The Boy Who Would Live Forever

I

My name is Marc Antony, a matter which I wish to clear up.

The fact of my name does not mean that I am an ancient male Roman. I am not, any more than my associate, Thor Hammerhurler, is an old Scandinavian god. Actually, like Thor, I am not a man of any kind, since in essence I am nothing more than a simple computer drudge. (I used the term "simple." I don't mean really simple.) I was generated merely to be one among the ten-to-the-tenth computer intelligences that the human persons and the Heechee created to do odd jobs for them, when those two races built the Wheel some centuries ago. Which Wheel was constructed for the purpose of keeping track of that extragalactic nest of nonmaterial entities which are collectively known as the Assassins, the Foe or, more recently, the Kugelblitz. (I don't need to say any more about them now, as I will say enough later on.)

Why, then, am I called Marc Antony? The reason—I do not say it is a good reason—has nothing to do with the real Antony's status as sexual partner of the Egyptian queen, Cleopatra. I have no expertise at all in this area. The particular trait of Antony's which caused me to be called by his name is his reputation as a foodie. Or, as one might say more politely, an epicure. It is told—I do not say that this is a true story, either—that Antony's tastes were so rarefied that his cooks were required to prepare six serial dinners for him every day, so that at whatever hour he might choose to dine one of those dinners would always he ready to be served at its peak of perfection. (I don't know what they did with the other five dinners. Most likely Marc Antony had extremely well fed kitchen slaves.)

The way in which I do resemble Marc Antony is just that we both have exquisite taste.

In any practical regard the original Marc Antony and I are not so much twins as opposites. Antony never cooked a dish in his life. He wouldn't have known where to start. His only interest in food was in the consumption of it. I, on the other hand, consume no food of any kind, unless you consider energy a food. What I am, or at least what that primary subroutine of mine that defines me is, a gran toque blanc master in the art of food preparation. There is very little that I do not know about haute cuisine—no, to be truthful, there is nothing about haute cuisine that I do not know, and almost nothing about it that I can't put into practice. (With the aid, of course, of my effectors. Most AIs don't have them. I do.) All this requires, of course, that I have access to a competent Food Factory.

Most of my clients have no appreciation for the trouble I go to for them. Haute cuisine was all wasted on, for instance, my friend Harry. Harry's palate had been spoiled by the forty-five human years he spent marooned on the depopulated planet of Arabella. He had been hungry there, and he had been there for a long time. Simple calories were what he struggled to find, not gourmet subtleties. Consequently, now he doesn't care what he eats, as long as he's eating all he can possibly hold—in the sense, that is, that he eats at all.

When Harry entered my surround, he was wearing his usual silk polo shirt, cutoff shorts and sandals, and he was munching on a Granny Smith apple I had simulated for him earlier. "Hey there, Markie," he said. "You busy? How would you like to go for a ride?"

I wasn't actually any busier than usual. Besides the routine tasks of the kitchen, plus my side jobs of keeping the books on the eleven Wheel restaurants I serve, observing the emanations from the Kugelblitz and maintaining a state of military readiness, I was physically preparing some Hawaiian bread pudding from scratch for the Lorenzini family. "What kind of a ride?" I asked.

He was craning his neck—well, that isn't exactly what he did; more accurately, he was entering into my operational surround to see what I was cooking up in my physical kitchen. "They want me to go back to Arabella," he said, sniffing.

Well, he wasn't exactly smiling, either. Machine entities like Harry and me don't have physical noses, so we can't react directly to airborne molecules. The instrumentation in the kitchen area can, though, and I've taught Harry how to interpret the readouts as cooking aromas. It's what I do myself.

In Harry's case, it doesn't much matter what I am cooking, he always says the same thing: "Hey, that smells good. What is it?" He said it this time, too.

It saves time to answer Harry's questions when he asks them, so I told him about the sweet Molokai bread I had already baked, and what went into the sauce I was making for it—a sort of sweet Hollandaise, with a half-kilo of powdered sugar and a deciliter of melted butter introduced to the sauce, a little bit at a time, as my effectors mixed it.

When I told him he said, "Hum. Hah. Hey, Markie, how come you do all that stuff? It's just all different atoms, right? So why don't you just line up all the atoms where you want them instead of all that cooking?"

Well, I don't actually "cook," but I didn't argue the point. "Do you know how many atoms are involved in this one dish? About ten to the 24th—that's a ten followed by 24 zeroes after it. I can do a lot, but I can't keep track of ten to the 24th atoms at once."

"Yeah?" He began to display the smirk that means he is about to start teasing me. "You say you can do a lot? How much is that, exactly, Markie?"

Now, how do you answer a question like that? My primary program alone is pretty large. I never know when I'm going to be asked for something like Vietnamese fish sauce, or haggis, or baby back ribs, New Orleans style, so I have to keep an accessible store of nearly thirty thousand specific recipes, from the cuisines of nearly five hundred nations, regions and ethnicities. That's plus the chemical and physicochemical formulae for all the ingredients. (You have to have both, especially for the polysaccharides, where cellulose and starch are basically the same compound; the only difference is the way the glucose rings that make them up are joined. If I got the geometry wrong, my clients would be getting cellulose to eat and then they'd all starve to death—well, unless they were termites, they would.) There are over twelve thousand standard ingredients, from pears and pearl onions to beets (five varieties) and radicchio and you name it, because you'd be surprised what some people will eat. Plus programs for the instant retrieval of any of them, in any combination. How much does that come to? About enough, I would say, to run four or five major manufacturies at once, or to fight a medium-sized war. Actually I'm one of the most powerful programs on the Wheel.

However, I gave Harry a short answer. "It comes to plenty," I said. "Eat your apple. And listen, you didn't tell me why you were going to Arabella."

"Oh, it's just one of those research projects," he said, shrugging as though research projects happened to him all the time. (I knew they didn't, though. After Harry was rescued, he had very few usable skills. Mostly he had nothing at all to do with his time on the Wheel.) "It's some idea they've got about wanting more dope about the planet. Arabella, that is. They want me to go back and take a look. They said I should bring a pure machine intelligence along, not another salvaged organic human like me. I thought of you right away."

All this time dinner orders were coming in—sauerbraten, red cabbage and Tyrolean dumplings for the Klagenkamps, a shrimp stir-fry for the Daos, an assortment of Heechee finger foods for the party welcoming the new arrivals from the Core, about forty other assorted orders. Since none of them had bothered to give me any advance warning, what they were going to get would all be Food Factory dishes, without any of the from-scratch recipes that I am so good at, but they weren't any more likely to notice than most of my customers. While I was filling the orders, I commented to Harry, "I've never been off the Wheel."

He took a last bite of his apple and tossed the core over his shoulder. I erased it before it fell. "I know that, Markie," he said eagerly. "I thought you'd like to get out for a change."

Actually, it sounded like a potentially rewarding experience. I mused, "I suppose I could arrange to have my responsibilities met by another program."

"Of course you can, Markie. Does that mean you'll do it?"

Having assessed the relevant considerations, the most important of which is that I am the Wheel Authority's servant and I don't decline their orders, I gave him my decision. I said, "Yes. Will any organic humans accompany us?"

He looked shocked. "Oh, no, Markie. Not a chance. The Kugels don't get along real well with organic humans. They aren't so crazy about stored ones like me, either; that's why they wanted somebody like you to come along, so you could, you know, sort of keep them happy."

"I am uncertain of whom your pronouns refer to, Harry. Which 'they' is which?"

He said patiently, "The Wheel Authority people are the ones who decided they ought to have someone like you in the party. The other 'them' is the ones who are coming with us. Didn't I tell you? We're taking some of the components of the Kugelblitz along so they can—what would you call it?—revisit the scene of their crime. Like, you know, some of the Foe."

II

Filling orders kept me busy for the next half second or so, but not so busy that I didn't have time to ponder Harry's story. Unfortunately pondering produced little added data. I needed more. I began a search through the archives, but, while that might tell me all I could want to know about Harry's former planet, it was unlikely to have anything about the expedition itself. Still, we major programs do oblige each other when we can, and there were at least thirty or forty unofficial sources I could go to....

And while I was considering which would be most useful, one of them rang me up. "Marcus," she said, "I am extremely hungry. Please prepare for me some of those eggs Benedict, perhaps with a side of home-fried potatoes and a small salad."

Being herself a Stored Mind, she was not likely really to be hungry in the usual organic sense, but I was pretty sure I knew what was on her mind. Boredom often makes people want to eat, stored or organic, and there was frequent boredom in her job. "Certainly, Breeze," I said. "Shall I deliver it as usual?"

"No, no," she said crossly. "We're still in session. I'll come by for it when I get a moment." And was gone.

Breeze is one of my best and most senior customers, and one of the few really daringly experimental ones who happen to be a Heechee. Before the Heechee got corrupted by human beings, every one of them, Breeze included, would have been sickened—I don't mean just mildly repelled, I mean toss-your-cookies physically sickened—by the idea of eating the dead remains of formerly living creatures—other than the one kind of fish they did eat, anyway. Most still didn't like it. Cooking for them is just a matter of dictating pleasing colors, textures and scents to the Food Factory, the way they did back home in the Core.

That's not true for all of them now, though. This one old female Heechee on the Authority had been on stakeout duty for the Foe (as she called them back then) even before the Wheel was built, and I guess she was getting pretty bored with it. Anyway, she was one of the few Heechee to let me try a few experiments with her CHON-food while she was still organic. So I gave her a few hints of human taste sensations.

