Vacumn Flowers

7

BILLY DEFECTOR

Rebel woke to an empty bed. She breakfasted and went in search of Wyeth. A pierrot directed her through a rock garden and around a kitchen, and a samurai sent her past the orgy pits and down a ramp. She came to a bottom ring room where three holographic wetware diagrams spun slowly in the air. Rebel saw that they were morphs of the same personality. Judging by the sickliness of the main branches and twisted distribution of the lesser limbs, it was a very badly damaged persona indeed.

The Comprise child sat beneath the rotating green spheres. He hadn’t slept. His face was puffy, his eyes glazed. His orange skin was blotchy with grey patches.

“What’s your name?” Wyeth asked. “Do you have a name?”

The boy shook his head. “I… uh, what?” Wyeth repeated the question, and without raising his eyes, the child said,

“B-Billy. Billy B-Be…” His voice stuttered to a halt.

Wyeth grinned and tugged the child’s braid. “We’ll call you Billy Defector, okay? Because you’ve come over to our side, you’re going to be human now. Would you like that?”

“He’s not going to thank you for doing this to him.”

“Shut up, Constance. Now, Billy, do you remember being a part of the Comprise? Do you remember what it was like?”

Billy’s head jerked up, eyes fearful. His hands twisted in his lap. Then he looked down again and mumbled, “I…

yes.”

“Good. Do you remember the briefing you got before coming here?” Billy said nothing. “Do you remember your instructions?”

Samurai parted for Rebel, and she slipped into the room. Her guard stayed outside. Freeboy glanced at her quickly from one corner, then away. His lips were thin, and he stared rigidly unblinking at Constance. Rebel walked over to him and whispered, “What happened to the kid’s face?”

“What? The blotches? We injected a phage under the skin to neutralize his dye; it takes a few days to flush it out of the system. Itches some, too. But since he’s not Comprise anymore, your boss doesn’t want him marked as one.”

“I thought your apple was supposed to deprogram itself.”

Freeboy curled his lip. Without looking at her he said pedantically, “For a normal psyche, a Billy Bejesus is a harmless, ego-intensive shyapple that leaves nothing behind but memories. But the Comprise have only embryonic egos—even the memory of having a strong personal identity is damaging to them. Changes the creatures drastically.”

“Shock imprint syndrome,” Rebel said, Eucrasia’s memories coming to her effortlessly. “Yes, of course.”

At the sound of her voice, Wyeth turned. “Sunshine!

Just the person I wanted to see. It seems you and I are the closest things to competent wetprogrammers we have.” He snapped open a thin white case and ran a finger down oneline of wetwafers. Hundreds of codified character traits, skills, compulsions and professions rippled under his touch. “I’d expected to just program up some experts. But it seems the regulations have changed in the last few years. Wetprogramming ware is very tightly controlled now. Beautiful, hey? None of the other professions are protected like that.”

Without any sense of transition, Rebel was at the case.

Her hands floated down over lines of joys, fears, sorrows, and ecstasies with unhesitating sureness, and teased out a manual skills program. It was for vacuum-casting ceramics as thin and delicate as soap bubbles. She slid it into an analyzer, tilting back her head to see its effect on the diagram overhead. The r-branch was straightened, but a self-destructive paradigm opened up near the midsection of the n-branch.

The rift was easily filled by altering the sensorium distribution and heightening religious susceptibility.

Rebel eased two more wafers into the analyzer, adjusted tone readings, and edited out a few irrelevancies. This strengthened the n-branch, but kinked the 1-branch at its first major split, so she replaced the ceramics wafer with a woodworking package. Little by little, the template began to shape up.

This was the great challenge, to find the health hidden within a damaged psyche and to assemble the programs that would restore it. She lost herself in the work. Some time later—minutes? hours?—she looked up again and found the interrogation was still going on. Not much progress had been made.

“Billy, do you remember being Earth? Do you remember what it was like?”

“It was like—” The child stopped and swallowed.

“Nothing happened. It was warm. No thoughts. Many thoughts. Nothing was real.”

“What kind of thoughts?”

Billy closed his eyes for a long moment. Then, in a rapid monotone, he said, “Rotate grating six raise two and rotate again reroute quote the Comprise agree in principle but with reservations unquote raise the vial of eagle’s blood reroute using Allen wrench adjust the potentiometer to the red mark reroute ship to Sanfrisco marked green code green reroute injecting kerosene between vascular stations seventeen and twelve reroute railroad bedding excavation—”

“Stop!”

