Vacumn Flowers

8

DELUSION’S PASSAGE

Rebel visited Billy daily, after singlestick practice. But she quickly found that while she lived by the sheraton’s strict Greenwich time, the village ran on different, internal rhythms. People ate when they were hungry, slept when they were tired, kept to no external schedule. Sometimes she would find that by village time only a few languid hours had passed. Other times, days would have sped by in a frenzy of work and play, of long naps and small meals.

One day she discovered that thousands of small spider webs, no bigger than tufts of cotton, had covered the orchid about the village like mist. In the filtered white wintery light, the children played a game with a rusting air tank. A child would leap into the court and bounce off the tank, kicking it toward the far side. Then a child from that side would jump out, trying to bounce it back. One girl got stuck in the court’s center, and was loudly and derisively called out. Then the game started over again.

Gretzin sat before her hut, weaving a grass mat to replace a worn wall. Rebel greeted her, then said, “Where did all these spiders come from?”

“Where do you think they come from? The tanks,”

Gretzin said impatiently. “Lots of vermin been spreading out. You should’ve been here yesterday, there were blackflies everywhere. Clouds of them.” She put the mat aside. “Fu-ya’s sleeping. Hold on, and I’ll get your little boy.”

A minute later she returned, hauling Billy by one arm. “I don’t want to!” he cried. “I want to play!” Seeing Rebel, he started to cry.

Rebel felt an odd sadness that the boy didn’t like her. A

cold touch of failure. “Well, that’s a sign of progress,” she said to Gretzin. “His temper.” She ran a hand over his head, and the delicate fuzz of new hair tickled her palmlike static electricity. Gretzin had cut off his braid; possibly the children had been teasing him. “This won’t take long at all, Billy.”

She put him under and went to work.

An hour later she released Billy and called Gretzin over.

“There’s not a lot more for me to do. His identity is a little fragile yet, but it’ll strengthen in time. Basically, he should be able to pass for human now.”

“Pass for human, huh?” Gretzin said.

“Yes, it’s good timing, too, since we reach Mars soon. I don’t know what Wyeth will do with him then.” She covered her uneasiness about the boy’s future with a smile. “I’ll bet you’ll be glad not having to worry about him anymore.”

“Yeah. That’ll be terrific.”

Being outside the geodesic after all this time was a shock. Some free-floating spores must have adhered to the hull before it was accelerated away from Eros Kluster, for it was now covered with great mottled mats of vacuum flowers. They were everywhere, growing in tangled heaps and piles. The blossoms twisted slowly, tracking the sun.

The flowers had been scraped away from the airlock and for dozens of meters around, revealing a hull that was dull, pitted, and uneven. Scatterings of foot rings had been snap-welded across the cleared surface. Standing in a pair, Rebel felt a perfectly irrational urge to start scraping flowers. Her hands itched with it.

Wyeth stood beside her, overseeing the departure of the Comprise. Almost half a thousand coldpack units were being lashed to a single jitney frame, layer upon layer building into a crude sphere. Inside those soot-black coffins were suspended the Comprise, throats and lungs filled with crash jelly. Spacejacks swarmed about them.

“Hey, look.” Rebel touched Wyeth, pointed. Twounmarked silver suits crawled across the geodesic toward them. Among the carnival riot of personalized suits worn by the workers recruited from the tanks and orchid villages, they stood out as startlingly as a croquet ball in a case of Faberge Easter eggs.

The intercom crackled. “I can’t believe they trust you to coldpack them after what you put them through.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be checking how far through the hull the flowers have eaten?” Wyeth asked.

The silver figures pulled themselves almost to his feet, slipped into rings, and stood. “That’s what I came to report. You’ve got four inches skin at the very thinnest.

Nothing to worry about.”

The spacejacks brought up a disposable fusion drive at the end of a kilometer-long connector rod and coupled it to the jitney, hot end away from the Comprise. They leaped away and (using long ropes) yanked the shielding. “Well, stay and watch the show if you want, Connie. Hallo, Freeboy. Still with us, I see.”

“He’s as loyal as a wizard’s daughter,” Constance said dryly. An almost invisible plasma flame puffed from the engine, and the assembly started away.

Three days, Rebel thought. Two to reach Mars, be intercepted and fitted with retros by People’s Defense, decelerate, and be unpacked. One day for the Comprise to build the transit ring that would bring the geodesic’s velocity to relative zero, leaving it at rest in Mars orbit. It wouldn’t take much of a mistake for them to miss the ring entirely, crashing the project and all its people right into the side of the planet.

