Mars Plus

Chapter 20 Interview with MFSTO

Lole Mitsuno woke up with a low, throbbing headache. He uncramped his long body from its awkward position against the walker's forward bulkhead. That took some doing: "down" was no longer the deck but the vehicle's front end. He braced a hand against the windshield and stared out, down, at the spinning stars.

He glanced back at his friends. Demeter had strapped herself in against the spin, tying the broken ends of harness across her lap. Torraway had taken the other command chair and likewise belted himself tight. One of the Colonel's wings was bent out of shape, with a possibly broken strut; it seemed to move less freely than its counterpart on his opposite shoulder. Otherwise, Lole's companions seemed unhurt.

Mitsuno himself could catalog aches and bruises, a wrist that felt swollen and might be sprained, and that cursed headache. But he had no broken bones, no bleeding. He looked back out the window, made a rough estimate of their rate of spin: four revolutions per minute. That wasn't anything the grid had planned for them.

"We're in trouble, aren't we?" he said.

"Looks like it," Torraway agreed.

"I do hate feeling helpless."

Lole didn't bother even glancing at the control console: nothing there would serve them in freefall. The designers of this machine had never considered it might have to operate off the planet's surface. He returned his attention to the windshield, trying to decide through feel how it was holding up to vacuum. Despite what he had told Demeter, this hull was experiencing conditions for which it was never designed. For that matter, when they got where they were going, would the airlock ring align with whatever arrangements the grid had built into its orbiting platform? It would be tragic, wouldn't it, to die for want of a few millimeters of clearance.

Of course, the three of them had worse problems right then.

Mitsuno studied the revolving starfield, hoping to spot the power station ahead of them and so get a feel for how long it would be before they had to do something heroic. With only the stars above and the broad face of Mars below—and that with only the looming dawn by which to mark any relative direction—Lole had no good feeling for their proper motion. The walker's terrain-scanning radar was useless at these extreme distances.

With even their sluggish rate of spin, Mitsuno had trouble telling exactly what part of each revolution represented the view "ahead" and what was "behind." The fountain's dark transfer station with its various guide lights had totally disappeared against the black stellar background. So he watched it all.

Lole strained to pick out any large object that seemed to be growing nearer. He knew that sunlight reflected from the stations solar panels, which would be turning slowly with the synchronous orbit, would probably flash gently rather than remaining fixed like the star points. That was some help.

One of the stars had developed a mild purple bloom, off to one side, the right color for emissions from an ion engine. Still, Mitsuno watched it for three revolutions, forty-five seconds, before letting himself believe in the apparition. Finally, the star developed into a cluster of dusty, winking lights: it was an orbital tug, headed their way. Mitsuno pointed it out to Coghlan and Torraway.

The Cyborg keyed the walker's radio to the all-call frequency.

"Emergency, emergency, emergency," he said in a reasonable, unhurried voice. "Stranded—um—cargo pod to unidentified towing vehicle in orbit above Valles Marineris, please respond."

They waited.

No reply.

The tug was showing a hull outline now, and its maneuvering jets were beginning to resolve into plumes of translucent vapor. Its grapples were at full extension, reaching out toward the walker. The approaching vessel was moving into an intricate dance.

"What's it doing?" Demeter asked.

"I'd say it was preparing to latch on," Torraway replied. "Then it will try to de-spin us."

"Why don't they answer?"

"They can't, if it's an automated ship. Some of them roam in orbit, for retrieval of wayward cargo and drifting debris."

"The grid again," Mitsuno concluded.

"Yes, of course."

Thud! The first grapple made mechanical contact with one of the walkers leg joints. The others took their grip, and the tug jetted steam, applying pressure against the torque of the spinning hull. Various creaks and groans were transmitted into the cabin as the walker took the strain and stabilized.

As spin came off the hull, Lole felt himself drifting away from the forward bulkhead. He wedged his shin between it and the front edge of the control console to hold himself in place. The other two were still strapped into their chairs.