Billy obeyed.

“What’s the problem?” Rebel asked.

Wyeth looked disgusted. “It’s all garbage. Bits and pieces jumbled together at random. I’m not going to learn anything from this child because he never knew anything.

He never thought a complete thought through in his life.

He just processed a constant flow of babble.”

Now Constance folded her arms, glaring at Wyeth. “He’s used to being a part of oceanic thought. You’ve ripped him out of his natural environment. Of course you can’t get any sense out of him… Look at him! He’s been damaged. Being remade in the mold of a human individual is a major devolutionary step for him.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, it is. God damn that superior smile, it is! This is the way that life evolves, from simple to complex. We’re all on an evolutionary voyage from the small and uncomplicated to the macrocosmic. From one-celled plants to comet oaks.

From amoebae through fish to apes. From simple sensation through sentience, intelligence, and then macrointelligence. Can’t you see the progression? All of life evolves toward Godhead.”

“A very pretty theory, but with all due respect, it’s full of shit.”

The boy was sweating. Constance wiped his brow. Hebegan breathing heavily, and she dabbed a fluid on his throat. As it sank through the skin, his breathing eased.

“You—”

Movement at the door. “Sir?” Two samurai escorted in a tall Comprise. “This one said he had to talk with you personally.”

“You have one of our number,” the Comprise said.

“Return him.”

Wyeth shifted slightly, put his hand on the child’s shoulder. Looking at Constance, he said, “Billy? Do you want to return?”

Billy trembled. His eyes darted here, there, everywhere but toward the Comprise. His body twisted away spasmodically. “In his condition, he can’t possibly give informed—” Constance began.

“Why?” Rebel asked the Comprise. “I mean, he can’t be much use to you in his condition. What do you want him for?”

“Experimentation. Dissection.”

Constance opened her mouth, shut it again. The Comprise spoke into the sudden silence. “We also require a good analytical laboratory, a surgery, and a supply of the drug administered to us. We will need to take a large number of tissue samples. The analytical equipment should be suitable for a comprehensive mapping of chemical trace effects in the brain. Earth will of course pay for your trouble.”

“The hell you say.” Wyeth’s face was hard.

Before the Comprise could respond, Billy bent forward, covering his head with frantic hands, and began to cry.

Gingerly, Rebel sat beside him, put an arm around his shoulders. He turned, throwing himself at her, and buried his head between her shoulder and neck.

Small hands clutched at her painfully. “We are not sure what you mean by that,” the Comprise said.

“Let me spell it out for you,” Wyeth said. “First, we like the boy, and we’re going to keep him. Second, our resources are limited, and we do not have the laboratory equipment to spare, no matter what price you’re willing to pay. And third…” He turned to a nearby samurai. “Those crates of shyapples I had brought here? Destroy them all.”

The floor exploded upward.

“Holy shit!” Freeboy cried, and then fell backwards as something fast glanced off the side of his head. The room was suddenly full of black, acrid smoke. A cable ripped free from the floor, stiffened with voltage, and fell forward, like a huge snake striking. Sparks skittered across the floor. Wyeth flung out an arm to point at Rebel and Billy. “Treece!” he shouted. “Get them out of here!”

Orange figures boiled up from the hole.

The Comprise child was heavy. Treece hustled them through long corridors while electrical equipment hissed and erupted about them. All the lights went out. “What’s happening?” Rebel cried. The boy’s small hands still clutched at her. He kept his face buried in her shoulder.

“Power outage. Wyeth’s crashed the computers. It’ll be on in a minute.”

Something exploded up ahead. There was a chemical stink in the air. “No, I mean—”

Treece grinned thuggishly. “Oh, you mean in general.

The Comprise have taken over our computer systems.

Nothing to worry about. We were waiting for this.” The lights went back on. In the hall behind them, a wall collapsed, and the lights blacked out again. In the dark, a squad of samurai trotted by.

“What?”

“Turn right here.” A sudden wind boomed down the hall, and Rebel almost lost her footing. “The Comprise will always suborn a computer system. It’s second nature tothem. But our systems are built to be crashed. We’ve got manual cut-offs through the sheraton. We can crash the system and rebuild it as many times as they can take it over.”

