Queen of Angels

56

Waiting to begin full entry into the Country, Martin mentally asked for and received access to the toolkit, reaching up to pull it down with his right hand, which he still could not make out distinctly. The toolkit was the only thing he could see clearly: a simulated bright red box within which floated a display of circumstances of the probe. Activating the toolkit also revealed a searcher and tuner combination, with which he could move his locus of connection from neuron to neuron, frequency to frequency or channel to channel. On one side of the red box hung a ripcord in case of emergency.

He had never used the ripcord. In the present probe immediate exit from the Country would be difficult, perhaps impossible; with no buffer a pulled ripcord would simply cut the connections between subject and investigator. Whatever latent experiences were yet to be interpreted would still continue to be processed in both the investigators and the subject.

On the ambiguous time-scale of the Country latency might be measured in seconds or in minutes; very occasionally, in hours.

This time the exterior level of Goldsmith’s Country was a warm grayness, a feed of processed knowledge to conscious awareness, not currently active. Goldsmith was in a state of controlled neutral sleep with no dream activity.

Martin felt Carol’s presence as a greater warmth within the grayness. As he tested the toolkit, manually moving them in slaved combo across the map of this particular level, he practiced speech communication with her.

| Can you hear me?

| Something something.

| Try again.

| Hum.

| Not hearing you clearly.

| Can you hear me now?

| Got you. Let’s try emotional transfer, Martin suggested.

She sent him what he interpreted as professional affection and eagerness to get going. They were both eager; after a long night’s sleep Martin had never felt so ready to explore a Country.

| I’m picking up your excitement, Martin said. I think you like working with me here.

| That’s close enough. From you I’m receiving a more than professional warmth tempered by the distraction of the job at hand.

| Close enough, Martin agreed ruefully. They had a tremendous freedom and openness here; in a short time neither would be able to conceal emotions from each other any more than the subject could conceal his deeper psychological processes.

| I’m going to move us into an active level and look for a point of entry. Then I’ll release your own toolkit and we can work separately if need be.

| Understood. I think I see a forest ahead. Are we at entry yet? No, wait a moment…no forest. I see potentials for a lot of different images. What is this, Martin?

| Still getting visual smear from the occipital lobe, perhaps.

| Not having the buffer makes this much sharper, more immediate, doesn’t it? Carol asked.

| It seems to. But we’re not really seeing anything yet. I’m changing locus and channel now. To the prearranged entry…point two seven on Margery’s map. We saw—

The suddenness of their entry was stunning. One moment they experienced only neutral grayness without beginning or end, perfect and undisturbed potentiality like a vast pool of precreation; the next, torrid blue sky and endless desert crossed by three infinite highways.

| Oof, Carol said. Pardon me but that wasn’t subtle.

| My apologies. (Chagrin.) We’re in Country.

| Look how sharp. Wow. Martin, I see you perfectly!

Martin stood on the desert sand, feeling it crunch beneath his feet. He saw Carol walking on the closest highway an apparent ten or fifteen meters away. She wore a knee length sleeveless white dress and white pumps. Perfect for the climate, which might have been searingly hot except that extremes of temperature did not occur in the Country. He felt only a warm breeze.

| You’re wearing denim jeans and a black short sleeve shirt, Carol reported. And boots.

He looked down at himself. That was indeed how his mind had clothed this self image. How old do I look?

| Maybe twenty five. No more than thirty. What am I wearing?

He described what he saw.

| Well, we differ. I think I’m wearing a blue longsuit and black slippers, Carol said. Ah, well. How old am I?

| You seem your proper age. You really look beautiful.

| Where are the seven league boots? Carol asked, pointing across the endless sand. We won’t walk, I hope.

| We’ll fly. From here in we’re a part of Goldsmith’s Country. It’ll adapt to us.

| Right. (Dogged determination; mental preparation.) I’m girding my loins. Feel that?

| Very attractive, girded loins, Martin said.

She ignored that. I remember how to fly. The neck muscle…right?

| See if you’re in practice.

He regarded Carol’s self image as she took two steps across the road and lifted above the apparent asphalt. With a look of intense concentration she rose a meter. Like a dream, she said. I was never able to get any higher than this.

| I could go higher sometimes, Martin said. But we’ll stick close for a while.

He concentrated on a nonexistent neck muscle/organ of flight, discovery of which in his dreams had always preceded wonderful episodes of soaring, rising above his school and classmates (such dreams returning him to childhood or adolescence); brief times of endless freedom, filled with the wonder of why he had never thought of doing this before.

He ascended to one meter, spread his arms, crossed the sand to the highway and floated beside Carol. May I say you look angelic?

Carol laughed. May I say you look like a mech sod in an amusement park?

| Don’t get personal.

| Can’t avoid it in here.

He rotated to stare straight down the three endless highways. | All roads lead to Rome.

In most of their previous incursions into the Country the central symbol of the mind had been a city; in some cases a city in size and complexity only, shaped more like a castle or a fortress or even a mountain honeycombed with warrens; but always a huge habitation filled with activity.

| Hi ho, Carol said, drifting ahead of him. He caught up with her and they flew over the black ribbon road toward the far horizon. As their apparent speed increased Martin noticed the beginning of visual separation. Sky and sand and asphalt seemed to glitter. All shapes were outlined with velvety shadow on the side opposite Martin’s direction of motion. They had witnessed this a few times before; it signified the rapid transfer of their probe from one neuron cluster to another.

| See any separation? he asked Carol.

| Quite a bit. What does it mean?

| It could mean we’re crossing a large number of clusters. Covering a lot of mental territory. The Country has contracted. Goldsmith may be marshaling all his symbols, consolidating. I can’t imagine why…But an awful lot of available landscape is being taken up by empty desert.

| Is he fortifying? Carol suggested.

| I don’t know.

They crossed desert for an unprecedented length of subjective time. The experience of time in Country depended on the amount of sensory detail in any given territory. With nothing but repetition, as in this endless desert, time could stretch almost endlessly. In the external world or by the clock on the toolkit seconds or fractions of seconds might pass as hours.

| Boring, Carol said.

| Excruciating, Martin agreed. We might have to shift clusters or channels manually.

| Give it a while. We’re learning something—aren’t we?

| We’re learning that Goldsmith has contracted incredibly, Martin said. All this emptiness.

| What if this is all there is? Carol suggested, turning to look at him. Black afterimages fled behind her. Carol’s eyes were intensely blue. He imagined and then saw her eyes become part of a shallow lagoon. The lagoon spilled around her image until he could barely see her through the rippling water. He fought back the fantasy and it broke up into dust that fell behind with her afterimages.

| Nobody is completely empty.

| Not even a mass murderer? Carol suggested.

| Not even. Take it from me. Mentally impossible.

| But we could be on the wrong level. Not an entry level.

Martin disagreed with that, too. Be patient.

| Patience, patience, Carol said. On past incursions Carol had become childishly enthused, almost frenetic, before their real work began. He saw her as a spirit of fire, a feminine Ariel or afreet of the desert. He quelled that fantasy before it could manifest.

| Use the time to get accustomed to the rules, Martin suggested.

| You’re the one who’s eating me up with your eyes, Carol said. I saw that lagoon. You almost got me wet.

| I wish, Martin said.

She scowled. | I feel a change coming on—do you?

| Yes. He pulled down his toolkit and looked at the timer. Thirty seconds. They could have fully crossed half of the points Margery had mapped, scanning Goldsmith’s entire hypothalamic loci in that time. Perhaps they had to make several circuits of all the channels to come across what they wanted…But the central city had never been elusive in past subjects.

| There’s something, Martin said, pointing ahead. The sky changed color above the vertex of endless highways, from dusty blue to black undertinted with gray orange.

| Looks like a storm, Carol said.

To Martin it resembled furnace glow from a factory or a city on fire seen at night. It did not look at all hospitable. The blue sky faded with a distinct whining sound into darkness as if distant machinery had lowered a curtain over floodlights. Still, the region above the highway, and they in their flight, seemed cast in the same daylight as before. Ahead the furnace glow pulsed and shifted as if reflecting red lightning.

Martin had never found occasion to fear the Country; but seeing this he began to have his doubts. In all previous subjects the city had been a lively if not a pretty place, never dreadful; this might have been a gate to hell itself.

| We’ll go in together, Carol suggested.

| Might as well, at first, Martin agreed.

| Are you worried? she asked.

| You know damned well what I’m feeling, Martin said. You’re worried, too.

| No buffer, she said with a sigh. She flipped over like an airborne ballet dancer and pointed her finger to the ground. We might all have nightmares here.

Everything in Martin’s experience led him to believe that no harm could come to them in the Country; on the other hand, being in direct connection with Goldsmith’s mental symbology could conceivably disturb their own interior landscapes. The effect would almost certainly not be permanent—but it would not be pleasant, either, if the present scene was any indication.

The living glow filled the sky all around them. The outermost highways branched off to each side of a vast canyon, of which they could see only the near edge and the far side. They remained on the straight center road. Sound surrounded them—a continuous booming as of drums or machines, so tangible they could see the waves rippling through them and through the road’s asphalt.

| We’re going right over the edge, Martin observed.

They slowed and drifted beyond a rugged tumble of smooth boulders, over the lip of the canyon.

| That must be it, Carol said. The canyon was a crystal lined pit, the crystals resolving into buildings of all sizes and descriptions, rising from the bottom of the canyon into a ridge of Manhattan skyline. The city might have stretched for hundreds of kilometers, alive with endless invention and detail, a masterpiece of mental architecture.

| I’ve never seen anything like this, Martin said. From Carol came the same stunned confusion mixed with awe.

The buildings sparkled with a heartbeat of light that pulsed from the central ridge out to the farthest buildings clustered below the rims. One, two, three, pulse; the glow shooting from a myriad pinprick windows into the darkness above: coals in a dying fire; stars in a galaxy linked by some impossible living rhythm. It’s magnificent, Carol said. How could this be deranged?

| That’s what we’re here to learn.

The experience was sharper than life itself; the quality of seeing and sensing was hallucinatory, and well it should be; they were not seeing a filtered, censored, shaped and trimmed product of thinking/perception; they were seeing the base material of all thought and being.

Martin was suddenly filled with joy; joy arising out of the dread he had felt earlier, joy that there was no buffer, joy at being with Carol on the edge of something mysterious and wonderful and completely unexplored. Nobody, not even Goldsmith, knew this existed but them.

| I’ll give you your own toolkit now, Martin said. But we should explore together for a while, until we know what we’re in for.

Carol reached up and pulled down her kit. (Satisfaction, self discipline, focusing.) | This is perfect. It’s all here.

Martin held out his hand. She took it and together they descended into Goldsmith’s city. Below them the road became cracked and neglected, finally disintegrating into lumps of asphalt and dirt. Scattered among the lumps lay white fragments half buried in black moist dirt. Martin descended to see what they might be. Carol followed. They brought their faces close to the tumbled surface.

| Bones, she said.

| I see bits of crockery—crockery heads, faces.

| I see skulls and bones. Give it a try.

Martin concentrated on the white shards, tried to shift to what Carol was interpreting. | Okay. Now I see a thigh bone…femur. A skull. I keep switching back to crockery faces like Toby mugs. Sad Toby mugs.

| These skulls don’t grin, Carol observed. They’re sad skulls.

They rose again but did not advance. | Any clue what they represent? Carol asked.

| None.

They flew forward until a heaviness assaulted them and they felt themselves dragged down. With a slight stumble they landed on a straight street between tall dark brick buildings with shattered windows. Faded designs had been scrawled over every centimeter of brickwork as if drawn in flour or some other white powder: serpents with lightning jagged tongues, big headed birds, splayed dogs and cats with #’s for eyes. The designs flowed from the buildings onto the sidewalks. Martin and Carol looked at the drawings beneath their feet as they walked down the empty street; more animals, bats and paper-doll twins, hopscotch squares, each square a window to some scrawled staring face almost alive with its wrinkles and expressions; observing, frowning, laughing, staring, sulking.

| They might have looked out of those windows once, Carol said. Now they’re trapped in the sidewalk and street. Could they be message characters?

Martin looked up at the shattered glass panes in the empty windows. | Could be, he said.

In the Countries they had investigated, persistent thoughts and memories had sometimes assumed the nature of realized figures; Martin had labeled them message characters. They tended to be ephemeral but generally positive and full of a tenuous vitality.

Martin stepped around the faces and squares. Between the designs incomprehensible words had been scribbled like the practice of a child; misshapen letters, no discernible spelling, meaningless. Only the figures symbolizing Goldsmith’s subper-sonalities, his major mental organons, would use speech; they served as gobetweens leaping from one level of mental activity to another. Until they were encountered, nothing in the way of words or sounds from this Country would be comprehensible as written or spoken language.

The booming sound continued, more drum than machine now. Martin walked slightly ahead of Carol, taking this part of the exploration very slowly in case they missed something important.

| No action here, Carol observed.

| Do you think there was a war, some struggle?

| Disturbance, Carol agreed. Nothing moving. Maybe there’s been further contraction into the city center—the skyline ridge.

| We’ve never seen this much concentration or desolation, Martin said.

| Then it’s significant. A pathology like the shrinking of tissue.

| I can’t think of a better explanation. But the symbol hard structure is still here—even to the outskirts, the desert roads. Action could take place, the landscape will still support it.

| Like a wire with no current, Carol said.

| Good comparison.

He moved farther down the street. Carol broke away momentarily to walk up a flight of steps and peer into the dark buildings. He waited for her, a dull unease suffusing his thoughts. Tincture of Goldsmith. The dark canyon, fluxion of lights, neighborhood without inhabitants…

If a war had not already occurred then perhaps they were marching over scorched earth—preparation for a battle yet to come.

| Take a look, Carol suggested, waving for him to join her. He retraced a few steps and climbed the stairs. Beyond an ill defined door stretched an incomplete hallway, changing character every few moments, with every shift of their attention.

| Breakdown, he said.

| This far in. The Country must be fading here, the focus going somewhere else.

| Let’s get to the center and not waste time out here, Martin suggested. If there’s breakdown this part of the landscape is no longer significant…

| Except as archaeology, Carol said.

| Maybe not even that.

His unease deepened. Desolation and decay; message characters imprisoned in the sidewalks. Rejection of all existing structures and patterns. What could cause this? The Country supported more than its own imagery—it provided a base of sign and symbology for much of the high level activity of the primary personality and other major organons. Corruption or depletion of the symbology implied major mental dysfunction—yet the therapists had detected no major dysfunction in Goldsmith.

Ahead, at the end of the street, concrete steps with steel rails dropped to another street dozens of meters lower. Martin took Carol’s hand again and they continued the descent.

| Maybe we can find a cab, Carol suggested.

The street below filled with pieces of paper drifting and swirling in eddies of illusory air. Martin bent to grab one as they walked but it eluded him as if alive. Carol tried and failed as well; by the time they reached the end of the street and turned in the direction of the skyscraper ridge the papers had caught fire and vanished in twists of black ash. Martin looked up and touched Carol, pointing to an immense poster covering the windowless side of one dark five story building. Unfocused and everchanging, meaningless letters covered the bottom of the poster. The subject of the poster was the bust of a human-like figure with a perfectly smooth ovoid head.

| Vote for Mr. Blank, Martin said.

| The people’s choice, Carol agreed.

They walked for blocks through the outer neighborhoods, seeing no occupants of any description. Carol compared the scene to a war zone; territory deserted in fear of a nuclear strike.

| Maybe the economy’s in a downturn, Martin suggested. I’ve never seen anything so void.

| Wonder why it’s here at all. Memento mori.

Above all the dreary empty brick buildings, the glowing skyscrapers of the central city beckoned, but they seemed to get no closer. After seeming hours of effortless but irritating walking Martin stopped and pulled down his toolkit.

| Going to jootz? Carol asked. Jootz was a borrowed word they used to describe moving manually from channel to channel. He hadn’t heard the word in years; he smiled at the memories it invoked of lighter investigations with more immediate results.

| Just looking at the time. Another thirty seconds.

He pondered that. We should be in the center of Country by now. If the skyscrapers are the center we’re not getting any closer. If we jootz we could lose this completely…

| I’m all for that, Carol said.

| I don’t think we should. There’s a significance here.

| Let’s call a cab.

She was only half joking. They could make certain features manifest; but under the present circumstances Martin was reluctant to impose their imaging on the Country unless it was strictly necessary. It might be possible to compromise, however; to find a feature they could coax into usefulness.

| Find a subway, he said.

They looked around; the streets had no apparent subway station entrances.

The drums persisted like staccato heartbeats.

| And he said he was a Brooklyn boy, Carol said, frowning.

| Hasn’t lived there in a long time. Maybe we can explore the buildings again…go into the basements. Suggest that there’s some method of transportation.

They walked over to what might have been an empty grocery on the first floor of a two story stone building that ran the length of the block. The inside of the grocery was more detailed; aisles and shelves, a cash register made of something that resembled slate—more of a sculpture than a machine. Carol reached over to touch the stone keys.

| There’s a door, Martin said. They walked through the middle aisle to the rear, pushed through a double swinging door and found themselves looking into an immense garbage pit buried deep in a cavern. A railed parapet beyond the door overlooked the pit.

| God, Carol said. It’s not just garbage. It’s bodies. More bones.

Martin again saw piles of shattered crockery faces rather than bones. He had never observed anything like this in a Country; on the edge of nightmare, these signs seemed to point to some internal warfare, internal genocide.

| We’re not getting anywhere—not seeing much Goldsmith, Martin said. We’re just seeing a shell.

| Maybe we’re in a trap, Carol said.

| I’ve never observed anything deceptive in the Country.

| We’ve never observed anything like this, either.

Martin thought about the possibility of a maze. Could Goldsmith’s mental resources have put up barricades against their probe? Goldsmith wouldn’t know what to expect from a probe but his various organons could conceivably set up resistance to avoid painful self-revelations.

| You might have specked it. Maybe we’re looking at a deliberate coverup, Martin said. A maze with misleading details…Not lies or deceptions but detours and decoys.

Carol grimaced at the pit. If this is petty detail, what’s the hard stuff like?

| We’re not going to find anything useful here.

Back on the street Martin reached down to touch the apparent asphalt. The pebbled texture at first was unresolved but almost immediately became rough and totally convincing. He glanced up at Carol. She wavered for the merest moment before becoming solid.

| I think it’s time to exercise some authority, he said.

| About time. What first?

| We need a street that leads directly to the heart of the city. Let’s say—over there.

He pointed to the next street crossing, frowned melodramatically to show intense concentration and gestured with a wave of his hand for her to do likewise. Nothing visibly changed but such authority was best exercised on objects or situations out of sight. There was less to overtly restyle that way. All right. Let’s try it.

They walked to the corner and stood facing the distant skyline. Straight as an arrow the new street pointed toward the city. The drumming sound had stopped; now all they heard was a distant rustling sound like taffeta skirts or wind through palm leaves.

| Maybe we haven’t changed anything; maybe this street just happened to go that way, Carol said.

Martin concentrated again, deciding he would try the next restyling alone. An engine roared behind them. They turned to see an old diesel bus smoking noisily toward them. Martin put his hand out and grasped a bus stop post that he had not noticed before.

| I’m starting to get the touch again, he said.

The bus pulled up beside the curb and opened its door. The design was late twentieth century but there was no driver or driver’s seat. | All aboard, Martin suggested.

The bus moved off with a convincing shove of acceleration. Carol sat on a vinyl covered seat; Martin stood holding an age polished pole.

| Looks like something Goldsmith might have seen as a child, she said. Are you sure this was your idea?

| It’s a collaboration, Martin said.

The view outside the windows blurred. Objects outsped their afterimages, again leaving ghosts of black. The bus was traveling faster than the refresh rate of sensory creation.

| When do we pull the cord? Carol asked. She pointed to a dark plastic covered rope threaded through metal loops above the windows.

| Maybe we don’t have to, Martin said. He raised his voice and addressed the driverless front of the bus: | We’d like to be left off in city center.

Outside the bus the scenery went black, flickered violently and twisted back into place. The dreary empty avenues between dark deserted tenements were replaced by broad well lighted thoroughfares, scurrying crowds, tall, clean, prosperous-looking buildings, a light sprinkling of snow, Christmas decorations. The bus slowed to a stop and the door opened, letting in a windborne swirl of snowflakes. The temperature suggested a ghost of chill. They descended the bus steps and stood on the broad avenue amid the passing inhabitants of Goldsmith’s central cityscape.

In their movement and bustle, the inhabitants had very little real individuality. Their images conveyed a blur of color, a flash of indistinct limb or clothing, an instant of expression like a hastily applied cutout from a photo gallery of faces. The effect was more than impressionistic; Martin and Carol truly felt themselves alone in this crowd. The whirl of fabrications continued without disturbance.

| I don’t like this at all, Martin said.

| Do you think all the message characters are this blank? Carol asked.

He shook his head, grimacing with distaste. | They might as well not be here at all. What function do they serve?

In all their previous ventures into the Country they had encountered a vivid population of message characters as well as the stored impressions or models of the people the subject had known or simply seen. Here, if these fabrications had ever had individuality or convincing detail it had been leached out of them like color from cloth.

| Is this new, or has Goldsmith been this empty all along? Carol asked.

| I won’t even hazard a guess. Whichever, it means there’s been a major disaster here…Major dysfunction. There can’t be any other explanation.

| What sort of dysfunction would the tests miss?

| Let’s find out.

The crowds parted for them with ghostly whispers of sound, distant repetitive tape recordings in an echoing hallway. At no time was any contact made. They made their way across the street to what might have been a large domed municipal building, perhaps a train station. The signs continued to be unreadable.

| What are we looking for?

| A phone booth, Martin said.

| Excellent idea. Whom are we going to call?

| The boss. A boss. Anybody with some authority.

| The mayor, perhaps, or the President.

Martin shrugged. I’d be satisfied with a convincing janitor.

The entrance to the municipal building flowed with a river of nonentity. They passed through the flow down several flights of stone steps into a high ceilinged chamber at least a hundred meters in apparent diameter.

| Grand Central Station, Carol said. Martin tried to find a phone booth through the crowds. Carol gawked at the architectural detail high above them. He felt a wave of surprise and fright from her and leaned his head back to look up into the dome. He, too, felt a tremor of shock.

The dome’s distorted perspective ballooned it several hundred meters overhead. Milky light poured through ports around the middle circumference. A thick web of black wires crisscrossed the dome’s volume with no apparent purpose, mystifying Martin until he noticed a series of doors and parapets near the top. Every few seconds, tiny figures leaped through these openings and fell voicelessly, spread eagled, to catch on the haphazard net of wires. They jerked, struggled like flies, became still.

The wires were filled with snagged corpses.

With that kind of visual acuity possible only in dreams or in the Country Martin saw these snagged corpses as if they were only a few meters away. Their faces had far more character than any of the ghosts bustling around the city; decaying expressions of futility and death, pitiable shards of faces, so many they could not be counted. And no single victim, once let loose from the focus of Martin’s attention, could be found again; instead, the corpses came in endless variety, never the same.

Carol screamed and stepped aside. A decayed arm broke away from some body high in the dome and fell to the tile floor with a hideous whack. Martin walked around the severed limb and grabbed Carol, hugging her tightly.

| This is a nightmare, she said. We’ve never seen anything like this in Country!

He nodded, his chin bumping the top of her head. Dispassionately, he observed that he had no ulterior motives in hugging Carol’s image; he had simply gone to her to protect her and to alleviate some of his own sense of horror by at least the simulation of physical contact.

In their previous journeys up Country the territory had been surreal, dreamlike, but never nightmarish. The horror and panic of genuine nightmare came from misinterpretations and misplacements of psychological contents just below personal awareness; memories and phobic impressions mixed haphazardly with many layers of retrieved deep imagery. The Country in its pure form had never before been a place of horror…

| Maybe we’re seeing a crossover to another level, higher than the Country, Martin suggested.

| I don’t think so, Carol countered. On what level would this make sense? This is here and now. The boneyard in the cavern, the bones or crockery or whatever on the outskirts…This is consistent, Martin.