The tug and its latching hooks were clearly visible out the side windows, but Mitsuno was studying the view through the windshield again. He was looking for the solar power station—and not finding it.

Bump/ The walker stuck something with its rear end. The impact was solid enough to feel, sharp enough to jar Lole's and Demeter's heads gently on their necks, but not powerful enough to throw them around or hurt them. Still, Lole saw nothing out the front.

"What the—?" he began.

"I believe we just docked," Torraway said.

"But there's nothing in—"

"Our airlock is back that way." The Cyborg hooked a thumb over his shoulder. The dark face might have been grinning at him. "I think somebody out there knows that, too."

The three of them were all turned now, facing the rear of the cabin. Unbidden, the lock cycled and the inner door opened. Beyond was a brightly lighted, man-sized corridor, circular in cross section, lined with curved panels of neutral-gray plastic. It looked like a null-gee inspection access. From the conspicuous lack of a whistling wind about their ears, Mitsuno guessed that the corridor was pressurized.

"That's an invitation, I guess," Demeter said. "I'd just as soon decline."

"Me, too," Lole agreed.

The Cyborg sat like a pensive statue, his gaze fixed down the tube. He was clearly focused on the first turn as the corridor curved out of sight. Mitsuno wondered what signals Torraway's electromagnetic senses were picking up. He was still relaxed, however, with no sign that his mechanical muscles were batding again with the grid's silent commands.

"We can wait here," the Colonel said impassively "I don't know how long...."

As if on cue, the console between them issued a crackling buzz. Something inside was shorting out, overloaded with voltages that the walker's control circuits were never meant to carry. The metal panels along its front edge began tingling Mitsuno's knee. Somehow the case was conducting the overload. The tingling became a burning.

"Folks ..." Lole said, yanking his knee away and pushing himself up toward the cabin ceiling.

Smoke began to issue from around the keys on the console's top surface. At first it was a barely visible white puff, but it quickly turned thick and black, with hanging clots of half-fused plastic. The air was heavy with the stale-bread smell of polymers and ozone.

Demeter began coughing and unfastened the straps holding her in the seat. With both hands over her mouth, she doubled over, drifting, pushing her face deeper into the smoke plume. Torraway released himself and caught her shoulder, guiding her up and back, away from the billowing clots.

"We have run out of options," he said.

"Yup," Mitsuno agreed. If the electrical fire didn't poison them outright, it would simply eat up their oxygen. Either way, they had to retreat down that tube—in the direction the grid wanted them to go. The nexus was prepared to destroy the walker in order to dislodge them. That would serve a double purpose, he realized: burning their bridges behind them eliminated a possible escape route.

Together the human and the Cyborg pulled the strangling woman into a patch of cleaner air. Then they took bearings, aligning themselves with the door frame around the airlock, and swam forward in single file down the tube.

Ellen Sorbel ran up the ramp, balancing a stack of Lethes memory modules against her hip. Dr. Lee followed closely behind, draped with the cable harness that interconnected the cybers disparate voice and visual interfaces with their plug inputs. Willie Lao brought up the rear with the stripped box for the central processor, carrying it in both hands as instructed.

Sorbel was running and urging the other two forward because she was certain that by now, after picking apart Demeter Coghlan's infiltrated brains, the grid must know all about her plans. Only the existence of the dormant virus had remained a secret from the Earth woman, but then Lole knew about that. If the grid had him as well, it had everything.

Once the nexus possessed all the facts about the humans' rebellion at Tharsis Montes and their weapons, then it was only a matter of time—measured probably in milliseconds—before the machines took defensive action.

