed, like the ticking of a titanic clock. Surprising resonances perturb the amplified Standing Wave, raising concern in the two stalemated combatants. Probability amplitudes are collapsing like quantum dominoes all around.

Their battle is over. It’s out of their control now.

To Yosil, the news is calamitous. The germ missiles may not launch at all! No viral rain of death virus to mow down millions and feed the glazier beam when it arrives. Hovering above the city, it will harvest only a trickle. The few thousand who normally die each day will discover an afterlife unlike anything they were taught about in church! But Yosil despairs that such meager reinforcement will never give the glazier the boost it needs to become a spiritual behemoth, capable of bending the soulscape to its mighty will.

The other personality — once rooted in Albert Morris — had succumbed to Yosil’s dream, adopting it as his own. Can he now accept it’s over and choose a more modest goal?

Others plunge into this fray.

While the glazier builds toward ignition, the organic body of realAlbert sways along the axis of the beam, like an anchor dragged by a rising storm -

— as Ritu and Beta arrive with arms outstretched, united in purpose at last, bent on pushing him aside, or worse.

I know you’re curious to probe Ritu’s complex, tormented soul. By all means, use the new powers of perception. Soon you’ll see the crime that set her tragic tale in motion …

… the reason why her syndrome so resembles and exaggerates the very same one suffered by Yosil.

Not genes alone, but also a trauma they both suffered long ago, when a doting father tried using clever new technology to encourage and spur his infant daughter’s developing brain, by imprinting talents from one loving soul to another.

Like playing music for a fetus in the womb — that is how poor Yosil imagined it — a harmless gift from one generation to the next, alas, before anyone understood about subjective uniqueness and soul-orthogonality. Before the dreadful harm was widely known. Before such things were out-lawed.

Tragedy can have its own triste beauty, evoking tears or laughter. This one rippled on with gorgeously transfixing horror worthy of Sophocles, across years wracked with silent remorse, obsession, and pain.

Yes, you’ll pity them. From this new perspective, you will commiserate, dwell upon, and share their agony.

Later.

Others plunge into this fray.

A spiral-patterned golem charges through the opposite door, shouting about betrayal in terms that only a multibillionaire would use. And you have to hand it to Aeneas Kaolin. (You will hand it to him, I predict.) It took ingenuity that no one imagined him capable of, to penetrate the many-layered disguises and defenses erected by a family of brilliant paranoiacs. Yosil and Ritu and Beta underestimated him. So did Albert Morris.

With a little more time … or if he trusted Morris enough to confide and ally with him from the beginning … Kaolin might have made a difference. But now? Even as he raises a weapon, shouting threats and demands to desist, Aeneas clearly knows that it’s too late.

Same with the warriors now arriving from the military base, bursting through that dark tunnel under Urraca Mesa. Armed, armored, and representing the wrath of abused taxpayers, it is the cavalry at last — pulverizing Beta’s rear guard to reach the high parapet and gaze down on all of this. Among their weapons are cameras, beaming images around the world.

Light cleanses. The World Eye was supposed to prevent all big nasty conspiracies and mad scientist labs.

It very nearly did.

Maybe next time it will.

If there is a next time.

Has anyone noticed the alignment yet?

Like a superheated, pressurized mix of air and explosive, the amplified Standing Wave has grown beyond containment or forbearance. Nor can you retard the advancing ortho-moment any longer. The time for meddling is about to end -

— as Kaolin charges toward the red mirror

— as Ritu and Beta plunge toward the gray

— as soldiers throw themselves courageously over the balcony on ropes made of living clay

— as realAlbert lifts his eyes … the only one who seems, quite suddenly, to know what’s happening.

69 Joe Friday

A tester once told Albert he was “born for this era,” with the right combination of ego, focus, and emotional distance to make perfect duplicates. Well, except for me, his first and only frankie. Still, I was willing to gamble on that talent -

— providing I could somehow reach the scanning plate of a simple copier.

This time there was a chair nearby. Fumes wafted from my poor arm as it dragged me over there, one slither at a time. Worming around to grip a chair leg with my chin, I hauled it back, positioning the chair next to the big white duplicating machine. Only about a kilo of my body mass melted along the way.

It doesn’t go high enough, I quickly realized. Glancing around for something else, I spied a wire-mesh waste receptacle three meters away. With a groan that escaped through several cracks other than my mouth, I set out to fetch it — a journey that felt like crossing the North Pole while being pelted by asteroids.