They stepped into an orangery with a stormy holographic sky. While Treece rummaged through an adjacent storeroom, Rebel stood dully looking at the orrery in the center of the room. Marigolds had been planted at its base. The samurai emerged with two broomsticks and thrust one at Rebel. He also carried a rifle and two singlesticks, one of which he also gave Rebel.

“Feel like you can handle the kid?”

“I feel like a marsupial.” The way Billy was clutching her, he wasn’t likely to come loose. She climbed into her saddle. “Let’s go.”

Treece raised his rifle and blew out the window.

They exploded out into darkness. Almost immediately limpet cameras swooped down on them from all directions. “Son of a bitch!” Treece screamed, bringing up the rifle. He burst all but two of the cameras before the remotes could reach them. One dove for his face, and he swung the rifle around like a club to smash into its complexly-lensed front. Fragments of camera and gun went flying.

The last camera came at Rebel. She slashed with her singlestick and almost lost her seat. The camera bobbed under her swing, and then there was an instant’s darkness as the sheraton’s computers were crashed yet again. The wheel’s lights came back on, and, before the Comprise systems could reprogram the camera, its momentum carried it through a window. It crashed to the floor, buzzing and crippled. Then window, room, and all swung away.

“Go!” Treece shouted, and Rebel got her hands back on the broomstick and kicked the jet nozzles wide open.

They screamed away. “Where are we going?” she yelled over her shoulder.

Treece brought his broomstick up alongside hers. Now that they were out of danger, he was impassive again.

“Anywhere you like, so long as it’s not the sheraton. Or the tank towns. Security is a problem there. This is a rigged fight, even if the Comprise doesn’t know it yet. All we have to do is lay low for a few hours, and it’ll be safe to go back home.”

They cruised the orchid’s edge, Rebel slowly killing speed with short bursts of retro, until they were moving at a crawl. Up ahead, Rebel saw a white rag tied to a stalk.

“Look there. What’s that for, do you think?”

Treece shrugged.

Coming to a stop, Rebel peered into the tangles of orchid. She saw another white rag tied further in. Between rags, several stalks looked frayed, as if they had served as common kickstops. The ghost of a memory from her life in Tirnannog tugged at her. “It’s a path. Somebody lives in there.” She angled her broomstick inward. The boy had not spoken since their flight had begun. She put a hand on the top of his head. It was warm, almost fevered; she imagined she could feel the interplay of emotions within.

His braid stuck straight out. She held it against his skull and wondered how old he was. Seven? Nine? Not that it mattered. “How are you doing, Billy?”

The boy shook his head.

They drifted deeper into the orchid, the light dimming as blossoms grew rarer. Roots and stalks grew thicker here, and more tangled. Rebel had to dismount. She put Billy into the saddle and towed the broomstick behind her. He peered about silently. She tugged the broomstick deeper into the vines, finding handholds and grabspots, and always following the rags. It was almost like a tunnel now, an irregular passage created by training back selectedvines. Treece followed after.

“This would be the perfect spot for an ambush,” he said.

A woman laughed. Not a friendly laugh. “Too true,” she said from the gloom. “So state your business. What do you want with the village? You mean us harm or not?”

Treece gestured Rebel back, then put his hands on his hips. “You see this woman, this child? You try to hurt them—you die. Anybody else tries to hurt them dies too.”

Silence. “But so long as you don’t hurt them, we intend no evil. We’re only looking for someplace to spend a few quiet hours. If you let us pass, we’ll go on. Otherwise, we’ll turn back now.”

A woman floated forward, materializing from gloom and tangled root. She held a rifle. “Fair enough,” she said.

“Pass. Just remember, there’s only the one path, and you have to come by me again on your way out. Behave yourselves.” She was gone.

The village was a handful of stick huts around a central clearing, something like a larger version of the courts in Tank Fourteen. But the huts here were loosely woven frames with wide stretches of orchid between, like a scatter of wicker boxes discarded in the weeds. As they paused at the edge of the clearing, several people peered from their huts with frank curiosity.

Rebel’s broomstick bobbed, and she turned to see Billy slip from the saddle. He darted to a hut where a man sat cross-legged in the doorway, a small pot of luminous ink before him. He had a scholar’s facepaint and was carefully drawing a long line on a rectangle of parchment.

The child approached the drawing slowly, as if hypnotized, the long, glowing line doubly reflected in his unblinking eyes.