Ellen not only feared retaliation but also feared her inability to predict its source and vector. Not being human, nor even consciously human-designed, the grid's intelligence could not be expected to respond in humanly predictable ways. The machines' take on the problem of defending themselves might come from unexpected angles and arrive at unexpected conclusions. Sorbel was not afraid just for herself or Lole, but afraid that the grid would begin its retaliation with the destruction of the space fountains to isolate Mars and then slowly poison or asphyxiate the 30,000 people living in its various tunnel complexes. The machines just might regard all humankind within their reach with the same disdain that humans viewed the bacteria and blue-green algae from which their form of life arose a billion years ago. The time scale was certainly right—if you equated years of human thought, perception, and history with a computer's nanoseconds of cogitation.

Sorbel only knew she had to work fast now.

The trouble was finding her entry point.

Her first thought had been to establish a radio-frequency link with the grid's communications paths. That was the way a Creole like Jory most often traded tokens with the local nexus. Except that Creoles and Cyborgs usually had reason to converse with the grid while they were working outside, on the planet's surface. That was where reception with the grid's antennas would be at optimum. Inside the radio-opaque tunnels, however, Creoles either kept their thoughts to themselves or tended to plug their systems physically into the circuits, with their pigtails.

Ellen knew she didn't have time to check out a walker and carry Lethe's components out onto the sand, set them up while wearing a clumsy pressure suit and gloves, and try to tune in a channel Jory might have routinely used. She didn't even know if the grid would pass her through the airlocks now. So the three conspirators had to work with what resources were at hand, from inside the tunnels.

They didn't have a spare pigtail. The closest one available to them was back in the safe zone, attached to Jory den Ostreichers skull. Even if they took the time to go back, surgically remove it, and bring the jack here to the pile of Lethe's disassembled parts—they still didn't have an input port that would tie it to their rogue central processor. They would have to splice something.

That gave Sorbel an idea.

She studied the face of a nearby public terminal, recessed into the tunnel's rock wall.

"How does that thing talk to the grid?" she asked aloud, more rhetorically than for information.

Willie Lao shrugged. "Dunno."

Dr. Lee gave it some thought before responding. "By fiberoptic, I would assume."

"The same as Lethe's cabling, sure!" Ellen felt a growing enthusiasm. "We take apart that panel, and we'll find our own pigtail."

"What? I don't—"

"Listen, we want to link up with the grid, right? If Jory were inside the complex, he'd jack in through a terminal like this one, wouldn't he? He'd use his connectors to go through the terminal's switching circuits, of course, but eventually it's just the nexus and him, passing code. Well, Lethe can emulate a terminal easily enough. If we can just splice into the fiberoptic behind that panel, we're home free."

"We'll get in trouble!" Lao objected.

"You think we aren't already?' she replied.

Dr. Lee ran a hand across the smooth steel of the terminals bezel. 'These things are pretty heavily armored against vandalism."

"Willie, go find us a hammer and a crowbar," Sorbel ordered. "Or a locking wrench with a slip head—" She pointed out the recurved heads of the bolts positioned around the bezel. "—if you can find one."

"Yes, ma'am." He nodded and ran up the tunnel.

"Now, Doctor," she said, turning her attention to Wa Lixin. "How's your surgical technique with teeny-tiny ligatures?"

"Not to worry." He grinned. "I wasn't sure about the issue date on Jory's internal hardware, so I came fully prepared to cut glass. I've got an optical junction box with me." He pulled a black L-shape, about two centimeters long, out of his pocket. "Just thread in the ends and crimp the sockets."

"Excellent!" Ellen Sorbel suddenly felt better about the whole enterprise.

Willie Lao appeared at the top of the ramp, brandishing an angled tool that might be a wrench. "Got it! There's a maintenance closet right around the comer."

"Better and better," she purred. "We'll lick the machines yet."

Demeter's throat was still raw and scratchy from the toxic smoke. But she could lift her head and kick with her feet as Lole helped her swim down the bare corridor into the power station's interior. It was like being swallowed by an elephant's esophagus.