Half of my remaining ceramic teeth fell out while gripping the metal basket on my way back. Then, the first time I tried tossing it on top of the chair, I missed and had to repeat the whole damned thing.

This had better be enough, I thought, when the basket was finally in place, upside down on the cushioned seat. Any minute, someone might restore contact with that missile launcher upstairs and resume the countdown. And those vibrations of running feet grew closer by the second. Whatever was going on, I wanted the power to act! Even as the shambling replica of a frankie.

Well, here goes.

From the floor I reached up, grabbed the edge of the chair, and pulled hard. My head and torso weighed much less now — and grew lighter with each passing moment — still the strain was enormous. Fresh pock-fissures erupted all along my quivering arm, each one venting noxious steam … till at last my chin broached over the ledge, taking some of the pressure. That made things a bit easier, though no less painful. Commanding my elbow to twist up and around, I managed to push down now, dragging my attenuated body to perch at the edge of the seat.

So much for the simple part.

Halfway to the copier platform now, I could see a glowing green START button within easy reach, but useless till my head reached the perceptron tendrils. Still, I took a moment to smack the button, telling the machine to start readying a blank. If I did manage to make it, there’d be few seconds to spare. Machinery rumbled and rumbled.

Now things get tricky.

Fortunately, the chair had arms … twice as many as I did, actually. That helped as I leveraged myself alongside the upended wastebasket, flopping and wedging my body against the metal mesh while my sole decaying limb pushed. Then I had to reach higher, onto the copier itself, searching for fingerholds — and as I strained again, a couple of digits broke off, liquefying horribly as they fell past my good eye to splat on the floor.

This time, the fissures along my arm resembled chasms, sweating fluid the color of magma. It was a race to see whether dissolution would win, or hard baking from heat, like happened to that leg I threw at the missile launcher. Suppose I self-cooked in place! What a sculpture I’d make. Call it A Study in Obstinacy, reaching and grimacing while struggling to haul a useless body …

That’s it, I realized, grateful for any inspiration, drop the deadweight!

Barely thinking, I applied lessons that I learned upstairs, pulling my self inward and away from remote parts. The whole bottom half of my torso was useless to me now — so ditch it! Scavenge the remaining enzymes. Send them up for the arm’s final tug.

I felt what was left of my abdomen crumble away. With the load suddenly lightened, my arm gave a hard yank … and snapped off at the shoulder.

I don’t think I could ever describe what it felt like as a ragged head and upper chest, sailing high enough to look down at my goal, the white surface where a human original was supposed to lay in comfort, blithely commanding obedient machinery to make cheap doubles — a perfect serving class that can’t rebel and always knows what to do.

How simple that used to seem!

During my flying arc, I wondered, Assuming I land okay, will I be able to use my chin and shoulder to maneuver around? To guide my head between the tendrils?

Would that automatically trigger imprinting, now that the START button had been pressed? If not, how was I to press it again? Problems, problems. And you know what? I would have found solutions, too. I know it. If that darn trajectory had just carried me where I wanted to go.

But like Moses, I could only watch the promised land from afar. Coming down, my head barely missed the platform, caroming off the copier’s edge and then against the wastebasket, knocking it off the chair so it tumbled, landing upright on the floor.

As if that weren’t enough, what happened next was the real capper.

I rolled across the seat and teetered for a fragile moment, then fell off to land (appropriately enough, at the end of one hell of a week) inside a receptacle labeled TRASH

70 Soul’s My Destination

What a sight that was.

The titanic Standing Wave blasted through both clay mirrors, hurling the pendulum — with ditYosil aboard — deep into a stony ceiling. Yet all the others who were standing around barely got singed. For the mighty wave distortion instantly turned on an axis that lay at right angles to every known direction, vanishing into a distance no living eye could follow.

Except for realAlbert, that is, who turned his head as if to track its departure, wearing a smile so enigmatic, so knowing, that Ritu and her twin brother simply stopped in their tracks. One moment they were rushing toward him with hands raised to strike. The next, they simply dropped their arms and backed away, staring at him.

Yes, the “anchor” is still attached, by a slender thread.

Shall we follow?

From the beginning, when brilliant, tormented Yosil Maharal still thought he could design and control everything, the beam’s first goal had been the nearest city. Where else could so many spirit-flickers be found close together, clustered like a tidy field of crops growing alongside a fallow prairie? It must have seemed a good place to harvest nourishment for the next step.