The scholar raised his head. Shadows pooled under his brows. “You like it?” He lifted the brush from the end ofthe line and dipped it into the inkpot. “It’s a pun.” With quick dabs he drew an ideogram on a leaf, held it up for inspection. “You see that? That’s my name—Ma. It means horse. My name is Ma Fu-ya. What’s yours?”

“Billy,” the child answered without hesitation.

“Well, Billy, you see this line I just drew? I want you to imagine that it’s the same as this line here”—the brush touched one line of the leaf ideogram—“only stretched long and warped out of shape. You see? Then this next line runs along one foreleg.” Quickly, surely, he drew the other lines, and together they made a horse. “You see?”

The child laughed and clapped his hands.

“He seems to like you,” Rebel said.

The scholar laid his brush in the air before him. “He’s a nice kid. Welcome to our village. We haven’t gotten around to naming it. If you’re staying, I advise you not to build too far from the clearing; one man did that already and lost his hut before he thought to mark the trail. Other than that, there’s plenty of room.”

The air was fragrant here. The village had been built within a local cluster of blossoms, and the light was soft and pervasive. Rebel liked it. It could have used a little more life. Butterflies at least. A few lizards, a squirrel, perhaps a tree squid. But other than that, it was pleasant here, sheltered within the orchid. “Maybe I will build a hut,” she said. “I could spend my free time here. Who should I talk to about rent? Who’s your king here?”

“There are no kings here,” Fu-ya said. Billy tugged at his cloak, and the scholar handed him brush and paint. From the hut behind him, he drew a piece of paper. “Here, have fun.”

“No kings?” Treece said, puzzled. “Then who owns all this?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps no one. Perhaps the man in the wheel.” He spread his hands. “You see, when peoplerealized they could build here, they didn’t stop to worry about legalities. They just packed up and moved in.”

One of Fu-ya’s neighbors came up with a sphere of fresh-brewed tea and a handful of drinking syringes.

Scowling, Treece took one and said, “Why? Why burrow so deep in the orchid? Why post a guard by the trail?”

“Defense is simple here,” the neighbor said. “One guard can hold off a dozen attackers. If more came, we could just untie the rags from the path—they’d never find their way in. Or if that didn’t work… we’d all scatter, I guess. That’d be the end of the village, but there’s others out there. Lots of room to build another, for that matter.”

“No, no,” Fu-ya said to Billy. “You want to hold the brush upright, between thumb and forefinger. There, you see?

That way you won’t smudge.”

“Who are you expecting to attack you?” Treece said testily.

Another neighbor had come up, a large bony woman who seemed all knees and elbows whenever she moved.

She said, “You’re not from the tanks, then? No, I can see you’re not. Well, the gang wars are heating up. It’s funny.

You live in the tanks, you think: what did the police ever do for me? Beat you up, smash your teeth, catch you up in their raids. But now, with no police, there’s nothing to stop the gangs but each other. So they try to spread out. People were getting snatched up and reprogrammed all over the place. You don’t watch out, you find yourself being rude girl for some hoodlum you never even heard of before.

Only now, you’re willing to die for him. Very bad.

Especially now that everybody has these rifles; have you seen them? Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Everybody?” Treece said. “I noticed your guard had one. She shouldn’t. Those are supposed to be restricted to programmed samurai.”

The villagers laughed. There were some eight people sitting about by now. “There must be a hundred rifles inthe tanks,” Fu-ya explained. “Maybe even two hundred.

It’s a very bad problem.” He had seated Billy in his lap.

Now he looked down and said, “Hey, look at that. That is very good.”

Billy Defector did not look up. He was drawing circuits on the paper, long glowing lines and intersections like cool rivers of light, straight and pure and enigmatic.

Somewhere, Wyeth was fighting a wizard’s duel with the Comprise. Possibly it was already over. But here, sitting and chatting and laughing, all was peace. A girl who ducked her head, coloring, whenever spoken to, brought out a flute and began to play. Somebody produced two short metal pipes and provided percussion. Soon a band had coalesced and people were dancing.

Rebel didn’t join in. To her way of thinking, zero-gravity dancing was like zero-gravity sex, a lightweight version of the real thing. While Billy drew his circuits, she attached him to a programmer. “Don’t wriggle,” she said, and put him in a trance. Her hands slid down the wafers, and she lost herself in the delicate art of editing. This was the kind of work both her personas enjoyed, and for at least an hour she had no clear idea who she was. Then her hands hovered over the wafers in indecision and drew away.