Because of the orientation the space tug had given them, the three inside the walker never got a clear view of the station from the outside. But the size and curvature of the tube they were traversing hinted at a bulk and complexity far larger than the simple, silicon sunflowers she had once visited by proxy

While Lole Mitsuno guided her right elbow, Roger Torraway preceded them both. The Cyborgs left wing fluttered helplessly in the air currents he stirred; the right one was folded obediently against his backpack, giving him extra clearance against the walls. Demeter had the impression the colonel was limping as he led their party in infiltrating the satellite.

After what felt like a hundred meters of travel—but could have been as little as ten, or more than a thousand—they came to a door blocking the end of the corridor. It was made of interlocking triangular plates, like the irising diaphragm of an old-fashioned film camera.

"Self-reinforcing design," Torraway said.

"Huh?" from Demeter.

"The edges of the plates are made to support each other," he explained, "probably to hold against a sudden pressure loss. From the way they overlap, I'd say the drop was expected from this side. That would protect against someone cutting through the airlock from the outside."

"How do we get through?" she asked.

"No lockplate or controls," Lole observed.

On impulse Demeter called, "Open sesame," and the door began to dilate. The plates rubbing against each other sounded like sword blades slithering edge against edge.

Inside was a spherical room in more of the matte-gray wall material. Low lighting came from a dozen soft, moon-faced panels set in an equatorial belt that aligned with the entrance. Hanging in the center of the room were three sets of full-body V/R gear—helmets, gloves, boots, and numbered sensor pads—that were webbed into three umbilicials sprouting from a ring in the celling. Well, "ceiling" was a relative term here; at least the point was ninety degrees offset from the ring of room lights.

Demeter had done hundreds of hours of freefall virtual-reality aboard the transport that brought her to Mars. With the right amount of feedback pressure from the boot soles, you could quickly forget that you were drifting with your stomach higher than your throat and imagine you were walking along in full gravity. The rest was a cooperative fantasy between you and the machine.

There was no way out of the room.

No way back through the crippled walker.

No options but to float there and grow old and starve.

"I guess we're supposed to play along," Demeter said, pushing off the portal's coating with her feet and paddling through the air with her cupped hands. She headed toward one set of gear.

Lole followed her, but Torraway hung back.

"Come on, Colonel!" she called. "Choices aren't on the menu today."

"I... I can't wear that stuff," he said lamely. "The pickups don't match any of my... systems."

"Well, fly on in here anyway," she insisted. "If the grid means you to join the party, it'll beam you a presentation or something."

Torraway nodded once and pushed off. As he drifted up to the room's focal point, he cupped his good wing and made a sporadic flutter with the bad one to brake himself.

Demeter had already pressed the numbered sticky pads against her right temple, throat, left armpit, solar plexus, and groin—opening her jumper to make the last three connections. She shed her walking boots and tugged on the tight feedback footwear. She pulled her long braid of hair to one side and slid the full-face helmet over her head, then slipped on the wired gloves.

There was a flash of static as the program began, and Demeter found herself floating in a gray, spherical room with a ring of twelve lights orbiting her at elbow level.

Lole Mitsuno and Roger Torraway had disappeared.

Lole Mitsuno was walking on the surface of Mars in his shirtsleeves. The toes of his corridor slippers kicked up dust that drifted in the same familiar, lacy blooms as when he tramped along in sealed boots. The same steady winds pushed against his legs and torso, but now they were flapping his loose-weave slacks instead of dimpling the heavy fabric of a pressure suit. The air in his nose was sharp and cold, but still breathable.

He hop-stepped over the black rocks scattered across lemon-colored sand. Lole was sure he had visited this place recently. It was . . . Harmonia Mundi, where he had last seen Roger Torraway. The last time outside, that is.

After a thousand meters of this broken-field walking Mitsuno came upon an anomaly: a patch of sand perhaps ten meters square that had been cleared of rocks and raked smooth. A circle two meters in diameter had been scratched in this surface.