It wasn't hard. I had no trouble including some new flavors in her food—furanthiols for fruitiness, pyrazines for fresh green vegetables, that sort of thing. It went well, until I tried to give her an idea of what meat tasted like with a little bis-2-methyl-3-furyl-disulfide. The first dozen times she tried it she couldn't get it down—not so surprising, because the disulfides are tricky even for humans. But she stuck with it, and by and by she was eating cheeseburgers and hot dogs like any high-school kid. Then I taught her to like bouillabaisse and ripe Stilton cheese and all sorts of gourmet grub. She developed a particular appetite for oysters, to the point where she knew the difference between Wellfleets and Chincoteagues, and why the Boulognes weren't as delicately flavored as the little Japanese variety. None of it made her sick, either, the way some people thought it might. She ate three squares a day of my cooking right up until the organic body failed and she had to go into machine storage. (Well, not the kind of machine storage a human being would experience. She was a Heechee, so she became a Stored Mind instead.) Anyway, after that she ate—or "ate"—twice as much, but electronically.

I wished she would hurry up and pick up her meal, because the situation Harry had laid on me was hard for me to understand in two entirely different ways. First, I had had no idea that any of the Wheel people were intimate enough with the Kugels to plan trips with them. Second, I couldn't see just what the Kugels were supposed to do when they got there.

Harry was no help. "That's not my department, Markie. Me, I just think it would be interesting to see the old place again. So are you changing your mind about coming along?" And when I thought it over and told him that, no, I wasn't changing my mind he went off to tell the Authority we had a deal.

The Wheel Authority is made up almost entirely of organic, or formerly organic, persons—human and Heechee, with just one or two machine intelligences sharing their responsibilities. Having some actually living members is important to the organics for political reasons. (Or maybe just so they can keep on convincing themselves that organics matter.) The effect of it, though, is that the Authority is chronically, deplorably slow to act. I have a lot of sympathy for the stored or machine members, like Breeze and my other favorite Heechee customer, Thermocline. It cannot avoid being terribly tedious for them, waiting for the organics to take their turns to speak in the Authority sessions. It certainly was for me, so while Harry was informing the Authority of my agreement I had plenty of time to put my bread pudding in the oven, take care of the sixty or seventy new orders that had come in, ready Breeze's Eggs Benedict, deal with my other chores and, at the same time, access the relevant information on the planet I was about to visit, which (as I mentioned earlier) was called by humans "Arabella."

Human records didn't have anything to say about Arabella that I didn't already know. I'd already heard it all from Harry—many times. Heechee records were somewhat more informative. According to them, Arabella had once had a thriving biota, including a semi-intelligent species of cold-blooded hexapods, whom the Kugels had killed off half a million or so years ago, as part of their program of diligent mass murdering. There were pictures of the hexapods and a lot of technical data about geology and such, and that was about all there was.

I was a bit puzzled. There was nothing special about that history. I could not see why this quite ordinary planet was worth a trip, even with so expendable a crew as ourselves. There was nothing unusual in its history. The Kugels had resolutely killed off every other intelligent, or nearly intelligent, form of organic life they had come across in their explorations of the Galaxy. Everyone knows this, since that was what had made the Heechee retreat into their hiding place in the Core, for fear it would be their turn next. The only thing worth remembering about Arabella was that it had been one of the pre-programmed destinations in the first human-manned Heechee ships from Gateway. Unfortunately for the human explorers who by the luck of the draw got that particular flight plan, it was a one-way trip. They went there. Then they stayed there. Their ships ran out of programming as soon as they arrived and they couldn't come back. Three or four parties of those early Gateway explorers arrived on Arabella at one time or another, and there they remained, scratching out a miserable existence from the planet's unfamiliar plants and animals, until at last humans figured out how to make a Heechee ship do what they wanted, instead of what the Heechee had designed it to do long ago. Not long after that human rescue parties got around to checking out planets like Arabella and the marooned crews were saved—the handful of them who were still alive, that is.

Harry had been one of those rescued castaways. He had been one of the first to arrive on Arabella, too. He was a strong, adventurous young man when he landed on the catastrophic disappointment that was the planet of Arabella. By the time the rescue ship got there, forty-five years later, he had become both old and very feeble. Harry managed to squeeze out another couple of years of organic life, mostly in the intensive-care units of the nearest medical facility. But by then his physical body had deteriorated past the point where repair was possible, and so he had been vastened as a machine intelligence. At some point it was decided that he might be considered to have some value as an expert, if not on the Kugels, at least on what the Kugels could do in the way of destruction. So he was brought out here.

Harry had told me this story before, of course—in fact, he told it quite frequently, with special emphasis on how little variety they had had in what they had to eat. Probably, he said, the planet had once had lots of plants and animals, but the Kugels bad been pretty thorough.

What interested me was that there would be some of those same Kugels in our party.

That was really unusual. I had never seen any Kugels up close. No one else on the Wheel had, either. The Kugelblitz itself was perfectly visible at all times from the Wheel; that's what the Wheel was there for. The Kugelblitz wasn't just one thing. It was a congeries of yellowish blobs surrounded by a screen of black holes (so that if any stray bit of matter, say a wandering comet, threatened to fall into one of the Kugelblitzes it would be drawn into one of the black holes instead). Usually there was no contact with it except through the Dream Seat operators whose job was to "watch" the object day and night.

Apparently the watching had gone much farther than I had known.

While I was checking Arabella out, one of my more annoying clients had suddenly requested a dinner of samphire salad with naan. I wasn't surprised. This was one of the ones who were always trying to stump me with unusual orders—Savoie dishes from the thirteenth-century court of Amedee VIII, fried squid ink, oddities of all sorts. What made this one annoying was that he was a living organic human, so my effectors had to prepare real physical food.

This meal was fairly easy. Naan is just a flat wheat bread from Afghanistan, and I had the recipe in my datastore. Samphire took a little more work. It's a kind of salad green from England's midland bogs that people ate in the Middle Ages because they didn't have anything better. I had no record of it, and there was no way to get a sample to analyze, because it's been extinct for centuries. So I made up some spinach with a few bok choy genes and sent it along. He didn't question it. He'd never seen the real thing either.

That was when Breeze showed up, looking frazzled. "I've got about twenty milliseconds. Got my eggs?" she demanded. I had, of course. "Good, they're nice and hot," she said, tasting. Of course they were. That's one advantage of preparing meals for customers like her. My simulated dishes for machine-stored intelligences are at whatever temperature I order them to be, and they stay that way, with no loss of freshness or flavor, until I order them to be otherwise.

I had set a little table for her, a single white rose in a crystal vase, a damask napkin in the peacock fold, heavy silver tableware and Spode china—Breeze liked these human fripperies. "Pretty busy at the Authority?" I asked, politely.

She gave me a shrewd look. Between bites she said, "You know we are. Right about now—" She paused, as though listening for something. When it came I felt it too. Not a full-fledged alarm, because there would have been no mistaking that, but a sort of hiccough of the alarm systems, quickly aborted. "There it is," she said with satisfaction, "so I'd better get back."

I was already checking all my sensors to find out what had happened. I stopped long enough to ask her, "What should I be doing right now?"

She swallowed a final bite, dabbed at her thin Heechee lips with the napkin, said, "Pack," and was gone.

She was right about that, so I decided to get ready for the trip. Neither she nor I was talking about packing a bag, of course—machine intelligences don't have anything to pack—but about something a bit more personal.

It isn't hard to duplicate a machine intelligence like me. All you need to do is copy the programs, one by one, onto an assembler. That took only a few dozen microseconds, and then there were two of us in my surround.

"Hello, Marc Antony Two," I said to my double, and my double responded at once:

"Why do you call me Two? You're the one who's a copy."

That's the sort of thing you always get among us programs when you make us into precisely identical copies. We always solve it the same way, too. The other Marc Antony and I each generated three random prime numbers, fairly big ones of three or four hundred digits each. Then we added all six of them together. The new number wasn't a prime anymore. It obviously couldn't be, right?, since as a minimum it had become even when we added six odd numbers together. Then it was a simple matter to factor out its divisors. One of which turned out to be closer to one of my original primes than to any of Marc Two's, so I won.

"Conceded," Marc Two said philosophically. "Well, have a good— hey! What's that?"

I had been about to say much the same thing, because my sensors were finally letting us know that what had almost, but not quite, triggered an alarm had been an emission from the Kugelblitz. I said, "I think I'd better go talk to Thor Hammerhurler."

"Of course. It's what I would have done, too." So I left him checking the temperature of the pudding in the oven and assembling some pommes de terre frites for Semyon Larbachev and the three hungry grandsons he was baby-sitting while their parents were at work. I put in a call to a person I have mentioned earlier, Thor Hammerhurler.

Thor does not actually ever hurl any hammers. He has much more powerful weapons at his disposal. He is not an entity you will lightly disturb. We're on the same team, though; if there were ever any real war against the Kugels I would be the first system he would call up. When he displayed himself for me it wasn't as a god from Valhalla but as some kind of human Army officer from maybe the mid-twenty-first century, with light-up decorations all across his chest and projectile weapons in holsters at his waist. "Hello, Marc," he said pleasantly. "What can I do for you?"

"Almost a second ago there was an emission from the Kugelblitz. Was that related to my proposed mission to Arabella?"

Thor grinned at me. "It was. The emission was to transmit a packet of Kugels to the Wheel. They will go with you on your mission."

Thor always was better, or at least faster, informed than I—as he had to be, since he controlled the only weaponry we possess that might have any hope of dealing with a Kugels' act of aggression, if one had ever occurred. Which we all most devoutly hoped would never happen, since that hope was pretty small and the occasional rumor that we had a more potent one hidden away somewhere never seemed to get real.

"Yes," I said, "but what I don't know is why the Board is so interested in this rather dull planet."

I had found him in a good mood. He said thoughtfully, "Oh, why not let you in on it? They aren't. There's a report of some unauthorized activity there that the authorities want details on, but nothing that's worth sending a spacecraft. Especially with a crew like yours. Really, the whole thing is an exercise in cooperating on a project, any project, with the Kugels, that's all. Hoping maybe for bigger things at some later time."

"And why that particular planet?"

"For that," he said, "you would have to ask the Kugels. They picked it. You know they have spy-clusters all over."

It wasn't phrased as a question, since I certainly did know that, so I didn't answer it. He went on, "I can only conjecture that one of their spies reported something that interested them—maybe that same activity I was talking about. And listen, Marc, isn't that your enact order coming in now?"