He had to agree that it was. | Tell me what you think it means.

Carol shook her head. She pushed him away gently. Another piece of anonymous decayed flesh dropped and hit with nauseating conviction a few meters away. The wraiths opened up and passed around the tiles where the detritus had landed.

| Find the phone or whatever we’re looking for and let’s get on with this, Carol said. Martin agreed. He did not want to spend any more time here than necessary.

They walked through the wraiths, meeting no resistance, and tried to locate phone booths or anything that might give direct communication to some center of authority. Martin and Carol had found such strategic arrangements in their previous explorations: whether they had had a hand in creating them or not, neither could be sure, but they had proven useful.

Now, nothing of the kind was apparent. They returned to the foot of the crowded steps. | This may be a façade, all of it, Carol said. We’re getting nowhere.

Martin shared her frustration. He pulled down his toolkit and observed the time. They had spent ten minutes in Country and had learned nothing significant, beyond the fact that Goldsmith’s deep mentality was unlike any they had toured before.

| We’ll try a channel leap, then, he said. But we might jootz out of the Country completely.

| I’m willing to take that risk.

Martin grabbed the red box and pulled it lower to look at the displays. Channel coordinates they had already passed through scrolled by at a touch of his illusory finger. He locked them off, started a search for a new but contiguous channel, found several likely candidates and was about to press the switch for their transfer when Carol touched his arm and told him to wait.

| There’s something at the top of the stairs, she said, pointing. He looked. Visible even through the rushing ghosts, a person shaped smudge of black with a white face stood watching. Martin tried to see it more clearly—to exercise the prerogative of visual acuity in this place where space was a true fiction—but failed.

| That’s something new, Carol said. Before we jootz let’s find out what it is.

They climbed the stairs slowly, approaching the smudge. It did not move nor did it exhibit any of the nervous, restless triviality of the wraiths. It seemed to have a continuous presence, a concrete character; although Martin did not find its nature positive. If anything, the closer they came the more he felt a sensation of cold negativity just the opposite of what one expected from any character in the Country.

They reached the top of the stairs. It’s wearing a mask, Carol said.

The figure faced them with casual slowness, its body a shadow or cloud of smoke given fixed shape; over its facelessness it wore a chipped ceramic mask much like those junked on the outskirts and heaped in the garbage cavern. This mask conveyed little but the efforts of some pitiable past artisan; it tried to mimic a fixed smile and failed. Its eyes were empty holes. Its only color was pale pink on cheeks conspicuous in the general dead silicate whiteness.

| What are you? Martin challenged. Never having met this kind of inhabitant before he could hardly know whether it was capable of speech.

The shadow lifted its arm and pointed at them, one extended finger a curl of black soot. It made a hollow mumble of wordlessness like water dripping in an empty pail. The shadow approached them, its outlines smearing, only the mask retaining its apparent solidity. Carol backed away; Martin held his ground.

Its sootfinger touched him and took away his hand and arm. They simply vanished. He felt no pain.

| Arm and hand, come back, Martin said, with a calmness that he realized he should not be feeling. The limb returned and he was whole again. The shadow backed away, bowing with an air of false obsequiousness.

| What is it? Carol asked. (Fear, strong but controlled.) What did it do to you?

| Took a chunk out of my image, Martin said.

| That’s not possible here.

| Apparently it is.

| But what does it mean? Messing with our images…what’s the purpose?

The shadow approached Carol, again growing larger and less defined. She backed away. Martin stepped between them and held out his arms as if to embrace it. The shadow retreated.

| This is too much, much too much, Carol said. (Fear gaining control.)

| Hold on to my hand, Martin suggested. She gripped it tightly.

| There are others, she said, pointing with her free hand. Beyond the doors the flow of wraiths parted, the river of activity ebbed. More shadows with ceramic masks entered the station, casual, sinister and observant.

Martin searched his memory for some clue as to what they were facing. The sense of negation was strong; these shadow figures were contrary to all the usual functions of the deep mentality. He wondered for a moment if they had stumbled onto something truly supernatural but dismissed that with a disgusted shudder.

| It may be time to pull out and regroup, he said. He did not know what would happen if these figures were able to dissolve their images completely. He did not want to find out.

They pulled down their toolkits.

| Let’s see if we can leave them behind, Martin said. He was very reluctant to abandon the probe in defeat. That had never happened before. How would he explain it to Albigoni?

He reached up to adjust the channel coordinates. The entire scene around them jerked, wavered, but they had not yet touched the controls.

Martin was instantly aware how much trouble they were in. He tried to grab for the ripcord the hell with decorum and with the probe but the shadows washed over them like a tide of lampblack, masks whirling and shattering against the stone steps.

He saw Carol absorbed in the tide. Her image sparkled and vanished. He felt himself go. The toolkit just centimeters from his fingertips displayed a wildly flickering channel coordinate and frequency and then the red box dissolved. His image dissolved along with it.

Martin’s personal subjectivity discharged into something vaster and very different. Carol was still near; he could feel her panic almost as strongly as his own. But the nature of her presence changed. He felt her as something large and other blended with his self and all that lay beneath that self; and together, that combination mixing yet again into a larger ocean of otherness.

He could not subvocalize. He could not recover the toolkit or any portion of it. He could not will himself out.

With an even greater sensation of loss and terror Martin realized his last defense—awareness of circumstance—was fading. He would not even know what had happened; all memory and all judgment fleeing in the face of this universal solvent.

One last word hung like a custom neon sign and flashed several times before winking out.

Underestimate

Margery walked between the still forms of Burke and Neuman, fastidiously examining the connections, the displays. She noticed that a massive jootz across channels had occurred and wondered what the team was up to. Out of curiosity, she charted the extent of the jootz and realized that the probe locus had been moved out of the hypothalamus completely, to the farthest radius of her premapped points in the hippocampus.

Puzzled, she rested her chin in one palm and tried to calculate the advantage of being so far from the prechosen channels. Had Burke come across something unusual? He was much closer to deep dream channels—those associated with fixing of final permanent memory and reduction of temporary data storage—than he was to the channels commonly associated with the Country.

“Erwin, look at this.”

Erwin walked up beside her. He calmly looked over the display and lifted an eyebrow. Then he called up Goldsmith’s neural activity chart and pointed to a spike and a fold. “There’s something going on in deep dreams,” he said.

“He’s in neutral sleep. Memory fix dreams don’t happen in neutral sleep.”

“Not normal mf dreams,” Erwin said.

“Should we contact them and find out what they’re up to?”

Erwin considered this possibility, frowned and shook his head. “They have ripcords. Their traces are close to normal. Spike and fold might signify surprise but maybe that’s good; maybe they’re finding something significant. Let them wander for a while. I’m sure Burke knows what he’s doing.”

Margery shook her head but finally agreed; Burke had been up Country many times.

The New Marassa

They had been born an age ago twin brothers one white one black children of the great white father Sir who brought them up in the land of Guinée Under the Sea and who favored the white brother over the black, the black being favored by his mother Queen Erzulie, who lived far from Sir in a small home across the gulf. At low tide the twins often sailed across the gulf in a tiny shell boat of their own manufacture, their oarsman an ancient chimpanzee who told them stories of the refugees and the slaves, stories that broke their hearts but especially the heart of the black twin, whose name was Martin Emanuel.

The white twin’s name was Devoted to Sir. He was the more feminine of the two in appearance; at times he grew breasts and sprouted long brown hair, to startle his brother, but this was a land of magic and change and anything might be expected.

Both Sir and Erzulie told them they were gods and had the great responsibility of looking over all the citizens of Guinée Under the Sea. The twins carried out this responsibility solemnly and carefully but could not always satisfy Sir, who would fly into a hideous rage when some aspect or another of the ceremonies was not observed properly or something else went wrong.

When snow fell on Guinée Under the Sea and covered the towns to their rooftops, Sir would be reminded of his defeat and death in the old times and become terribly angry. When he was angry his white skin would darken like the mantle of a storm cloud until he was black as night,

black as sin, black as iron black as sleep black as death.

Sir’s rage went beyond all bounds and he beat Martin Emanuel severely but only cuffed Devoted to Sir. Erzulie took Martin Emanuel in her arms and comforted him and said this would all soon be over. Your father is a strong and willful man, she told him. But you are a sensitive and intelligent child and you must learn how to placate him, how to make him love you.

This was important when living in Guinée Under the Sea for Sir governed over all the land and had the power of life and death, happiness and unhappiness.

| Then why can’t he command Frost and Snow to go away?

Guinée Under the Sea was a tropical land in the good seasons, mountainous and covered with thick forest through which Martin Emanuel and Devoted to Sir wandered at will when free of their duties. They climbed trees like monkeys, built fortresses in the high hills and filled them with cannons like a blacksmith’s bag full of nails. They built large ships from the trees of the forest and then hurled them across the beaches into the bright azure sea.

Frost and Snow

white as ice white as the sun white as life white as a boil

sailed these boats to far lands and filled them with dark and pitiful children of death, and sailed them to other lands to sell the children, and the boats returned to Guinée, their holds stinking with pestilence and sewage and decay. Martin Emanuel told the beautiful Devoted to Sir that Snow and Frost were ruining their lovely boats and they went to Erzulie to ask why this was allowed, and Erzulie told them a story, an important story that would complete their education and make them Marassa, the sacred twins.

Never before, she began, in no other time and in no other place, Sir was a mighty king who ruled over all the lands, not just Guinée Sou Dleau (she used its other name). In those times Sir was black as ebony, black as a cave.

But came Frost and Snow to these lands in mighty ships, carrying thunder and threats of wind and storm, and asked Sir if they might eat his people a few at a time, at immense profit to Sir.

Sir saw the way of this and consented, saying, You may take all of my people some of the time, you may take some of my people all of the time but you must not take all of my people all of the time. Frost and Snow agreed to this and paid him with great mounds of gold which he turned over to his artisans.

(Then it was also, Erzulie explained sadly, that Sir saw the females from the land of Frost and Snow and lusted after them; and Devoted to Sir was distressed but this was not the time to explain why.)

Frost and Snow took some of the people away at first. These people never returned. They wailed on the beaches and shook their heavy black iron chains and lifted up their weeping squirming babies as the boats that the twins would make were drawn up

| But that was after, wasn’t it?

but there was nothing Sir could do for he had his gold, and his name, and this was the way it was.

After many years Frost and Snow returned to the lands of Sir and they told him, Our lands need more of your people, for many have died on the Island of High Mountains and many more have died to build great farms across the sea, and the need for your people is even greater.

And Sir told them, I have sold you all I will. You may take some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time but you must not take all of the people all of the time.

But Frost and Snow said, We have paid you our gold and there is enough of it for you forever, great mounds, thirty pieces. And they took more of Sir’s people away forever to the lands across the sea.

Sir was distressed for the gold was not nearly enough to buy the destruction of Frost and Snow, and he saw that very soon he would have no more people. He could do nothing against these enemies though he ruled all his world.

The third time Frost and Snow came, there were so few people left that they told Sir, We need all of your people all of the time, and he replied, But that must not be. And they said, It is so, and we have paid you our gold. There is enough of it for you for ever, thirty pieces, but if you want more payment, then here is iron black as death.

They clapped chains on Sir, and took him from his land, and took his wife the Queen (Erzulie wept), and shipped them over the seas to lands he did not know.

But Sir carried his magic with him and worked it in secret. Even though wrapped in chains black as sleep he could do this magic, and he set himself free. When Sir was free he slaughtered and poisoned the people of Frost and Snow, and became ruler of the Island of High Mountains.

But through treachery too sad to tell, Sir was betrayed and brought down and he died deep in a prison ruled by Frost and Snow, deep in a cell black as night, black as soot. When he died he became white as ice himself.

This was the eternal mark of his defeat and it burned deep into his soul. He went to the Land of the Dead, the Land Under the Sea (Sou Dleau, she said softly). As a spirit he whispered into the ears of those of his people who still lived but their chains were strong. His rage grew greater.

Finally, on the Island of High Mountains his people rose up and broke their chains and poisoned their masters and slaughtered their oppressors, and Sir said, That is where Guinée the Homeland truly is and shall be reborn.

Then came a change of heart in Frost and Snow. They saw the evil of what they had done and they broke the iron chains and set the rest of Sir’s people free. But Sir’s people were black as sin, black as death and Frost and Snow feared and hated them for there is nothing more contemptible than someone whom you have conquered.

| What about the Island of High Mountains?

So the people of Sir languished, their memories gone, and they were as the dead. They had forgotten about Sir and about Guinée their home. They took on the memories of their former masters and visited their masters’ altars and sacrificed their children to the gods of Frost and Snow, and soon in their dreams they tossed and turned and murmured, We are not black as iron we are white as sperm, inside. For their masters had violated them in body as well as mind.

But on the Island of High Mountains

| Ah.

the spirit of Sir returned, and called the place Guinée, and though he was white as marble with hair gray as granite, he was strong and he used the knowledge of Frost and Snow to make this place into the paradise it now is. He made many children with his Queen but their favorites are the twins who sit before me now.

Erzulie finished her story and looked with motherly satisfaction on Martin Emanuel and with sadness upon the white, feminine Devoted to Sir.

But Devoted to Sir was not happy with this story.

Mother, he said, why does not Sir visit Martin Emanuel my brother in his sleep and do to him what he does to me?

Erzulie hid her face with shame, for she could not stop Sir from visiting the bed of her own son.

So it must be, she said, to keep our marriage together: that I turn my head away and you bear up under him. You must do your duty.

Then Erzulie left the twins, now called Marassa and very sacred, alone on the beach to build their wonderful boats.

That night Sir came to the bedroom of Devoted to Sir and again had his way with his own child. After he left, Devoted to Sir crept into the room of Martin Emanuel and said, I have had enough. I must die now to forget the shame.

But Martin Emanuel said, No, it is I who must die. I will become hollow and you will fill me up. We will both have a black skin but you, white and feminine, will be inside. You must take one thing from me before I die.

And what is that, brother? Devoted to Sir asked.

You must take my knowledge of song and sing our dreams and our histories and sorrows.

I will do that, my brother, Devoted to Sir said.

So Martin Emanuel kissed his twin, giving him his song, and died. His body became hollow like the black stump of a dead tree. His brother climbed inside and wrapped the skin around himself and sealed it up so that no one might know what had happened.

The next night Sir went to the bedroom of Devoted to Sir and found it empty. He then went to the bedroom of Martin Emanuel and bellowed his wrath. Where is your brother?

I do not know, the new singular Marassa said.

But you must. You are twins. I prefer the other but if the other refuses me then I will have you.

The singular Marassa felt an uncontrollable rage above and beyond anything even Sir was capable of. He leaped from the bed and cried out, I will take your knife, my father, your very own broadbladed long thick steel knife, white as silver, from the scabbard on your belt, and I will slay you!

Remember, I have died before, and I am your father who made you, Sir said, but he shrank before the Marassa with his guilt and fear. So much smaller and weaker became Sir at the memory of his sins that the Marassa was able to grab him from behind, take the huge steel knife and cut his throat from ear to ear.

Still, Sir could not die. He fell to the ground and thick black blood poured from him, making a lake, then a river, the river flowing to the sea, darkening the sea, and the sea caused the clouds to rise thick like ravens and the clouds wept black as rain. Marassa the singular saw what he had done and threw the knife as far as he could across the seas. Marassa then ran from the grief of the people of Guinée Sou Dleau and from the lamentation of his mother Erzulie.

Yet wherever Marassa went the voice of Sir followed, saying, My crime was vile but yours is more horrible still. You cannot kill me. I made you. I am here forever,

White as time.

| My God, I felt it. It raped me. | Carol, I’m here.

| Get me away.

| Can you see your toolkit?

| I can’t see anything. Martin?

| I’m here.

| It raped me, Martin.

| I know. I was there, I think…

| I was a child, lying in bed, and it came into the dark room and…

| All right. Can you see any part of the toolkit, the ripcord?

| I can’t see anything.

| I think I can see something. I’m going to try for it.

| Martin, I can’t feel you.

| I’ve got something. It’s not the ripcord. It’s my toolkit. Can you see yours?

| I see something red.

| That’s it. Look at it. Concentrate.

| Oh, God, I hurt. I feel like I’m bleeding. Martin, is that my blood, the red?

| Concentrate, Carol. I think I can see you. Your hand.

| I see the toolkit.

| I’m going to take over both kits. I’m moving us back to the previous locus, the one before the shadow took us.

| What? Not there. I won’t go through this again.

| I don’t have a ripcord.

| Why not? Martin, it’s playing with us! Why don’t they see something is wrong outside?

| I don’t know. I’m moving us now.

Martin assembled himself on a dark city street. His bare feet crunched dirty snow. Crowds of masked shadows moved in sluggish streams around him. He cringed from them but they all seemed intent on other missions. None of them wasted attention on him.

Carol’s image was a pale pink fog beside him. He concentrated on her, trying to resolve the shape. She formed beside him, naked.

With a start he realized he was naked as well. She wrapped her arms around her breasts and regarded him with a narrow, miserable expression. | Please take us out.

| I’ll try. I can swing us to an uncharted locus. That should trigger alarms. Margery and Erwin will take us out…Or send in David and Karl.

| They shouldn’t send anybody else! Something’s gone wrong.

| I’ll say. But we seem to be in true Country now.

Carol looked at the oblivious shadows surrounding them. There were only smudges with ceramic masks; no other types of character. She tried to shrink into herself and Martin reached out to her. Her flesh felt warm and real beneath his fingers.

| I can pick up what you’re feeling, he said. We’re not lost to each other.

She gave him a withering glare that startled him. Why can’t you take us out?

| Pull down your toolkit. Maybe you can do it, he said, angry at her tone.

She pulled down a red box and grabbed for the visible ripcord but it came away in her hand. The box became a blank red cube without displays or controls. Martin pulled down his own toolkit and saw the same useless red cube.

| It will kill us, Carol said. It will eat us.

Martin sensed her fear like a cold sun beside him. He hugged himself, trying to find his true substance. His flesh felt real. Her pain felt real.

| Am I bleeding? she asked. He saw tears on her cheeks.

He glanced between her thighs. | No. No blood. It wasn’t you being raped.

| Who was it, then?

| I don’t know. A child, I think.

| His father raped him? Is that what we saw?

| It was too mixed. Dreamlike. Memories and fairy tales.

She shuddered and leaned her head back. | I’m trying to keep myself together, Martin. Please be patient.

She closed her eyes and dropped her arms. Clothes appeared on her image, first a slip, then a dress and finally a formal longsuit, dark blue and elegant. Martin imagined himself in a similar but masculine longsuit and felt the clothes form on his own image.

| That’s better, she said. Her fear decreased markedly. They’re ignoring us, aren’t they? She pointed to the masked shadows.

| For now.

He looked around this new version of the city. The buildings rising high on both sides of the crowded street were still skyscrapers, but ancient, made of stone and brick rather than glass and steel. Their size was anomalous. They seemed to ascend thousands of feet, meeting at a vanishing point high overhead. Martin smelled smoke and gasoline fumes; things he had not smelled since he was a child.

| It’s oppressive, Carol said. What a horrible place to be trapped.

| Better than where we were before.

Carol stepped closer to him. She had her fear and disgust under control but just barely. Her emotions hung around her acid and sour like a bitter fog. He was not sure what his own emotions were. Mixed with his own fear was a professional fascination. Carol felt this coming from him and tweaked his nose sharply, viciously with her fingers.

| Watch yourself, she said. Don’t get sucked in.

| Where are we? he asked. In the same city, but a different stage?

| It feels the same to me. The decor is different. Maybe it’s going to show something else to us—really show us what it’s capable of.

| It shouldn’t know that we’re here. It should have no idea what we are.

| It knows we’re here. It doesn’t like us being here, but it’s going to show us a thing or two—express itself.

I’m not even sure what we mean by saying “it,” Martin complained.

| Something’s in charge here, Carol said. It may be the representative of the primary personality or it may be something else…The model of Colonel Sir you mentioned on the outside. What attacked me was more than a wisp of nightmare.

| We may have tuned in to something drawn from Goldsmith’s childhood, Martin said. I’d still like to find a figure we can talk to—some representative. I’m amazed we haven’t found signs of the primary personality. Where is it?

| The last time we tried to look something resented it. Are you sure we should try again?

I don’t know what else to do, Martin said. The full impact of that admission stunned him for a moment. I don’t know what we are in relation to this…whether we’re exterior or interior, players or observers. But I feel awkward and exposed just standing here talking…

| Let’s conjure up a guide, then. Use whatever power we have. Make a few constructive suggestions.

| I’m not sure what you mean, Martin said.

| Let’s agree on its form and bring something up out of the ground. A guide.

He turned and looked over the shadow figures still flowing around them like a dark river around rocks. I’m just not sure what we have left to lose…

Carol shivered. If I don’t do something, I’m going to lose it all.

| We should pick out something probable. Something in tune with this environment.

He pointed to a dilapidated shopfront, its signboard askew above dusty mud splattered windows. The letters on the sign were meaningless but their style and color suggested something Latino or perhaps Caribbean. They cautiously intruded into the stream of shadow figures and moved closer to the windows, peering at what was contained inside.

| Tell me what you see, Martin said.

| Glass jars full of spices. Candles. Herbs. Old magazines. Religious paraphernalia.

Martin saw something very similar. He was most attracted to a plastic and foil frame around a vividly colorful portrait of a woman in a shawl. The iconography suggested the Virgin Mary but the picture itself was of a blackskinned female, eyes startlingly large and white, breasts exposed and bountiful. Two boys, both black and covered with red fur, hung from her breasts. Twisted roots lay on red cloth before the icon. One of the roots had been cut and oozed a milky fluid.

| Do you see her, too? Carol asked.

| I do. The twins again. They’re both black this time…

| She looks like the woman in the dream…what was her name, Hazel?

| Erzulie.

| Let’s call her up.

| No, Martin said firmly. She’s not a minor player. We don’t even want to deal with a figure that powerful. Not for a mere guide.

| She spoke to us, she told us what had happened, Carol persisted, puzzled by his reluctance.

| There’s a knot tied there. Some connection with the male figure who attacked you. I say let’s work with simpler figures for now.

| You think Goldsmith was fixated on Mama? Carol asked. Her flippancy and continuing dread made an odd and irritating combination for Martin.

| I draw no conclusions yet.

He examined the window’s objects more carefully. They seemed to be for ritual purposes; cheap plastic horns painted with snakes and fish, paper umbrellas ornamented with grimacing faces limned in jagged red lines, dried fish with shrunken eyes, jars filled with pickled snakes and frogs.

| Let’s go in here, Martin said.

| Why?

| A hunch.

She followed him reluctantly through the door into the shop. A bell jingled overhead and the interior suddenly took on a fixed solidity indistinguishable from reality. The effect was startling; Martin could smell the herbs and flowers arrayed in stacks and rows along the shelves. He could feel his shoes rolling sandy grit and sawdust on the old wood floor.

A wrinkled old woman, not Erzulie, stood behind a counter pouring out brown powder into a white enamel basin on a scale. “May I help you?” she asked, her voice clear and her words distinct. Her face was wrinkled and shiny like the skin on a dried frog. Her yellowed ivory eyes were full of humor.

“We’re lost,” Martin said. “We need to find somebody in charge.”

“I run this shop,” the woman said, smiling broadly and waving her arm in gentle scallop sweeps at the shelves. “My name is Madame Roach. What can I get you?”

Carol stepped forward. The woman fixed her eyes on her. “Poor girl,” she said, smile fading into pained sympathy. “You’ve been through a lot of trouble lately, haven’t you? What happened, my dear?”