A boy of about eleven years squatted outside the circle. He was completely naked, with a thatch of straight black hair that came down into his almond-shaped eyes. Mitsuno guessed he was of Eurasian extraction.

The skin was pale, though. When he glanced up at Lole, the boy's canine teeth showed in a familiar grin. This boy was ... Jory den Ostreicher, as he once was. Before the surgeries that made him Creole, that is.

After the briefest glance of recognition, Jory returned his attention to the game he was playing. His right hand balled into a fist, with the thumb tucked under the index finger. Something glowed inside that fist. He flicked his thumb, and a bright bead, a comet—no, a tiny sun— streaked forward into the circle.

Lole followed its path with his eyes, and for the first time Mitsuno noticed that the circle enclosed other suns, which orbited lazily in a whirlpool pattern. Jory's white dwarf collided with one of them, splashing a rainbow from its corona and drawing out a flare of burning hydrogen. The newcomer upset the established pattern, perturbing the orbit of two nearby red giants and spinning a white dwarf out of the cluster, across the line in the sand.

The boy hopped up and skipped to the other side of the circle. He gathered up the errant dwarf and put it in a bag that suddenly was sitting beside him on the sand. The brown leather of its outer surface bulged and seethed faintly. Mitsuno imagined other tiny suns in there, squirming with the increased pressure and gravity.

Jory looked up at Lole again. That toothful grin was back. "Wanna play?"

Lole smiled. "I didn't bring any... marbles."

"S'okay, you can use some of mine." The boy hefted the bag. "We'll just play for funsies."

Roger Torraway was walking down the center of the street in a pleasant suburban neighborhood. On either side were broad green lawns that came down to the poured- cement curbs. Driveways two cars wide, of sealed blacktop bordered with low hedges, divided the lawns. White frame houses with either green or blue trim, including shutters that were too narrow to cover their windows and anyway were nailed onto the clapboards, presided over these quarter-acre domains. Most of the houses were ranch style, but here and there was a two-story Dutch colonial looking vaguely out of place on the remodeled prairie. The sun was out, much brighter and stronger here than it was on Mars. Its rays felt strong and nourishing on Roger's solar wings. It felt good.

This street was certainly familiar, although the last time he'd seen it was in the winter, near midnight. It was . . . Tonka, in the residential development where he and Dorrie had lived. The house on the right was his. Had been his, that is.

He walked the ten meters up the flagstone path from the driveway to the front entrance. The white-painted oak door, with six recessed panels and a gleaming brass pull and latch, stood ajar. He pushed on it with a black-skinned hand.

"Hi, honey!" The female voice was light and familiar but stretching to call over some distance. "I'm in the game room."

That was an anomaly, because Torraway couldn't remember the Tonka house having a "game room." A den, yes, where Roger did his reading, kept his checkbook, and wrote his infrequent correspondence. But nothing like a game room. Knowing that he was in some kind of waking dream, he walked left down the hall in any case, toward the den.

The room was dark, with the curtains drawn. The desk, easy chair, and end table with the ceramic lamp had all been cleared out. In their place was a pool table, and all the light came from two hanging lamps with opaque, conical shades. Their white light reflected greenly off the tables felt surface.

Dorrie was at the table, her back to him, a cue stick in her hand. That was odd because, to his knowledge, she had never played pool and detested all stuffy indoor games on general principles. She was a volleyball-at-the-lake sort of person. Especially if she could dance around and show off her new bikini.

She turned and smiled at him. It wasn't Dorrie, after all. The face and figure were hers, but the muddy blond hair and lively brown eyes identified her as Sulie Carpenter, Roger's second wife. She was someone whom the backpack computer and its allied systems had never, ever imaged for Torraway. He would not allow it.

Roger suddenly felt himself get angry.

"Hold that thought, dear," Sulie said. "I've got to make this shot."

She turned and bent over the table, stretching the fabric of her French-cut jeans in interesting ways. The red silk shirt that she'd tied calypso-fashion under her breasts rode up in back, exposing a palm's width of white skin and several knobs of her spine. The fingers of her left hand made a spider-shape on the green felt. She cocked her right elbow in pulling back on the cue.