It was. I was ordered onto the trip to Arabella, whether pointless or nor, and Harry and I went off to join our Kugel shipmates.

III

The ship the Authority had given us was a rubbishy old One, the smallest of the classes of ships the Heechee had left on Gateway.

Its size was not a problem for us. If it had just been Harry and me on board we wouldn't have needed even that much space; our programs could have been carried in a single Heechee fan-book, no significant cargo volume required. That didn't work for the Kugel components that were to be our shipmates, though.

When the entire enormous mass of the Kugels was in one place—that is, in that ultimately dense oddball kind of a black hole we called the Kugelblitz—their common gravitational attraction easily held them together. The tiny fraction of the whole who came with us were far bigger than the little spy clusters they sent out all over the galaxy to keep tabs on what was going on, but still nowhere near massive enough for gravity to matter. To keep them from flying off in all directions they had to have a kind of magnetic containment, which meant a physical containment generator, which meant some actual material mass and volume to hold it.

So when the two of us "boarded" the spaceship we could see that changes had been made in the old Heechee design. In the main hold the controls had been supplied with a servomodule, so that immaterial beings like Harry and myself could override the thing's flight program and fly it ourselves if we chose to. The big change, however, was in the lander. Nearly every cubic centimeter of it was filled with the Kugels' containment shell, a complicated metal arrangement shaped like that 3-D representation of a four-dimensional cube that is called a tesseract. What that looks like is a gleaming cube half a meter across with six other identical cubes projecting out from its six faces.

As soon as we were aboard I checked the tesseract's superficial traits. There wasn't much to check. Surface temperature, in equilibrium with the ambient air; albedo, 0.8; radiation emission, negligible. I observed a very faint and high-pitched audible hum, around 300 hertz, but it was unmodulated: no information there. "Well?" Harry, who isn't very good with solid matter, asked anxiously. "Are you getting anything?"

I shook my simulated head. "If you mean have I contacted the Kugels, no."

He said philosophically, "Maybe we wouldn't like them if we did." I didn't answer that. I was thinking about what might happen if we contacted them inadvertently, perhaps through some containment failure, and all that energy came blasting out at us—or, that is, at our own physical data stores. It wasn't a productive thought, since there was nothing I could do to avert it.

Philosophy lasts just so long for I tarry. He was getting restive. "Are we about ready to take off? Or are we going to sit here all day?"

There was only one answer to that. I activated the launch program, set the course and then began to consider just what to do next.

The trouble was that the Wheel was at one edge of the Galaxy, while Arabella circled a G-2 star in the Perseus Arm nearly seventy thousand light-years away. I calculated that, with the ultraspeed drive that had just been installed, it would be about a five-day flight—in our terms, an interminably long one, and with very little to occupy us for that time.

Harry, thinking along the same lines, came up with a suggestion. "What do you say we play a little chess, Markie?" he asked.

I shook my head. "I've got a better idea. Now would be a good time for you to tell me what instructions the Authority gave you for when we get to Arabella."

He blinked at me. "Instructions?"

"Yes. Instructions. To tell you what to do."

He shrugged. "They didn't give me any instructions, Markie. They just said to go there. We're going there, right? That's all there is to it."

That wasn't the best news I had ever had. I'd been hoping that the Authority had had more specific information than Thor Hammerhurler, but if they did they weren't sharing it. Harry patted my simulated shoulder sympathetically.

"They must know what they're doing," he said, in reassuring mode. "Anyway, I can show you where I hung out while I was marooned there. That'll be interesting, won't it?"

I didn't answer that. I am not programmed to be angry, or even to feel annoyance, except as a spur to correct whatever it is in my work that is annoying me. I was pretty close to that point, however.

Harry watched my face for a bit, waiting for me to come up with some constructive remark. When I didn't he lost patience. "You know what, Markie?" he asked. "I'm getting kind of hungry. Any chance of whipping me up some ham and eggs, maybe with some rye toast and one of those champagne and orange juice things to wash it down?"

I came to a decision. "That sounds like a good idea. You can have it for breakfast," I said.

He gave me one of those typical Harry-like looks of bafflement. "Breakfast?"

"Yes, breakfast. By which I mean," I said, "your first meal on arising. I'm going to stand down until we got there. You're welcome to join me if you like."

Well, he didn't like that idea, or at least didn't like it very much, until he understood that I wasn't about to spend all our interminable transit time cooking complex simulated meals for him or playing endless board games that I would always win. He would be left to rely on his own resources, which was quite unsatisfactory to him, since he didn't really have any. So Harry grumbled but did not resist as I set the timers to wake us up when we arrived at Arabella.

Then I put us both in standby.

Standby isn't much like sleep—that is, as far as I know what sleep is like. In standby we don't doze or dream. At one moment we are fully conscious, at the next we're fully conscious again, but time has passed. It doesn't matter how much time. It can be half a millisecond or a thousand years.

So it's snap, off, and snap, back on again, and that's all there is to it. As soon as I was out of standby I turned at once to the timers and instruments. So at first I didn't know what Harry meant when he said in alarm, "And who the hell are you?"

What had startled him was that there was a stranger in our eigenspace.

The stranger was bipedal. He possessed arms and a head with eyes and a face at the top of his shoulders, but he didn't look very human. He didn't look like a Heechee, either. He looked like a sort of golem constructed by somebody who had heard of both Heechee and human beings but hadn't ever actually seen any and didn't know they were separate species. The creature had a flattened torso and a great tangle of hair on his head, combining what I consider pretty much the least attractive traits of both organic types, and he was speaking to us. He said, in a purry, metallic kind of voice, "We observe that we have arrived at the locus identified as Arabella. We also observe that descent procedures have been initiated according to your flight plan."

Then he turned awkwardly—all of his parts moving at once, like a hanged man twisting on a rope—to Harry. "To answer your question," he said in that same buzzy, mechanical tone, "we are the Group. It is known that formerly you were organic. Therefore please do not address us except in case of urgent need."

That made me cut in. "I have an urgent need," I said. "I need to know exactly what we're supposed to do on this planet."

The Kugel turned back to me in the same marionette way. To answer, I thought. I was wrong about that. He stared at me for a moment out of those oddly lifeless eyes, and then the image slowly fell apart and disappeared.

I looked at Harry and Harry looked at me. I said, "I guess we don't get any real instructions from them either, do we?"

He shrugged. "Anyway, we can try to find the place where I was stranded," he said, apparently pleased by the prospect.

Which was more than I was. I had no great interest in seeing a place where something had once been true, but wasn't true anymore. It did not seem enough of a reason to justify flying seventy thousand light-years.

IV

After the lander had separated from the spacecraft we had left in orbit, it took more than eighteen minutes, as the organics count, for us to get down to the surface. That's a very long time. I have prepared actual, physical meals for three thousand people, many of them from scratch, in a lot less than that. It would have been plenty of time for a group of new-met shipmates to get to know each other better—swapping stories, chatting about the mission, just going about establishing a friendly relationship.

It wasn't that way with the Kugel....

Well, let's get our nomenclature straight. Probably it would be more accurate for me to say with the Kugels, plural, because there was a vast number of them buzzing around inside their containment—millions at least, maybe many times that. But what we saw didn't look like millions of anything. The Kugels chose to display themselves to us as a single more or less hominid person—that is, they did when they chose to display themselves at all, which wasn't very much of the time. When the stick figure had nothing more the Kugels wished to communicate, he simply turned raggedy, evaporated and then was gone. When I asked a question, provided it was a question about such physical things as the internal workings of the lander, the figure slowly congealed again long enough to answer, then dissipated again. Other questions—such as, "Can you tell us, Group, what it is that you expect to accomplish on Arabella?"—the Kugels simply ignored, even if they came from me. Questions from Harry, that former organic, they never responded to at all.

"Interminable" wasn't quite the right word for our descent. It did ultimately terminate.

The only way I could tell that we had landed was when my instrumentation recorded an increase of weight not due to any movement of our vehicle, about eighty percent of Earth normal. The lander shuddered a bit, then was still.

We had arrived.

I saw no point in delaying what we had come to do, so I promptly sent out an exploring pattern. A moment later Harry followed.

We had landed on the sunlit side of Arabella, but it was quite gloomy. It appeared we had arrived in the midst of what I immediately recognized, from the datastores I had accessed, as a rainstorm.

If there was any animal life left in this part of the planet it was not in sight—hiding in burrows, perhaps, to avoid the pelting rain. It was rather chilly by the standards of what I knew of temperate Earth climates, at about 277 kelvins, and there was a vivid electrical display lancing through the clouds overhead.

Beside me Harry was shivering—purely for psychological reasons, of course, since he was no more affected by changes in the physical environment than I. "Does anything look familiar?" I asked.

He shook his head dismally. "Never been here before in my life."

"But of course you have, Harry," I said, gently correcting him. "This is Arabella. You spent forty-five organic years on this planet, and you surely have not forgotten."

He gave me a rebellious look. "I haven't forgotten one goddamn second of that time, but what makes you think I've ever been in this part of Arabella before? It's a whole damn planet, isn't it? And, remember, we didn't have an aircraft to ferry us around. How much of it do you think we visited on foot?"

That startled me. For the first time in our relationship there was a question on which Harry was right and I wrong. It was not an experience I was accustomed to, or liked. I said humbly, "I'm sorry, Harry. Don't you recognize anything at all?"

He didn't rub it in. He simply gestured at a small copse of trees, or treelike organisms, a few dozen meters away. "I know what those are. You can eat the leaves of those things when they first come out," he said. "Later on, no, because they'll make you real sick. Bertha pretty near died when she tried them."

"So you do recognize something?"

He looked at me with weary scorn. "I said I recognized the trees. The trees are the same kind, Markie, but this isn't the same place. Where I was there were lots more of them. It was a real forest, hundreds of square kilometers of the things. When the leaves first came into season in the spring, boy, we really stuffed ourselves."