“They were as helpless as a vat of kitten embryos,”

Constance said. “I can’t imagine why they trusted you. I certainly wouldn’t have.”

“The Comprise is not human.” Wyeth’s mirrored visor turned toward her. “They don’t carry personal grudges.”

Constance looked away, toward the dwindling coldpack assembly, then turned back and with sudden heat said,

“I’m glad we’re parting ways at Mars!” She bent over to grab the foot rings, then pulled herself hand over hand toward the airlock. Freeboy followed.

When she was gone, Wyeth said softly, “I’m going to miss that woman.”

The next day, when Rebel reached the village she found it deserted. Spiders had shrouded the huts in white. A

woven wall, ripped from its frame, floated in a silent curl at the center of the court. “Hello?” she called.

No sound but the buzzing of flies.

All the huts were vacant, their contents largely undisturbed. A brush frozen in a bowl of hardened ink floated by Fu-ya’s door. Trailed by her two samurai, Rebel looked down all the twisty paths that had been marked out from the village to private plantations, clearings, and the like. They went a distance down the red rag trail, and then the blue, but found nothing but more empty huts.

Rebel took a long, shuddering breath. She felt her fear prowling through the orchid depths, silent and shadowy.

“Treece, what happened here?”

The second samurai offered Treece a bit of blood-stained cloth that the flies had drawn him to. Treece brushed it aside, examined a fractured wetwafer. “Press gang,” he said. “Very slick, whoever they were. Took out the guard, surrounded the village, didn’t miss anyone. Put a compulsion on them and took them all away.”

“Away?” Rebel asked. “Where away? Why?”

Treece bent the wetwafer back and forth in his blunt fingers. At last he shrugged. “Well. Let’s go tell the boss.”

“I don’t like it,” Wyeth said. “Look, none of us likes it, but it’s the only logical way to proceed.” Dice clicked andrattled obsessively in his hand. He threw them down, scooped them up. “We don’t know for sure that it’s Wismon. Let’s not kid ourselves—I haven’t had any news from the tanks in two days. Only Wismon could’ve found and silenced my spies.”

They stood in the empty lobby of the sheraton. Wyeth had dismissed all his samurai and darkened the room so he could think. The only light came from the orchids outside. “What are you arguing with yourself about?”

Rebel asked in exasperation.

“Strategy.” Wyeth rolled the dice again. “I can’t go up against Wismon in my warrior persona. He’d be able to predict my every move. The only way I can take him by surprise is to go mystic. Right?”

He waited, and none of his other voices spoke up. “Good.

At least we’re agreed about that.” He rolled the dice again.

“For God’s sake, what is it with you and those dice?”

“Random number generator. By randomizing my tactics, I keep Wismon from anticipating me. Already the dice have decided on direct confrontation on his home turf. Now they’re deciding how many samurai I take with me.” He rolled again, fell silent.

In the dark and quiet, Rebel’s thoughts kept returning to Billy. His persona was fragile. Any crude attempt at reprogramming would destroy him, collapsing not only his personality structure, but much of his autonymous control systems as well. The best he could hope for was permanent catatonia. At worst, he might die. “They wouldn’t reprogram the children, would they?”

“Depends,” Wyeth answered abstractedly. “Slavers wouldn’t need to, once they’ve grabbed the parents. But who can say, with Wismon? We don’t even know why he did it. My people tell me this is the only orchid village he’s hit. That’s not just coincidence.” He took a deep breath.

“Well. Time to go meet the man.”

Impulsively, Rebel asked, “Can I come with you?”

Wyeth shook the dice, looked at them.

“Yes.”

As the elevator slowly rose toward the central docking ring, Rebel thought to ask: “How many samurai are you bringing?”

“None,” Wyeth said somberly. His mischievous voice came up. “That’ll sure take Wismon by surprise. I can’t wait to see how we’re going to handle him.”

They rode broomsticks around the orchid. As the tanks swelled, they saw that the metal exteriors were covered with glowing lines of paint—gang chops, territorial markings, threats and warnings, a small propaganda war in graffiti. There was no traffic. Everyone had either fled or been impressed into the gangs. “I’m afraid,” Rebel said.

Beside her, Wyeth grinned cockily. “Me too.”

The closer she got to the tanks, the less clear Rebel’s motives for going were to her. She’d wanted to have a hand in rescuing Billy, but now that they were at the crunch point, that desire seemed sourceless and quixotic.

She wasn’t exactly close to the child. Certainly he didn’t much care for her. So why was she doing this?