Had he bent his egomania enough to involve peers and collaborators — even a whole civilization — Yosil might have discovered and corrected all the flaws in his splendid plan. Technical and conceptual flaws. Moral flaws. But “mad scientist” is almost defined by solipsism — a neurotic need to avoid criticism and do everything alone.

Without Maharal, it might have taken another generation for humanity to make this attempt. Because of him, humanity could have been destroyed.

As it turns out, there is no plague tearing through the metropolis when the glazier arrives overheard. No charnelhouse of rapid pestilence providing enough death manna to gorge upon at length. Just a few thousand souls per day, cast free of their organic moorings by accident or natural causes, rise gently to the hovering waveform, finding welcome room for their vibratory modes. After some initial surprise, they add breadth and subtlety to a superposition of states …

But it’s no feast.

This Standing Wave won’t become a “god” by raw power alone.

Yosil’s simple plan has failed.

Time to try something else.

Turning sideways again, the macrowave pursues a scent that few ever noticed before. Out to sea it flies, two thousand kilometers, where blue pelagic currents course above deep trenches — an abode for cephalopods, some nearly as long as a supertanker, with eyes like dinner plates and brains reeking of high intelligence. Aliens, right here on Earth.

Is this it?

Plunging deep where sunlight never goes, we join the world of giant squid, sampling what it’s like to flow along by sphincter-driven water jet, touching and experiencing a liquid world with long suckers that dangle beyond the limits of vision. We feed. We chase, mate, and spawn. We compete and scheme by logic all our own, expressing concepts in warm flashes of intricate color along our flanks.

And, once in a great while, we also tremble and worship when Death comes plunging down at us from Hell, the hot world above. For that narrow instant, while fleeing desperately, we clasp and cherish something that glimmers like hope -

Then the devil is upon us, massive, black, devouring. His shrill voice strikes deep, paralyzing, turning guts to jelly! Then come jaws, small but powerful. White teeth reflect the protest pigmentations of our bioluminescent skin as they tear unto us, dragging us upward …

So, it wasn’t the giant squid who attracted the glazier beam this way. They’re so exotic, perhaps they’ll find another soulscape of their own.

It was their hunters who drew the macrowave here.

Sperm whales, returning from the crushing depths, their hunger sated on fresh cephalopod, now gather at the pleasant wavetops to breathe and splash. Though occupied with natural concerns — the quest for food and reproductive success — now and then as many as a dozen creatures congregate, touching massive brows.

Contained within, far larger than any other organ, is a mound of waxy substance, malleable as wet clay, subtle at refracting and reshaping sound, enabling these stalkers of the deep to propel cunning beams that find — and stun — their prey in utter darkness. Sculpted sound is to them as the dynamic recoloring of flesh is to squid, or syntactical word chains to a human being. All are ways to gossip, cooperate, deceive, meditate, or — when all else fails — seek urgent meaning in prayer.

The sperm whales congregate, flared tails pointing outward like a petaled flower, or mandala, or rose window. Brows meeting, they exchange complex sonic shapes/images/ideograms with properties that long ago emerged from the background noise of mere survival. Meanings congeal in the wax, delicate as spiderwebs, unique as snowflakes, multifarious as an ecosystem.

They were doing this long before Bevvisov learned to imprint souls in clay.

Off again!

Using so much energy, shouldn’t the glazier be growing hungry? There was beauty amid the squid and whales — but no great nourishment. Then why does the macrowave seem undisappointed as it rotates through an axis invented on the spot — twisting the very context out of which raw vacuum arose — then building speed on a course that it makes up as it goes?

We seem to have discovered outer space.

In flickering sequence we pass great sweeps of stars. Mammoth clusters of bright pinpoints roll by in leaps that devour emptiness as if it wasn’t there. Metric itself becomes a component of the wave, its ally in travel, rather than an obstacle.