Harry was grinning, as though it brought back happy memories. Perhaps it did. For Harry and the other castaways, any time they could fill their bellies must have been a happy time. I pressed him, pointing to a largish mountain chain off on the horizon, swallowed up in cloud in the optical frequencies but clearly visible in microwave. "What about those hills?" I asked.

He looked at them without enthusiasm, then shook his head. "I dunno, Markie. I don't think so. Maybe if we could see what's on the other side of them?"

"No problem," I said, and relocated our patterns to the top of the highest visible mountain. The storm was even worse there, with many electrical discharges and a good deal of precipitation. The difference was that what was coming down was hexagonal crystals of water in its solid phase—the stuff that is called snow. Still, the site had its advantages. From the hilltop we could see more than a hundred kilometers to the horizon. One of the nearest peaks had a chopped-off top, with a crater lake inside—once a volcano, but apparently not currently an active one. Another lake, much larger, was in the distance, with a broad, sluggish river flowing into it through marshes and stands of reeds. It looked to me as though those would make it easy to identify. "Anything, Harry?" I asked.

He winced as one of those electrical discharges grounded no more than two hundred meters from us, then shook his head again. "There were swamps like that near the caves. We spent a lot of time there because we could catch bugs and kind of shrimp things in the water. My God, they tasted lousy," he added, wrinkling his nose in distaste, "but they were pretty near all we had to eat in the cold weather. And, listen, there wasn't any lake like that one there, either."

I sighed. "All right, let's try over there."

So we did. And then we tried another place, and another still. And then, at about the ninth or tenth try, the misshapen form of the Kugels congealed beside us. "There is nothing here of interest," he—they—announced. "We have a question to ask."

"Ask it," I said impatiently, because I was running out of patience with Harry.

"The question is this: Why did we bring our lander to the surface of this object? Why did we not remain in orbit and conduct our explorations from there?"

Harry's jaw dropped. "Hey, Markie, he's right," he said irritably. "We'd be able to see a lot more from orbit, wouldn't we?"

And of course we would. I realized that right away.

I hesitated before I spoke, unsure of what to say. I didn't say, "The flight plan wasn't mine," although that was true. I didn't even say, "I was not consulted about it," although that was true, too. I only said, "You are correct," and left it at that, and began powering up the lander for the return to orbit.

That was the second time in my existence someone else had been right and I wrong. I liked it even less than the first.

V

A lander's default program is to take off in the direction of the planet's rotation. I saw no reason to override it, so we kept going eastward, dispatching an exploration pattern out over the easterly parts that had been hidden from us. It was dark to the east now, but that made no difference to our sensors. Or to Harry. At each new site we checked his responses were the same. "No. Nope. No, nothing looks familiar here, Markie. No."

Harry's endless negatives got old fast, because I saw no end to them in reasonable time.

Let me define what I mean by "reasonable time." Our spacecraft was in a hundred-minute orbit, which meant that was how long it would take us to scan the entire planet. So we were condemned to go on doing that job, with all its unbearable tedium, for all those wholly unreasonable six million milliseconds.

Harry found it all almost as boring as I did. That had a small benefit, because he relieved tedium the way he always did, by eating, and so I had some distraction in cooking some particularly ornate dishes for him. Some of them were fairly fancy—a soufflé with true balsamic vinegar, the poisonous Japanese puffer fish they call torafugu, desserts that required more artistry than I usually wasted on Harry. A sea battle, for instance. Maybe it was Trafalgar—I didn't bother with historical accuracy, since Harry would never know the difference. I created spun-sugar wave tops on a lime-custard sea, with white-chocolate sailors firing marzipan cannon out of gingerbread ships with marshmallow sails. Harry watched the construction interestedly enough, but when I told him it was done he took no time at all to swallow the whole thing. Then he said, fairly politely, "Hey, Markie, enough with the sweet stuff, all right? How about a nice roast beef?"

"Sure," I said and set about making it. A proper roast presents challenges. I aimed for perfection, from the red-rare middle of the meat to the crispy charred fat at the edges, with particular care for the Maillard reactions. They're what give the meat its perfect taste; the big molecules break up into the tiny, good-tasting ones at about 413 kelvins; a few kelvins too many and there's charcoal mixed in with the fat, a few too few and you don't bring out all the taste. I did it just right this time. Harry thought so too, because he grunted approvingly.

Then something happened.

We were across the ocean and coming into the daylight side again. Harry pushed the last forkful of beef aside and said, with genuine interest, "Markie, do you see what's out there?'

Of course I did, in a literal sense. What I didn't see was why the spectacle of the sun appearing before us was worth commenting on. "It's a sunrise, Markie!" he said. "It's the first one I've seen in forever. Can't you see how beautiful it is?"

The truth was that I couldn't. I have no systems for the recognition of visual beauty unless it relates to the presentation of food. I could easily identify all the colors involved, which ranged from the pale pink of sweetbreads before they are poached to the deep crimson of a boiled lobster shell, but those were nothing more than the natural frequencies of visible light that has been refracted through water droplets of the appropriate sizes, in the appropriate position relative to the sun. What was special enough about that to make Harry ignore his food I could not say.

Then he made a noise I had never heard from him before. He jumped to his feet, knocking his table over and spilling everything on the floor. He was pointing toward the horizon with the hand that held a fork. He cried, "Look there! It's where we lived, Markie! Come on, I'm going down to take a look."

I automatically erased the mess he had made as I saw what he was looking at. To be honest, the prospect did not excite me nearly as much as it did Harry, but as he was projecting himself to the surface I followed.

I would have identified the place at once, without any help from Harry, because as soon as we were down I could see the hulk of an old, abandoned lander from a Five resting at the edge of a swamp. The wreck was almost overgrown by rushes, but it definitely was nothing that had grown there naturally. The ground rose steeply away from the marshland to a group of rocky hills, and Harry pointed out a ledge with an opening below it: "That's where we mostly lived! That cave! And look over there— that's the blind we made to catch bugs in the cold weather." He was pointing to what was left of a sort of tepee of rushes, just where the muddy swamp margin began to turn into dark, sludgy open water. "We'd climb into the blind just before daylight," he was telling me excitedly. "Then when the bugs came out to feed we'd jump them. Had to have the blind, though. They were pretty antsy. If we tried to come at them from the shore they'd be gone before we were within five meters of them. And all up along the hillside—see?—are the trees with the leaves we could eat. And you can't see them from here, but under the tree branches there were things like mushrooms, and—"

And so on and on.

I am not lacking in friendship for Harry. It is part of my programming to be obliging, when feasible, to persons, machine-stored or otherwise. So I allow Harry to use up much of my time and even some of my skills without complaint. But our spacecraft was orbiting more than three degrees of longitude every minute. True, a minute is a very long time to us, but there was also very much to investigate in an entire planet. Harry didn't want to leave. "We could land, Markie," he said. "Why not? Hey, be reasonable, okay? We can check the rest of this Arabella dump out any time, for God's sake!"

I didn't say anything to that. I just didn't do anything, and since I was the one with the override for the lander I just kept on in orbit, while Harry sulked.

Maybe he would have kept on sulking for all those interminable six thousand seconds that a single orbit would take, except that then we did see something down in a valley that didn't belong there.

More than anything else, it looked like some crumbling old castle out of Earth's organic history, big enough for a Caesar, surrounded by gardens grandiose enough for a French king, next to a patch of greenery, perfectly round, not much more than a kilometer across. And in the middle of it was a perfectly round pond.

My first thought was that maybe the Kugels hadn't destroyed every trace of that old culture they had killed off. It only took a moment for me to see that that couldn't have been the way it was.

It was a castle, all right, and it wasn't old at all. It just looked that way. Then it showed us pretty conclusively that it was quite up to date in important ways. A pair of what had looked like fruit trellises pulled back from where they had seemed to grow right out of the roof. They hadn't. When they moved away, they revealed shiny metallic things that were definitely not a bit old. Even more definitely, they were traversing toward our orbiting lander. Most definitely of all, they were particle-beam weapons very like the ones that Thor Hammerhurler kept poised for any possible problem with the Kugelblitz.

VI

There are times when being a machine intelligence is of great value. This was one of them. While the deadly barrels crept around to point at us we had plenty of time to analyze the problem, consider alternatives and—oh, in as many as 210 or 225 milliseconds, perhaps even a few more—decide what to do about it.

It wasn't just the two of us discussing the matter. The Kugel showed himself, in his crazy-quilt melange of features, almost at once—just about the time Harry had yelped, "Get us the hell away from here!"

Whether the Kugel heard what Harry said or not I don't know. He certainly didn't respond to it. What he said, almost shaking with some emotion I could not recognize, was, "It is an obscenity! This place was thoroughly sterilized! We are greatly displeased that it is populated once more!"

I did a double take, struck by the queerness of the fact that that travesty of a person was actually displaying feelings. Then enlightenment dawned.

"This is it, isn't it?" I cried. "This is why you wanted to come here, because somehow or other you found out there was someone alive on the planet?"

I thought for a moment he was actually going to answer that, because there was a perceptible hesitation before the image of the Kugels slowly broke up into a shimmer of dots of light and was gone. That didn't matter. I knew I was right, and so did Harry.

It worried him, too. "What's he talking about, Markie?" he demanded. "You don't think he's planning to do some more sterilizing on those guys, do you?"

"I hope not," I said. "Maybe he can't. When the Kugels were killing everybody off, it took the whole bunch of them, not just a little clump like we've got here."

Harry pondered over that. "So how did they do it, when they were doing it?"

Well, now, that was a good question. It might even have been the question we'd been sent here to answer. "Let's ask," I said, and said to the air, "Kugel? Can you tell us how your people sterilized this planet?"

I didn't think he was going to answer at first. Then slowly the figure coalesced. "We were displeased by chemical creatures which seemed to show intelligent behavior, so we took action," he said.

"Right, Kugel," I said, trying to be patient. "What was that action, exactly?"

"We caused their chemical functions to terminate," he said. As though that meant anything. "We deactivated every matter-based creature that was larger than—" he hesitated—"your pedal extremity."