Maybe because Eucrasia wouldn’t have.

They swooped down on Tank Fourteen. The airlock’s outer doors had been blown away in some recent skirmish, and there were blast marks among the rust. But to judge by the way a few dimly-seen guards floated within, slow and unconcerned, the gang wars were obviously over.

At the locks, bright-eyed women kicked out of the shadows to take their broomsticks and search them for weapons. The women were painted with bioluminescent tiger-stripes, not just on their faces, but down their bodies as well, and they were all stark naked. “We’ve come to see Wismon,” Wyeth said when one brought out a programming unit. “Tell him that his mentor wishes to speak with him.”

The women glanced at one another quickly, uncomprehendingly. One smiled and licked her lips. She held up the programmer again, and Wyeth impatiently pushed it away. “Listen, your boss isn’t going to—”

With a snarl, the woman seized his head in both hands and twisted. Wyeth grunted in pain as he spun about. The cat woman’s legs wrapped about his thighs, and her hands cupped his chin. She yanked back, and he floated helplessly.

All this happened in an instant. “Hey!” Rebel said, and then she was floating in a similar hold, unable to talk and barely able to breathe. She tried to hit the woman on her back, but it was an awkward reach, and her hardest blows were soft taps when they landed.

In a wash of horror, Rebel saw the cat women attach the programmer to Wyeth and switch it on. He stiffened. The device buzzed softly to itself. I won’t let them do that to me, Rebel promised herself. I’ll die first. She struggled in her captor’s iron hold.

Those guards not directly involved watched with alert interest. They prowled restlessly about the lock without ever once exchanging a word; their silence was superhuman. Two almost collided, but disdainfully, carelessly, slapped hands together and bounced off each other. Finally a red light flashed on the programmer, and Wyeth was released. He floated dead-eyed and unresponsive.

The women turned to Rebel.

“Heads up, Sunshine!” Lashing out with one foot, Wyeth kicked the cheap little programmer from one cat woman’s hands, right into the face of the woman who held Rebel captive. For an instant she was free. Spinning around, she punched her captor in the nose, as hard as she could, andblood exploded outward from her fist. By then a dozen more guards had converged upon them, and they were both recaptured.

One woman retrieved the programmer, broke it open, reassembled it. She ran a finger over Wyeth’s forehead, then brought her face close to his and sniffed his lips. She looked puzzled. Meanwhile, others had bound his wrists and ankles together behind his back and done the same to Rebel. “Wyeth?” Rebel asked. “Are you okay?”

“Oh yeah,” Wyeth said. Two of the guards looped ropes around their wrists and kicked off. They were yanked after. “That’s my best trick. When we built me, I was given access to my own metaprogrammer. All the time they were programming one persona up, another persona was programming it down.”

“Oh.”

They were hauled through the deserted corridors of the tank town. Without the traffic continually sweeping them clean, the narrow corridors were dense with trash. The flowers seemed barely able to lighten the gloom, and there was a thrumming quality to the silence, like vastly extenuated echoes of distant bass rumblings. The stench of rot and decay was almost unbearable.

They were taken to Wismon.

“Ah, mentor! As always, a surprise to see you. What a delight!”

The fat man floated behind a guard of sullen rude boys, his mad little eyes dark with inner furies. A thin string of saliva clung to one corner of his mouth, waving slightly as he talked. “How do you like my angelheaded little girls?

Lovely, aren’t they?”

“They’re certainly something,” Wyeth said. “What have you done to them?” Behind him, the women snapped his bonds and then Rebel’s. There were two pairs of rings by Wismon’s ankles, and the guards knelt within them,crouching at his feet. He reached out to clumsily pat one on the head, and she arched her back in pleasure.

“I’ve increased their intelligence—they’re quite as smart as am I. Ah, don’t turn pale. I’ve also deprived them of language. They have no symbolic structure at all. They cannot make plans, cannot reason complexly, cannot lie.

All they know is what instructions I’ve programmed into them. Isn’t that marvelous? They’re perfectly innocent.

They act by instinct alone.”

“They’re grotesque,” Rebel said.

“They are very beautiful animals,” Wismon said reprovingly. “One of their instincts is to bring me anything out of the ordinary. Anything interesting. Are you still interesting, mentor?”

“I’ve always wondered what sort of society you would create,” Wyeth said.

“Oh, piffle. I’m just having a little fun. I only have three days before we reach Mars, isn’t that right? And then I’ll have to put my toys back in the box and return to a gentlemanly life of quiet contemplation. The pity is that so much time was wasted dealing with factions of petty criminals that might more profitably have been used for my researches.”