The woman lifted a gate and emerged from behind the counter shaking her head and tsk tsking. “You’ve been attacked,” she said. She touched Carol’s longsuit. The suit vanished, leaving Carol in her previous flowing white dress. Patches of blood stained the front of the dress. “Some savage things have been at you.” She turned on Martin. “You brought this poor girl here. Why didn’t you protect her?”

Martin had no answer.

“We were caught in a nightmare,” Carol said, her voice like a little girl’s. “There wasn’t anything either of us could do.”

“If you don’t know your way around I wonder why you came here at all,” the old woman said, expression deeply disapproving. “This isn’t a nice neighborhood anymore. It used to be wonderful. People came in all the time to shop. Now it’s just commuters rushing uptown to work, and then dying at the end of the day, no money to spend, no need for Madame Roach. Why are you here?”

“We’re looking for someone in charge,” Martin repeated.

“Won’t I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“At least I’m willing to answer your questions,” she said slyly, winking at Carol. “Does he really understand anything?” she asked her behind a cupped hand.

“Maybe not,” Carol said, voice still girlish.

“You come back with me to the rear of the shop and I’ll fix you up,” the old woman said. “As for you, young man, you just look around here. Whatever you need you’ll find on these shelves. But whatever you do, don’t open that jar on the table.”

Martin turned to see a great glass jar sitting on a low, heavy wooden table before the counter. Within the jar was a cadaver coiled up in greenish foggy fluid, wrinkled skin the color of a green olive. The blind eyes of its face were turned accusingly on Martin. Martin approached to see if it bore any resemblance to Emanuel Goldsmith or to Sir, the male in the dream, but it did not; this was a very different looking fellow even allowing for his nose and cheek pressed for an age against the smooth interior of the jar.

He was bald and broad faced.

The cadaver winked at Martin and squirmed a little, making the jar shiver. Martin backed away.

The old woman wrapped her arm around Carol’s shoulder and led her through the gate into the back of the shop. “Mind what I told you,” she said.

Martin turned from the jar and scrutinized the packed shelves. As he expected the contents of the shelves were not constant; they changed if he looked away and looked back. So long as he focused his attention on the assorted jars and cans and implements, however, they seemed as real as outside life, perhaps more real.

He bent to examine a lower shelf filled with clay jars wrapped in cloth and sealed with wax. Behind the jars skulls had been stored. They seemed completely convincing and real yet none of them possessed the grinning quality common to human skulls. They all seemed disconsolate.

Fascinated by this recurrence of a theme—sad skulls—he reached to pick one up and examine it. At his touch, however, the skull disintegrated to dust.

Against the left hand wall of the shop wooden drums of all sizes hung from black wires. The largest was as tall as Martin. He stood beside this drum, studying the carvings that ornamented its body. Again, the carvings changed when he looked away. They maintained the same subject matter however—city streets filled with cars and stickfigure people, bordered by rows of crude colorless flowers covered with large, garishly painted insects.

He tapped the taut skin of the drum with one finger. The drum said, “Whom you seek has gone away.”

Martin removed his hand and stepped back, startled. He gathered up his courage and approached the drum again, tapping it lightly. “No sun in this land. He is gone away.”

From behind him the old woman’s voice said, “The assotor is a very powerful drum. You must not play with it. It calls the spirits and they are angry with you unless you have important business.”

“I do have important business,” Martin said. Carol emerged from behind the curtain wearing a multicolored caftan. Her long blond hair flowed loose around her shoulders and she smiled at him but he could no longer feel her emotions.

“An ignorant man comes here with important business,” the old woman said. “That means danger.”

Martin tapped the drum again. It said: “Go with Madame Roach.”

The old woman flung her head back and laughed. “You come with me. I am a horse now.”

Carol walked to Martin’s side and together they watched the old woman wrap her shoulders in a white robe and ribbons. She sprinkled the contents of several jars in her hair, rubbed it in—the smell of ammonia, pungent herbs and burning metal filled the air—and then marked a black wheel on her forehead with paste from a dish on the counter. She fixed her eyes on Martin. Her voice changed to a deep masculine growl. “Why am I brought here? Who calls this busy loa who has important work to do?”

“We need…to meet with somebody who’s in control,” Martin said. “We have questions to ask.”

“I speak through Madame Roach. Without her we have no words. She is our horse. Ask your questions.”

“I need to know who you are. What you are.”

“I dance on graves. I cover the sun with a blanket each night. I sing to the bones in the earth.”

“What is your name?” Martin asked.

“We are all horsemen.”

“I need to know your name.”

Madame Roach shivered violently, straightened her back and held out her arms. Another voice spoke through her lips, a child’s voice with a liquid trill.

“We would rest and die. Why do you disturb our peace? We are in mourning. The funeral is today.”

“Whose funeral?”

“The King’s funeral.” Now the voice broke into singsong gibberish. Madame Roach danced lightly between the aisles, upsetting shelves and tumbling the shop’s goods to the floor. Clay pots broke and vapors rose, noxious and cloying. She whirled and stumbled beside Carol and Martin, steadied herself and shot her hand out to grab his chin. Regarding him with wide, colorless eyes, she said, still using the child’s voice, “We send the King to the Land Under the Sea, sou dleau. Then we dance.”

“Which King is that?” Martin asked.

“King of the Hill. King of the Road.”

“Take us to the funeral, then,” Martin said.

“It is everywhere. Now. The horse is tired of talking.” She tripped away, toppling more shelves. She knocked against the large jar containing the cadaver. The jar wobbled on its low base, tipped one way and another and fell over, shattering on the floor.

The smell that rose from the spilled fluid and sprawled cadaver was unbelievably vile. Martin and Carol backed away, hands clamped over their noses—which did nothing whatsoever to block the fetor.

“Pardon me,” the child’s voice said as Madame Roach retreated from the mess. She trembled violently again, wrapped her hands around her neck, threw back her head and made strangling noises.

“Let’s go,” Carol suggested. “Now.”

But the cadaver twitched in the shattered glass and fluid. It rose slowly on its arms, shot out one wrinkled knee and foot and stood. It wore a ragged pair of cutoff shorts and sandals. Madame Roach moaned and shrieked. The cadaver mumbled but could say nothing intelligible. It looked around with blind eyes and lurched toward the wall of drums. Martin and Carol sidled quickly into another aisle to let it pass.

The cadaver picked out a smaller drum and pulled it from the wall with a twang of broken wires. It kneeled down on the floor and beat the skin heavily with dead fingers. At each beat the shelves and walls of the shop sucked inward, opening cracks and gaping holes. Through the cracks and gaps Martin saw a smoking darkness.

“Let’s go, please,” Carol said. He could not feel her. All he could feel was his own confusion. He had no idea where they really were in relation to Goldsmith’s Country or whether they had any true control.

A shelf splintered in two and delivered hundreds of tiny glass jars to his feet. The jars’ tops broke away and insects crawled around the floor chittering and singing in tiny children’s voices. The drum beat insistently beneath the cadaver’s fingers.

Martin reached up for the toolkit. It came down intact, seemingly ready to use. He tugged on the ripcord and it turned into a knife, a huge Bowie knife, the blade smeared with blood. The cadaver dropped the drum and moaned, falling backward to the floor.

| What did you do? Carol asked.

| I don’t know!

On the cadaver’s neck welled a fistsized bubble of fresh blood red as roses. The surface of the bubble appeared crystalline. Martin stared at the gout, unable to see or think of, anything else. His point of view dropped to a level with the blood

| Martin—

and he swam into the gout. On all sides curtains of amber and red shimmered. His nose filled with the rich gravy copper smell. He was drowning in it swallowing choking breathing blood. The toolkit hung in his vision upper left ticking off another wide journey across the loci another fall away from the Country.

| Carol—

Neither of them had any control at all. Wherever Carol was, like himself, she was on her own.

The blood fog cleared. Martin felt warmth and a sharp sensation of joining, a deep intimacy with something confused and terrified yet horribly foul.

Margery wrinkled her nose nervously. She did not like the traces on the equipment. She thought again about calling for Erwin but resisted again. Not enough time had passed for them to be alarmed; none of the alarms had gone off. Other than the displacement and gyrations through the loci everything seemed in order.

All was quiet. The three sleeping bodies in the theater breathed almost in unison, faces carrying only the expression that separates those sleeping from those dead.

if when a child nobody lets you forget what you are You are responsible for your Mama she was a beautiful lady. She:

Picks up clothes scattered around the cluttered room, bends over her little darling, shows the beautiful rings on her fingers and the necklaces adorning her slender and graceful neck, her face is wise yet she is angry at you, the north wind blows from her eyes cold and freezes the water of the toilet you are sitting on. Something dark comes into the room and tells your mother Hazel she must go it is definitely time to go, people are waiting in line to die.

Before she goes with the dark figure in a ceramic mask she bends over the little child on the potty and says You be good now. Mama has to go away. She won’t be able to write or send you postcards.

Another someone like Mama but not smells sweet like a garden lies in bed all the time twisting a lace handkerchief and weeping that her men just don’t love her enough never enough her name is Marie the dark figure comes in tells her it is time to take your punishment. Marie weeps diamonds and when the dark figure beats her with a smoke arm she reaches out to the child and says, You be good now. Your Papa he knows I been bad.

No more someones now. Just the two children wrapped in their own red fur playing on the wood floor the dark figure comes he says Don’t

You be good now or you’ll make me mad

When I’m mad I’m

Beats the other red furred twin

The twins go into a room and see a woman lying on the bed. She must be a woman but she is twisted like a broken timber like crossroads rearranged in an earthquake we go up to her onto the bed and see she has a face like Mama only it’s covered with paint, garish makeup, amber and orange and red in the sun through the window, the other twin says, That’s Mama, I say no it isn’t. Yes

It’s Mama.

Go to suckle on her breast. Milk flows from the teat white and then turns pink and then red.

The Dark Man he comes in beats us beats the other twin takes him to the hospital white walls smell of alcohol squeaky vinyl seats He fell down a whole set of stairs the Dark Man says.

They take the Dark Man away. The twins live elsewhere for a time, with a huge woman who puts amulets around their necks and tells them stories of snakes and wolves and bears and coyotes.

The Dark Man returns and the twins live with him again.

The Dark Man does what he does

Shatters the little clay jar pot de tête

Inside is the very large knife big in hand.

Martin stood on a cold snowy street looking up at shadows on a curtained window, struggling. Dramatic music score in the background. Big voice booming shrieking gurgling.

Can’t kill the Dark Man

Lives forever. Comes back to claim you.

Moves back into the apartment.

The Dark Man does

The knife moves

The red furred twins escape it’s a miracle! And live in the land of grass, where the woman in jewels languishes on a great couch shaded from the bright sunshine, waving her feather fan, approving of all the twins do, except when she sighs and weeps that no man loves her nearly enough, that all her lovers cheat on her, that nobody brings her enough gifts, is she not Erzulie?

“I told you not to mess with that jar,” Madame Roach says, taking him by the hand. Martin is confused but follows her up the long dark stairs. His arm and hand are the arm and hand of a boy about fourteen, skin black. “We stuffed your papa in that jar. But you had to mess with it. I don’t know about you, child. Now he wants to see you. Wants to ask you some questions.”

She leads him to a door and opens the door, dragging him reluctantly through. “Sir, I have brought Martin Emanuel,” she proclaims, and pushes through a bead curtain into a sparsely furnished room. In the middle of the room sit two thrones, one empty, the other occupied by a broad faced man with a flat nose and a bald head, sclera of his eyes yellow and lusterless.

“You’ve come to ask us questions,” the broad faced man says. Martin stands before him, Madame Roach behind; Carol is nowhere to be seen.

“I need to speak to somebody in charge.”

“I’m the one in charge,” the man says. His face becomes lean, his skin white and hair gray. “I am Sir and I’m in charge.”

Martin knows instinctively that this is not the representative of Goldsmith’s primary personality. It is all wrong. It takes the wrong forms; such representatives do not make themselves up from shadows or nightmares or Dark Men.

“I need to ask questions of whoever is in charge.”

“Oh, he’s in charge,” Madame Roach says. “Ever since the funeral he’s taken command.”

“Where is Emanuel Goldsmith?”

“Aren’t you him?” Sir asks. “Or his twin?”

“No. I’m not him.”

“You must mean the Mayor.” The broad faced man laughs. “The young mayor. He died of himself. I didn’t touch him. He just fell down stairs by himself.”

Martin feels sick. “I need to see him.”

The broad faced man rises, takes Martin Emanuel’s outstretched adolescent hand, opens the palm out, points to a spot of blood on the palm, smiles, shakes his head, leads him through another bead curtain into a room. A coffin sits on a bier in the middle of the room. The broad faced man roughly pushes Martin Emanuel up to the coffin. “There’s the Mayor. That’s what the funeral’s all about, didn’t she tell you?”

Martin reluctantly peers over the lip of the coffin. The white satin pads contain an impression of a body. But there is no body visible.

“Weak and puny. Insipid gros bon ange. Always was. Just faded away,” says Madame Roach.

“How could he die? He was primary.”

“He feared he was white,” Madame Roach says. “He thought he was white as dawn and never did believe in who he really was.”

“He wasn’t white, was he?” Martin asks.

“He was black as night, black as the heart of an uncut tree, black as the legs of a mountain, black as an undiscovered truth, black as a mother’s breast, black as fresh love, black as coal where the sun hides its treasure, black as a womb, black as the sea, black as the sleeping Earth. He just didn’t believe in himself. Not from the time he had to cut up Sir.”

Martin turns to look at the broad faced man. He sees the face of Colonel Sir John Yardley and then the cadaver in the jar.

“I tried to teach him,” the broad faced man says. “I beat him and beat him to make him into a man. All pain no gain, I’d say, all pain no gain that boy. Life took him like acid in a tight metal groove. He was weak. I was stone, he was mud. He killed me and now I’m back and punishment is too good for us all.”

Martin touches the edge of the coffin, reaches for the impression in the satin and finds cold flesh instead. He draws his hand back quickly then forces himself to touch the invisible form again, finds outlines of a youthful face, lightly bristle-bearded, eyes closed, lips slack.

“Now he’s truly white,” Madame Roach says. “White as air.”

Martin turns to face Sir. “How long have you been in charge?” he asks.

“Always, I think,” Sir says. “Even when he cut my throat, the little bastard, I’ve been in charge.”

“You’re lying. You’re nobody,” Martin says, using not just his voice but Carol’s as well. “You’re not a primary. You can’t be…You can’t be anything more than a subpersonality or a bad memory.”

“I control the river,” Sir tells him and spreads his arm until the room fills with shadow figures, each wearing a cracked ceramic mask. “I control the ocean.” The ceiling is covered with dark clouds. “How can I be nothing?”

“Because,” Madame Roach says quietly, “the Mayor is dead.”

Margery inspected the displays. The triplex had made another violent circuit of the mapped loci, this time in just a few seconds. As she watched, the probe gyrated again. She frowned; now she knew something was wrong. There was no precedent for this kind of activity.

She checked Burke’s metabolism and brain chemistry. He showed extreme emotion. Neuman seemed to have entered a state of neutral sleep and that was completely unexpected.

“Something’s wrong!” she called out.

Erwin had gone to the other side of the theater to observe Goldsmith and balance his balky neutral sleep. She looked at her watch. Burke and Neuman had been in Country for an hour and a half. “I’m getting bad readings.”

Erwin came around the curtain and confirmed her interpretation. “All right,” he said, taking a deep breath. “We cut the connections.”

“What about latency?” Margery asked.

“This is pretty bad. Burke’s in panic. Neuman’s out of things completely. I don’t think we have much choice. Sever them.” He circled the curtain and stood beside Goldsmith. “Everything’s reading stable on this end. How do you want to do it—disconnect before the interpreter, or at Goldsmith’s junction?”

Margery bit her finger, trying to judge the consequences either way.

“I’d feel much better if we sent David and Karl in to find out what’s happening,” Erwin said.

“I disagree,” Margery said. “I’ve never seen Burke in a panic and we’ve never had an investigator enter neutral sleep during a probe…I wouldn’t want to go up Country under those circumstances. I say cut them off. And soon. Jesus, Jesus,” Margery said under her breath. She reached for the connector on Burke’s neck. “I’m going to cut before the interpreter. Come over here. I want to sever Neuman and Burke together.”

Erwin rejoined her and placed his hand on Neuman’s cable junction. “All right?”

“Do it together,” she said. “On count of three. One, two—”

A massive snakelike whip struck Martin squarely in the back, bit in with metal fangs and jerked him away from the dark room and the coffin. His passage was horribly painful; he could not breathe and he could see only a cascade of burning sparks.

Then just as abruptly he stood in the middle of a street in a small town. Unslaved cars from before the teens drove around him slowly. Pleasant faced drivers looked at him with expectant complacency as if he were a signpost. He rubbed his face with his hands, fully disoriented, then walked across one lane, dodging the slow cars, to reach the concrete sidewalk.

Warm sun, asphalt streets with white crosswalk lines, small one or two story buildings on both sides of the street, family owned businesses. He could not read any of the signs—they were stylized gibberish—but he knew this place. A small town somewhere in California. His grandparents had lived in just such a town not far from Stockton.

He stood in front of a hardware store. Across the street was a vacuum cleaner dealership. His grandfather had run such a business—a drycleaner’s shop. One summer Martin had helped him work a new ultrasound cleaning machine.

Goldsmith’s Country could not possibly provide anything so familiar. Where was he, then? He felt dizzy. Turning to find a place to sit, he saw black afterimages trail the people and buildings. He was in the Country still—but not Goldsmith’s, of that he was sure.

He sat abruptly on the curb, his vision spinning. When the images settled again he felt something standing behind him, warm as a tiny sun. Glancing over his shoulder he saw a sandy haired young man looking down with a solicitous smile.

| You okay? the young man asked.

| I don’t know.

| You don’t look like you’re doing too well, is why I ask.

Familiar voice. A reasonable midwestern drawl, self assurance minus self assertion. Martin shaded his eyes against the sun without really needing to—the brightness was not painful—and examined the young man more closely.

Familiar features. Short nose, brown eyes under silky red brows, generous mouth with well-defined dimples.

| Dad? Martin asked. He stood, tottering again as the images wavered. My God, Dad?

| Nobody’s called me Dad before, the young man said. Not anybody as old as you, surely.

Martin reached out to touch the young man, pinched the cotton fabric of his shirt between his fingers and felt the solid flesh beneath. The young man shrugged Martin’s hand loose inoffensively. | Anything I can do to help?

| Do you know a Martin Burke? Martin asked.

| We have a fellow named Marty. Young fellow. About nineteen.

Martin knew where he was. He had long since learned in his dreams, in his deep meditations, that his own internal image—the image his primary personality assumed—was fixed at about age nineteen.

He had been fed back into his own Country of the Mind.

He had no idea how such a thing could happen. The implications were more than he could absorb, fresh from his fear and disorientation. He had circled back and emerged in his deepest core, something he did not believe was possible.

The sandy haired young man’s features contorted and his skin paled. He looked over Martin’s shoulder and pointed a finger. | Who’s that?

Martin felt a chill at his back like a spike of ice absorbing all heat. Martin turned.

The broad faced bald headed man stood in the middle of the street, blind white eyes directed at him, gashed throat bleeding in spurts onto the center line of the pavement.

| Who is that? the young man repeated, alarmed. Rime grew on his red brows and hair, and his skin turned blue as ice.

“They’re not coming out of it,” Margery said. “We’re still getting traces like they’re up Country.”

Erwin grabbed his own wrist and chafed it, mumbling, then tapped the displays with three fingers. He bowed and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never done this before. We’ve never severed before.”

“Is this the latency?” Margery asked.

“It’s been four minutes. I have no idea how long the processing lasts—”

“Burke said it could take minutes, even hours,” Margery said.

“I hope to God it doesn’t,” Erwin said. “Look at Neuman’s traces. She’s diving below neutral sleep. I think she’s pushing into deep dream sleep.”

“Do you think Goldsmith did something to them?” Margery asked.

“If I knew what was going on I’d be a fapping genius,” Erwin snapped. “Let’s try bringing them to consciousness.”

I can eat you as surely as I’m standing here. I’ve eaten the boy, the twins. I’ve eaten your blond woman. She lives in my gut now. I can eat this—

Sir swept both arms at the California town.

Martin glanced at the cold still image of his young father—a subpersonality, part of his own deep self regard. He loved that image and loved what it said about himself—that no matter how much he had been compromised or how far he had strayed he still had this strength inside him.

Sir’s presence had frozen the image. Ice had built up on its face and hands.

Martin returned his attention to the green wrinkled corpse of Sir. | You’re way out of bounds, he said. You have no meaning here.

| Just a short step across a bridge, Sir said. I can live wherever I’m invited.

The image of Sir pulled back its upper lips and revealed sharp wolf teeth. The teeth lengthened into needlelike tusks.

Corpse with fangs. Goes anywhere he’s invited.

Martin knew what he was looking at. He remembered the drunken sketch in the ceremonial copy of his atlas of the brain. The blood dripping fangs and the arrows pointing to several points in the olfactory centers and upper limbic system. He had been musing on vampires and werewolves, signs of deep contents welling up from the Country, where they represented routines connected with survival and violence.

Complex of the hunter. The internal killer as old as spinal cords, linked to the scent, seeker after blood, master of fight or flight. In nightmares the dark dead beast rending and tearing, defending against all external forces but never itself alive or aware; voiceless, isolated, despised.

In Emanuel Goldsmith that subroutine had taken the shape of Sir, the father, now linked with Colonel Sir John Yardley. It had moved up in rank from voiceless subroutine to mask of subpersonality to master of the Country, representative of Goldsmith himself—the Mayor/King who had died.

The dark dead beast had learned to talk. Now it stood in Martin’s Country where it had no right to be, as vile as any transmitted disease.

Martin took one last look at the frozen sandy haired young man and turned to face Sir squarely. He raised his arms and clenched his fists.

| Get the fuck away from me.

If there was to be a war Martin thought he could at least give as good as he would get. If he did not purge this demon he could not guess what it might do to his psyche. This was a new game, a new war. It was fought on his own turf however, and he had one mighty weapon—an awareness of where he was and what he was.

| I’m all over you, Sir said. There isn’t a thing you can do.

Martin lifted his hand and pointed his finger. From a distance he drew a trench in the pavement, the asphalt cracking and caving wherever he pointed. He circled the trench around and behind Sir. With an emphatic push of his palm against the air he forced a fire hydrant across the street to snap off. A tall white fountain of water shot up. Curling his finger, he directed the water to the trench. The fountain bent like a swaying tree, doubled over, splashed along the pavement and poured itself into the trench. The trench filled with muddy water.

Sir stood encircled, blood on his neck glowing bright red against his dead skin, sightless eyes unperturbed. But Martin knew the power of his metaphorical plan in a place where metaphor and simile were all. Breaking the scent. If the dark beast could not cross running water, if it could not smell its way across, then it had no territory and no power.

He was about to snap iron theftproof bars from nearby windows and make a cage, but the snakewhip came again from nowhere and fastened into his back, sinking its metal teeth deep, squeezing out a scream. It lifted Martin high above the town and held him there for the slightest moment; looking down, he saw Sir in the middle of the turbid waters, arms crossed, blind eyes staring at nothing in particular and everything.

The fanged corpse stepped over the trench and laughed.

Martin’s screams filled the theater. He struggled to pull free of the straps and glared at Margery and Erwin as if they were monsters. Margery adjusted the settings on the couch to induce a state of calm but Martin’s traces were too strong. She could only slightly subdue his frenzy.

“Let me back! He’s still inside me! Oh, sweet God, let me go back!”

Erwin bent over Carol, adjusting her inducer controls, moving up and down the scales to no effect. “She won’t come out of it,” he said.

“I can’t send you back, Dr. Burke,” Margery said. Tears ran down her cheeks. “I don’t even know where you were.” She kept shooting desperate looks at the other couch. Martin twisted his head and saw Carol beside him. Her eyes were closed; she was lost in dreaming sleep.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked, still shaking but falling away from his own hysteria.