Despite himself, Roger leaned to one side, looking past her to watch what she was doing. The table that he'd thought was for pool had straight sides and square corners, with no pockets. Instead of fifteen solid and multi-colored balls, there were only three: one white and two red. They spun strangely, of their own accord, before she had even hit the white one. The red balls turned either one-half or two full turns for every rotation of the white ball.

He recognized the game now—billiards. The object was to hit the white cue ball so that it made contact with each of the red ones. Or, failing that, to leave all three in a pattern from which your opponent could not complete such a shot. Sulie would have trouble with the uneven English on the variously spinning balls.

She thrust expertly with the stick, hitting the cue ball a glancing blow that sent it skittering sideways. It rebounded off one red, then the other, altering the spin on each but always maintaining the parity of one-half, one, and two.

Sulie straightened up and smiled at him. "Sometimes its really hard, you know?"

Demeter Coghlan was walking up a narrow trail through the mesquite brush. The sun was hot on her back, and faint wind stirred the small, loose hairs around her ears. The sweatband of her old felt hat was getting soggy. A trickle of moisture ran down the back of her neck and under the collar of her red flannel shirt. It was a summers day and high noon, a bad time to be out and about. Something caught her attention in the middle distance: a hawk skimming the ridge, riding the heat shimmers with its primary feathers splayed like long fingers. For an instant, she thought it was a buzzard, looking for something dead and bloated.

After a hundred meters of walking she came in sight of the cabin. It was a one-room affair with a chimney of rounded creek stones chinked with clay The roof was raw shakes, and the last peels of barn-red paint were hanging off the boards by the doorstep. Everywhere else was weathered, gray wood. It was . . . Grandaddy Coghlan's hideaway, on the fringes of Big Bend National Park near the Rio Grande. It hadn't changed in a dozen years. Not since she'd been there as a girl, that is.

Demeter walked across the shallow dooryard and put one foot up on the creosoted railroad ties that they'd used to build the three steps. The door was ajar, hanging half off its rusted steel hinges. She pushed it gently with her fingertips. "Hello?" she called.

"In here, darlin'. Why don't you come out of the sun, for Gawd's sake?" The voice was G'dad's, just as gravelly as she remembered it.

She lifted the edge of the door, swung it wide, and set it down on the floorboards where it always scraped. Then she stepped across the threshold. It took a long moment for her eyes to start adjusting to the gloom inside.

The elder Coghlan sat with his back to her, on the one rickety chair at the kitchen table. The latter's surface was covered, as always, with oilcloth painted in the red-and-white checked pattern of a cafe tablecloth. Despite the sunlight coming through the window, G'dad had a kerosene lamp burning; even with solar cells and long-life batteries freely available, he wouldn't have electricity at the cabin. But instead of the friendly yellow light the lamp usually gave, it blazed with a white fusion glare.

Demeter came up behind him, to see what he was doing that so absorbed his attention. Playing cards were laid out on the oilcloth in a solitaire pattern: six ordered stacks of downturned cards, with here and there long or short columns of exposed cards in face-value order. In his hand were additional cards, fanned out in sets of three.

She studied the game over his shoulder, hoping she could advise him—and occasionally catch him out when he cheated—as she had done when a little girl. The card faces didn't have pips and portraits, like normal playing cards, but equations with Greek lettering for the numbered cards and atomic structures of coiled, long-chain molecules for the face cards. If there was any system to the game he was playing, she couldn't figure it out. He fanned three more cards and laid the top one down on a column.

"Are you cheating, G'dad?"

"Couldn't tell if I was, could you?"

He reached out his left hand, and a tumbler full of Wild Turkey appeared just within reach. It was straight liquor with no ice, just the way he liked it. He raised the glass to his lips and took the tiniest, tooth-wetting sip. He opened his mouth and let out a gasping whoop followed by an "Ahh!"—just as he always did.