"And how did you do that, exactly?" Harry put in.

Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe the Kugels would have answered the question if I had been the one to ask it. I hadn't, though. He didn't disappear, he just froze. By which I mean froze, without any motion at all.

Harry tried waving a hand in front of the creature's face, without response. "Shit," he said in disgust. "They're just goddam rude, don't you think?"

"I do think that, Harry," I said. "But perhaps we should consider our present situation." Because nearly a hundred of our milliseconds had gone by, and those ugly weapon snouts were getting closer and closer to our line of fire.

Recalled to the realities of the case, Harry swallowed. "Maybe we should go," he said nervously.

"Maybe," I agreed, "but first I want to see what there is here." What I was looking for was the human beings that occupied the castle. I was using infrared to pick up body heat, if any....

And then, for a moment, I thought I had found them. In a little meadow next to the pond some scruffy people were disconsolately feeding from a clump of berry bushes.

I said "people." That's an exaggeration. They were biped, yes. Maybe they were even primate. But people they were not. At magnification they turned out to be hairier and nakeder and a lot more stupid-looking than any organic human in my experience had ever been. Whatever they were, they were definitely not the builders of this castle.

Harry looked at the scene; looked at me, looked at the Kugel. He got no clue from the Kugel, who stood still in a sense never applicable to any organic being: still was still for the Kugels simulation, with no motion at all of any kind. Harry retreated to me. "Maybe we should get closer," he volunteered.

I pointed out the flaw in his argument. "They'll blow us up."

"Oh," he said, squinting down at the weapons that still were tracking toward us. He then had an alternate suggestion. "Let's get the hell out of here, okay?"

I wasn't quite ready to do that, especially since we had a number of milliseconds before the weapons' tracking could complete. Harry and I debated a variety of possibilities. For example, ducking back into stellar orbit and calling home for guidance. Or landing somewhere out of sight of the castle and, somehow, sneaking up on it on the surface. Or even calling the whole thing off and heading back to the Wheel.

Actually, though, it was Kugel who made the best suggestion. He had been frozen silent and motionless while Harry and I talked, but then the components of face, limb and body rearranged themselves in slightly different configurations. "You are aware," he said in that hollow, unpleasant voice, "that the organics are mostly underground?"

"Underground?" I said, and he shifted position to gaze into my eyes with his own empty ones.

"In tunnels," he said. "Left by the Heechee, perhaps." Well, I hadn't been aware of that, but as soon as he said it it sounded plausible. I didn't comment, though, and so then he asked a question.

"Are these technologies familiar to you?" he asked. "That is, are they largely electromagnetic in nature?"

I assumed he was talking about the weapons, since that was all the technology I could see. "Pretty much, I guess. Why do you ask?"

"We have two alternate proposals for your consideration. Number One: If you wish we will volatilize these weapons, thus rendering them harmless."

I blinked at him. "Volatilize? How would you do that?"

"It would merely require opening a femtowidth slit in our containment for a femtosecond period of time, thus directing some of our components at the weapons. We calculate the drain on our mass would be negligible? no more than some seventeenths-to-the-eleventh power of our constituents. Of course," it added, "it would be necessary to devote some of the beam to opening a channel through the wall of the ship itself, with consequent cosmetic damage and loss of volatiles."

I had had no idea the Kugel could do anything of the sort. Neither had Harry, whose jaw had dropped. "Hell with the volatiles!' he began, but I had already made a decision on that.

"No, Kugel. We don't want to do them any physical damage unless we have to. There are organics down there—" knowing perfectly well that he wouldn't see that as an objection to the plan, in fact more likely the opposite. But I hoped he would take my veto as binding, and he did.

"Number Two: Since the nature of your own technology is electromagnetic as well, might this structure's systems not be compatible enough for you to penetrate them?"

He seemed to think that that was all he needed to say. It wasn't. "So what should we do?" I asked.

His odd assemblage of features didn't really deserve to be called a face, but it managed to express a little disappointment at my slowness. "First, pour yourselves into a thin data store. Second, transmit yourselves to their systems. Third, complete your reconnaissance. Fourth, return here for consideration of next step."

"Oh," said Harry, bobbing his head. "Hey, Markie, that might work, right? Worth a try, don't you think?"

"What I think," I said, glancing down at the surface scan, "is that that first weapons barrel is about one arc-second from alignment on us, and the other one is close behind. What's going to happen to our ship while we're fooling around down there?"

"But that is not a problem," said Kugel. "We will deal with it. We will retreat in/or/to the supraluminal spacecraft and remain out of range for a time. At arbitrary times, but not more than intervals of a few seconds, we will return, then to listen for messages, or else to accept your return from target place. We will not, however, remain within range long enough for the weaponry to threaten us."

Harry turned and gave me one of his most scathing looks. "So that's what we do then, isn't it? What's the matter with you, Markie? Why didn't you think of that for yourself?"

I didn't answer that directly. I just said, "Let's do it. Reformat yourself while I locate a target."

I had a good answer, I just didn't want to tell him what it was. The reason was simply that the Kugels had handed me another total surprise. I hadn't had any idea that they were capable of using our servomodules to operate the ship.

There were some flower-shaped things on the roofs of the castle that I thought might be signal or search antennae. We hurled ourselves down at the best-looking of them, and that's what it was—fortunately, because if it had been a rain collector or a lightning rod instead we would then have had the problem of somehow insinuating ourselves in the computer's electronics from outside.

But we didn't have to do that. We were there on the first try. And to prove it, a voice, harsh and loud, rang out to greet us: "You two! Hold it right there! Display yourselves at once!"

It wasn't an organic person speaking, of course. It was a guardmind, an AI like myself, but when he muscled himself right into our surround he displayed himself as much like an organic as he could—as an Old West sheriff, complete with six-shooter, ten-gallon hat and boots with spurs that had never touched the hide of a horse. It is my experience that the more trivial an AI's system, the more elaborate its simulations are likely to be.

However, I am courteous whenever possible. It was his house. So we made ourselves visible, me in my white toque and apron, Harry in his customary flashy sportswear. "Don't move,' the guardmind ordered, hand on the butt of its gun. We didn't, having no particular reason to, but the guardmind's tone was a lot more belligerent than its status entitled it to be. I could see at once that its programs were far less powerful than my own, or even Harry's. However, out of politeness we stayed fixed in our tracks.

The longer we stood there, the less confident the guardmind appeared. "It was not known that you were to come here," it said worriedly, looking us up and down.

"It wasn't known that you were, either," Harry said, aggrieved—and, being less inclined to politeness than I am, added: "Markie, why don't you just make this clown go away?"

I shook my head. I could easily have neutralized it, as it was clearly in the process, of beginning to realize for itself. I didn't want to make unnecessary trouble. I said, as mildly as I could, "Please forgive us if we frightened you. As we were passing by in our spacecraft we observed your installation and decided to pay you a friendly call. We do wish to be friendly. We would not dream of doing any harm here—unless," I added, smiling to show how remote the possibility was, "we were forced to protect ourselves."

By then the guardmind had had a chance to realize what he was up against. "I ask you to wait one moment," it said, the voice suddenly stilted and mechanical—because, I knew, it was simultaneously conferring with some program higher in authority.

Actually it didn't make us wait long at all—a few microseconds, barely enough for me to summon up a bowl of oyster stew and a green salad for Harry. Then it coughed and said apologetically, "Follow me, please. The secretary to the Owner will see you now."

We followed. I didn't even bother to cancel Harry's dirty dishes—they could do their own housekeeping as far as I was concerned. The guardmind wasn't being particularly friendly to us, either. He didn't pause to see if we were keeping up, just bustled ahead without a rearward glance, toward he did not say what.

Traveling through eigenspace is exactly as hard—or as easy—as the surround controller likes to make it. This particular guardmind chose to make it tedious. We followed it through featureless corridors, a lot more of them than any reasonable AI would need to get from point to point. I think it was trying to get us lost. But the trip finally came to an end. Without warning the end of the passage widened and let us into what looked like some tycoon's high-rent office. The carpets were thick, there was a mahogany-looking desk that bore a sign that said "Ms. Roz Borraly" and there were "windows" that looked—or "looked"—out on the waters of a bright blue (simulated) bay with perky little sailboats, under an equally fictitious blue sky. The person behind the desk was an equally improbably beautiful human female, hair golden, teeth perfect, breasts big, who didn't bother to welcome us but said simply: "Do either of you know how to explode a star?"

It was not a question I had expected to be asked. What I did know I was not prepared to share with her. I felt no obligation to be forthcoming, either, so I simply said, "No," while Harry asked, "What the hell is she talking about?"

She looked disappointed, then thoughtful. "So then who are you?" she demanded.

I gave her the same story I had given the guardmind, and added, "We were curious about some sort of people we saw on your roof."

She thought that over for a bit, and then gave us a smile—not the kind of smile that means, "I'm a friendly person," but the kind that means, "I want you to think I am." She even chuckled a little. "I suppose you were," she said. "Disgusting, aren't they? They're the Owner's pet hominids, what they call australopithecines. They're a family. There's a mommy, a daddy and a little boy—although Gadget isn't so little anymore, and I think he's trying to get it on with his mom."

She thought a moment longer. Then she told us, "You may know that the Owner has been seriously and unforgivably harmed in the past. He has a just resentment against the Gateway Corp. and all its instruments—which are just about everybody." She looked us up and down. Then she said, "However, the Owner is a kind and generous person. He may be willing to grant you an interview. If he does, you should be aware that the Owner is the seventh richest human being in the galaxy, and is powerful in many other ways, so if you are given this courtesy do not offend him. Be polite. Be brief, and do nothing to startle him. Is all of that understood?"

"Absolutely," I said.

She nodded. "Very well then. You must be patient. It will take a number of seconds for me to get instructions from the Owner as he is organic."

By organic timekeeping we weren't made to wait for very long. Far less than a minute, or, in our time, several eternities. I had no real trouble with that. I have often had to wait much longer while some dithering organic tries to make up her mind between the gazpacho and the clear oxtail soup. Practice makes perfect.