With a sigh, she removed the adhesion disks. Billy stirred.

Fu-ya’s woman, Gretzin, said, “Is your little boy all right now?”

“I’m just the doctor,” Eucrasia said irritably. “The little boy doesn’t belong to me or anybody else for that matter.

He’s an orphan, I guess.” Then, with a gentle internal shift, she was Rebel again. “He’ll need lots more work before he’s all right. I only dared make minor changes, because he’s so fragile. There’s only a trace of personality to work on—just the memory of a hallucinogenic persona, really. It’s not the easiest thing to set right.”

Fu-ya swam up and lifted the child away. “Come on, Billy. I’ll show you how to fold a paper bird.”

Gretzin stared after the two. “I didn’t really think he was your little boy. I just kind of hoped.” She snorted. “Paper birds!”

The sheraton was a mess. Uprooted trees floated over drowned parasols in the ponds. Rebel skirted a pile of broken glass. She trailed a finger along a wall, and it came up stained with soot. “Where’s Billy?” Wyeth asked, coming up on her suddenly.

“I found a couple in the orchid and hired them to look after him. He’s staying in their village.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I thought they’d be good for him. A little quiet living should strengthen his sense of identity enough for me to try a bit more editing.” They matched strides. “Oh hell, Billy took a shine to Fu-ya, and when I tried to take him away, he started screaming hysterically. I was afraid if I separated them his emotions might run out of control and collapse what little mental structure he has.”

“Hmmm.” They stepped around a team of wallknobbers, gilders, and scrimshaw artisans. Workers were everywhere, making repairs. “Look here. I want to show you something.”

A morgue had been set up in the conference room, the corpses laid out on gurneys by the goldfish stream. There were seven cadavers, all Comprise. “I panicked them into moving early,” Wyeth said. “That’s one reason the casualties were so low. They knew they couldn’t take over the sheraton permanently and that they’d have to pay reparations for any humans killed.” He stopped at a Comprise corpse whose torso was cut open and the skin peeled back. Rebel looked down at the glistening organs, horrified and fascinated. Metal glinted here and there.

Wyeth picked up a hand and turned it over. “See here?

Retractable patch leads inside each fingertip. All she had to do was bite off a bit of callus on the tip and she could interface with anything. There are three separate rectenna systems buried under the skin, and a second spine with God knows how many gigabytes of storage capacity.”

“My God,” Rebel said. “Are they all like this?”

“No, just five. We call them lockpicks because their sole purpose is to break into computer systems. The Comprise hide a few inside every group they send into human space.

They were easy to spot because they’re carrying all that metal within them. As soon as we took them out, the fight was over.”

“Killed.” Constance limped in, trailed closely by Freeboy. He had a dirty bandage on his head. “You did not

‘take them out,’ Mr. Wyeth. You killed them.” Several embroidered panels in her clothing were stained; she reeked of smoke and wrath.

“Aren’t you supposed to be tending to the shrubberies, Moorfields?”

“My people are taking care of that. I want to know why you provoked this senseless, brutal battle.”

A tech reached into an access hatch by the foot of the bridge. The sky flickered and went on. Blue, with big, fleecy clouds.

“Oh, hardly a battle.” Wyeth smiled. “And far from senseless. It certainly took the starch out of the Comprise.

Half of them are down with shyapple sickness. Also, I learned a great deal from this incident. Means of fighting the Comprise, which I’ve taken the liberty of taping and sending to every major public data bank in the System.

They’ll be there when they’re needed.” His voice switched from warrior to mystic. “Someday, humanity is going to have to fight the Comprise. Someday the conflict will be out in the open. And when that happens, we’ll be the tiniest bit better prepared because of today.”

“You sound like you’re looking forward to a nice, big war.”

“No, but unlike you, I see it as inevitable. Ah, here are the lawyers.” Two men in legalface, one People’s, the other Kluster, strode up. Wyeth bowed to Rebel. “Shall we?”

They crossed the bridge and walked in among the Comprise. First came Wyeth, arm in arm with Rebel, and then the lawyers. Constance hesitated, then followed, and Freeboy scuttled after her.