“You’re going to restore everyone you’ve forcibly programmed?” Wyeth sounded skeptical.

“Oh, absolutely. Except for my rude boys, of course. I had them before all this began. And I think I’ll keep my beautiful little girls, how could I ever bring myself to give them up? And there are a few more that might prove useful in the future—but enough of that! I mentioned my researches? Well, I flatter myself that I’ve made some small progress. I have created a garden—no, a menagerie of new minds. Perhaps you’d care for a brief tour of the highlights?”

“No.”

“A pity. I remember a time when you were not so scornful of scientific endeavor.”

“I was young then.”

“Wait,” Rebel said impulsively. “I’d like to see what you’ve done.” Wyeth turned to her, astonished.

“Well! An original thought—you charm me, Ms.

Mudlark. I will deny you nothing.” Wismon extended his arms and the cat women stood under them, each stretching a supporting arm across the immensity of his back. “Where’s my zookeeper? Call him to me.”

A sullen rude boy ducked into an archway. A moment later he returned, followed by a young man painted for wetware research.

“Maxwell!” Rebel cried.

“I knew you’d have a spy in my organization,” Wyeth said with a touch of sadness. “Did you buy him or just reprogram him?”

“Oh, I assure you he acted not for any ignoble reasons, but purely out of love. You do love me, don’t you, Maxie?”

Maxwell nodded eagerly, face rapt. His expression was at once so ardent and so familiar that Rebel had to look away. “Lead us to your charges,” Wismon said. “I grow bored.”

The party floated out of the court. Maxwell led, followed by Wismon and his cat women. They eased him along with feather-light kicks and grabs against the walls and ropes.

Rebel and Wyeth came next, escorted by a guard of rude boys. They came to a confluence of passages and halted.

“What shall I show you? I’ve arranged my creations by type. Would you care to go down the tunnel of fear? The straight and narrow way of discipline? Or perhaps you two lovebirds would enjoy a kick and stroll down lovers’ lane.”

They said nothing, and Wismon flapped a bloated pink hand at one passage. “We’ll go the way of delusion, then. Ihave something I’m especially eager for my dear mentor to see.”

They went up the red rope to a nondescript court. At a word from Wismon, Maxwell led them within. It was quiet there. A man sat in the doorway of his hutch, eyes downcast as if lost in thought. He was hooked into a small transcorder unit. “Cousin!” Wismon cried. “Sam Pepys!”

The man scrambled to his feet, bracing himself within the frame. “My Lord!” he said. “You do me honor, coming to Seething Lane.” He swept a hand at an imaginary table.

“I was just now working on your accounts.”

To Wyeth, the fat man said, “Samuel Pepys was a clerk of the British navy on Earth in the seventeenth century. A

ludicrous little man, but able enough in his way. A bit of a diarist. The transcorder feeds him a wafer of background sensation. His only connection with the real world is through myself. He takes me to be his relative, Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich. Isn’t that right, Samuel?”

The man smiled gravely and bowed, obviously pleased.

“Your Lordship gives me too great a credit. Will you stay to dine? Mr. Spong has sent over a barrel of pickled oysters, I’ll have the girl fetch it. Jane! Where is that lazy slut?” He looked fretfully over one shoulder, setting the transcorder leads swinging.

“It’s a simple enough delusional system,” Rebel said.

“Rich people have been known to spend good money for two weeks of that kind of delusion. I’ve arranged for a few such vacations myself.” That had been during Eucrasia’s internship, she recalled. It had been dull work, cookie-cutter programming, but (because legally dubious)

lucrative.

“Ah, but always under sensory deprivation, eh?

Otherwise small incongruities creep in from the real world.” A cat woman was exploring the court. She sniffed curiously at Pepys’ crotch. He didn’t notice. “Right in the middle of the battle of Thermopylae, a city cannistereclipses the sun. On virgin Arctic snow, a lone papaya glows with otherworldly light. Little by little your dream world crumbles into paranoia and nightmare. But the beauty of this system is its flexibility. It can justify any amount of incongruity. Samuel, I have noticed a great number of brontosauri in the streets of London this past week.”

Pepys frowned. “Brontosauri, my Lord? The… ah, large, ancient lizards, you mean?”

“Aye, Samuel, three in Whitechapel alone, and two more by the ’Change. Down by Saint Paul’s the streets are filthy with their spoor. What make you of that, Cousin?”

“Why, that it will be a mightily cold winter,” Pepys said.