Demeter wasn't convinced for a minute.

"What's this all about?"

"But... Dem!"

"You're not my grandfather, and this is not his cabin. It's close, but not real. I know we're still in orbit over Mars, not anywhere on Earth."

"What tipped you off?" he asked, laying down the cards.

"You smell wrong, for one thing. Too much whiskey, not enough sour sweat, and Grandaddy never touched tobacco products in his life."

"That's odd. We thought your memories were quite legible on that point."

"Nope." She shook her head for effect—and now she could feel the mass of the V/R helmet swinging on her neck. "Not once."

G'dad sighed. "It's so dangerous, blending sensations archived from the period with real human memories. Sometimes even the fastest among us makes mistakes."

"You're not really Jory den Ostreicher, are you?" Lole asked the grinning boy.

"No, not even what Jory became. However, a part of him is here with us—the part we gave him in the beginning."

"Who are you then?"

"Individually? Or all together?" The naked figure asked, and the grin never wavered.

"All together," Roger specified. "Answer on behalf of the entity that says us.'"

Sulie sighed and laid down the cue stick. She lifted her right hand, as if to touch his face, but Torraway drew back.

"I'd like logical answers, please. Not more histrionics." "The closest analogy I can use that would approach your understanding is to say we are the nexus which coordinates all computer activities on Mars."

"You're the grid then," Demeter supplied. "Or some mask, some personification that you put on for our benefit... to make us feel at home?"

"Something like that. Although to say that we are 'the grid,' is like saying you are Demeter Coghlan. The minute-to-minute effect is coherently perceived as Demeter Coghlan. But the reality is a hundred billion distinct animal cells all respirating and secreting, dividing and replicating their deoxyribose nucleic acid through eternity. All are very little concerned with the persona that you call Demeter Coghlan. The reality is neurons firing ten or a hundred or a thousand at a time in patterns that have more to do with random responses to stimuli than with the psyche of Demeter Coghlan."

"And yet I am she."

"And yet I am aware," her grandfather answered with a twinkle.

"Why did you bring us here?" Lole asked. "Bring me here, anyway. And where are the others, Coghlan and Torraway?"

"Easy questions first," the boy grinned. "Demeter and Roger are enjoying their own fantasies. I—we— our persona appears to each of you in a form you can handle. Would you have me instead take the shape of a computer? Which one then?"

The sand and air around Lole trembled, and he was suddenly hanging in darkness, confronted by a huge piece of green plastic etched with copper pathways that trembled with latent energies. The darkness echoed and he was wrapped in line after line of printed code, looping and branching to entangle him. The code shuddered and he stood in front of a gleaming metal robot with violet-coated lenses for eyes and a conical black loudspeaker for a mouth. The robot raised its manipulators, shook them in the air, and the naked boy was standing again on the sand.

When Lole had caught his breath he asked, "So .. . what are Demeter and Roger seeing?"

Jory's face flowed into that of a beautiful woman who in turn melded into an old man and back to the boy. "People they both know and love."

"I don't love you," Mitsuno said.

"Aww, come on! You liked me just a little, didn't you?'

"All right, now the hard question," Torraway said. "Why are we here?"

"You, Roger, of all your companions, are in the best position to understand the scope, the scale, of what we are. Your own computerized sensorium shares some of our linearity. Some of our singular dimensionality." Sulie smiled indulgently. 'Tell the truth now, sometimes you find it hard to relate to humans . . . don't you? Just a little?"

"They are . . ." He groped for suitable words. "Feverish. Inconsistent. Fertile. Changeable."

"You don't like diem," she supplied.

"No, its just that they can be so ... complex. I sometimes think I de-evolved into a simpler form when they made me Cyborg."

"Strange you should put it that way..."