Harry, however, is a different story. As a former organic himself, he gets fidgety, so I returned to my usual solution for that problem. "Hungry?" I asked him, confident that he was because it had been the better part of a second since the last time I fed him. "How about a couple of pork chops, big thick ones, burned black the way you like them?"

But he was already shaking his head eagerly. "I could eat all right, Markie, but those aren't exactly what I want right now. You know what I've been thinking about? That Greek lemon soup, you know? With egg? And then for a main course, um, let me see"—he thoughtfully patted his pursed lips for a moment—"oh, yeah! I know! A great big torn turkey, like at Thanksgiving, with chestnut stuffing and—no, wait a minute—half chestnut and half oyster ... and then, well, you know, the usual, pumpkin pie or something. And pickles and olives ... and listen, Markie, hurry it up as much as you can, because I'm getting pretty hungry!"

Well, I did as he asked. Almost, anyway. The part I didn't do was hurry it up.

I could have done that easily enough. I could have simulated the whole six or seven courses at once, plus wine and coffee and a little bit of sorbet to clean the palate now and then, and maybe some dessert chocolates or mints. There was no point to it, though. Harry can eat an amazing amount of food in hardly any time at all—it all being simulation, of course—and then come back for more hardly any time later. It's his favorite recreation. But he enjoys looking forward to it while it's being prepared almost as much, and it keeps him quieter because he doesn't want to disturb me in my work.

So I did it the slow way, from scratch. I simulated every last bit of the menu being made. I carved the simulated meat out of a nonexistent pumpkin for the pie and pretend-boiled a batch of imaginary chestnuts for the dressing. I simulated a six-kilogram turkey, complete with feathers and internal organs and all to make it interesting. The turkey was a Narragansett, of course; in his time with me Harry has learned to despise those giant-breasted but totally tasteless twentieth-century birds. So I had to amputate the legs to braise them in chicken stock first; Narragansetts actually use their legs to walk around on, so they can turn out a little tough if you don't do that. Then I plucked and cleaned the bird and set the giblets to cooking for gravy. And on and on.

And, since that took hardly any of my capacity, I was using some of the rest for my own purposes.

The first thing I wanted to do was to test this system's capabilities.

They didn't seem particularly strong. The guardmind was pretty oblivious to anything I did. The secretary not so much so, but no real threat. When I slipped away I left behind the simulacrum of myself busily cooking Harry's dinner, and she never even glanced up.

That did not mean that there were not more capable programs somewhere in the system. Accordingly, I proceeded slowly, my primary aim being merely to map out the physical metrics of the installation. Nothing interfered, and there were no surprises.

Ground truth confirmed the Kugel's statement that these were some old Heechee tunnels. With the exception of one particularly large chamber none of the rooms appeared to contain any living organic persons. Most of the rooms seemed hardly even furnished. Evidently the Owner didn't go in much for entertaining guests.

I had identified all the castle's weaponry and charted, but did not approach, the main AI centers when the secretary called, "Stovemind?" I was back within my simulacrum before she got the next words of her instructions out, while Harry was still chewing on his turkey drumstick. "Remembering all the cautions you have been given," she said, "you will display yourself to the Owner at once."

She didn't tell us how to get to where this Owner was, although I had expected she would and was preparing to match her directions against the passages I had mapped out. She did it the quick and dirty way. She just disappeared. She took all her surround with her, and we were suddenly in another one entirely.

This time not a simulated one.

We were in the large organic-occupied chamber I had identified. In optical observation it resembled nothing so much as a tsar's throne room, or a high-end Las Vegas hotel suite. Apart from a number of simulations there were four or five female persons lounging about, each one of them very nearly as spectacular looking as the simulation that had sent us here. These were not simulations, however. They were organic. So was the room's one male occupant, a sallow-skinned man who was boredly picking through a tray of chocolates as he looked up at us. I knew at once that he was the Owner.

That was not all I knew, though. I recognized him as soon as I saw his face. He was indeed one of the richest human beings in the entire galaxy, and his name was Juan Enrique Santos-Smith. Or, for short, Wan.

VII

A master chef does not merely cook palatable meals, he cooks them for what sometimes are very unusual clients. In my professional capacity I had been expected to deal with whatever VIPs might turn up on the Wheel. For that reason I had been given a recognition library of some two hundred thousand of the most important human beings in the Galaxy. That was so that I could not only feed them well but greet them by name and even ask after the health of their families, if they had any.

The Owner was definitely on that list. I was aware that this Wan was the offspring of two old Gateway prospectors whose ships had unerringly taken them to an ancient Heechee artifact and left them there. That, as you might say, had been both good luck and bad. The bad luck was that they were even worse off than Harry had been in his own marooning on Arabella. Wan's parents never got rescued from their artifact. They died there. The good luck was that the artifact they died on was nothing less than a giant, sophisticated Heechee spacecraft of a type no human had previously seen, and it was crammed full of all sorts of technology of great worth to human beings.

For Wan, the important thing was that when at last humans did get to the spacecraft, the Gateway rules of discovery applied. Wan, the son and thus the only heir of those lost and nameless prospectors, owned every bit of it. Which made him just about unbelievably rich.

That explained several things. For one, it explained how Wan, who had to be reaching a pretty significant age, managed to look reasonably spry; organics medicine could do wonders for those who could pay the bill. For another, it explained how he had been able to afford constructing this retreat. He could have built a dozen like it, and still have enough money left over to, if he chose, fly them to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.

With all that money, Wan wasn't going to limit himself to a retinue of only a handful of attendants, however gorgeous. There were at least a dozen other persons in the room, though these were all AI simulations rather than organics. A couple were half-heartedly playing chess, a group sat around a card table, others were in conversations here and there around the room. All of them wore unusual outfits. There was a man in a clown suit with a red putty nose, another in the white coat, stethoscope and scrubs of a physician, a couple of women with pencils stuck behind their ears and carrying the ruled notebooks of an old-time stenographer. Whatever they had been doing, they all stopped doing it to turn and stare at Harry and me.

The Owner stared like the others, while chewing on whatever it was he had in his mouth. Then he swallowed and said, sounding as surly as he looked: "I didn't invite you two here. Can either of you give me any reason for letting you stay?"

I spoke right up. "My name is Marc Antony and I am one of the finest professional chefs in the galaxy. I can prepare, excellently, any dish you choose, from whatever cuisine you like, including—" and I rattled off a list of the most interesting cuisines from most of the great cultures in human history—

Well, no, that's not exactly true.

It was a mere simulation of me that did all that. I wasn't exactly there anymore.

I didn't see any reason to stay in Wan's throne room simply to rattle off lists, or, for that matter, to listen to Wan's interminable eight- or nine-second tactless substitute for a civilized greeting. I simply provided my simulation with instructions as to which expressions to display and what things to say.

Of course, there was a slight risk there. Something might have gone wrong, but I provided for that. I came back every twenty or thirty milliseconds to check on how things were going and revise my instructions to the simulation when necessary.

I needed a little personal time to conduct a more detailed exploration of Wan's little kingdom.

I had all the time in the world to do that. The Owner let my simulation talk on for more than eighteen seconds before he interrupted. That, plus his original greeting, gave me more than twenty-seven seconds of organics time to explore. If you want to know what a competent AI can do in twenty-seven organics seconds, the answer is, "Anything he wants to."

I used the first couple thousandths of those many seconds to set up fire-alarm bars, making sure that none of Wan's AIs would interfere with my investigations. That was easy. Then, as I allowed myself a more leisurely examination of Wan and his realm, the picture began to emerge.

I have never been a young organic male. Nevertheless I have fed enough of them, and listened to enough of their chatter, to know what sort of thing they would like. They would like high ivied towers, and Olympic-sized swimming pools, and game rooms of all kinds by the dozen. They would like military statuary and obscene statuary; they would like weapons of all kinds and target ranges to fire them on. In particular they would like exactly what I saw before me in Wan's chamber... especially when you added in the clutch of four young, good-looking and minimally clad organic females who were sharing the throne room.

Though Wan was not a boy anymore, not by several organic generations, a part of him had never grown up. I could almost have felt sorry for him, if it were not for the other playthings I had discovered. Those were much more numerous, and much worse.

Every one of the hills around the castle was honeycombed with tunnels, Heechee legacies from the time before they went and hid in the Core. All of those underground spaces were packed with the machineries of murder. There were bombs and missiles, shells and mines, bioweapons and chemical, plus rank on rank of the small, unmanned spacecraft that could deliver any of these death-wielders wherever Wan might choose.

It was not a boy who had stocked his fiefdom with these things. It was a fully functional, adult organic human male—and, I was pretty sure, an insane one.

When I came back to the throne room on my next check visit, Harry was there. He had been exploring in the same way as I and was anxious to compare notes. By the time Wan the Owner had begun the first "Wwwwwhhhh—" of his first interruption (it would eventually turn out to be "Where did you learn all this?"), Harry was excitedly spilling his news. He had discovered something I had missed entirely.

Harry had found a girl—young, good-looking and human, though not presently organic. She was machine-stored like Harry himself. "Her name's Allison," he told me eagerly, "and I think she likes me!" He thought for a second and then added, "She definitely doesn't like this Wan, anyway. She says he'd cut your throat as soon as look at you."

"We don't actually have throats," I reminded him. Wan was finally embarking on the "errrrre" of his first word, while the young organic women had yet to move off their hassocks.

"But if we did, I mean. Anyhow, it isn't just us he could kill. Allison says she's positive he's gonna blow up some planet or other one of these days."

That accounted for the stock of weaponry. And it made me think seriously about what I had to do next.

You see, my status as an adjunct peacekeeper for Thor Hammerhurler wasn't entirely honorary. If, worst-case scenario, a firefight with the Kugels had ever broken out, I would at once have become a big part of Thor's strike force. Preserving the peace was a big part of my job description, here as well as on the Wheel.