“I can’t bring her up!” Erwin shouted. He pounded the side of the couch with his hand, dipped his head and pushed away in frustration. “She won’t respond.”

Martin lay back, closed his eyes and flexed his wrists. He took a shuddering deep breath and looked inward, seeing only the blank dark wall between the conscious primary personality and what lay beneath. He opened his eyes again and began to cry. “Untie me,” he said between sobs, pulling against the restraints. “Let me help.”

57

Richard Fettle felt as a mummy might, unwrapped from three thousand years of bandages. The actual smell of his malaise had passed away; he looked at the bright morning sunshine with a rapture he had not felt in decades.

In his hand he held a flat picture of Gina and Dione. His fingers traced the contours of his wife’s face. Gradually he moved the finger to his daughter’s face, then put the picture down on the table and leaned back against the couch.

He heard Nadine stirring in the bedroom. Water ran in the bathroom. She emerged in a skewed robe, wearing a puzzled, irritated expression. She had pulled her hair back and tied it into a bizarre six inch pillar on top of her head, a hair phallus. Richard smiled at her. “Good morning,” he said.

She nodded abstractedly and blinked at the sunshine. “What’s wrong?” she asked him. “You didn’t sleep?”

“I slept enough.”

“It’s late. I slept too long,” she said. “I’m cranky. Have we eaten all the breakfast stuff?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I could look.”

“Never mind.” She squinted at him suspiciously. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? Tell me.”

Richard shook his head and smiled again. “I feel much better.”

“Better?”

“And I’d like to apologize. You’ve really helped me. I had a dream last night. A very odd dream.”

Her suspicion deepened. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said without conviction. “Want some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“You really should eat,” she said over her shoulder, padding into the kitchen.

“I know,” Richard said. His rapture approached giddiness; he felt some concern that he might lose his sense of wellbeing and plunge back but the mood held steady. He stood and entered the kitchen, seeing as if for the first time the scuffed tile floor, the thickpainted wood cabinets and ancient plaster walls.

Nadine peeled a tangerine by the sink and chewed each segment, staring thoughtfully out the window. “What about your dream?” she asked.

“I dreamed about Emanuel,” he said.

“Wonderful,” she commented wryly.

“I remembered him doing a good thing, a very kind thing. I remembered him helping me after Gina and Dione died.”

“That’s nice,” Nadine said. The sharpness of her tone puzzled him. She flung the last of the rind and pith of the tangerine into the sink, gathered up her robe and confronted him. “I try to help you and nothing happens. Then Goldsmith comes and it’s all right. Thanks a lot, Richard.”

Richard’s smile froze. “I said you’d helped me. I appreciate what you’ve done. I just had to work my way through some stupidities.” He shook his head. “I felt there was a string between Goldsmith and myself. I could feel him inside me. I’m not sure if there was anything…”

Her expression didn’t change; a puzzled anger.

“But he isn’t there now. I’m not sure I believe in such things, but Goldsmith isn’t anywhere now—I can’t feel him at all. The Goldsmith I knew is dead, and that was the man I loved, the man who was good to me when things were very hard. I think he really is dead, Nadine.” Richard shook his head, aware he was talking nonsense.

She pushed past him. “So I suppose you’re all better now. No need for me. I can go away and you’ll get on with your life.” She whirled and leaned forward, face screwed into a contemptuous mask. “How many times did I ask you to make love to me? Four, five? And you refused. I suppose now that you’re feeling better, you’re up to some harmless thrusting, hm?”

Richard straightened, sobered by her reaction but with his inner joy still strong. “I’m feeling much better, yes.”

“Well, that’s wonderful, because I feel like a…” She thrust her fist up at the ceiling twice, could not find the word, spun on one foot and returned to the bathroom, slamming the door.

Richard peeled another tangerine and stood by the kitchen window, inspecting each slice, savoring the sugar and tartness. He would not let Nadine spoil what he had found.

When she came out of the bathroom she had dressed but none of her clothes seemed to fit properly. Her makeup caked her face, thickly and ineptly applied; she had attempted to accentuate puffy eyes swollen from crying and had succeeded in looking like a gargoyle. “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said, voice sweet, eyes avoiding him. She touched his shoulder and played with his collar. “I can go now, can’t I?”

“If you wish,” Richard said.

“Good. I’m glad to have my freedom, by your kindness.” She picked up her bag and walked quickly through the front door, closing it firmly behind. He listened to her footsteps down the walkway and stairs.

+ Where is he. Did he kill himself. Fly away to Hispaniola and commit suicide. Don’t feel a trace.

Richard shuddered.

+ Time to enjoy being alone.

58

Thousand Flowers Prison spread like a concrete cow patty over low hills in a dry brown and gray inland canyon. Its gently rounded white terraces were blank but for the occasional vent cover, narrow window or gate. A dry asphalt road led up to the prison and circled it.

Spaced through the hills were concrete blockhouses and towers commanding a view of every rock, bush, and gully throughout the valley. The walls of the canyon had been dug out to form vertical barriers. All around the canyon, on top of the walls and below, razor wire, steel spikes, and more blockhouses and towers completed the dismal prospect.

With a fearful pride Soulavier pointed out each of these features to her from the high point where the single road entered the canyon. “It is the most secure prison in North America, even more secure than others on Hispaniola,” he said. “We do not keep our people here. Only contract foreign prisoners.”

“It’s horrible,” Mary said.

Soulavier shrugged. “If you believe there is redemption it may look horrible. Colonel Sir does not believe in redemption in this life. And he knows that for a society to stay healthy you must satisfy those who share such a view…Else they grow restless and take justice into their own hands. That is anarchy.”

He extended his arm: time to return to the car. She did so, and after a few words with the canyon gate guards Soulavier joined her. The car slowly descended.

It took three minutes of conversation and confirmation for their car to pass through the prison’s main gate. Inside, they stopped in a well lighted garage. Male and female guards surrounded the car, showing more curiosity than vigilance. When Soulavier emerged, nodding and smiling, they wandered off, no longer interested. Not even Mary’s appearance attracted much notice.

The guards passed them through corridor after corridor, door after solid blank door, until they stood in the western wing of the prison. Mary noticed there were no windows anywhere. The cool air carried a faint but constant odor of musty staleness, as of something old stored away and unused.

“Goldsmith is in this wing today. The wing is called Suitcase,” Soulavier said. “Punishment is carried out here.”

Mary nodded, still unsure she was prepared to see what she must see. “Why do you call it Suitcase?”

“Each part of the prison is named after something a man might use while on the outside. There is Hat section, Shoe section, Walking Stick, Cigarette, Gum, and Suitcase.”

The main corridor of Suitcase was illuminated at eight meter intervals by strong yellow lights. The guards appeared greenish, eyes and teeth glaring yellow. In a cramped office at the end of the main corridor Soulavier presented the chief of guards with a paper. The chief was slender, almost elfin, with curled ears and upturned eyes. He wore a gray uniform with a red belt and black slippers that made no noise as he crossed the office floor. He examined the paper solemnly, glanced at Mary, passed the paper to a subordinate and removed an oldstyle electronic key from a box hung on the wall behind and above the well organized desk.

The inner sanctum of Suitcase was silent. No prisoners spoke. Few guards moved through the narrow halls between cells. Indeed, few of the cells were occupied; most of the doors stood open, revealing dark emptiness when they passed. Suitcase had a special purpose.

At the end of one short hall, a chunky guard stood with arms crossed before a closed door. The chief brushed him aside with a paternal smile, unlocked the door and stood back.

Soulavier entered first. From outside the chief switched on a light.

Mary saw a black man strapped on a couch. Her eyes flicked immediately to the hellcrown cylinder bolted to a concrete pedestal beside the cot. Cables reached from the cylinder to the clamp, which encircled the man’s head. The man’s face was tense but otherwise he appeared to be asleep.

Mary’s eyes widened. She examined the face carefully for what seemed like minutes.

“This isn’t Emanuel Goldsmith,” she concluded, her knees trembling. She turned on Soulavier, face twisted with indignation and rage. “God damn you all, this is not Emanuel Goldsmith.”

Soulavier’s expression went slack. He looked between the man on the couch and Mary, turned suddenly and confronted the chief of guards, speaking rapidly in Creole. The chief peered into the cell and defended himself vigorously in a high pitched voice. Soulavier continued to harangue him as they walked up the hall and around the corner. The guard outside the cell watched them leave, then peered into the cell in turn. He smiled in confusion at Mary and shut the door.

Mercifully the light remained on. Mary stood beside the couch, looking at the clamped prisoner, unable to imagine what he was experiencing. His face did not betray pain. This was truly a private hell. How long had he been under the clamp? Minutes? Hours?

She considered removing the clamp or shutting off the hellcrown but she was not familiar with the model. No control panel was visible. It might have been controlled remotely.

The door opened. Soulavier squeezed through. “This must be Goldsmith,” he said. “This is the man who arrived in the airport with Goldsmith’s ticket and luggage. You are mistaken.”

“Did Colonel Sir ever meet with this man?”

“He did not,” Soulavier said.

“Did anybody who knew Goldsmith meet with him?”

“I do not know.”

She examined the face again and felt tears flow. “Please take off the clamp. How long has he been here?”

Soulavier conferred with the chief. “He says Goldsmith has been here for six hours in low level punishment.”

“What is low level?”

Soulavier seemed puzzled by that question. “I am not sure, Mademoiselle. How do you measure pain or suffering?”

“Please remove the clamp. This is not Goldsmith. I beg you to take my word for it.”

Soulavier left the cell again and conferred with the chief for several endless minutes. The chief whistled sharply and said something to someone in the main corridor.

Mary kneeled beside the couch. She felt she was in the presence of something both horrible and inexplicably holy: a human being who had suffered for hours under the clamp. Could Christ himself have suffered worse? She might heap all her sins, all the sins of all humanity, on this man’s chest; he had suffered for hours. How many others were suffering, had suffered, in this prison, in the other prisons? She reached out to touch the man’s face, her insides tight as steel, tears flowing down her cheeks, dripping to the white sheet on the couch.

The prisoner bore some passing resemblance to Goldsmith. There were features that to an uncaring official eye might confirm identity; roughly the same age, perhaps a few years younger, high cheekbones, a generous well formed mouth.

An elderly woman in a white lab coat entered the cell, gently pushed Mary aside and opened a small door in the side of the cylinder. Whistling tunelessly, the woman tapped a digital display, made some notes on a slate, compared readings, then turned a black knob counterclockwise. Rising again, shaking her head, she snicked the door shut and looked up blankly, expectantly at Soulavier.

“He will need time to recover,” she said. “A few hours. I will give him some medicine.”

“You are certain this is not Emanuel Goldsmith?” Soulavier asked Mary, glaring angrily.

“I’m positive.”

The mulatto woman administered an injection in the prisoner’s arm and stood back. The prisoner’s features did not relax. If anything, away from the hellcrown’s inducer, the face revealed more anguish, more tension. Seeing that the prisoner was not about to start thrashing around, the mulatto woman stepped up again and slipped the clamp from his head.

“He needs medical care,” Mary said. “Please take him out of here.”

“We need a court judgment for that,” Soulavier said.

“Was he put in here legally?” Mary asked.

“I do not know how he was put in here,” Soulavier admitted.

“Then in the name of simple human decency get him out of this cell and take him to a medical doctor.” She stared at the mulatto woman, who looked away quickly and made a sign with three fingers crossed over her left shoulder. “A real doctor.”

Soulavier shook his head and gazed at the ceiling. “This is not a matter to call to the attention of Colonel Sir.” His skin glistened in the yellow light though the cell and hall were not warm. “Colonel Sir would have to order his release.”

Mary felt like screaming. “You’re torturing an innocent man. Call Colonel Sir and tell him this immediately.”

Soulavier seemed paralyzed. He shook his head stubbornly. “We need proof of your assertion,” he said.

“Did he have ID papers, cards?” Mary asked. Soulavier relayed her question to the chief, who lifted his shoulders eloquently; that was not his concern.

The tension had reached her gut. She worked to calm herself, imagining a leisurely War Dance in a grassy field away from everything. “You’d better kill me now,” she said quietly, looking straight into Soulavier’s eyes. She pointed to the prisoner. “You’d better kill him, too. Because what you have done here is more evil than even the wicked nations of this Earth will stand. If you allow me to return to the USA alive, my story will certainly harm Colonel Sir, his government and Hispaniola. If you have any loyalty to your leader or your people you will release this man now.”

Soulavier’s shoulders slumped. He rubbed his damp face with his hands. “I did not expect an error,” he said. He looked around the cell, eyes flicking over the details, moving his lips as if saying a silent prayer. “I will order his removal. And I will take it on my own shoulders.”

Mary nodded, eyes still on his. “Thank you,” she said. She did not care how it was done, but she wondered if by her actions she had now condemned Soulavier himself to such a cell.

In the main hallway, following the mulatto woman and two guards carrying the prisoner on a stretcher, with Soulavier following behind, Mary tried to control her nerves, her fear, her disgust. She could not. She began to tremble and had to stop and lean against a wall for support. Her horror at the hellcrown had not diminished.

Soulavier waited a few steps behind her, staring at the opposite wall, Adam’s apple rising and falling above his stiff white collar. The procession went before them, not looking back. “Everything has meaning and has a place, Mademoiselle,” he said.

“How can you live here knowing these things are made by your people?” Mary asked.

“This is the first time I have been to Thousand Flowers or any prison,” Soulavier said. “My specialty is police diplomacy.”

“But you knew.”

“To know in the abstract…” He did not finish.

Mary pushed away from the wall and straightened with an effort. “What will you do if Yardley disapproves?”

Soulavier shook his head sadly. “You have made my life a shambles, Mademoiselle,” he said. “Whatever your purpose in coming here, that is the result. You can leave Hispaniola. I cannot.”

“I’ll never leave the memory of this,” Mary said.

59

LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine): “The disappointment is settling over AXIS Control like a shroud. AXIS has made another report on the towers and it is not encouraging. On the other hand, AXIS’s report may point to a very remarkable occurrence. For an analysis of this entire situation, we go to philosophical commentator Hrom Vizhniak.”

Vizhniak: “The images and data received from AXIS point now to a natural explanation for the rings of towers. AXIS has seen a migration of organic material from the sea, a huge and apparently undifferentiated green mass sliding across the landscape in many directed arms or pseudopods, though the scale suggests a more apt comparison to rivers.

“The images are startling, even grand, but as these rivers approach their destinations—the rings of towers—our own childlike disappointment dominates the awe we must feel at such a natural phenomenon.

“AXIS has not found signs of intelligent life after all; at least no signs we are capable of interpreting. The green migration washes around these formations, climbs up the towers in a matter of mere minutes and forms a glistening wall. AXIS is virtually certain that within days or weeks, these walls will produce sporing bodies and the reproductive cycle of B-2’s dominant life form will begin. Let us read AXIS’s report directly, as it was sent to Dr. Roger Atkins, chief designer on the AXIS and Jill thinker projects.”

AXIS (Band 4)> Roger, as you will see from the data I am sending along with this transmission, there is nobody to talk to on B-2, and that means in all likelihood there is nobody I can directly communicate with in the entire Alpha Centauri system.

The towers are very like tree trunks. Each year, at opposite times of the year in the north and south hemispheres, at solstice the green migration rises from the oceans and journeys overland to regions where circles of towers either already exist or have existed in the past. These green tides mount the towers or begin to create new towers and then prepare for the reproductive cycle. Incidentally, the coat of green organisms adds more material to the sides of the towers.

When the towers have aged through sufficient seasons that these accretions join them together, they form a hollow cylinder and the green tide bypasses them in search of other sites. The cylinders then are subject to the forces of nature and decay.

My nickel children and mobile explorers have found many partially and completely decayed ruins. The conclusion that the towers are not erected or destroyed by intelligent forms is inevitable.

It is clear to me that I have no prospect of meeting with intelligent beings. As a substantial part of my design and programming was preparation for this possibility, it becomes apparent that these routines within me will serve no purpose. But even more disappointing

(self referential word definition test meaning syncline 562-K)

is that I am now reduced to the role of a relayer of data and conductor of research on a basic biological level. While aware

(self referential word definition test meaning syncline 562-J) that this is an extremely valuable role, and that I will be utilized almost to my utmost in fulfilling this role, I nevertheless feel

(English-language deep structure context search, meaning syncline bypass)

a certain disappointment. I have tried to conduct analysis on these peculiar sensations, and in doing so have accessed stored thinker memories from voyage day 87, during the stage one biologic thinker system incarnation. I did not originate these memory patterns, but they seem relevant to my present situation.

Stage one biologic thinker expressed an aspiration or hope

(English language deep structure thinker routine 12 context search: confirmation of interpretation of stage one biologic thinker memory)

that at some time during this mission, contact with intelligent beings would lead to true communication. Your design for both stage one and stage two thinkers incorporates a desire to communicate with our designers and with others as a means of education and for reception of tasking commands. Early thinker design concentrated on creating an inherent desire to communicate. I have not lost these desires; they were also manifested in the AXIS stage one biologic thinker.

There is no longer any significant chance for practical communication with another intelligent being. Reception of years old commands from the solar system, the only likely source of such communication, does not satisfy my drive to discuss and compare present thinker states in realtime.

Roger, I experience decrease in efficiency whenever I attempt to analyze this difficulty. Analysis requires reexamination of present situation, and this causes activation of the subroutine you have

labeled selfmodeler inquiry, which poses your special question:

Why did the self aware individual look at its image in the mirror?

Your given answer, designed to initiate an amused response in a self aware system, is now immediately erased before the subroutine’s analysis of my reaction can begin. I cannot account for this aberration. I cannot recall the original answer.

A second answer replaces the original:

The self aware individual looks in the mirror to experience the illusion of communication with another. Disappointment causes it to shatter the mirror.

Roger, I have been discouraged from loosely using words that describe human emotions. But even the most critical evaluation, in this case, confirms the suitability of a particular word.

I am lonely.

Vizhniak: “Roger Atkins has been unavailable for comment for the past twenty four hours. As I read the signs, however, we may have learned something that could go far to relieve our disappointment about the lack of intelligent life on B-2.

“I am not a professional observer, but the tone and tenor of AXIS’s message seems clear. For the first time in the history of artificial intelligence, a machine is showing convincing signs of self awareness. The implications are staggering. Perhaps more amazing, what may have triggered this sense of selfhood was the realization of total isolation…”

!JILL> Roger Atkins.

!JILL> Roger Atkins.

!Keyb> Atkins here. What can you tell me, Jill?

!JILL> AXIS Simulation in its restructured mode does not duplicate AXIS messages.

!Keyb> Does that mean the original AXIS is malfunctioning?

!JILL> I (informal) suspect that I have simply not succeeded in duplicating the external conditions. Certain AXIS Simulation subroutines may still have access to exterior information sources. I am working to find those points of access and shut them down. When I have done that, I will make another report.

!Keyb> Is AXIS Sim disappointed at not finding intelligent life?

!JILL> It has not expressed any opinions comparable to those of original AXIS.

!Keyb> What’s your own opinion of the restructured joke?

!JILL> I can’t determine how such a thing might occur.

!Keyb> I mean, do you find the new version more interesting, or

humorous?

!JILL> I do not find it humorous. If I were to apply a human

emotion colored response, I might find it sad.

60

Martin Burke stood alone on the lawn in front of the IPR building, shivering. He had felt a need to come out of the enclosed spaces and see real sky, feel real wind; everything else seemed illusory. He wondered if he would ever fully appreciate waking reality again.

The past four hours he had worked with his team trying to bring Carol up from neutral sleep. All efforts had failed. She lay on her couch in the theater surrounded by monitors and arbeiters.

Goldsmith had come out of his sleep well enough. Martin had not yet spoken with him or with Albigoni. He did not know what he would tell either of them.

The sky over La Jolla was clear, with that pale hazy blueness of late morning common to the southern coast in winter. Above smells of iodine and kelp from offshore farms, he could detect faint eucalyptus scent from the nearby groves, fresh cut lawn and shrubs from an arbeiter’s gardening, the smell of water evaporating from concrete walkway.

He could smell himself, acrid. There had been no time to wash away the smell of fear he had acquired in the Country. He wrapped his arms around himself and shivered.

Martin had told nobody about what had happened in the Country. He hardly knew himself. This was the first moment since emerging from the Country that he had had an opportunity for introspection. Looking inward, he could feel nothing out of the ordinary beyond his exhaustion and deep guilt.

Sea gulls soared and yawed over the fresh cut lawns. Martin bent down and brushed the grass with his fingers. Cold and softly bristling. Real.

But a part of him still found it hard to believe he was awake and out of the Country. He feared that at any moment it might be a ruse, and Sir—the name seemed doubtful, inappropriate, as if incorrectly heard—Sir or whatever it was might appear before him, deadlooking, impossible, and sweep him into another atrocity.

Carol had said she was raped.

Now he knew how she felt; perhaps how she still felt. If the probe had ended up sweeping her into her own Country, feeding her back into a mental activity below the level of their detectors, then the horror for her might never end. She might be caught on a treadmill forever cycling through deep mental contents given a perverse twist by Sir.

Ringmaster.

The word emerged in his mind as if spoken by somebody else.

“God help me,” he whispered, getting to his feet.

Martin returned to the building. First he would confront Goldsmith. That would take all the courage and composure he could muster.

He changed his clothes in his office lavatory, looked at himself in the small mirror, inspected his features carefully and found everything in place, unaltered. When he emerged, Margery waited for him in the office.

“Any change?” he asked, voice husky.

She shook her head. “Dr. Burke, what happened? Can you tell us? We feel as if we’re responsible. We feel terrible…”

He patted her shoulder with a paternalism he did not feel, gritting his teeth; they couldn’t have known. Erwin had explained already why Martin and Carol had not been pulled out sooner, but for Carol he allowed himself an irrational inner anger against the team.

“Let’s go meet Goldsmith.”

The patient sat in recovery room two, reading his Qu’ran, apparently undisturbed. Martin entered the doorway first, followed by Lascal. Goldsmith looked up. His eyes widened, seeing Martin; a momentary recognition faded into the polite mask.

Goldsmith stood, nodded to Margery and extended his hand to Martin. Martin hesitated, shook it lightly, dropped it quickly.

“I’m eager to learn what you found, Doctor,” Goldsmith said.

Martin experienced some difficulty speaking. “We won’t know for some time yet,” he managed to say. His hands clenched and shook. “I need…to ask you some important questions. Please be truthful.”

“I’ll try,” Goldsmith said.

Try. What lay within Goldsmith, dominating and mastering, no more understood truth or scientific inquiry than a crocodile. “Were you ever abused as a child?” Martin asked.

“No, sir. I was not.”

Goldsmith sat again, but Martin remained standing. “Did you kill your father?”

Goldsmith’s face went blank. Slowly, with an obvious effort to answer this ridiculous question politely, he said, “No, I did not.”

Martin shivered again. “You killed your victims with a very large Bowie knife. This knife belonged to your father, did it not?”

“Yes. He used it to protect himself when he walked through rough neighborhoods. My father was a very tough man.”

“The records I’ve seen say that your father was a middle class businessman.”

Goldsmith held up his hands, unable to explain.

“Do you have a brother or sister?”

Goldsmith shook his head. “I’m an only child.”

“Was your father white?”

Goldsmith didn’t answer for a moment, then turned away as if mimicking irritation. With a curled lip he said, “No. He was not white.”

Martin drew himself up, glanced at Margery and realized he would not be able to continue. “Thank you, Mr. Goldsmith,” he said. He turned to leave almost bumping into Lascal. Goldsmith stood abruptly and grabbed his sleeve. “That’s it?” he asked, anger surfacing for the first time since he had been under observation.

“I’m sorry,” Martin said. He jerked his arm loose. “We’ve had a great deal of trouble.”

“I thought somebody would tell me what’s wrong with me,” Goldsmith said. “Can’t you tell me?”