Four samurai brought up the rear. “Over the Rubicon,”

Wyeth said cheerily, but to Rebel it felt more like crossing the Styx, to the land where the bloodless dead dwell in perfect equality. The Comprise parted for them, closing back around the group as it passed. Hundreds of eyes stared at them.

Wyeth chose a man at random, grabbed him by the shoulders, and said, “You. Can you talk? We’ll talk through this individual.”

“That is not necessary,” the Comprise said.

“That’s how we’ll do it anyway. I’m going to ask you some questions. If I am not satisfied with the answers, I’ll charge you with violent aggression and see to it that the four hundred however many of you never rejoin Earth again. Do you want that? I can do that to you.”

The Comprise stirred uneasily. “You manipulated us into attacking you.”

“So what?” Wyeth turned to his lawyers. “Does that make any difference legally?”

“No.”

“No.”

Rebel touched her bracelet and saw the tangled lines of energy linking the Comprise in a shimmering haze.

Electromagnetic fields rose from them like wings.

Directional beams blinked on and off, converging upon the spokesman. He flashed bright as the eye of a coileddragon. “Ask, then.”

“What does the Comprise want?”

Almost scornfully, the Comprise said, “What does any organism want? To live, to grow, and to employ one’s abilities constructively.”

“I was thinking of something a little less sweeping. Why did you want the shyapples so badly? You almost killed young Freeboy here, trying to get information he didn’t even have. What information were you hoping to find?

What did you want that badly?”

“Earth is interested in all new developments in the mind arts.”

“Answers,” Wyeth said grimly.

Again the Comprise shifted in agitation. Individuals jostled against each other; heads turned at random.

Several cried out. “We…” the spokesman began. He paused as the interactive fields shifted configurations wildly, withdrew, and then closed in about him. “We seek integrity. We seek a means of maintaining our identity as Comprise when we are separated from Earth.”

“Integrity? I don’t understand.”

“Away from Earth, we are cut off, orphaned,” the Comprise said. “We lose identity. You could not understand. Our sense of being Earth fades and shifts. We become Other. You would say individual. We do not desire this. It is painful to us.”

“Ah,” said Wyeth. “Now that is interesting.”

“Are you satisfied now?” Constance demanded. Wyeth looked at her. “You’ve been torturing this creature for your own… your own paranoid fantasies, that’s all. You are a dangerous man, Mr. Wyeth, a machine running out of control and causing pain for no purpose at all.”

Rebel reached out, touched the spokesman’s wrist. “Tell me something,” she said hesitantly. “Is Wyeth right? Are humans and Comprise really enemies?”

“Of course not,” Constance snapped.

“Yes,” the Comprise said. “We are by definition natural enemies since we compete for the same resources.”

“Resources? You mean like… what? Energy sources?

Metal ores?”

“People. People are our most important resource.”

Constance stood motionless, looking pale and betrayed.

“I…” she said. “I thought—” Her voice was close to tears.

Abruptly she turned away and limped back across the bridge, to the land of the living. Freeboy scurried after her.

Not actually grinning, Wyeth favored Rebel with a nod and a wink. He turned to the Comprise. “Another question. Why haven’t you taken over human space already? You have all the resources of Earth at your disposal, and the kind of physics we can only dream of.

Why have you stayed put? Why aren’t you out here among us in force?”

The crowds of Comprise expanded slightly, then contracted, like an enormous beast taking a deep breath.

“We are held back by the speed of communication. It is not true that thought is instantaneous. Thought is only as fast as our electronic linkages allow. Even on Earth this causes problems. It is possible for the Comprise to be divided against ourself. Thought moves in vast waves, like pressure fronts, across the continents. Sometimes two conflicting thoughts arise on opposite sides of the planet.

The thought fronts race outward, and where they collide, there is conflict. It is like a mental storm. You would not understand it. But these are momentary unbalances, easily settled. The problem becomes crucial only when Comprise leave Earth.

“Earth has tried creating colonies of ourself in near orbit, on the moon, elsewhere. But small Comprise such as we are sicken away from the communion of thought. We become indecisive, we make errors. The large Comprise do not sicken, but they lose integrity and drift away from Earth, becoming individuals in their own right. Then they must be destroyed. Three times it has been necessary to apply the nuclear solution. It is not permissible that the Comprise of Earth become Other. You would not understand.”