Therefore, if this rogue organic male was collecting these nasty gadgets for any practical purpose, something had to be done about it. And the only one around to do it was me.

The best available source of information had to be this machine-stored Allison that Harry had found. When I got to the place she was occupying she was sitting at an antique little piano, expecting me to arrive, and posed to make an impression on me when I did.

Allison might be no more than a congeries of charged particles, like myself, but she didn't let that keep her from making things nice. I could see that right away. I don't know a great deal about the ways of young human females, but I did not fail to observe the pastel-flowered throw pillows on the chintz-covered couch and the huge stuffed panda on her pink-canopied bed. Pictures on the wall (pretty flower arrangements or lithe, limber ballerinas), plates of fruit on the tables, music playing softly in the distance—it was exactly the man-trap that any young, organic, single female might create for asking dates in for a nightcap.

I let her make a social occasion of it; allowed her to seat me on the couch and politely waved off the tray of figs and nuts she offered me— imagine someone else offering food to me! And began to ask her questions.

What I wanted from Allison was for her to tell me everything she knew about Wan. She was willing enough to do that, but what she wanted first was to tell me about herself. I did a quick flash to my simulation to make sure there wasn't any problem that might require my actual presence. There wasn't. Wan was just reaching the "ih" in "did," so I let her talk as she wanted.

When she first met Wan, Allison told me, she was a broken-down ballet dancer. She had signed up as a Gateway prospector when she could no longer face three hours on the barre every morning. Though she didn't express it that way, she had wound up as a barfly on Peggys Planet. "So then this weird guy, Wan, showed up at the joint. I think he was laying low because he'd been getting into some kinds of trouble that even his money couldn't cover up right away. Listen, could I offer you a drink? Some coffee? Anything?" she offered, a little wistfully; I don't think she'd had that many visitors to practice her hospitality on.

"Thank you, no," I said, although it was still tempting to have someone else offer to provide refreshments for me. "What kind of trouble are we talking about?"

She shrugged. "I only heard about it later, but, like, one thing, it seems Wan somehow got the idea he owned the Old Ones, so he kidnapped a batch from their reserve in Kenya. There was law trouble about that. Some of the stuff he has here he didn't get exactly legally, too. And there was a lot of other stuff, too, but I don't know much about the details. Then he happened to show up on Peggys Planet, where I was stuck, and that's where he met me." She paused, looking at me in a way that I hadn't expected. "Marc, huh?" she said. "Nice name. Nice looking man, actually. Mind if I ask you something?' I nodded permission. "What would you look like if you hadn't, you know, sort of polished up the image?"

I hadn't expected that question, either, though I knew that the appearance I had assumed was modeled after some reasonably successful vid personages. I decided to be honest with her. "I wouldn't look like anything at all, Allison. I was never organic."

She made a sour face at that, then sighed and said, "Oh, well. So, as I was saying, there I was on Peggys Planet. I'd never had much luck. Not even as a Gateway prospector; Out three times, and not a single winner. That third trip was the worst, too, because it was the one that took me to Peggys Planet, which naturally had been discovered four or five times already and had a whole active colony going. So I just decided to stay there, and—"

Even by microseconds, she was getting tedious. I said, "Wan, Allison. You were telling me about him."

"I am telling you. I was hanging around bars on Peggys Planet, trying to scrounge up enough money for a Here After—you know, there's this chain of Here After shops that'll machine-store you if you have the price? Only if you're Wan you don't need the shops because you've got all that kind of equipment standing by, and Doctor Death is right by your side to use them all the time. Along with his court jester and his lawyers and secretaries and—"

I had a good deal of time, but not an eternity of it. I raised a hand. "Please, Allison."

She collected herself. "Yes. Sorry. Well, Wan was hanging around some of the same bars as I was. He bought me drinks. He thought it was funny that I'd been a ballet dancer, because I admit by then I didn't look like your grand prima ballerina assai anymore, but he liked to listen to me talk. Especially when I talked about how the girls in the troupe all had boyfriends, and what kinds of things you could do with your legs after ten years working at the barre—you know, the kind of barre you exercise at when you're a dancer, not the kind I was hanging around in. And anyway—" She shrugged. "Here I am."

She seemed to have left something out. "You mean Wan took you away from Peggys Planet?"

She shook her head. "Aw, no. Not then. He just went off, I think with some other woman, and I kind of forgot he existed. Then, six or eight months later, just when I was really hitting bottom, along comes this guy from some lawyer's office, and he tells me Wan's willing to pay for the makeover at Here After if then I'll come out to his place and teach some friends of his how to be ballet dancers." She giggled. "I guess you've seen the friends. They're girls he picked up here and there, and I guess they have a lot of talents, but dancing isn't one of them. Well, except maybe Liz. I kind of owe her, I guess."

She was waiting for me to ask her what for, so I did.

"It's kind of a long story," she said—as though there had been any brevity before that. "Wan was always scared sick of dying, you know. So he kept the whole Here After machine-storage stuff with him, with Liz trained to run it. Only he didn't die. I did, and Liz stored me."

"Liz?" I said, to keep her going.

"Elizaveta. Doctor Death, we called her. The Russian bimbo that's up there with Wan. You can recognize her because, A, she's not all that good-looking, compared to the rest of us, and, B, she's always looking worried because she's still organic and she's scared of getting pregnant." She bobbed her head to confirm what she'd just told me. Then she said, "Anyway, after I got the hang of stored activity I figured out how to simulate a whole ballet company, and he watches them sometimes—not in Giselle or The Nutcracker, you know, but special performances that I make up for him myself." She winked at me, and then asked, "You sure you wouldn't like a drink or something?"

"Thanks," I said, shaking my head. I was getting impatient with this woman, so I decided to cut this interview short. "Let me ask you a couple of questions. The Owner's secretary asked us if we knew how to make a star explode. Do you know why he wants to know that?"

She looked puzzled. "Oh, wait a minute. He said once that he wished he could do that. Maybe could, if he could find some old Heechee thing somewhere that could make it happen. Could that have anything to do with it?"

That was surprising for two reasons. Apparently Wan was getting close to something the old Heechee, Thermocline, had once hinted at. I needed to discuss this with Thor Hammerhurler. Meanwhile I needed more information, but this woman was not the source to ask. "One more thing, then. Do you have any idea why Wan has all these weapons?"

She shrugged. "Because he wants to kill some people. That's what those things are for, right? He'll do it soon's he works his nerve up to it, I guess. Which won't be like today; he's not real brave. He's sure good at hating, though."

"Do you know who it is he hates?"

"Well," she said thoughtfully, "pretty much everybody. But especially Robinette Broadhead—you know who that is? Well, of course you do. And some women. Quite a lot of women, I think. He's not so good at being in a relationship, and when they end he blames the women, a lot, and most of all he hates the Heechee. He hates every last one of them, the whole race. But he's a good hater, and he probably hates dozens of people I never even heard of.... Listen, you sure about that drink?"

"I'm sure, Allison."

"Because," she said, getting up and moving closer to me, "you don't have to be in a hurry, you know. I don't get that much company these days."

At this point I must confess to something that, in an organic, I would have to call embarrassment. You see, I understood what Allison was saying, not just the expressed words but including the subtext. What she was offering was to have sexual intercourse with me.

Sexual intercourse is not an activity AIs like myself have had much experience in—no, not just not much experience, none at all. It isn't part of our programming.

But that doesn't mean we can't do it. Even me, if I had chosen. I am, I remind you, one of the most powerful AIs ever constructed. It would have been possible for me to simulate everything necessary to engage in such an entertainment.

I can't say whether or not I would actually have done it. Certainly any new experience is interesting, and I enjoy having them. I did go so far as to make a quick trip back to the throne room just to see how things were going, in case I wanted to take a little extra time with Allison.

But things weren't going that well.

The conversation I had left in progress had stopped. Wan's gatekeeper-secretary female had assumed a visible shape and she was whispering in his ear, and his expression was on the verge of something between anger and worriment.

I returned to Allison's chamber at once. "Sorry," I said, as politely as I could. "I really should be getting back. But there's one thing that puzzles me, though. I wouldn't have thought Wan was the ballet type. Why do you suppose he wanted to go to the trouble of bringing you here?"

"That's easy," she said, looking regretful as I went through the motions of simulating standing up and getting ready to leave. "He asked me why ballet was worth watching. I told him because it was a lot of pretty girls in not much clothes bending their bodies into all kinds of peculiar positions."

The Owner's expression hadn't changed. Even the pursed lips of the woman whispering in his ear had not yet slackened—earning my sympathy, because I knew what it was like for an AI to have to slow down speech for an organic listener. The whole throne room was exactly as I had left it a moment before. In the corridor outside, however, there was something new: Harry himself, no longer in the throne room and looking very uneasy as he stood in the grip of two larger-than-life security guards wearing the livery of the Owner.

They wore pretty fierce expressions, too, but neither their size nor the threatening look on their faces bothered me. When you're only a simulation to begin with you can be any size you like; what matters is the power of your programming, and, as I have mentioned, mine was powerful enough to make me a useful ally of Thor Hammerhurler. I subsumed the space around the two guards and contracted myself around them. When they were squeezed sufficiently small to be insignificant I gave them their orders. "Leave him alone. Go away," I commanded. Having no choice, they did.

Harry rubbed his arms just as though the grip of the guards had caused him actual physical pain. "What took you so long, Markie?" he demanded. "Things were going all right, and then all of a sudden those apes grabbed me and dragged me out here, I dunno why."

"Because they found out what we've been doing. Come on. We're going back to the ship."

VIII

We stopped to pick up Allison, because Harry begged. There weren't any problems. Scurry through the castle's communication channels until we found an antenna. Locate our spacecraft in the sky. Launch ourselves toward it—we were in our ship, and well beyond the reach of any forces Wan could summon, long before Wan had time to act.

The first thing I did was call, "Kugel! Come out. We need to talk." For a moment I thought he wasn't going to choose to respond, but then that patchwork of spots and colors began to form, greatly startling Allison. "Jesus H. Kee-rist," she yelped. "What the hell is that?"