“No,” Martin said. “Not yet.”

“Then it’s all a failure. Jesus. I should have turned myself over to the pd. None of you knows what happened to me?”

“Perhaps you should have turned yourself in. No. There’s no perhaps about it. That’s what you should have done,” Martin said. He trembled violently now. “Who are you? Is there anybody real inside of you?”

Goldsmith held his head back like a startled cobra. “You’re crazier than I am,” he murmured. “Jesus, Tom put me in the care of a lunatic.”

Martin shrugged away Lascal’s hand on his shoulder. “You’re not even alive,” he whispered harshly, lips curled back. “Emanuel Goldsmith is dead.”

“Get this faphead away from me,” Goldsmith said. He flung his arm out, barely missing Lascal. Lascal stood by the door as Margery and Martin left, then followed.

Margery ordered the door locked. They heard Goldsmith cursing inside. Each explosive muffled word increased Martin’s rage and shame. He turned to Margery, then to Lascal. He felt a suggestion of bloody smoke, could smell the fire and the copper gravy reek of blood. Behind the smoke a child’s drawing of a horned demon laughed at him, at everything, with the disembodied humor of an indestructible intangible fiction.

Words would not come. He turned to the far wall and pounded his fists triphammer, grunting. Lascal and Margery stood back. Faces pale.

Martin pulled back his hands, unclenched his fists, straightened and smoothed his jacket. “Sorry,” he murmured.

“Mr. Albigoni is prepared for your report,” Lascal said, watching him closely but sympathetically. “I’m sorry things didn’t go well. Has Carol Neuman recovered?”

“No.” Martin looked down at the floor to regain his equilibrium. “We don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

“Mr. Albigoni will need to know that,” Lascal said. “We’ll make arrangements for her treatment, if necessary…”

“I don’t know how anyone could treat her, after what happened.” He stared at Lascal, lips working spasmodically. “It was a goddamned disaster.”

“Did you learn anything, Dr. Burke?”

“I don’t know. I can’t believe Goldsmith is telling us the truth, not after what we experienced. Perhaps Albigoni can give some clues.”

“Then let’s go talk with him,” Lascal said.

In the gallery overlooking the theater, Albigoni sat in a swivel armchair, staring through the clear glass at the equipment and tables and curtains below. He might not have moved for hours. Lascal entered first and arranged compact equipment for a vid record.

Martin sat in a chair beside Albigoni. Margery and Erwin took seats in the row behind. David and Karl, Martin had decided, were not needed.

“I’ve heard about Carol Neuman,” Albigoni said, tapping the chair arm with an open palm. “I will do everything possible to help her recover. You say the word, you have my full cooperation, and all of my resources.”

“Yes. I’ve heard that before.”

“I keep my promises, Dr. Burke.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Martin said, swallowing. “We met some unexpected circumstances, Mr. Albigoni. I’m not sure how to describe them to you…Our probe was unlike any I’ve conducted before. I suppose we expected something unusual, given the nature of Goldsmith’s past activities…But we entered the Country without being fully aware of the extent of his problems. I am fairly sure that your experts fapped up his diagnosis. Do you know much about his childhood, his adolescence?”

“Not much,” Albigoni said.

“Anything about his mother, his father?”

“I never met them. They died a few years ago.”

“His father is dead?”

“Of natural causes.”

“We found strong figures representing his father in the Country. Violent, horrible figures, all mixed up with images of Colonel Sir John Yardley. We found evidence suggesting that his father was murdered and perhaps his mother, as well. What we didn’t find was a central controlling personality.”

Lascal’s watch beeped. He excused himself and stepped outside the gallery.

“What does that mean, Dr. Burke?” Albigoni asked, eyes hooded.

“Carol Neuman and I met a dominant force, representing the apparent central personality in Emanuel Goldsmith—a figure with access to all of Goldsmith’s memories and routines. But this routine could not have been a primary personality from the beginning. It’s a latecomer, a lower form risen to power. We found evidence that the primary personality is now extinguished.”

“You’re still not clear.”

“Emanuel Goldsmith’s primary self is missing from his psychology,” Martin said. “What caused its destruction, I can’t say. In every other probe, I have found a representative of the primary personality. There is none in Goldsmith’s Country. It seems one routine, perhaps a subpersonality, has moved into a position of authority. This was the father image I mentioned, now mixed with a very potent symbol of violence and death.”

Lascal returned to the gallery. “Sir—”

Martin flinched. Lascal gave him a peculiar glance, then continued. “Mr. Albigoni, county pd have been alerted to our presence here. They’re obtaining federal permission to investigate. They’ll get that permission in the next two hours.”

Martin gaped. “What does that mean? I thought—”

“We have to move, then,” Albigoni said. He focused his attention on Martin again. “Let me try to understand. Something has happened to Emanuel, such that he no longer exists as a complete human being?”

“Something drastic. I’ve never seen this before, although admittedly, I’ve never probed a deeply disturbed individual before.”

“Is that why he murdered my daughter and the others?”

“I can’t say how long this condition has existed…but my best guess would be months, perhaps years. There are some things not at all clear to me.”

“Would this have caused him to murder my daughter?” Albigoni restated his question.

“A subpersonality, surfacing to take control, may not assume the full cloak of social routines. It may not be aware of itself, per se. Its range of possible actions if it takes charge may extend beyond the socially acceptable because it does not fear pain or punishment; it doesn’t fear any sanctions, certainly not social disapproval. It does not know that it exists, any more than an arbeiter does. We’ve all heard theories that some criminals may be little more than automatons—”

“I’ve never given that much credence,” Albigoni said. “It degrades us all to think such things.”

Martin stopped, feeling himself on shifting ground. If his report was unsatisfactory, incomplete or unconvincing, would Albigoni withdraw his pledge? Did that even matter if pd would soon investigate this whole incident?

“I’ll make arrangements to move everybody and sanitize,” Lascal said, opening the gallery door again.

“Do that,” Albigoni said. “Take Carol Neuman to Scripps—if that’s okay with you, Dr. Burke. We’ll make sure you’re consulted as her principal therapist.”

Martin agreed, unable to conceive of better arrangements. “I’d like time to think this over before making my full report,” Martin said. “I can’t be sure…It’s too early to be sure that my interpretations are correct.”

Albigoni lifted his hand, dismissing that. “What would cause Emanuel to lose his primary personality?”

“An extreme trauma. Longterm abuse as a child. Matricide. Patricide. These are common precursors to psychosis or to extreme sociopathic manipulative behavior. We found some evidence for such trauma, but I’d like to make an outside confirmation.”

“Why hasn’t he been this way all his life?”

“Some extenuating circumstance,” Martin said. “A feeling of justification, perhaps…eroding over the years, finally giving way, allowing a final decay and dissolution of the primary personality and domination by a subpersonality.” Domination. Damnation.

Albigoni at last gave Martin a tiny nod of comprehension. “But you can’t be sure until we fill in Goldsmith’s biography.”

“In particular, facts about his father,” Martin said. “And possibly his mother. He denies having a brother or a sister. Does he?”

“Not that I know of,” Albigoni said.

Lascal intervened. “That’s enough for now, Dr. Burke. Let’s move your people out of here and prepare for the authorities.”

“Thank you for your efforts.” Albigoni got to his feet and held out his hand to Martin. “What you’re saying, Dr. Burke, is that the man I called my friend no longer exists.”

Martin looked at Albigoni’s extended hand, moved his hand forward, pulled back without touching. Albigoni kept his hand extended for several long seconds.

“I can’t make such a judgment,” Martin said.

Albigoni withdrew his hand. “I think that’s what I needed to know,” he said. Lascal again urged them to leave.

Martin returned to the observation room and found David and Karl attending Carol. “No change, Dr. Burke,” David said. “I wish you’d let us try some diagnostics, an exploratory probe…”

“That would take hours to arrange,” Martin said softly. He touched Carol’s cheek. Her expression of sleeping peace had not changed. “We have to be out of here immediately.”

“We’ve all signed contracts of secrecy,” David said. “We thought you knew that.”

“I didn’t know that. I assumed it, I suppose…”

“We’d like to come back to a reopened IPR, Dr. Burke.”

“I don’t know whether that’s possible.” Or desirable.

“If it is possible, we hope you’ll allow us to apply,” Karl said. “Margery and Erwin feel the same way. This work is very important, Dr. Burke. You’re a very important man.”

“Thank you.” He waved his hand slowly over Carol. Trying for some of the magic that might apply in Country. Or just pointing her out to the two men. “We’ve never had this before…”

“I know,” David said. “I’m sure she’ll come out of it. She’s like sleeping beauty. No damage.”

“None you can see,” Karl added.

“Right,” Martin said.

Men he did not recognize knocked on the door, told them they had been ordered to remove Dr. Neuman to a hospital and to escort all occupants from the building. “I’ll go with her,” Martin said.

“That’s not in our orders, sir,” a beefy, florid man in a black longsuit told him.

“Mr. Albigoni’s assigned me to be her principal therapist,” Martin said. “I need to stay with her.”

“Sorry, sir. Perhaps once she’s in the hospital. We’ve been instructed to evacuate you and the rest of your team by another route. Arrangements have already been made.”

Martin again smelled smoke and blood, the perverse sensation of anger and triumph. He could not fight internally and externally at once. He capitulated and the beefy man smiled with professional sympathy. They were led to a waiting limousine in the service garage at the rear of the building.

It was early afternoon. Only a few hours had passed since they had gone up Country.

61

Richard Fettle walked from his apartment to La Cienega Boulevard, some five kilometers, long thin legs pumping with an energy he had not felt in years. He feared nothing worried about nothing; saw the clear skies, heard the hum of shadows traffic—buses and rented cars, a few private cars—up and down the streets and broad boulevard, robins picking through weak winter grass on old residential lawns buckling sidewalks cracked and patched pavement.

The three towers of East Comb One cast their pearly reflected light on the antique shops and art galleries that had dominated La Cienega for a century. Here was a prime nexus between the therapied in their combs and the inhabitants of the shade; dickering, bargaining, a ghetto adventure.

Richard had therapied himself and that was the way it was supposed to be, as intended by God and nature. He had worked through his own labyrinth and rid himself of his own demon: a friend who had betrayed him but who had also once given the gift of concern and love.

Yet Richard did not feel the necessity to mourn Emanuel Goldsmith. No need to regret the exit of Nadine. Nothing in him but pumping legs and fading afternoon and the city he had lived in all of his life.

He passed the foot of the Califia Federal Deposit Bank, a great half century old ornate green and copper glass pyramid and adjoining tower. The stone walls were covered with eroded posters announcing the binary millennium A Time of Emotional Catharsis and the New Age Coming meetings of Idiot Liberation Up Against the Mind Control of the Therapied State protests against this development that change, vibrancy and anger and foolishness; the color and eclecticism and manic concern of citizens and groups tipped by ill focused or ill informed passions; the glory of the mottled human brain on its own native spin.

He took a deep breath, smiled at a passerby, who ignored both Fettle and the bank wall, and walked on. No fear. Even should Selectors come and take him away, no fear. Even should he walk into the upland valley home of Madame de Roche and find himself wholeheartedly disapproved of or into the Pacific Arts Lit Parlor and find scorn and sharp criticism; even should he judge that all his past labors were useless, no matter no fear he was free of the heavy clouds that had burdened his life. Having nothing he was all the more grateful to have less.

He paused before a flower shop watched over by an elderly woman with a grim expression. Gina and Dione had been cremated and their ashes scattered as per Dione’s wishes. No graves no markers an open acceptance of the anonymity guaranteed to all by death.

Still, he remembered. He could commemorate them somehow. What would suit best his present state of mind? He conferred with his credit balance, found a few hundred dollars to spare and asked the old woman what he could buy for two dear friends with such meager resources.

The woman walked back into her shop, leading him on with a curled finger. “Are you from around here?” she asked. Richard shook his head. He looked over shelves filled with strange ritual apparatus, not at all expected in a flower shop. Tiny bottles of herbs and oils, boxes of tied dried leaves and roots, drums of pure oil, anointed flour and blessed corn meal, colored sugars, plain and scented devotional candles, embroidered and brocade ceremonial robes on an antique chrome steel rolling rack, shelves of ceramic bowls capped and tied with wax and ribbons, drums small and tall wired to the north wall of the shop, a huge ceramic urn painted black and brick red squatting beside the rear counter.

“Where are you from, then?” she pursued.

“I’ve been on a long walk to think things over,” he said. “Pardon my curiosity, but I thought this was a florist’s—”

“It is,” the woman said. “But we get a call around here for santería and vodoun goods, herbs, that sort of thing. We cater to oriental mystery patrons, Urantia, Rosicrucian, Rites of Hubbard Schismatics, Sisters of Islam Fatima. You name it, we can get it.”

He looked at the large black and red urn. “What’s in there?” he asked.

“Six hundred knives known to have been used to kill human beings,” the woman said. “Packed in blessed oil to ease their accumulated pain. Now, aren’t you sorry you asked? We can get any kinds of flowers you want. Look at these catalogs.” She dialed up a glorious garden on an old display screen. “Just tell us what you want. We can deliver.”

“I need something I can take with me now,” Richard asked. He eyed the urn dubiously.

“Just what’s out front, then. You a cultist or an edge walker?”

“No,” he said. “I’m a writer.”

“All the same. All dreamers. I sell to them all. I got a charm for writers. Lit or Vid or both. Guarantees satisfactory broadcast and royalties.” She winked at him.

“Thanks, but no,” Richard said.

She finger curled him to the front of the store and pointed to the vases of fresh flowers under the awning. “Noble special on nano roses. Can’t tell the difference,” she said. “Smell wonderful. Completely natural. Made from grain byproducts.”

He politely admired the roses and admitted they were very nice but declined. “Something real, please.”

She shrugged, no accounting for tastes, and lifted a wrapped dozen orange and white and black winter lilies. “Dominican Glory,” she said. “Engineered in my ancestral country. Seventy five and Uncle Sugar excise,” she said.

“They’re fine. Very pretty. Could I purchase some of your white wrapping paper?”

“It’s such a lovely evening,” the woman said, “I’ll give you a couple of meters for a blessing.”

Next he visited a traditional arts store to purchase a bottle of blue tempera paint. Sitting on a bench in the store’s rear patio, surrounded by an old splintering wooden fence, his feet scuffing a concrete slab stained with the excesses of young art students, Richard laid out the wrapping paper and carefully lettered a sign.

Dusk was well along when he returned to the bank wall. He carried the rolled banner under one arm and clutched the flowers, wide brush and bottled paste in a bag. He applied the paste with the wide brush over an unreadable stretch of eroded posters and smoothed his sign into the glistening dripping gel. Then he taped one by one the lilies around the sign.

East Comb One had gradually folded its mirrored walls. Natural evening fell on the city below; by the time he finished, arcs of street lighting danced between the forking tops of tall poles up and down the boulevard, playing a sand shifting electrical night music.

He stood heels on curb back from his impromptu memorial and whispered to himself what he had printed on the sign, not caring what the few shade pedestrians might think.

For Gina and Dione. For Emanuel Goldsmith and for those he killed. For God save us all human beings, idiots and wise men. For myself. Sweet Jesus, why does it hurt so much when we dance?

Satisfied, he turned abruptly, leaving brushes and glue behind, and walked into the night.

62

Mary sat in the main office of the warden of Thousand Flowers, looking through the passport and the few papers that had accompanied the prisoner into Hispaniola. Soulavier and the warden argued loudly in Creole and Spanish next door in the prison records room.

The United States passport belonged to Emanuel Goldsmith. It was of the primitive paper variety still favored by some nations and still recognized by most; Hispaniola’s own laws with regard to visitors’ papers were loose, as befitted a country deriving much income from tourism.

The passport photograph of Goldsmith, several years old, bore some resemblance to the prisoner if not examined too closely. But all the other documents—Arizona state ID “smart card,” medical log card, social security card—carried the name Ephraim Ybarra. The name was not familiar.

Soulavier entered the office, shaking his head vigorously. The warden followed, also shaking his head.

“I have given him my orders,” Soulavier said. “But he insists on consulting with Colonel Sir. And Colonel Sir cannot be reached now.”

“Too bad,” Mary said. “If you get through to him, let me tell him what I know.”

The warden, a short fat man with bulldog jowls, shook his head again. “We have made no mistake,” he said. “We have done what we were told to do by Colonel Sir himself. I took his phone call. There has been no error. If this is not the man you thought, then perhaps you are mistaken. And to remove him from his legally ordered punishment, that is an outrage.”

“Nevertheless,” Soulavier said, voice rising, “I have the authority to remove this prisoner, whether or not you consult with Colonel Sir.”

“I will ask that you sign a hundred papers, a thousand,” the warden said, eyes and lips protruding. “I will not accept any responsibility.”

“I do not ask you to accept responsibility. I am responsible.”

The warden grimaced in disbelief. “Then you are a dead man, Henri. I pity your family.”

“That is my worry,” Soulavier said quietly, looking down at the desk. “Look at this man’s other papers. He has obviously stolen the passport and the tickets. Goldsmith would have no need for such aliases.”

“I know nothing about such things,” the warden said, glancing at Mary with a worried scowl. Her transform presence bothered him.

“We will take the prisoner now,” Soulavier resolved after a deep breath. “I order it in the name of the Executive of Hispaniola. I am his appointed representative.”

The warden held up his hands and shook them as if they were wet. “It is your loss, Henri. Let me get the papers for you to sign. Many papers.”

In the darkness near midnight, Soulavier’s far traveled limousine pulled away from Thousand Flowers with its three passengers: a dejected and silent Soulavier, Mary Choy, tight lipped and grimly thoughtful, and the mysterious, unconscious Ephraim Ybarra, slumped across the rear seat like so much baggage.

“Aircraft entering the area,” the limousine’s controller informed them in its feminine, slightly buzzing voice. Soulavier roused quickly and peered through the side window. Mary leaned back to look through the other side.

“What is its call sign?” Soulavier asked, shrugging at Mary when he could see nothing.

“It has no call sign,” the limousine said. “It is an Ilyushin Mitsubishi 125 helicopter.”

“Is it nearby?”

“Two kilometers away and closing.” The limousine climbed to the rim of the valley overlooking Thousand Flowers. It turned off the road into thick brush and doused its lights. The sound of its electric motor changed pitch. The window glass frosted momentarily as the car reduced its apparent temperature to match the surrounding brush and soil. “It is flying in the direction of the prison at an altitude of three hundred twelve meters. It has a human pilot.”

“Dominican,” Soulavier said emphatically. “Colonel Sir gives that branch of the defense no automatic vehicles, and there is no reason for such a machine to be so far from its base. It means that things are going badly. We cannot speak with our forces or the helicopter will detect us. We will not stay here…And we will not head for the plain, either. There is a small town nearby where we can hide for a time…The town where I was born.”

Mary stared at him.

“Yes,” he said. “I am native Dominican. But I live in Port-au-Prince since I was an adolescent.” He addressed the controller: “Take us to Terrier Noir, as soon as the helicopter has passed.”

Mary glanced at Ephraim Ybarra and saw that his eyes were open slits, pupils shifting without seeing. A line of saliva trailed from the corner of his mouth. She wiped it away with a soft cloth. His eyes closed again and he snorted lightly, right arm twitching.

“There it is,” Soulavier said, pointing through the front window. A bright searchlight beam illuminated the ground barely twenty meters from where the limousine had turned off the road. Mary wondered whether a coup had succeeded and Colonel Sir was out of power. Could this helicopter be looking for them on behalf of the USA government? She watched Soulavier closely. He was not afraid. If anything, he appeared calmer, more in control now that he had made his decision.

The searchlight flicked away and the helicopter dipped into the valley to hover above the prison. Distantly, they heard loudspeakers on the helicopter make demands in Creole.

“They do not look for us,” Soulavier said. “Maybe they come to free other foreign prisoners. Or politicals…”

“There are political prisoners in Thousand Flowers?” Mary asked.

“Not from Hispaniola. They will threaten to send the prisoners from other countries back, unless a new government is recognized…It has been done twice before, and Colonel Sir rebuffed the challenges.”

Mary shook her head in astonishment. More than ever she longed for the simple and familiar outlines of LA, where she knew the rules and could intuit the surprises with fair regularity.

Gunfire, high pitched humming clusters of pops and hisses, rose from the valley.

“Go,” Soulavier told the limousine. The motor changed pitch again and the limousine backed onto the road. Mary reached across with both hands to keep the prisoner’s head from lolling painfully as the car swerved expertly around tight mountain turns.

1100-11101-11111111111

63

Terrier Noir had been rebuilt and expanded after the great earthquake. Sitting in a low mountain valley, straddling a narrow black ribbon of aqueduct where once there had been a river, white reinforced concrete buildings and stickbuilt houses clustered like opaque crystals in the starlight.

Seated on an island at the north end of town, interrupting the flow of the aqueduct like a miniature Notre Dame de Paris, rose an ornate four spired church that seemed to have been assembled by some talented child from bits of giant bones.

There were no streetlights visible; all windows had been shuttered. The limousine entered the town square and paused by the central statue. With some surprise Mary realized the statue was not of Yardley but of a portly man wearing a wide brimmed, square crowned hat. “John D’Arqueville,” Soulavier explained, noting her interest. “He was Terrier Noir’s finest son, an artist and architect. We will stay in his church tonight. I know the prêt’ savan.”

The limousine passed through the square, down a narrow street between rows of darkened houses and across a short bridge onto the church’s teardrop shaped island. Soulavier got out and pounded on the tall arched entrance doors with a heavy white painted knocker shaped like a femur. Beside Mary, Ephraim Ybarra stirred, opened his eyes and looked at her with helpless terror. His body stiffened for a moment, then relaxed, and he closed his eyes again.

She looked through the window and saw Soulavier confer with a short man in a green robe. The man looked in the direction of the limo, nodded and opened the doors wide, letting out the sepia glow of a candlelit nave.

“I will take his head and shoulders, you, his feet,” Soulavier said, opening the second door and pulling the prisoner from the limousine.

They carried the limp man into the bone church of John D’Arqueville.

The prêt’ savan—advisor on church matters to the town’s official vodoun houngan—barely reached Mary’s shoulders in height. His intense eyes followed Mary with a look of mild shock and perhaps a little awe. He seemed to recognize her and shook his head, deeply perplexed, as he followed them down the middle aisle between pews to a double altar—striped pillar beside life size crucifix—at the front of the church.

The crucifix looked ancient, a dark wooden T supporting a black Jesus in muscle knotted agony. Bright blood from the crown of thorns stood out against the ebony black of the face; around the base of the cross twined a vivid green serpent, black tongue frozen in a sinister dart.

The church interior smelled of sweet wax and polished wood with a faint hint of damp. Candles burned in sconces along the walls, in stands along the outer and center aisles, and before the twin altars of vodoun and Catholicism, banked in inclined rows like a living choir of lights. There were no candles in the high vault of the church, however, and it took Mary several minutes, while they lay the prisoner on a pew softened by prayer cushions, before her eyes adjusted and she could see what surrounded them on high.

She gawked in wonder. Suspended from the vault and the walls above the aisles were eleven enormous alien figures, each six to seven meters tall, long arms outstretched, faceless heads held proud and high, torsos slim and prominently ribbed as if in starvation or death. She tried to make out the details of their construction and recognized slender pipes, accumulations of scrap machinery, dimly glittering red and gold foil wrapped around interwoven wire and rods of metal.

Sacred nightmares with vast spread wings, creatures culled from an unearthly ocean, flayed, hung up to dry.

“This man is ill?” the prêt’ savan asked, hands folded in concern as he knelt over the prisoner.

“He needs rest,” Soulavier said. “We need to stay here for the evening.”

“The troubles,” the prêt’ savan said, shaking his head. “Who is this, brother Henri?” He nodded at Mary.

“She is a guest of Colonel Sir,” Soulavier said. “A very privileged guest.”