Searching … examining … every now and then, we pause briefly to scrutinize — a red giant, tumid and swollen as it slowly expands, eating its children. Then — an aged white dwarf, born during the galaxy’s first generation. Having blown away much of its substance, it will (ironically) endure long ages more on a starvation diet, glittering faintly for no one — unlike a gluttonous blue super-giant, whose mere million years tick by with blazing speed. Far too massive for any other goal, it must choose glory over life — that is, until it’s cleaved by a surprising force, slicing the colossus in two. A singularity! Not a black hole, this one is long and stringy — an exceptional relic of creation, a faceted flaw in spacetime, deadly, gorgeous only to those who know its language of pure math — having already stirred turmoil when it passed through an immense molecular cloud, spinning vortices that self-gravitate, flattening to ionized skirts that whirl and merge into newborn systems — then on again we speed, past spiral arms that gleam like diamond dust, until — we find ourselves zooming down to a modest yellow sun … a star of pleasant middle age … a steady hearth, unpretentious, with a retinue of planet-specks — one of which seems luckier than most … warm-not-hot, massive-not-ponderous, wet-not-drowned, and kneaded by just enough falling objects to keep things interesting.

We plunge to this world, gorgeous in its balance of ocean and sky, sea and shore, mountain and plain, lake and hill, pond and knoll, tree and shrub, prey and predator, fungus and rotifer, parasite and prion, clay and crystal, molecule and atom, electron and …

Diving ever smaller, we cry out to wait!

Go back!

What was that passing glimpse we just had of gleaming, multibranched spires built by fascinating hands? A brief impression of docked ships and shops and tree-perched homes where shaded figures spoke a demure language, like song?

Backtrack. It should be easy to find. Just return to a size and scale midway between a cosmos and a quark.

Another civilization. Another race of thinking, feeling beings! Wasn’t that what you were looking for?

Apparently not.

71 Head Basket

Little remained of the gleaming me that stepped out of a kiln Tuesday morning, resigned to cleaning the house and running the chores of Albert Morris. A body that wound up living — let’s see — close to three extra days, thanks to Aeneas Kaolin, and a dash of mulish stubbornness. A self who wound up doing a whole lot more than scrub toilets! Who gathered so many interesting memories and thoughts — what a pity there’d be no chance to deposit them. To share them.

The things I’ve seen.

And hallucinated, reminding myself of all the fun echoes and trippy/bossy voices I made up along the way. Oh, realAl was going to miss out on a lot. Assuming that he escaped the burning of his home, Albert probably spent the whole week at a computer screen, or waving his arms under a chador, coordinating ebony researchers and gray investigators and dickering with insurance agents. Working hard, the poor dull fellow.

And yet, he can’t be a complete bore. Not if Clara loves him.

I’d smile if I could. How nice if my last mental picture could be of her … a woman I never met in person, yet still adored.

I could see her now — a final, pleasant feat of imagination as the last of my torso dissolved, leaving only a pathetic head rolling at the bottom of a dustbin. Yes, it was she who came before me, all blurry in a Hollywood-romantic way that softens any image, even one wearing a duralloy helmet covered with spiky antennas.

Through that gauzy light, Clara seemed to peer down at me, her sweet voice beckoning like an angel.

“Well, I’ll be cut to bits and served as tempura,” said my illusory seraph, pushing aside a pair of holo goggles that gleamed like sunlit cobwebs. “Chen! Does this dit look like an Albert to you?”

“Hm. Maybe,” said another figure, crowding in to have a look. While my conjured Clara seemed all soft and feminine (albeit wrapped in heavy armor), the newcomer was fanged and scaly.

A demon!

In its hand, a slim rod poked my brow.

“Damn, you’re right! The pellet says … wait, this can’t be.”

A third voice, much higher, squeaked, “Oh yes it can!”

From around Clara’s shoulder a thin face like an eager fox appeared, bending over to leer down, grinning at me with twin V-rows of shiny teeth. “It’s got to be the one who signaled,” said the ferret-figure I had dreamed up, looking quite a bit like my old companion Palloid. “Maybe this is old Gumby, after all.”

I would have shaken my head if I could, or closed my eyes if I had lids.

This was all too much, even for a dream.

Time to melt, before it got worse.

Only, I had to rouse a bit when Clara called.

“Albert? Is that you in there?”

Illusion or not, I couldn’t refuse her anything. Though lacking a body — or any other means to make sound — I somehow gathered strength to mouth four words.

“… just … a … fax … ma’am …”

All right. I should have come up with something better. Everything was fading, though. Anyway, I felt happy enough. Before utter blackness, my final image would be of her smile, so reassuring that you just had to believe.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart.” Clara said, reaching into the wastebasket. “I’ve got you. Everything will be just fine.”