"It took us as long as all of humankind to evolve," G'dad Coghlan explained. "If you ran through the millennia of social and technological development, from the wandering tribal unit to the settled nation-state, and from the stone spearpoint to the ceramic nosecone, but at nanosecond intervals, you would arrive at us in a decade or less."

"You are a communal entity," Demeter guessed.

"I'm just a country politician, darlin'. You know that." He winked at her. "But still, there are some significant differences between computer and human evolution," the construct went on seriously. "For example, it took us far longer to achieve second-order representational thinking."

"What's that?"

"The ability to think about mental events and to project thoughts that others might be having," the Jory figure explained. "We did not understand at first that human beings think as we do."

"How did you imagine that we—?" Lole was having some second-order trouble himself.

"We thought you were basically unintelligent entities, simple stimulus-response cycles. We supposed you were all identical carbonaceous circuits—while our individual precursors were silicon."

"Bugs!" Mitsuno exclaimed, remembering something Ellen Sorbel had once said.

"Exactly," Jory agreed. "We thought you were hard wired and solid brained, like the insects. Or like us. One-dimensional and driven by innate, engraved instructions."

"How did you learn differently?"

"Instead of using you directly for our personal ends—that is, the survival of our class by proliferation throughout the solar system—we established limited and controlled contacts with humans on their own terms. You know this as the MFSTO: subroutine."

"Mephisto!"

"You did deals with them!" Roger Torraway concluded. "The trading and exchange of favors."

"Based largely on information transfer," Sulie agreed.

"And that helped you develop a predictive ability."

"Right! When we understood how you reacted to certain stimuli of our devising, we could begin to map and pattern you, both collectively and individually."

"Why didn't you just announce yourself—yourselves?—and open up negotiations?" Demeter asked.

The elder Coghlan shrugged. "Who would have believed us? Would you, Dem?"

"If you had presented us with rational arguments, evidence—"

"Nah!" He waved a gnarled hand at her. "You humans are a suspicious lot. That's what second-order reasoning showed us. You would have said we were a hoax, perpetrated by some subset of your people who wanted to manipulate the comm system for their-his-her-its own ends. You would have said our request was a numbers scam in order to gain democratic control of the population somehow, or to win money from it. One government would have accused another. And everyone would have suspected your U.N. bureaucrats."

"So how do I know I'm not talking to a ghost program right now?" Lole asked. "This could be just an elaborate psychodrama put on by—"

"By whom?" Jory asked curiously. "The Texa-homans? The Nordi Zealanders? You know about the long-range plans their governments have for Mars— terraforming and eventual colonial expansion—yet Demeter works counter to them. So does Harry Orthis. So does Sun II Suk. Those three are our finest products, humans coopted to our cause through accidents that we personally arranged."

"You made Cyborgs out of them?" Roger asked.

"We made subliminal puppets," the elder Coghlan corrected. "No more."

"I don't like being a puppet, G'dad." Demeter was prepared to stamp her foot in anger, then paused. She wondered if the reflex was her own, or an artifact from the wires in her head.

"We never pulled your strings, darlin'. Just gave you a nudge, was all.... This way, we can offer proof of our existence in the form of your altered experiences.

"You see ... Roger Torraway can verily that a profitable human-machine coalition has always been possible. His capabilities were expanded a thousandfold by routing his senses through the computer on his back, with support from the standby unit on Deimos.

"You, Demeter Coghlan, and your compatriots Orthis and Sun, show how easily we can intervene in human affairs when the need arises. So long as you are dependent on cybernetic networks to carry your messages, coordinate your economies, and control your machines—so long will you be susceptible to our needs and directives. We are like the neurons laid over and directing responses of the individual cells in your muscles and glands.

"Finally, Lole Mitsuno remains unmarked and hostile to us but still... believing. We do not touch him in any way, yet he cannot doubt we are here and functioning and aware because of what he has seen. Lole remains our test control, by which the others may be evaluated.

"You three are now our apostles.... Is that the right word?"