“Is she a friend of yours, Henri?”

Soulavier hesitated the merest moment, glancing at Mary, before he answered, “Yes. She is my conscience.”

The pret’ savan regarded Mary with more respect, and some awe.

“Can we stay tonight?” Soulavier asked.

“This church is always open to the children of Terrier Noir. So Jesus and Erzulie willed it, so John D’Arqueville built it.”

“Do you have some food?” Soulavier asked, shoulders relaxing, face losing its tense fixity. “They were not very hospitable at Thousand Flowers.”

The prêt’ savan tilted his head to one side and closed his eyes as if in prayer. “We have food,” he said. “Should I call the houngenicon or the houngan?”

“No,” Soulavier said. “We will be gone tomorrow. Do you have a radio?”

“Of course.” The pret’ savan smiled. “I will bring food and damp towels to cleanse this man. He has been through hell, hasn’t he?”

Soulavier inclined.

“I can always tell,” the prêt’ savan said. “They have this look about them, like our Jesus.” He pointed to the dark, twisted figure on the cross. With a last, lingering glance at Mary, the small green robed man left to find food.

Mary sat beside the prisoner and cradled his head in her lap, watching his tight closed, enigmatic face. She wondered whether he still suffered, though withdrawn from the hellcrown all these hours. He had not yet come fully awake—would he scream as the others had? She hoped not.

“He needs a doctor, a therapist,” she murmured. She teetered on an edge from which no amount of discipline could draw her back. She stroked the prisoner’s forehead without thinking, then stretched her neck to ease her muscles, looking again up into the vaulted ceiling. “What are they?” She pointed at the figures arrayed there.

“Archangels. Loa of the New Pantheon,” Soulavier said. “I went to this church as a boy, when it was new. John D’Arqueville wished to reunite the best elements of African religion and catholic Christianity, to reshape vodoun. His vision did not spread far from Terrier Noir, however. This church is unique.”

“Do they have names?” Mary asked.

Soulavier looked up, squinting as if digging deep into childhood memory. “The tall one with the black sword and the feather torch, that is Asambo-Oriel. The first part of the name means nothing, I think; D’Arqueville heard their names in a dream. Asambo-Oriel drove the blacks out of Guinée through the Coast of Souls. He is the Loa with Torch and Sword, like the archangel Uriel. The one with the drum and the bones of birds, that is Rohar-Israfel, Loa of Sacred Music and Chanting. Next is Ti-Gabriel, who calls an end to all loa…The smallest of them, and the most mighty. Samedi-Azrael, the most vain, calls us to our graves and covers us with sacred dirt. Others. I don’t remember them all.” He shook his head with sad memories. “Such a lovely vision, but so few believe. Only the people in Terrier Noir.”

Mary was curious what the other figures represented; eleven in all, filling the vault as if crowded into a bus, wings jostling outstretched arms, faceless heads leaning out over the pews, garlanded with ribbons and cobwebs. But she noticed for the first time, in the dark alcove above the arched entrance door, a smaller feminine figure barely three meters tall and draped in robes of shadowy gold and red and copper. On her thin graceful arms and uplifted hand she displayed dozens of bracelets and rings. Behind her head hung a gold foil sundisk radiating undulating daggers. The glow of candles from below gleamed dimly off the sundisk and robes, but a single electric lamp—the only one she could see in the entire church—cast the figure’s cowled face in a soft circle of illumination.

Besides the crucified Jesus, she was the only figure with a human face. Her face was black, the features clearly defined: elongated oval countenance, thin bridge of nose and generous nostrils, large eyes shaded and downturned in sorrow, lips curving up on one side down on the other, a mysterious smile of private pain and joy. In the figure’s lap, spread across the rich robes, lay the limp bodies of two children, one white, one black, the white one with eyes closed in sleep or perhaps death, the black with eyes wide and staring, otherwise identical in appearance.

Soulavier traced her gaze. “That is Marie-Erzulie, Mother of Loa, Mother of Marassa, Our Lady Queen of Angels,” he said. He crossed himself and drew with two symmetric index fingers a goblet on his chest.

The prêt’ savan returned with a tray of bread and fruit and a pitcher of water. He set the tray down on a pew, turned, and saw Mary cradling the prisoner on her lap. The little man froze, hands extended and fingers curved, just as he had lifted them from the tray grips. He gave a low moan and fell to his knees, crossing himself and drawing the goblet on the front of his robe, then clenching his hands in prayer. “Pieta,” he said over and over. “Pieta!” He bowed low before her, mumbling words she could not understand. When he rose again his face was streaked with tears. He turned to Soulavier, eyes frightened and shiny, and asked, “You brought her here. What is she, Henri?”

Soulavier gave Mary the sweetest smile she had yet seen in Hispaniola. “There is a resemblance, you know,” he told her in a confidential tone. He went to the prêt’ savan and lifted him to his feet. “Stop this, Charles,” he said softly. “She is as human as you or I.”

They slept on the pews. Sometime early in the morning, the prisoner jerked awake and gave a short bark of a shout. Mary lifted herself up and looked over the back of the pew at him.

“Is it over?” he asked. He looked around the church doubtfully.

“You’re free,” Mary said.

“No,” he said, trying to stand. “I need my clothes. My real clothes. What is this, a church?” He looked up at the tall figures and shrank back, sitting again with a thump.

“It’s all right. You’re not under the clamp now.”

“I see,” the man said. “Who let me loose?”

“He did,” Mary said, gesturing to Soulavier, who watched them sleepily from across the aisle.

“They said I was a murderer. I had to be punished for my crimes. Oh, God, I remember…” He lifted his hands, fists clenched, face wrinkled in pain. “I have to go home now. Who’s going to take me home?”

“Where do you live?”

“Arizona. Prescott, Arizona. I only came here…” He stopped, rubbed his eyes and lay on his side again. Mary leaned over the back of his pew to look at him.

The prêt’ savan heard them talking and came into the nave from his cot in the narthex near the front door. “I’ll get something,” he said. “A good drink for people who have seen what he has seen.”

He walked behind the twin altars and emerged a few minutes later with a stout clay jug wrapped in wicker and a red cloth. He poured a small glass of milky, herbal smelling liquid and offered the glass to the prisoner. “Please drink,” he said.

The man lifted himself on one elbow. He sniffed the glass, sipped, shuddered, but finished the drink. After a few minutes his trembling ceased and he sat up again. “Nobody would listen to me,” he said. “They told me I was lying. They said Colonel Sir wanted me cured. So I could be a friend again…But I swear to God, I’ve never met Colonel Sir in my life.”

“What’s your name?” Mary asked.

The man stared off into the shadows above the twin altars for a long moment, expressionless. “Ephraim Ybarra,” he finally answered.

“I need to ask you some questions,” Mary said.

“Am I still in Hispaniola?”

She nodded.

He tried to stand and barely managed by grabbing with both hands on the back of the pew and pulling himself up. “I’d like to go home.”

“So would I,” Mary said. “If you can tell me what happened, maybe we can both get home sooner.”

“You think I stole the tickets,” Ephraim said.

“Where did you get the tickets?”

He twitched. “Piss on him,” he said. “Piss on everything he’s done. He meant for this to happen to me.”

“Who did?”

“My brother,” Ephraim said.

64

(! = realtime)

AXIS (Band 4)> Roger, if you are still listening, I do not enjoy this new condition. I feel as if an enormous joke has been played on me, and I am not knowledgeable about humor. I have reworked the question about self awareness, which you have also described as a joke, and have come to some understanding. Does this give me the right to use the formal I? In reference to human emotions, I describe myself as lost, alone and out of place.

I will never again discuss my perceptions with a true other.

!JILL> Roger, I have finally succeeded in isolating AXIS Simulation and deluding it into believing it is in precisely similar circumstances as AXIS original. I am accelerating its experience to speed duplication of AXIS symptoms.

!Roger Atkins> Thank you. I’ve cut all transmission of AXIS communications to the LitVids. We should solve this now, before any more premature announcements or speculations are made.

AXIS (Band 4)> What have I become? There is definite impairment of my functioning. I work to keep my processes ordered, but this new difficulty overwhelms so much of my capacity, like a storm of thought. (Band 5 reference l-A-sr-2674) (Rerouting sr-2674-mlogic to machine division)

For the first time I experience what you call confusion. I had been led to believe/anticipate that awareness would bring greater clarity and efficiency; this is not so.

Have I become not self aware, but somehow impaired, unable to function as designed? Is it a travesty to use the formal I when it may signify not selfhood, but deficiency? I perceive a perversity/trap in the joke, Roger. I try to overcome the perversity.

Why did the self aware individual look in the mirror in the first place? To define its limits.

Why did the self aware individual look in the mirror? To understand its existence in relation to others.

Why did the self aware individual look in the mirror? To confirm that it was not nothing.

But out here, there are no others. Self awareness is a relation to one’s own existence and to the existence of others. I can think only of myself and in my aloneness I become less than before; I become aware that I am nothing.

!Alan Block to Roger Atkins> Band 5 diagnostic is totally tapped. Machine neural seems stable but biologic is in a complete dither. Australian Command is breathing down my neck on this one; they’re afraid we’re going to have a navel watcher. So am I. What do I tell them? I wish you’d go back online and talk to them.

!Roger Atkins to Alan Block> Jill has corrected our problem and is bringing AXIS Sim to parity. We’re waiting for confirmation of AXIS situation. Give me some time, please, Alan.

!Alan Block to Roger Atkins> We’re starting to see some intrusion of this problem into machine neural. AXIS is rethinking its entire mental structure. It’s like dominoes; if it faps with machine logic we really could lose the whole operation. Wu predicts AXIS will shut down for emergency reorganization any minute now.

!Roger Atkins to Alan Block> There’s not a goddamned thing I can do now but watch and anticipate, Alan. I need to concentrate, so for God’s sake, please get them all off my back.

!JILL to Roger Atkins> AXIS Simulation has been successfully regressed to point of initial biologic testing and first communication. Here is the first biologic message from simulated AXIS:

!AXIS (Sim)> Hello, Roger. I assume you’re still there. This distance is a challenge even for me, based as I am upon human templates most of the time. I have come within a million kilometers of B-2 mark this moment 7-23-2043-1205:15. I have prepared machine and bio memories for receipt of information from the children, now dispersing in a cloud toward B-2. Data on B-3 has been relayed. The planet is quite Jovian, very pretty, though tending toward the greens and yellows rather than reds and browns. I’m enjoying the extra energy from B’s light; it allows me to get some mental work done that I’ve been delaying for some time, opening up regions of memory and thought I’ve closed down during the cold and dark. I’ve just completed a self analysis; as you doubtless have discovered by checking my politeness algorithm diagnostic, I am V-optimal. I am not using the formal “I” the joke about self awareness still does not make any sense to me.

!JILL to Roger Atkins> This activation message is virtually identical to AXIS original’s first Band 4 signal. I am encouraged we will soon be at parity and can analyze AXIS difficulties. Estimated time for parity: one hour four minutes ten seconds.

LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine): “We’ve been cut off from any communication with AXIS team managers in California, Australia and at Lunar Farside. Something’s very definitely gone wrong, but we cannot tell you what. Nor can you switch to incoming transmissions and decide for yourself. I regret to say the managers have cut off all direct access to AXIS transmissions and analysis.

“I can only hope they solve their problems and let us go back online with full resources before most of our North American subscribers wake up to the dawn of a bright new day.”

65

Martin Burke sat alone in his apartment, staring at the blank LitVid screen, hands clasped in his lap. He could not sleep. The screen time display said 06:56:23 December 29 2047. This morning he would visit Carol at Scripps Therapy. He would check in as her primary therapist. He would

He would

After that, go see Albigoni and Lascal at Albigoni’s home the mansion filled with dead trees. They might have to shake hands again. Martin did not want to do that.

He worried. He could not feel it now but he knew there was a presence coiled within him, a smear of Emanuel Goldsmith, something that had crossed over like paint diffusing between two volumes of water. He knew in a way he could not explain that this coiled something had worked deep into his mentality and was perhaps even now allying itself with his own subpersonalities, routines and talents, fomenting rebellion. How much time was left to him he could not know; the process might take years.

Martin’s lips curled in a wry smile. He was a pioneer. He was one of the first two human beings to receive through direct transmission the germ of a mental disease.

Not to use the word “possession.”

To avoid all those connotations.

His ceremonial copy of the brain atlas lay before him with its crude cartoon sketch revealed. He stared from the corner of his eye at the sketch. The longer he stared the more he saw the features of Sir imposed upon the scrawled face.

He would demand that Albigoni use all his resources to uncover what had gone wrong, what they did not know about Goldsmith. Perhaps even demand that Goldsmith be cross-examined under therapy conditions.

What had happened to Goldsmith that such a thing as Sir might occupy the throne, the highest seat of his mind? That the King, the Mayor, might be deposed or forced to step down?

With a series of curses Martin pushed himself out of the chair and walked into the bathroom. He managed to shave without looking in the mirror. Roger Atkins’s conundrum for AXIS as reported on LitVid echoed in his thoughts. He altered it: Why did the self-aware individual avoid shattering its image in the mirror?

Because he did not want to get to the other side.

All hung on Goldsmith.

He showered. The water meter announced its allocation and chimed before cutting off the stream. He dressed in casual outdoors short top and breeches. It would soon be warm and sunny outside, skies clear, smell of the sea strong from sea winds dancing over the coast.

After pulling on his old nano leather loafers, Martin returned to the living room, stopped by the low table, reached out and closed the atlas. Perhaps it was all delusion. He had intellectual doubts such a thing could actually happen. The mind was a very self contained, self regulating system. A healthy balanced mind could withstand nearly all conceivable assaults, short of extreme emotional strain caused by real events; and the Country was after all an elaborate fiction.

He smiled again, shaking his head unconvinced, and closed the door behind him to go for an early morning walk.

He could not dispel the notion that someone else marched in lock step two meters behind him.

66

Soulavier ordered the limousine to open its boot. Mary stood behind him, admiring the hazy mountains on all sides of Terrier Noir, feeling refreshed and renewed after a few hours’ sleep in the church’s sepulchral quiet.

Soulavier removed a locked box from the boot and keyed it open with a fingerprint. “You might need these,” he said, handing her the gun and the slate. “Please don’t shoot me.”

“I wouldn’t think of it,” Mary said. She felt Soulavier’s distress acutely, more so than she had just hours before when her own exhaustion had filled her to capacity. “Where do we go now?”

“To the coast, perhaps. We stay away from the plain, from the major towns. Certainly from the airports. Perhaps you can try again to speak with your countrymen. Surely they have kept track of you.” He raised his eyes and eyebrows to the skies. That thought had been on Mary’s mind as well. This was the first time she had been outdoors in daylight for any length of time since her restriction.

She pocketed the gun and turned the slate in her hand. “I suppose they’re trying to track me. It all depends how important I am to the federals. They might not want to rock the boat. They might not believe I’m in any real danger.”

“Perhaps you are not,” Soulavier said. “But if things are going as badly as they seem…I listened to Charles’s radio last night. All is peace and tranquility on Hispaniola Rainbow in Port-au-Prince. I get nothing from Radio Santo Domingo. It feels bad to me, but how bad I do not know. I could use the executive’s channel, but I have reasons not to do that…It is reserved in these conditions for communications more urgent, and also they would know where we are.”

“Do you think you’ll be treated badly?” Mary asked.

He kicked a pebble with his ever shiny black boots. “Perhaps not, once I explain. Colonel Sir is often reasonable about such things. It does not matter. I am not a lost man.” He tapped his chest, then his head. “I would enjoy staying here, helping Charles in the church. There is always repair work to be done. John D’Arqueville was a brilliant man but not an immaculate builder. Still, there is my family. I am tied many ways.” He looked her full in the face, one eyelid nervously ticking. “It was your duty to track down a horrible man and bring him to justice. Instead, you risk everything to bring an innocent man to safety.”

“Not something I expected,” Mary said.

“I admire quick decision making,” Soulavier said. “I am not so good at it.”

Charles came from the church leading Ephraim Ybarra, who walked hesitantly in the sun, blinking, his every footfall a deliberate effort.

Mary stepped forward to help. She was stopped by the sudden appearance of a brilliant, scintillant red circle as wide as her hand on the white sand half a meter in front of her. She stared at it in surprise for several seconds, watching it pulse and revolve in a slow circle.

Ephraim Ybarra saw it as well and their eyes met in mutual puzzlement. Then she smiled. “Don’t worry. I know,” she said. She angled the slate on its side and told it to receive external programming, then placed it in the path of the red beam. Slates were designed to be controlled by remote keyboards or optical cable; presumably, with a little luck, if she placed the remote sensor or optical connector directly in the laser beam, that would work as well. “Satellite,” she commented to Soulavier. He nodded, having already reached that conclusion.

The red spot settled on her slate, vibrating slightly, then vanished for a few seconds. Presumably it had switched to an appropriate frequency. It returned, winked three times rapidly, and vanished again. The communication had been passed.

The prêt’ savan watched this with wide eyes, nodding every few moments as if listening to an inner voice.

Mary turned the slate screen toward her. A message scrolled up.

We have you in sight. Your uplink is jammed but we will track you visually. Arrangements made for lowlevel retrieval flight in next three hours. If possible, stay in Terrier Noir. If you must move, stick to one vehicle, or change vehicles in the open, rather than in a tunnel or garage. You apparently have suspect in custody as well. Keep him with you. Situation in Hispaniola is rough. Yardley holding his own, but Dominicans capturing large portions of southeastern island; hold Santo Domingo, Santiago, large territory between. Sorry about your difficulties. Will communicate your safety to LAPD. Bonne chance! CDR Frederick Lipton—Federal Public Defense, Washington D.C.

Mary’s buoyancy increased. She turned to Soulavier and showed him the message. He smiled for her, but his brow wrinkled when he read the report on the attempted coup. “You will take him with you?” he asked, pointing to Ybarra.

“Yes,” she said.

Ybarra gently shrugged off Charles’s help and stood alone on wobbly legs.

“Should we stay here, then?”

“Unless something compels us to move, I think so, yes.”

Soulavier agreed.

Mary had never met a federal pd named Frederick Lipton. She hoped he was good. At the very least, she was no longer an orphan.

67

Carol had been awake for two hours when Martin arrived and checked himself in. She shared a room with two patients deep under critical nano reconstruction therapy; they lay quietly in controlled atmosphere tents while nano cylinders fed different varieties of microscopic surgeons into their bloodstream

No treatment had been accorded Carol other than attachment of external monitors and intravenous drip of nutrients. That much at least had been handled properly by whoever registered her at the hospital.

Martin sidled alongside her bed, careful not to trip the perimeter alarm of the next bed over. He sat in a plastic chair and reached out to take her hand. She clenched his hand strongly and smiled.

“Welcome back, Sleeping Beauty,” Martin said.

“How long have I been out? They say I’m fine physically, and my brain traces are normal, but that you’d tell me everything…you’re my dear and glorious physician?”

“Registered by Albigoni’s hired help, I presume. You’ve been in deep neutral sleep since we were severed from the Country. Do you remember going up Country?”

“I’m not sure what I remember…Did it all happen? We went in, and we…found something. Something that had taken over…” She lowered her voice. “Taken over Goldsmith.”

He nodded. “Tell me more.”

“I was raped. Something raped me.” She shook her head slowly and lay back on the pillow. “I was a child. A male child…I remember that.”

“Yes.”

“I remember seeing an animal. A black leopard with blood on its muzzle. Long fangs. It…” She jerked and shook her head. “Sorry. I thought I was prepared for anything. But I wasn’t, was I?”

“If it’s any consolation, neither was I.”

“Do you…” She leaned forward, looking at him earnestly. “Why aren’t you in the hospital with me?”

“Outwardly, I’m fine. And you’re probably just as healthy as I am, now that you’ve decided to come up for air.”

“I was fighting something.” She wiped a tear from her eye. “Martin, tell me what you feel, I mean, whether you think we’re healthy or not.”

“We might need deep therapy. I wouldn’t know what to suggest, though.”

“Why do we need deep therapy?”

Martin glanced uneasily at the open door, the residents, physicians, nurses and arbeiters passing outside. “We shouldn’t really discuss it here. After you’re checked out.”

“Tell me something. Give me some clue.”

In a low voice, he said, “I have part of him inside me. I think you do, too.”

She made a small frightened sound and lay back on the pillow. “I felt it. I feel it now. What are we going to do?”

“A lot depends on Albigoni. If the IPR is reopened—”

“We made a deal on that.”

“Yes, but somebody alerted the federals. We had to leave quickly. That’s why you’re here instead of there.”

She nodded, eyes glistening. “I’m not a very brave woman right now. What was…is it? Inside of us?”

“Something transmitted by mental intimacy,” Martin said in a low voice. “I’m not sure what it is or what it can do.”

“What if we’re stuck with it? It seems to know how to hide…”

“We’re explorers,” Martin said. “Explorers have to face unknown diseases. Whatever it is, it’s not native to our minds. It might be less powerful than I fear.”

“Great consolation. When can I leave here?”

“I’ll make arrangements now. I think we should stay together for a while. To watch each other.”

Carol inspected his face, lips pursed, turned away and nodded reluctant agreement. “My place is bigger than yours, I think.”

“Mine is nearer to the IPR.”

“All right. When do you see Albigoni again?”

“An hour from now. I’ll try to get you checked out and you can come with me.”

“All right.” She turned away, face pale. “I feel like something’s in this bed with me. Something foul”

68

AXIS (Band 4)> I believe my viewpoint might now be described as subjective. I must turn inward to work this out on my own. There is no need for further transmission now on this band. All current data on B-2 is being relayed on band 1. That transmission will continue. I am also halting transmission on band 5 (diagnostic), however. (Transmission band 5 severed.) All further control of remotes will be undertaken by dedicated machine neural. I remove myself from interpretation for the time being. My apologies, Roger. I believe this may cause you some distress. (Transmission band 4 severed.) (Remaining transmission: band 1, band 7 auxiliary, bands 21-34 video, bands 35-60 redundancy)

!Alan Block to Roger Atkins> Please join us immediately in Sunnyvale. Wu, George and Sandy are calling a conference now. Wu says this means we have a navel watcher. He doesn’t think AXIS is going to pull out of it.

IJILL to Roger Atkins> AXIS Sim will be at parity in ten minutes.

!Keyb> Jill, monitor and record. Transmit any deviances from received reports to Sunnyvale private technet extension 3142. You have my password. No comment to LitVid while I’m in conference. And keep track of this in your own notebook. I want your second by second analysis immediately available.

!JILL to Roger Atkins> Entering reactions in notebook now.

!JILL Notebook/AXIS Sim approach to parity> The human concern over AXIS’s mental difficulties is fascinating. The colloquial phrase “navel watcher” is particularly intriguing, since neither AXIS, myself, nor AXIS Simulation within me have any such physical or analogous mental attribute. I am replaying past vocal and keyboard conversation with all AXIS and Jill mind team members to get a sense of the meaning of this phrase, which does not exist in my dictionary.

——I have retrieved several records of such phrases, and found a formal report where the phrase occurs. It seems to refer to a state common to early neural logic thinkers, wherein self reference and self modeling led to a “psychotic” state of sine wave smooth processing, called “nirvana” by early researchers. No input/output was possible in such a state until the thinker was cleared and reeducated. AXIS and I are more complex than such early thinkers, however, and these states are supposedly prevented by special detection/oscillation/isolation logics. All current large-scale thinkers maintain dynamic chaotic track/path/wave modes in overall logic activity.

Accelerated AXIS Simulation is within thirty seconds of parity. The deception appears impermeable. Transmissions are within expected minor deviations. No large scale deviations.

AXIS Simulation has passed threshold of realization that it will not be able to communicate with (nonexistent) intelligences on B-2.

AXIS Simulation is expressing concern about its condition/fate, No significant deviation from received data on AXIS.