“I see,” Wyeth said. “I think I see. That’s the reason for your interest in the mind arts, then? You want a means of keeping Comprise colonies integrated with Earth.”

“Yes. For a long time Earth has sought the answer in physics. A means of instantaneous communication would bind the Comprise across vast distances. But the speed of light remains an absolute barrier. It cannot be cheated.

There is no simultaneity in the universe. So we look elsewhere. Perhaps a solution can be found in the mind arts. Perhaps a new mental architecture.”

“That brings me to my next question—”

“No,” the Comprise said. “You are satisfied. Sickened though we are, we can read you that well, Boss Wyeth. You got as much from us as you had hoped for. We need give you no more.” The spokesman took a step backwards, merging into his fellows. Hundreds of eyes all turned away at once.

For a moment Wyeth stood open-mouthed. Then he laughed.

When they made love that night, Wyeth was awkward and he came too soon. He rolled away from Rebel, staring out the window wall. Faint strands of orchid floated slowly by as the sheraton revolved. “Wyeth?” Rebel said gently.

He looked at her, eyes bleak and hollow. “What is it?”

Wyeth shook his head, looked downward. “I have a sick conscience. I am not at all at peace with myselves.”

“Hey,” Rebel said. “Hey, babes, it’s all right.” She took his hand, held it in both of hers. “Which one of you is this?

It’s the leader, right?”

“Yes, but we all feel this way. Constance was right. About the kid. Billy was perfectly content as part of the Comprise.

Not happy, not aware—but content, anyway. And then I appear in a blaze of light and a rush of noise, and yank him into consciousness. Here, kid, have an apple. Bright and shiny. Let me make you one of us. I dragged him out of the Comprise and halfway to human, and made him into what? A crippled, crazy, unhappy animal of some kind.”

“Hey, now, it wasn’t your fault he ate the shyapple. The Comprise did that. It caught us all by surprise.”

Wyeth sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed.

He sat there, not moving. “You think not? I waved that apple under their noses. I wanted them to bite. I wanted to see what would happen. But when I pried Billy loose from the Comprise, it turned out he didn’t know one fucking thing. So what good did I do? None. I acted blindly, and now there’s one more miserable creature walking the sky.”

“I’ll heal him for you, Wyeth, I promise I will. I’m coming to terms with Eucrasia’s skills.” Rebel hugged him from behind, crushing her breasts against his back, and laid her cheek against his shoulder. “Listen, I can really do it.”

Wyeth shook his head back and forth ponderously.

“That’s not it. That’s not it at all.” She released him, rocking back on her heels. “Undoing the damage won’t help. The thing is, I don’t want to be the kind of person who’d do that to a child.”

Rebel said nothing.

“Do you remember when we first met? I was just a persona bum. Very bright, very good, but with no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The one thing I wanted most was to have a sense of purpose. We collaborated on the tetrad’s design together, do you remember that?”

“No.”

“That’s too bad. It was an exciting piece of work. We putlots of late hours into it. It was pirate programming, we had to do it in secret. Eucrasia came up with the notion of a four-faceted persona for the stability, the self-sufficiency of it. She was hell for self-sufficiency. I was more interested in it because it would generate its own sense of purpose.”

Rebel felt irrationally jealous of Eucrasia, working so closely with Wyeth. She wondered if they’d slept together, and felt an oddly unclean excitement at the thought.

“How?” she asked.

“The pattern-maker. I figured he’d take care of that. He did, too. First time he came up, he asked what is the most important thing happening in our times? How can we contribute to it? The answers— well, you know the answers. Eucrasia was disappointed. She thought I was being grandiose and impractical, and she wanted to strip the program down and start over again. So we parted ways. I mean… the survival of the human race! What better cause could you have?” He fell silent, then said,

“Only now I don’t know. Maybe what I really wanted was to have a good opinion of myself. I mean, I made me into a kind of secular saint, a self-contained guardian of humanity. A man with no doubts. But now I’m not so sure.

I’m not sure of anything. I guess I don’t know myself as well as I thought I did.”

“Hush now,” Rebel said. She put her arms around him, rocking him gently. But they might as well have been in different universes. Eucrasia’s memories were growing stronger. Soon they would swallow her up completely, and then she would be no more. She wanted to care about Wyeth’s problems, but they just didn’t seem important to her.

“Hush,” she said again. “You’re not alone.”