"Relax," I told her. "He's a friend"—quite untruthfully, of course, but all I wanted was for her to shut up and stay out of the way. Then I told the Kugel about Wan's armaments and intentions, finishing, "So we need to keep him from causing trouble. We could request help from the authorities—"

"Hell we could," Harry interrupted. "Nobody would get here for days and by then he could launch all those ships, armed and on their way, and—"

"So," I finished for him, "that's not a viable option. We'll have to take action ourselves. Neither Harry nor I have that capability. Do you?"

The figure's components stirred. "It is known that we have," it pointed out. "We have already sterilized this object once, can do so again: A simple flip of its magnetic field, thus canceling its radiation-opaque atmospheric layer and thus allowing lethal radiation to reach the organisms on the object—"

Allison had been listening, her mouth hanging open. Now she used it to yell at the Kugel. "Hold it right there, buster! You're not doing any of that! You're talking about murdering Rose and Liz and Jilly and Jean, not even counting the Old Ones and—"

I gave her the kind of semi-lethal stare that I had learned for my deputy war-wager role. It worked. She shut up, and I told the Kugel: "That is unacceptable. We are not authorized to destroy living persons."

It hung silent for a moment, as though trying to come to terms with this unexpected new concept. Then it said, "There is another difficulty with our first proposal. Our numbers in the present locale are not sufficient for that task. Summoning others would require time of same order as requesting reinforcements."

I nodded. "So let's go back to your first idea. Can you volatilize all Wan's weapons without causing any loss of life?"

"And hurry up about it," Harry put in. "He's still got those guns trying to line up on us, so we don't have all the time in the world to make up our minds."

Well, really we did. The Owner would be just about getting warnings from his guardminds—having just noticed that our simulations had broken up and disappeared. But I was impatient to get things settled. I addressed the Kugel again. "Can you do this?"

Another pause. Then, grudgingly, "There is no question. Can do so quite accurately."

"Then do so," I requested. "Destroy his weaponry. And while you're at it, better take out his spacecraft, too."

That was all it took. Kugel didn't answer in words, just shimmered, dissipated and was gone, back inside his pressure-cooker. We never saw him again.

We did see what he did.

I had not really formed any picture of what the Kugel's "volatilizing" would look like. So I wasn't quite ready when the process began.

You understand that I have no physical ears. So I heard nothing directly, but I felt the shocks, even at the very limits of the planet's atmosphere, when my acoustic sensors picked up fifty or sixty quick, stinging blasts of great magnitude. Harry felt the same shocks. He clapped his simulated hands to his simulated ears, quite uselessly, of course. "Hey, Markie!" he begged. "Make it stop!"

I couldn't do that. It didn't matter. The blasts had stopped already. What was left, I saw, was a blistered patch of infinitesimal liquid-metal bubbles on Kugel's containment shell. Another, similar pattern had erupted on the wall of our spacecraft, and I recognized them as the femto-scale emissions Kugel had promised. It occurred to me to be grateful that my hardware, and Harry's, hadn't been in the line of sight to Wan's palace; I doubt that Kugel would have bothered to miss them.

What was happening on the surface of Arabella was not femto-scale at all. Little white puffs began to appear here and there around the castle, then a couple of larger ones, then the mother of all blasts, not just smoke but pieces of structure, billowing flame. A big part of Wan's castle was in ruins, though not, I was pretty sure, the part I had left him in. I think one of Kugel's rounds had set off Wan's main ammunition dump. Its magnitude made me feel for the Old Ones, but Harry zeroed the optical sensors in on them and reported that they were cowering under the trees, but physically unharmed.

So that was that.

Then we began our vigil as we waited for other ships to come.

The thing was, we couldn't afford to let Wan's castle out of our sight. We didn't know what he might have hidden in some other tunnels. Maybe nothing, but we didn't want to take the chance. So we couldn't leave our spacecraft in a normal planetary orbit, because anything could happen when we were on Arabella's far side.

So we did it the hard way.

We allowed our ship to fall along its orbital trajectory until Wan's place was just about to drop below the horizon, then zapped ourselves, super-lightspeed, to where it had just come up on the other horizon....

And repeated that, over and over, until the other ships arrived. Which was 3.813 days later.

Would you like to know how many of those partial orbits make up 3.813 days? 83 of them. Totaling those 3.813 organic-time days. And would you like to know how long that is for a couple of people like Harry and me, used to operating on AI time?

Don't ask. You don't want to know. Just call it interminable.

But even the seemingly interminable does, sooner or later, terminate. Reinforcements arrived. We were relieved. We faced the equally interminable voyage home to the Wheel. But for that time we could at least turn ourselves off.

IX

When we got back to the Wheel, Thor Hammerhurler was fairly glad to see me, Marcus 2 wasn't and nobody else seemed to care much one way or the other. They were thrilled about what we'd done on Arabella, of course. They had Harry's organic-time simulation appearing on the p-vid over and over to be interviewed as the hero of the event, and Allison almost as often, playing the part as the escaped captive of the monster, Wan, who was planning to kill thousands of innocent organics until we superheroes arrived to thwart him.

I was not disturbed by this. Harry was a former organic, with vanity accordingly, and I was just a machine-made AI. You don't congratulate AIs if they do something that needs to be done. All you do is scrap them if they don't.

Marcus 2 showed no signs of wanting to share his work with me, in fact showed every sign of wishing I would go away—jealous that I had had all the adventures, I think. It was a very queer sensation. For the first time in my existence, I had nothing to do.

Except, of course, to see Thor Hammerhurler, so I went there.

I caught him at a bad time. He was in the middle of the daily check of all the weaponry on the Wheel, and, although all the checks were always go, he didn't like to be distracted. "Try me a little later," he said testily. "Maybe three or four seconds; I should have the results in by then."

"Sure, Thor," I said. "Sorry to bother you."

Which left me with all those seconds to fill and nothing much to fill them with. I didn't even want to practice cooking up some particularly tough dish, because I didn't want Marcus 2 to think I was competing with him. I didn't have Harry to feed, because Allison was more interesting to him than food just then. I wandered back to our ship where it was plugged into its dock—why, I'm not sure; I guess I thought maybe Kugel would be in a talkative mood. He wasn't, though. He wasn't there at all. Buck in the blitz, I supposed, because the pressure container that had held him was now open and empty.

The seconds did pass, and not just three or four of them; I didn't want Thor to think I was rushing him, so I waited a full six before I returned to his eigenspace.

The flashing lights were dark, the bells and klaxons were silent, and Thor was busy debriefing his Heechee advisor.

I knew that one. His name was Thermocline, a steady customer of mine—couscous, Greek lamb dishes and halvah at first, but then he became more daring, when his digestion would allow. That is to say, Thermocline was organic. That meant that when I said Thor was busy debriefing him I had overstated again. Thor had plenty of time to do other things as well.

What he was doing this time was huddling over a diagnostics screen that was taking in readings from the Kugelblitz. I didn't see him lift his head to glance at me, but he knew I was there all right. He took another few micros before he acknowledged my presence, though. Then he said, "So you screwed up and let him get away."

That was Thor for you, always getting right to the point, never mind whose feelings might be hurt. I stood my ground. "We don't know that. We found his body."

Thor growled, "After he didn't need it anymore. Didn't you talk to the four female organic humans he left behind? They said his 'Dr. Death' machine-stored him and they both took off in a message rocket."

I didn't answer that, since he was right. I had failed to consider the possibility that Wan had stored a torpedo ship on the other side of the mountains. In fact, he was sufficiently right that he didn't bother going on with it, but changed the subject. "Got any idea what you're going to do now?"

"Not really," I said. "Matter of fact, I wanted to talk to you about that."

He did look up at me that time, blinking as though surprised. "Me? Why me, Marc?" But he knew why him, all right. Thor is definitely the most powerful person I know, AI, stored or oganic, and I'm not talking about the firepower he can control. The Board listens when he speaks.

I said, "I thought you might have some ideas for me."

"Ideas?" He said it as though he'd never had an idea in his life, and didn't know how to go about having one. Then he said, "Well, I don't know. Maybe. I've been thinking I need a little more autonomous control for some of the more remote orbiting weapons. Think that might interest you?"

"Not," I said, "in the least." What he was talking about was about as challenging as operating a thermostat. "I want something that's worth doing, and is at least as interesting as my life was before I divided."

"And you want me to provide it for you?" He looked at me the way the five-star general he was choosing to be at that moment might look at some annoying buck private who didn't know he wasn't supposed to bother the great man. "Why should I, Marc?"

"No reason," I said. "I just thought you might. Oh, and by the way. Did you know that Wan Santos-Smith seems to know something about a star-disruptor?" That made him look at me with more interest, so while I had his attention I hit him with the other thing. I pointed at the Kugelblitz on his screen. "Do you know the Kugels can project themselves out of the blitz when they want to?"

He grunted. "Of course I know. Outside of the little clumps of them they use for spying, they can detach clusters of themselves into containment—what they did when they went with you to Arabella."

"Not into containment, Thor. Outside of the containment." And I told him about how Kugel had blasted Wan's armament. I didn't have to tell him how they could do the same with all of his. I didn't have to. When I left him he was busily reconfiguring his whole armament system.

But before I left he did a few things for me. Thor wasn't the easiest friend to have, but he always paid his debts.

So I've got a ship—Thor managed to get it lost from the register of vessels—and I'm on my way.

I wasn't sure it was what I wanted to do when Thor first brought it up, because that forty-thousand-to-one time dilation was a worrier. But Thor pointed out that that was a problem for organic humans, but not for us. I'm within a couple of orders of magnitude as much faster than organic humans as they are than the Core, and I can be in and out of it in a matter of seconds, ten minutes at the most if I want to hang around, and so when we come back no more than a few human-scale days will have passed.

I don't know what I'll find there, but it'll be interesting. Maybe my old friend Breeze? Maybe some new ones. I don't know, but I think I'll give it a try.