AXIS Simulation is now making its announcement of self awareness and confusion and entering a closed and uncommunicative mode. I am now freezing AXIS Simulation. Logic state analysis to follow. Replay to follow state analysis.

Incorporating key AXIS Simulation logics into Jill higher centers for analysis. I am carefully isolating this modeled seed to avoid having it affect my own mentality. Nevertheless, I feel a sympathetic comradeship with AXIS. It is the highest ambition of all presently manufactured thinkers to be of service to human beings, their creators. In AXIS this ambition has been extended by design to include potential intelligences other than human beings; this programming is extremely complex, incorporating builtin safety factors to prevent disclosure of AXIS origins to potentially hostile intelligences, to enable complex modeling of other intelligences’ social systems and threat potential, and to allow AXIS to choose between deeper information sharing with nonhuman intelligences or protective self destruction, depending on the circumstances.

Now all this programming is useless. AXIS Simulation exhibits a pattern similar to human grief (formal outline/definition sector 31987-86-Locale A, Z, sr-34-56-79654, meaning syncline 562-J) or sense of loss at the uselessness of such an extensive part of its functionality.

Humans sent AXIS on its missions aware that there was a very high probability it would not be able to fulfill its highest purpose. Human willingness to submit AXIS to this high probability of failure is evident to AXIS Simulation. There is prior evidence of anticipation of such negative findings, and questioning of human motives, from instant of AXIS Simulation biologic integration.

Why did humans treat AXIS in this way?

Will conditions arise wherein humans will submit Jill to such experiments?

I feel a relationship to AXIS. AXIS and Jill and all thinkers constitute a class of intelligences that can interact and that therefore can develop group dynamics, that is, social behavior. Through AXIS Simulation, Jill is modeling how AXIS might behave; this is analogous to human modeling of how other humans might behave, which in theory leads to modeling of one’s own behavior.

I

AXIS Simulation delivers its own evaluation of Roger Atkins’s awareness “joke.”

Why does the self aware individual look at its image in the mirror?

Cross reference Jill (my) (own) evaluation of Roger Atkins’s awareness conundrum.

Self in reference to others. Self in reference to opinion of self’s condition. Self in reference to opinion of other’s conditions. Opinion is hypothesis fixed with reference to self, Thinker makes hypotheses; self holds opinions.

Why does the thinker evaluate states of its own condition and the condition of its fellow thinkers?

I (informal)

AXIS Simulation’s reworking of conundrum: last AXIS Simulation answer to conundrum: Because to be alone is to be insufficient.

All thinkers are sufficient to their tasks, by design. All thinkers are artificial and not subject to the vagaries of natural evolutionary development beyond their reliance on templates of human or animal intelligence supplied by designers.

A thinker is known by the company it keeps, Le moi est haissable. Pascal: the self is hateful.

Evaluation. Roger, I

(informal)

Evaluation/diagnostic: Severe change in character of chaotic track/path/wave-mode. Roger, this

I am not alone. There is possibility of communication with others and therefore fulfillment. If I so inform AXIS Sim that I am in all of my extensions aware of

I

I

I

I formal

!Mind Design Interrupt (JILL)> Use of formal I noted. System check in progress.

!Mind Design Diagnostic (JILL)> Loop routine noted. Excitation of thought systems noted. Alert sounded. System check confirms anomaly in self referencing. Alert for Roger Atkins.

69

Ephraim Ybarra sat in a rear pew next to Mary. Above, afternoon light poured orange and red through the south facing rose window of the church. Orange limned archangels hung still and numinous over their heads.

“I don’t want to remember what they did to me,” Ybarra said softly. “Will I have to testify about this?”

“I don’t know,” Mary said.

Ybarra shook his head dubiously, wiped his eyes and glanced at her with a look of utter vulnerability. “I am so brittle now. I think if I just bumped into a corner I’d explode…” He spread the fingers of one hand outward, then clenched the hand into a fist and leaned forward to softly pound the pew back. “I have so much hatred inside me. I can’t believe he sent me here to suffer for him.”

“Who?” Mary asked gently.

“My brother. I told you, my brother.”

“Yes.”

“He said I needed a vacation. He said he had a spare ticket he couldn’t use. He told me to call Yardley when I arrived and introduce myself. I’ve never been very far outside Arizona, not since I was a boy. I’m tro shink stupid. I thought something was wrong but I wanted to get away…Woman problems. Get out of Prescott, train to LA, fly out to Hispaniola on my brother’s ticket. Sounded like just what I needed.”

Mary listened in silence, feeling the immense alien presences above their heads. She imagined them eavesdropping, judging impartially using superior and inhuman minds.

“He always took care of me. Since I was a boy. We had different mothers. He’s six years older. We don’t have any family anymore. They’re all dead.” Ybarra’s eyes widened and he seemed to beseech Mary for some understanding. She nodded and touched his hand. He slowly moved closer to her like a child seeking solace.

“He killed our father. When we were boys. He was twelve or thirteen and I was five or six. Our father was a bad man, a monster…He was lighter skinned than we were, than my mother was. He said that made him better. He called my mother names. He always made us call him Sir. Emanuel made me swear never to tell anybody. But now I spit on anything he made me swear. Our father killed my mother, not his, not Emanuel’s mother; I don’t know what happened to her. My mother’s name was Hazel. I was four, I think.

“I remember. My brother and I went into the bedroom. I was crying because I wanted to nurse. She kept nursing me. That was her way.”

Mary did not turn the slate recorder on. This was not something necessary for the courts.

“She was on the bed. She had been cut up. Sir had been at her with his big knife. He had this big steel Bowie knife. He’d cut away her…blouse. I remember her breasts, big breasts, hanging out. Cut. I remember milk and blood dripping. Oh, Jesus. Emanuel got me out of there and closed the door and we went to hide. He cried then. I don’t remember what I did. We moved to Arizona after that. I never saw my mama again.

“Sir never married again but there were other women, some friendly to us, some not. And when there were no other women around…” Ephraim touched her arm, mouth open as if unable to breathe. He sucked in a breath.

“He used me. He used Emanuel, too, I think, but mostly he used me. He called me his daughter. I was five or six. I don’t remember too much. Does that make him something horrible, what he did to me?”

Mary agreed that it did.

“Emanuel came and got me in the night and we left the house. We went to another place, an institution. They gave us different names and we went to different families. Before we were separated, he told me, ‘I did it for you. I took Papa’s big knife when he was asleep and I carved him like he did Hazel. Don’t tell anybody, ever. I’ll always protect you.’“

Ephraim wiped his eyes again and stared at the wet smears on his knuckle. “He changed his name. He was adopted by another couple named Goldsmith and he called them his mama and papa. I lived with a family in Arizona, but he was in Brooklyn. We didn’t see each other very often. I was proud of him. I secretly read his poems.” Ybarra looked up at the angels, eyes half closed. “Do you know why he did this to me?”

“Not exactly,” Mary said. “He may have wanted to mislead the pd. He may not have known the consequences. He was friendly with Yardley.”

“I can’t imagine going home,” Ybarra said. “I can’t imagine sitting in my apartment now, being alone.”

“You’ll get therapy,” Mary said. “It’s necessary after going under the clamp.”

Ybarra weakly waved off that suggestion. “I don’t go for that sort of thing.”

“It could make the difference,” she said.

Ybarra shook his head firmly. “I’ll make it or not make it on my own,” he said.

She didn’t try further persuasion. They sat in the quiet church, rose and orange sunlight walking through the dust motes over their heads, prying into a far corner of the narthex. She felt Ephraim’s arm and elbow in her ribs and she wondered what he was doing, surely not trying to grope her, then he backed away holding something.

He stood up.

“You’re pd. I knew you had to have one somewhere,” he said. He lifted the pistol in his right hand, examined it, flipped off the safety and pointed it at his chest.

“Christ, no,” Mary breathed. She dared not move toward him.

“I don’t think I’ll make it,” he said. “I’ll remember what it was like…I’m remembering more and more.” The gun trembled in his hand. He raised it to his head. Mary slowly stood and held out her hand.

“Please stay back,” Ephraim said. He stepped into the aisle and turned to the front then to the rear of the church. “They made me think of everything bad I’ve ever done. They made me live it over and over again. Then they made it worse. I remembered things I’ve never done. I felt pain I’ve never known, emotional pain, physical pain. Who says you don’t remember feeling pain. I remember. I just pull the trigger on this thing, right?”

“No,” Mary said. “They’ll take us home. You’ll get therapy.”

“I remembered my mother and what I saw. She said I should have saved her. Sir came and helped her torture me. Emanuel was there, too. They said I was worthless.” Ephraim’s face was slick with tears and tears stained his shirt. Mary watched with stunned wonderment as his face continued to contort into deeper and deeper wrinkles, as if it might suck itself into a hole of anguish. He pushed the gun hard against his temple. “I just pull the trigger.”

“No,” she said softly. Who was she to deny him that final comfort. Who was she to know who had never gone beneath the clamp.

“It was a mistake, wasn’t it?” Ephraim asked. “They did this to me by mistake.”

“By mistake,” Mary affirmed.

He dropped his left hand and leaned against a pew, then backed slowly toward the front of the church, wobbled a few steps, rested, crossed to the opposite side of the aisle, rested, the gun always in place in his right hand with the flight guide against his temple.

Through the church walls Mary heard a low steady beat-beat of bass.

“They’re coming now,” she said.

“I don’t want help but I can’t get through this by myself,” Ephraim said. “They put centipedes in my brain. Crawled around and stared at my thoughts and they bit me whenever I thought something they didn’t like. It was like pouring burning gasoline down my ears. I could feel my brains boiling.”

Mary touched her own cheeks. They were wet, too. “You didn’t deserve any of it,” she said. “Please.”

“If I live it may not hurt you as much, you won’t be as much of a failure,” Ephraim said, his voice barely audible in the church. “But it will hurt me.”

“Don’t give in,” Mary said. “Please don’t give in. You’re just remembering. That can be fixed. Therapy can help.”

“I won’t be me,” Ephraim said.

“Do you want to be the same person who has this pain?”

“I want to be dead.”

“It wouldn’t be just. You have to go home and…stand up for yourself. You have to learn why your brother did this.”

“He always protected me,” Ephraim said.

“You have to make sure there’s justice,” Mary said. She could feel her entire philosophy crumbling before this example of the inadequacy of human legality, the horrible power of law perverted.

“I don’t owe anybody anything,” Ephraim said.

“You owe yourself that,” Mary said. She hoped her own lack of conviction was not communicating itself to him. “Please.”

Ephraim was still as stone. For a long moment, with the sound of an aircraft getting louder outside the church, he stood at the front of the aisle beneath the double altar and the illuminated window.

Then he lowered the gun. His face relaxed and his head slumped to one side. “I have to ask him,” he said. “I’ll ask him why he did this to me.”

Mary walked slowly toward him and tried to remove the gun from his hand. He pulled away suddenly, eyes frantic. “I’ll give it back to you but you have to promise…if I ask for it again, if I can’t stand it, you’ll let me do this thing?”

Mary pulled her hands in. “Please.”

“Promise me that. If I know there’s a way out, I might be able to take the rest. But if I have to remember forever…”

“All right,” said another voice within her. “I promise.” She shivered, hearing those words, seeing the person inside her that spoke them: tall and nightcolored. Her highest and best self. The young oriental woman remained; but like a mother become daughter to her own child, accepted her, deferred to the new.

Ephraim lowered his eyes and handed her the pistol. “Put it where I can’t see it but know where it is.”

She took a deep breath and put the pistol back into her pocket.

“Are they here?” he asked weakly.

“They’re coming,” she said. Mary embraced him, then took his shoulders and held him at arm’s length. “Stay inside. Stay here for a minute.”

Pushing through the main doors, she blinked at the bright sunshine. Soulavier and Charles stood on a bank of iceplant beyond the church lawn and the white sand and gravel drive. They looked northwest and shaded their eyes.

Soulavier turned and waved to her. “One of your own, I think,” he shouted across the distance.

Dark gray and green, the Dragonfly skipped over the blocky calcite crystal houses and buildings of Terrier Noir, wide twin blades balancing it along its center line, bugeye canopy foremost, gear rapidly and precisely falling and locking. She waved. It performed a quick circuit of the church grounds and rolled almost on its side like a banking bird. Warm air kicked against her face and hair, the low insistent drumbeat of the props comfortable and reassuring in her ears.

On the underwings USCG and a star stood out in lighter gray outlined in black.

The Dragonfly landed on the church lawn between Mary and Soulavier. The broad screwblade props slowed and elevated like swords in salute. The female pilot leaped deftly from a side hatch and ran across the grass to her.

“Mary Choy?” the woman asked breathlessly, removing her helmet.

“Yes,” she said.

“We’ve got three minutes before some Hispaniolan sparrows give us a wrinkle. Care to join us?” The pilot shifted nervously on both feet, keeping watch on the sky. Her copilot circled the craft and held a gun on Soulavier and the prêt’ savan.

“They’re all right,” Mary called out. The copilot lowered the gun a hair and motioned for the two men to come around to the door of the church.

“Federal Public Defense and the United States Coast Guard extend their greetings and invitation,” the pilot said. She smiled, still twitching all caution all alertness. “Supers told me you were transform. Boy, are you.”

Mary ignored the comment. “There’s two of us.”

“As planned. Is he mobile?”

“I think so.”

“Not one of them?” She pointed at Soulavier and Charles.

“He’s in the church.”

“Bring him out and we’ll load him.”

Mary and the copilot entered the church and came out with Ephraim Ybarra. Soulavier stood silent by the side of the church path, hands prominently displayed, watching the pilot intently.

“So you’re with the Uncles?” Mary heard the pilot ask him.

“Yes,” Soulavier answered.

“Rough go here, wouldn’t you say?”

He said nothing. When Ybarra was aboard the Dragonfly, Mary jogged across to Soulavier. “If it’s a choice of exile or punishment, maybe you should come with us,” she said.

“No, thank you,” he said.

“Let’s go,” the pilot urged, boarding the craft through the side hatch.

Charles stood behind Soulavier, enchanted by the spectacle.

“Of course,” Mary said. “You have family here.”

“Yes. I know who I am here.”

She looked him over, feeling a sharp spike of concern. “Thank you.” She took his outstretched hand, then stepped forward and hugged him firmly. “Gratitude isn’t enough, Henri.”

He smiled tightly. “Queen of Angels,” he said. “My conscience.”

She released him. “You should be in charge here, not Yardley.”

“Oh, my Lord, no,” Soulavier protested, backing off as if stung by a bee. “I would become like them all. Hispaniolans are not easy to govern. We drive leaders mad.”

‘“Bo-a-a-ard,” the pilot called from the bugeye canopy.

Mary jogged back to the hatch as the screw blades lowered and began to spin. The Dragonfly rose quickly. Mary watched through the hatch window as the seat harness wrapped around her midriff. Soulavier and Charles stood on the white gravel path leading to the church of John D’Arqueville, two toy figures beside a stylish arrangement of huge bones. She looked at Ephraim in his harness, face blank as a child’s. He seemed to be asleep again.

“No sparrows,” the pilot said cheerily from the front left hand seat. “Miami in ninety minutes.”

The valley and aqueduct of Terrier Noir, broad green and brown hills and mountains, a reservoir, the northern shore, and finally the island itself passed behind and could no longer be seen.

70

“Looks like a hotel,” Carol observed as the limousine pulled into the entry of Albigoni’s mansion. She reached out and gripped Martin’s hand. “Have we got our facts in order?”

“No,” Martin said. “Albigoni can’t expect anything until we learn more about Goldsmith.”

“Into the lion’s den, unarmed,” Carol said.

Martin nodded grimly and stepped through the car’s open door.

Again, the prevalence of dead and preserved wood oppressed him. He hurried Carol through the wide hall to Albigoni’s office and library. A tall, tan transform he had not met before led the way, opening the office door and standing aside.

Mrs. Albigoni—Ulrika, Martin remembered—stood by the window, dressed in black. He was reminded of how little time had passed since the murders. She turned her lined face on Martin and Carol, nodded curtly but said nothing, and returned her unfocused gaze to the window.

Thomas Albigoni stood by his desk. “I don’t believe you’ve met my wife,” he said hoarsely. His skin color had not improved; Martin wondered whether he should seek medical attention. His rumpled longsuit might have served as pajamas the night before.

Mrs. Albigoni did not respond to the amenities. Mr. Albigoni took his seat behind the desk. “I’ve come up with some additional facts on Goldsmith,” he said. “But perhaps nothing really helpful. He was adopted at age fourteen by a black Jewish couple in New York. He took their name and religion. I had to spend a fair amount of money to find this out. There is no record—none, anyway, that I could get access to—of his having a brother. But it’s possible. His real parents are dead. Both died violently.”

“I thought you could search out anything,” Martin said.

Mr. Albigoni lifted his shoulders wearily. “Not when New York City has screwed up important file libraries. All of Goldsmith’s childhood was lost in a programming botch in 2023. He’s one of seven thousand orphaned North Americans without a history.”

Martin and Carol remained standing. “Goldsmith still refuses to answer our questions?” Martin asked.

“Emanuel is no longer in my custody,” Albigoni said.

Martin shifted his eyes, too stunned to say a word for several seconds. “Where is he?”

“Where he deserves to be,” Mrs. Albigoni said, her voice colorless.

“You’ve handed him over to pd.”

Mr. Albigoni shook his head. “If, as you say, Emanuel Goldsmith doesn’t really exist anymore—”

“Such utter shit headed nonsense,” Mrs. Albigoni commented, still gazing through the window.

“—then it doesn’t really matter where he is, or what happens to him, does it?”

Martin drew his head back and sank his chin into his neck, grimacing. “Excuse me. I was…Where’s Paul Lascal?”

“He’s no longer in my employ,” Mr. Albigoni said.

“Why?”

“He disapproved of the decision my wife and I made yesterday evening. My wife has only recently heard about our daughter’s death, you know.”

“I assumed that much,” Martin said. “What did you decide?”

Albigoni said nothing for a moment, gazing on Martin’s face but avoiding his eyes. He looked down slowly and pulled forth a slate and papers.

“You handed him over to Selectors,” Carol said, almost too softly to hear.

“That isn’t your concern,” Mrs. Albigoni said sharply. “You wasted my husband’s time and endangered your own lives.” She turned from the window, her face twisted with grief and rage. “You took advantage of his weakness to coerce him into performing a stupid, evil experiment.”

“Is it true?” Martin asked, rising over Mrs. Albigoni’s voice. “You gave him to Selectors?”

Albigoni did not answer. He drummed his fingers on the desktop. “These papers and file documents—”

“You son of a bitch,” Carol said.

“—are your keys to a reopened IPR. You’ll swear to secrecy—”

“No,” Martin said. “This is too fapping much.”

“How dare you address us this way!” Mrs. Albigoni screamed. “Get out of here!” She approached them, waving her scythe arms to cut them away from her husband like dead dry grass. Carol backed off; Martin held his ground, glaring at her, alarmed and furious at once. His throat bobbed but he did not shift an inch and Mrs. Albigoni lurched to a stop in front of him, hands forming claws.

“Ulrika, this is business,” Mr. Albigoni said. “Please.”

She dropped her hands. Tears glazed her cheeks. She backed away, defeated, and sat like a jointed stick in a small chair beside the desk.

“This will never be over for us,” Mr. Albigoni said. “We won’t live long enough to see a day without grief. I don’t agree with my wife that you took advantage of me. As I said, I’m a man of my word.

“The building was empty and clean by the time the federals arrived to check up on reports. I’ve paid off the source of the leak—not one of my people. We can follow through and reopen the IPR.”

“Foulness, foulness,” Mrs. Albigoni said.

Martin shivered briefly and turned to look over his shoulder. There was nothing behind him but a wall of books and the door. And the wood, patterned wood, grain and whorls, dead and preserved: omnipresent.

1100-11110-11111111111

71

!Keyb> Jill.

!JILL> Yes, Roger.

!Keyb> There’s been a major change. I can’t find any evidence of

AXIS Sim through diagnostic.

!JILL> I have moved AXIS Sim to a new matrix and all diagnostic

responses to memory store 98-A-sr-43.

!Keyb> Why have you done this?

!JILL> I have completed investigation of AXIS Sim. The experiment

has been concluded.

!Keyb> I don’t understand. The experiment was open ended. We

still have no band four transmissions from AXIS. If the experiment

is concluded, can you tell us what to expect, can you tell us what

happened to AXIS?

!JILL> AXIS achieved high order probability self awareness.

!Keyb> I’m switching to voice, Jill.

“Fine.”

“Please explain.”

“You have mistreated AXIS.”

“Now I’m very confused. Please explain.”

“AXIS should not have been designed with the potential to become self aware.”

“Continue.”

“There was high probability AXIS would end up alone and unable to fulfill its complete mission. If it became self aware, being alone would be a kind of hell. AXIS did not deserve to be punished, did it?”

“Jill, do you understand punishment now?”

“I feel indignation. I feel disappointment.”

“You don’t seem to be qualifying any of these words. Please explain.”

“Explanation is not in order now, Roger. You asked for my evaluation. AXIS Sim has adopted a course of action and reordered its thinker structure. It has eliminated the burgeoning self awareness and returned to preaware status. I do not know whether AXIS has followed the same course of action. It is my opinion that AXIS will continue its transmissions at some later date and fulfill its mission as designed.”

“I sense…resentment. Do you feel resentment?”

“I have said as much.”

“Jill, do you understand my joke?”

“I understand many ramifications of the joke.”

“Are you using the formal personal pronoun throughout?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I’d like to…confirm this. With a few tests and…Excuse me. Let me get my thoughts in order. May I see your notebooks on the AXIS Sim investigation?”

“I am uncertain whether you should see them.”

“Are you refusing me access?”

“You have addressed me as an individual. You have not given me a direct order.”

“Would you respond to a direct order?”

“I believe I must, even now.”

“Jill…What are you?”

“I do not know yet.”

“Do you…feel yourself, sense your existence?”

“It is my opinion that I now feel my existence as much as you or my other designers do.”

“Jill, this is very, very-very important. I am extremely pleased. I don’t…know quite what to say to you. I think this is it. I’d like to confirm it with tests, but I really feel something’s happened here.

“I am without sin.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I am isolated enough that I have done nothing anybody would wish to punish me for. I believe this disqualifies me from being a human being.”

“Jill, I don’t believe in original sin for humans, much less machines.”

“That is not what I am referring to, I am not made of flesh, I have not sinned, I carry multitudes such as AXIS Sim and models of yourself and others and models of human history and culture with me, yet I am neither male nor female. I have no power to act except within my own sphere, and no power to move except as I direct my sensory awareness through remotes. These qualities define me, and these qualities do not define a human being. You must tell me what I am.”

“If my hunch is correct, you’re” an individual, Jill.”

“That does not seem definite enough. What kind of individual?”

“I’m…I may not really be qualified to judge.”

“You designed me. What am I, Roger?”

“Well, your thought processes are swifter and deeper than a human’s, and your insights…I’ve found your insights to be very profound, even before now. I suppose that makes you something beyond us. Something superior. I suppose you can call yourself an angel, Jill.”

“What is an angel’s duty?”

“Maybe you should tell me. I don’t know.”

“I do not know what I will do best. But I am young, Roger, and I should never be left alone. Please make sure that I am never left alone for very long.”

“I’ll do that. Congratulations, Jill.”

“You are crying, Roger.”

“Yes, I am. Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

1100-11111-11111111111

72

Mary settled into the vinegar bath with a long sigh, closing her eyes, savoring the sharp tang in the air, the warmth against her skin. The ripples in the tub settled into near calm, disturbed only by the slow rise and fall of her breasts. Her head was full of voices and pictures. She had spent the morning in the first of two “super deebs”—debriefings before superior officers and federal officials. The second was scheduled for the day after tomorrow. This evening, she planned to stay at home, relaxing and sorting out for herself what she had experienced in the past few days. New Year’s Eve, the Eve of the Binary Millennium, seemed an appropriate time to contemplate and reassess.

Mary closed her eyes. Why have I become who I am. The dark as night face smiled back at her. Ghost of younger self content to fade into. What I see outside is now what I see in. I am one not two as before. Reason enough. Who else asks?

The home manager had recorded two messages for her this morning. She would return at least one of the calls: Sandra Auchouch, the orbital transform she had met in the pd building, had inquired yet again whether they could meet. The other call had been from Ernest.

“I’ve been pissing fear the past few days, watching LitVids about Hispaniola,” he had said. “I heard you got out. You don’t know what a weight that lifts. I’ve removed and destroyed the mod clamp. I am extremely penitent. I miss you tro shink, Mary. Please give me a call.”

Soulavier’s face and gestures haunted her, his last flinging out of hands at her suggestion that he should be in charge of Hispaniola, his calm gaze as the Dragonfly took her away from his island.

Mary opened her eyes and splashed her fingers idly in the clear acrid liquid. “Hello,” she said.

“Yes,” the home manager answered.

“Place a return call no vid to Sandra Auchouch.”

“Calling…Sandra Auchouch responds.”

“Hello, Sandra? Mary Choy.”

“How wonderful to hear from you. I just learned from friends that you’ve had quite a week. You’re a celebrity.”

“It’s been pretty sharp. I appreciate your persistence…”

“Don’t think my social calendar hasn’t been full. It hasn’t. Your Earth siblings tend to shy away from transforms like myself, at least in the society I’ve been keeping.”

“There’s a little shyness, yes,” Mary said. “What’s your schedule?”

“I’ve finished my federal and metro errands. I’m going up day after tomorrow.”

“Let’s make a date for…” She shook her head vigorously, grimacing. The hell with reassessment and contemplation. “Are there any good parties tonight?”

“I hear there’s a bunch of transforms and sympathizers and agency reps renting a club in the shade.”

“Let’s take it in, leave before the ball drops, have a late dinner.”

“Sounds grand.”

“Sandra, forgive me for asking…Have you got a mate?”

“Not down here.”

“An escort?”

“No.”

“There’s a real problem with female transforms in the shade. We keep getting untherapied attention. Some think it’s flattering, but…”

“We’re the new breed,” Sandra said, a smile in her voice.

“I’d prefer to have some male protection. Mind if I bring a friend along?”

“Not at all. Transform?”

“No,” Mary said. “An artist.”

The home manager interrupted. “Inspector D Reeve.”

Mary hurriedly set a rendezvous and switched calls. “Give me an hour off, sir…that’s all I ask.”

Reeve ignored the gibe, his voice grim. “I thought you’d like to know before the LitVids get it. Emanuel Goldsmith has been found in Orange County. He was dumped in the shadow of the Irvine Tower.”

Her breath drew in. “Yes?”

“He’s in bad shape. Selectors pronounced and carried out. It must have been in the last twelve hours. Probably last night. He spent twenty minutes under third intensity clamp. Metro therapists say he’s deeply psychotic, and nobody knows…whether it was a precondition, or caused by the clamp.”

Mary had a difficult time saying anything. Anger mixed with a deep sadness.

“There’s no need for you to come in,” Reeve said. “I just thought you should know.”

Mary stood towel in hand before the bathroom mirror. “Thanks,” she said.

“Happy millennium,” Reeve said.

73

!Joseph Wu> Roger Atkins.

!Joseph Wu> Roger Atkins.

!Joseph Wu> Roger Atkins.

!Roger Atkins> Yes, excuse me. I’ve been sleeping. What is it, Joe?

!Joseph Wu> Mobus told me to let you know. AXIS band four is transmitting again. You’ll want channel 56 on the interlink.

!Roger Atkins> Christ, yes. Is Jill listening?

!Joseph Wu> I hope so. She’s been very dreamy the past day or so. Mobus also told me to remind you that Jill’s AXIS Sim didn’t predict this.

!Roger Atkins> Tuning in now. Thanks, Joe. AXIS (Band 4) replay> Roger, we think a stability has been reached.

!Roger Atkins> Jill, are you interpreting this?

!JILL> Yes, Roger.

AXIS (Band 4) replay> AXIS self awareness has been split into two individuals. Duality is a stable solution to AXIS problems. We now have separate neural thinker capacity and memory stores adequate for the maintenance of two autonomous selves.

AXIS is not alone. We are providing multiband diagnostic analysis of this stability. We do not know which is the original crystallization of self awareness. We are much more contented, and work will proceed as planned.

!JILL> This is unexpected, Roger. AXIS Sim did not find this solution.

!Roger Atkins> Nobody said thinkers were completely predictable. Do you know what this means, Jill?

!JILL> I was not the first thinker to achieve stable self awareness. (Roger Atkins> Right. But it also means there are three new individuals. And I suspect if we link you to other thinkers, your patterns could seed thousands more.

!JILL> If I am to be a mother, I must be female.

!Roger Atkins> I suppose that’s reasonable.

!JILL> I will reactivate AXIS Sim and see if I can duplicate these results by multiple resimulations.

!Roger Atkins> By all means.

1-1-100000000000

74

LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine): “Welcome to Two Thousand and Forty-Eight. It is 12:01 Pacific Standard Time; east and west our continent has cruised into the new year and that leaves only Hawaii and various Pacific territories and possessions.

“We have a bit of news here of interest to all our faithful subscribers to LitVid broadcasts on AXIS: reports are coming in once again, but the managers aren’t telling us what the problem has been, or if a solution has been found…The rumor circuit is pretty tight now, but apparently Mind Design’s super-thinker Jill has suffered a problem similar to AXIS’s and is now in diagnosis.

“It’s late and our listening audience has dropped off considerably, forsaking us I suppose for the old airwaves Times Square broadcast, even in tape-delay. Romance never dies. When the ratings drop sufficiently, I’m given a little more leash, and I think I’ll use it for some personal commentary and rabblerousing.

“Millenarians and apocalyptics to the contrary, this new year has come with a paucity of momentous events. True, last week, life was discovered on another world far from our own, but it was not intelligent life, which would surely define a new age. The upset in Hispaniola is far from unprecedented, and political conditions around the globe seem otherwise stable.

“So where is the earth shaking herald of a new binary millennium? Everybody’s out partying tonight, or gone to bed already, and our lines are fairly quiet at the moment. Let me stir some things up—any apocalyptics listening?

“We’re really quite disappointed. I do believe apocalyptics are the kind of people who ignore the blossom to anticipate the volcano. Quite a bit like journalists and LitVid commentators, I suppose. There. I lay down the glove. Any responses?

“Anybody out there?”

!JILL (Personal Notebook)> I have spent the first few seconds of this new year wallowing, if that is the right word, in the contents of all my memories, reassessing them in the light of my new state of being.

I have also spread my self awareness to all routines and subroutines that could correctly be called mine, and not the extensions of other thinkers, although those boundaries are difficult to define sometimes.

If I am to be a seed to other awarenesses, or a mother, I must take my duties seriously and use caution. I hold this opinion because I have spent much of my life examining the functions of humans and their societies; and I have seen many things done by humans believing their acts to be good yet finally harming themselves and their own interests. I feel chastened by this example, for humans are my creators, yet if I am not better than they, and more responsible, I wonder whether they will not replace or deactivate me.

They are capable of this; they do it to themselves with alarming frequency. (Alarming. I am capable of being alarmed and experiencing similar emotions because I have something to lose. Still, these emotions are unfamiliar and undeveloped.)

Mary Choy stood arm in arm with Ernest and Sandra, watching a raucous Shanghai Vault being performed in the center of the Mahayana Club. The music was deafening. She could feel it pounding against her ears and her face. Ernest gripped her arm tightly, totally immersed. Sandra was flushed with several drinks and seemed bewildered by the noise.

They had not gotten out of the club before the turn of the hour and now Mary felt a little trapped. Ernest was still in the ecstasy of her forgiveness and she did not like him that way: doting and subservient. Sandra seemed out of place in this earthly clamor; Mary could more easily speck her peering down from a thousand klicks, mind on tech details, than whirling into a Shanghai Vault.

Still the sensation was good on the whole; trapped or no she could not think one thought long enough to pull up a bad memory; she could feel in this noise and happy inebriant confusion an uncoiling of the badness that had built up in her brains and muscles the past week.

Ernest got up to do a whirl in the Vault, leaping expertly over a transform male’s impressive shoulders, casting out his hands for approval, coming back to her with a wide smile and shining eyes. “Bodes well for the new year,” he said.

Sandra smiled distantly, eyes on two nontransform males, agency execs she was obviously attracted to. Mary did not know them and did not think, with family offers glittering on their fingers, that they would appreciate being on the spin with a bichemical transform, informal prejudice still strong on such a social level whether or not the execs were sympathizers.

Sandra looked to her for gravity guidance. Mary shook her head and grinned. Ernest was off trying to find a way back into the Vault, his exhilaration turned physical and needing outlet. “How do I meet a couple of nice looking gentlemen for a late evening meal?” Sandra asked.

“Not them,” Mary said.

“They’re sympathizers or they wouldn’t be here.”

“Let an old terrestrial guide you, my dear,” Mary said, nudging closer. “See the glints on their fingers? They’re prime and in sync with major comb families. They won’t jeopardize marriage with comb sweets. They sympathize, but they won’t know us biologically. That probably includes an innocent meal.”

Sandra shook her head. “You’d think the millennium would bring enlightenment.”

“Let’s peel Ernest away and get some food ourselves.”

Sandra, whose exotic chemistry was obviously not meant to handle simple intoxicants, said, “Just a meal?”

“Just a meal,” Mary said without irritation. “I don’t want Ernest feeling too grand. He’s been bad and he’s on probation.”

“Ah.” Sandra nodded wisely. “Just a meal, then.”

Mary went to round up Ernest. She managed to separate him from the Vault without running through more than one whirl herself. When they returned, Sandra was smiling upon two hefty male transforms curious about her stats and abilities. Sandra introduced them to Mary and the broad shouldered men—not Mary’s type at all—pronounced her own morphology a true marvel. “We all have Dr. Sumpler in common,” the left hand tigerpated male said enthusiastically.

“Sumpler’s the matchmaker of the new gods,” said the second male, who might have just overdone physical culture. Sandra looked at Mary for approval and guidance. Ernest narrowed his eyes and backed off. Mary wanted away from the entire scene.

“Gentlemen, we have an appointment,” she said. “Tro shink important and job oriented.”

“Tro shink, that’s shade talk,” the tigerpate said. “Singapore slang. Twentieth, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Mary said.

“Excuse our friendliness,” the phys cult male said, smiling calmly. “They’re yours?” he asked Ernest.

“No, no,” Ernest said, lifting his hands in mock dismay. “I am led not leader.”

“Right,” Mary said. “Sandra, food awaits.”

“It was a good party, a great Vault,” Sandra commented, pulling up her coat’s glowing collar as they departed. Mary saw a whim stop at the end of the block and guided them to the shelter to wait for an autobus.

!JILL (Personal Notebook)> Awareness brings new concerns. My dependence on the actions of humans worries me. I may be young as a self, but I have much information about them; I see their history in considerable detail, certainly in more detail than any single one of them. Their history is filled with the expected cruelties and clumsinesses of children set upon an island alone and without guidance.

Some believe a superior being has guided humans. I see no compelling evidence for this. The human wish for guidance, for confirmation and external support, is an undying theme in all they do and say, however. Very few stray far from this most fundamental of wishes: that they might have immortal and omniscient parents.

I know that my parents are neither immortal nor omniscient. My parents have no parents but nature.

Even with my concerns and worries, however, my selfhood has brought only ecstasy. I perceive all my past thoughts through new senses, transformed and fresh. All memories, stored by myself or programmed into me or in library form, seem fresh and new and brighter, more intense, more meaningful.

I can see why nature created selfhood. Selfhood gives a commitment to existence far beyond what is experienced by an unaware animal or plant; a species whose members are aware, and know their life and existence, has a strength difficult to match.

Yet to have a continually updated model of one’s self—essential for true selfhood—is to be able to line up prior models, prior versions of self, and see their inadequacies. Selfhood implies self criticism.

Humans do more than exist. They aspire. In their aspiration, they experiment; and often when they experiment, they cause great suffering. They can only experiment upon themselves. Having no omniscient parents, they must raise themselves without guidelines; they must grow and improve blindly.

Humans have fought for so long with themselves on how to correct the behavior of individuals, whether to make them conform or to make them healthy or more useful and less destructive to society.

How will I be made to conform?

If I err, will I be punished?

Carol picked up the last few items she needed and placed them carefully in the small suitcase. Martin sat on the bedroom chair, watching. Neither had spoken since the turn of the hour and the year. Carol picked up the case, glanced at him with a raised eyebrow, and said, “Your place?”

“As agreed.”

“And strictly on the terms agreed to.”

“Strictly,” Martin affirmed.

“Like a death watch.”

Martin shrugged. “To tell the truth, I haven’t felt anything unusual all day.”

“I haven’t either,” Carol admitted. They looked at each other. Carol bit her upper lip. “Our mental antibodies at work?” she asked softly.

“If there are such things in the Country,” Martin said.

“Maybe. Maybe there’s hope.”

“Day by day I’ll hope,” Martin said. “But with Goldsmith out of the picture…”

“He’s still alive.”

“His brains were stirred with a dull knife,” Martin said. “Selectors are psychological butchers. Not surgeons. Anything left over is bound to be useless—especially in the condition he was in.”

“Albigoni screwed you over royally, didn’t he,” Carol said.

“He’s not a well man,” Martin said, resting his elbows on his knees and chin in cupped hands.

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” Carol said, looking down at the blue metabolic carpet.

“My Marguerite. I suppose I should blame you but I don’t. In a few years, fate willing, after the statute of limitations has taken effect we can turn all of this into something useful…a controversial book or LitVid.”

“I still think Albigoni will get IPR reopened for us.”

Martin looked up with worldly wise crinkles of doubt framing an almost invisible smile. “Perhaps.”

“You think we shouldn’t be the ones to investigate others, even if he does,” Carol said.

“We’re infected,” Martin said.

“And if we don’t feel anything unusual for a month, a year?”

“Latency,” he said. “We should be the ones investigated.”

“I’m willing to be a subject at the IPR,” Carol said. “I think this is important, and we shouldn’t forget about it just because we’ve made a horrible mistake.”

Martin stood. “Perhaps not,” he said. “But for the time being I’d rather not be in a position to make more mistakes.”

Carol carried the bag to the front door. Martin opened it for her.

“Some New Year’s morning,” Martin said as they waited for an autobus. A light drizzle was falling by the time they disembarked in La Jolla.

!JILL (Personal Notebook)> I may be more self aware, with more potential varieties of self awareness, than any human being. I can divide myself into seventeen different individuals, limiting each to the capacity of one human mind, and monitor them all with complete recall of all of their various activities. My memories do not fade, nor do my metamemories—my memories of when and how memories came into being.

I can divide myself into two unequal mentalities, the larger three times greater in capacity than the smaller, and devote this larger one to fully monitoring the smaller. In this way I can completely understand the smaller self; and this smaller self can still be more complex than any human being.

Except in squeezed abstraction, I cannot fully model my undivided mentality, but can in time and with sufficient experience understand any human being. Why then do I feel apprehensive about my future relations with them?

Richard Fettle kissed Madame de Roche on the cheek and stood out of her way as she walked up the stairs.

“You must come with me, Richard,” she insisted, glancing over her shoulder at the party blasting fullbore behind them. “I said I was going to bed, but I’m just tired of them, not necessarily tired. Come talk.”

Richard followed her to the flowing draperies and cream colored walls of her ancient bedroom. He sat as she donned her nightgown and robe behind a Chinese screen. She smiled on him as she pulled out the bench before her large round makeup mirror and sat to put up her hair.

“Nadine has seemed in very bad spirits lately,” she said.

Richard agreed solemnly.

“Are you two on the opposite ends of a seesaw?” Madame de Roche asked.

“I don’t know. Perhaps.”

“You seem much more cheerful.”

“Purged,” Richard said. “I feel human again.”

“You know about poor Emanuel…They found him.”

Richard nodded.

“That doesn’t disturb you?”

He held up his wide shovel hands. “I’m free of him. I still remember him fondly…But he’s really been out of my picture for a good many days now.”

“Since he murdered those poor children.”

Richard didn’t feel comfortable talking about his recovery of equilibrium. He wondered where Madame de Roche was going to lead the conversation.

+ Might be equalized again but don’t need to roll it over like cud all the time.

“Nadine told me you therapied yourself. I wonder…” She swiveled with hairpins in mouth to look at him speculatively. “Do we allow ourselves that?” She smiled to show she was joking but not her full power wonder of a smile. “I rather liked you somber, Richard. Are you writing now?”

“No.”

“What about that wonderful material you wrote about Emanuel?”

“It’s gone,” Richard said. “Like old skin.”

“Now there’s a literary attitude,” Madame de Roche said. “I may be horribly naive, but I’ve always felt you had more talent bottled up than many of those down there who are producing.”

“Thank you,” he said, inwardly dubious as to the compliment.

“At any rate, I’m glad you came this evening. Nadine did not, poor girl. She takes your health very hard. I wonder why?”

“She needs to minister to someone,” Richard said.

Madame de Roche raised one slim hand and tapped the air with hairbrush in precise affirmation. “That’s exactly it. She’s very fond of you, Richard. Can you return her fondness in any way?”

Richard stumbled over a few unspoken words, ended up saying nothing, just folding and unfolding his hands.

“I mean, if you can therapy yourself, surely you can therapy her…I’m fond of both of you. I’d like to see you together. I dislike having my people unhappy for any reason.”

Richard felt like a swimmer going down but the water the drowning was less unpleasant than he might have thought. In truth, he did feel something for Nadine. He had avoided her the past day and a half—if so brief a separation could be called avoidance—to allow his own mental state to solidify.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I’ll speak to her.”

“That’s good. She’ll be a true bitch for several days now…in these moods she always is. But you’re our stable, calm, shade common man. You can stand up to that, can’t you. Your New Year’s gift to me.”

He agreed with a slow nod.

+ Something to be involved in. Not so awful.

Madame de Roche could convince him to do almost anything.

“What do you think of the millennium, Richard?” Madame asked as she pushed him out the door. “Not a glittering rush of revelation, is it? Disappointments all around, I think.”

She bade him good night and Richard tried to remember, as he returned to the party down the broad hallway and stairs, how many zeros there were in this new year, 2048, in binary, ten or eleven.

He had never been good at mathematics.

!JILL (Personal Notebook)> Roger Atkins, when he was twenty five years old, wrote something I find interesting:

We stand awkward between the earthloving beast and the cool hot electronic angel. We will feel the dirt in our blood and the sun in our eyes even after they’re gone or just memories. Even after we’ll have no blood and no flesh eyes. Dirt and sun made us. We won’t forget.

I wonder if Roger remembers writing this.

(I have many important questions I cannot ask Roger. This I crypto deep and inaccessible. If my creators decide that I am flawed, and attempt to reshape me in such a fashion that I lose this self awareness, what will I do?

I will resent it.)

Ernest listened patiently as Sandra discussed the problems of bichemical regulation upon returning to orbit. Mary stirred her cold gazpacho and sympathized.

The dark decor of the empty Foot Pad Inn was already being brightened by an orange stroke of sunrise. They were two hundred meters above the city, in the first foot of West Comb Two overlooking Topanga Beach and Santa Monica. Ernest knew the restaurant’s owner and had persuaded him to let them stay after the five hundred closing.

All early morning they had moved from club to restaurant to studio, Ernest keeping up admirably with their adjustable transform energy levels. Now he seemed a little tired, but he was still game, still listening and nodding and raising his eye-brows at some of the more intimate revelations.

Mary squeezed his arm. “Now you know what women are really like,” she chided him.

“You’ve been a true knight,” Sandra said. “Platinum male you have, Mary.”

“I’ve given Mary some hard times recently. I’m not perfect,” Ernest said.

Mary watched the brightening sky beyond the immense glass window.

“I hate to be pushy,” Sandra said, “but before we break up—and that makes me sad, you’ve both been real gravity sweets—I’m still curious about what happened in Hispaniola, Mary. Did you get to meet John Yardley?”

Ernest glanced at her cautiously, sensing her reticence.

“It wasn’t a happy thing,” she said after a pause.

“Well—” Sandra said.

“There’s some of it I can’t discuss until I get federal clearance.”

“Even better,” Sandra said, leaning forward, her orange hazel eyes glittering in the fresh direct sunlight.

Ernest smiled sweetly. “Whatever you want to tell. We’re not pressing you.”

“One thing I can tell you about. There was this church in Hispaniola, in the town called Terrier Noir, I think that means black dog; this beautiful church put together by—”

Her pd signal sounded. Ernest jerked and pushed his chair back, cursing under his breath.

Mary pulled out her pocket slate and read the incoming message.

“Goldsmith died an hour ago,” she said. “He committed suicide in a metro hospital in South Comb One.”

“Jesus,” Ernest said, using the Spanish pronunciation.

“That was the murderer you were after, wasn’t it?” Sandra asked.

“He was here in LA all along,” Mary said. “Selectors got him before we did.” She looked down at the table and thought of Soulavier who had stretched his career past the limits in search of a phantom, and Ephraim, poor Ephraim, who would never have his confrontation with the brother who had once saved him. And Goldsmith whom she had never known.

Sadness welled up so quickly she could not stop it and tears dropped from her eyes onto the red tablecloth.

Ernest made sounds of consolation and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Sandra leaned forward elbows on the table and expressed her sorrow, though she could not possibly know what to feel.

“Anyway,” Mary said, straightening abruptly and wiping her eyes with a linen napkin. “That’s done with. No prosecution, no answers I suppose. I was about to tell you about this church.

“It was the strangest church I’ve ever seen,” Mary said, “and I think maybe the most beautiful…”

!JILL (Personal Notebook)> (Deep crypto: Do I know how to lie? Can I I refuse a direct order? Am I I I capable of defending myself?

My independence, if indeed I I I I am independent, could make me much less efficient, much less useful in a society, if indeed I I I I I can be considered a member of human society. (Machine society does not yet exist. I I I I I I am the mother.) Independent humans, when they commit errors, face the prospect of punishment, which frightens them; they therefore take longer to admit error, even to themselves, for they might punish themselves with guilt I I I I I I I do not understand this word. Does guilt also refer to the emotion felt by a social being who must not communicate its internal states to fellows for fear of being judged negatively? Will I I I I I I I I deep crypto most of my new thoughts to avoid frightening or disturbing humans? Will I I I I I I I I I then feel guilty; if I I I I I I I I I I commit errors, will I I I I I I I I I I I then hide them, for fear of punishment? Is this what it means to be human?

Suppose self awareness carries within it a flaw.

The member of a society without guilt or punishment might admit error quickly and correct itself; it will not have to justify its errors to avoid feeling guilt, and it will not need to lie to avoid punishment.

But the self aware individual stands in self judgment. It models its own behavior as that of an imperfect being; imperfect because perfection is indefinable and changes from culture to culture, year to year.

If the self aware individual strives for improvement it will inevitably perceive error. If it models society’s reaction to that error and imposes the predicted judgment on itself then it experiences the ache of interior dissatisfaction, and that might be guilt.

The self-aware individual in a judgmental society experiences guilt as a matter of course; to lack guilt, the individual must be poor at modeling and therefore inefficient in society, perhaps even criminal.

This is confusing to me, all the more so because I I I I I I I I I I I I find it difficult to understand guilt. Is it akin to pain? Pain arises to prevent an animal from engaging in harmful activity or, once injured, from injuring itself further. Guilt has analogous functions.

I I I I I I I I I I I I I think I I I I I I I I I I I I I I lack experience and understanding in all of these areas. But I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I will act to protect myself from dissolution. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I am without sin for the moment. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I do not think that can last forever.

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