“The brutes never venture out in such numbers be the coming weather fair and clement.”

“I fail to see the point of this,” Wyeth said stiffly.

“Patience. Samuel, poke up the fire, would you?” Pepys obliged, seizing an imaginary poker and stirring up the logs and embers of a fireplace that was not there. The mime was so perfect that Rebel could almost see his stuffy little room and feel its monotonously heavy gravity.

Suddenly Wismon shouted, “Samuel! A coal has landed on the back of your hand. It’s burning the flesh!”

With a shriek of pain, Pepys tumbled over backwards, waving his hand. Spinning slowly in the air, he put hand to mouth and sucked on it. At a gesture from Wismon, two rude boys steadied him.

“Here, Cuz. Show me your hand.”

Pepys extended a hand trembling with pain. An angry red circle swelled on its back. Even as they watched, puss-white blisters bubbled up on the inflamed spot.

Wismon laughed. “Belief! Belief alone burned that hand.

Think on it. It rather puts some starch into the ancient notion that all we experience is illusion to begin with, doesn’t it?” He stroked the hand lovingly, breaking theblisters. “But Samuel doesn’t perceive our illusions, only those that are pumped into him. All that stands between him and reality is one thin wafer of electronic London.

Let’s see what happens when we remove that final veil.”

Maxwell held up the transcorder for Wismon, who daintily took the wafer’s pull-ring between thumb and forefinger. “Samuel?”

“My Lord?”

“Tell me what you see.” He yanked the wafer.

Pepys stiffened, and his eyes jerked open wide.

Unblinking, they focused on infinity. “The walls! The walls fade like smoke! I can see through ceiling, rooms, and roof to the clouds beyond… Nay, the sky too is become pellucid and the stars stand bright and stark… But now e’en they too fade. I see…”

“What do you see, Sammy?”

For the longest moment Pepys was silent. Then,

“Music,” he said. “I see the music of the crystal spheres celestial.” He began to cry gently.

Wismon giggled. “Perfect madness. I could as easily have had him die. Come. This is only prologue to what I really wish to show you, dearest mentor.”

They exited, leaving Pepys afloat in the center of the court, weeping.

For half the length of the passage, Maxwell hesitated at each doorway and was waved on. Then Wismon nodded and Maxwell peeled back a sheet of tin, and they entered a courtyard. Again it had but a single inhabitant, a man. He had a bland face with an enormous beak of a nose.

Perched on a rope, he seemed some kind of ungainly bird.

As they entered, he looked up and smiled. “Hallo,” he said.

“Quite a crowd.”

“Yes, I’ve brought some friends to examine you,”

Wismon said. “You don’t mind?”

“Oh, no.”

“Question him,” Wismon commanded.

“All right,” Rebel said after a pause. “Do you know where you are?”

“This used to be Queen Lurline’s court. She’s gone now.

I’m the only one here. King Wismon is holding me as an experiment in recursive personality.” The man’s eyes sparkled with mirth.

“Do you know who you are?”

“King Wismon calls me Nose. For self-evident reasons.”

He rubbed his fleshy nose and chuckled. Rebel looked to Wyeth and shrugged. There was something askew in the man’s sourceless, irrational humor, but nothing in her or Eucrasia’s experience could explain it.

Wyeth looked thoughtful. “Let’s see. You showed me that last guy—Pepys?—to demonstrate how perfect a delusionary system you could create. So this must be a refinement on that. What is a step beyond delusion?” He snapped his fingers, glanced at Rebel. “Reality!” She caught his reference: It came from something she’d said when he was new-programmed, and she’d wanted to strip his persona down and start over again. Delusion was hard enough to deal with, she’d said, but a frivolous grasp of reality was worse. “You don’t believe that what you’re seeing is real, do you?”

Nose kicked his feet with joy. He had to grab at the rope to keep from floating away. “Oh, this is most entertaining.

Really!”

“Nose is a prototype of the perfect citizen,” Wismon said.

“His true persona is entirely hidden from the outside world. His surface persona is a perfectly consistent game the submerged persona plays. He thinks he is dreaming.

To him, his entire past is an irrational construct that’s just come into existence. Thus, he denies continuity but is able to act within it. He will accept anything, endure anything,for none of it is real. Which leaves me free to control his dreams. No matter what happens, he is happy to obey whatever instructions he receives. Isn’t that right, Nose?”

Nose nodded happily.

“All right,” Wyeth said sourly. “I’ll ask the question you want me to ask. Why are you showing me this creature?”

“Oh, that’s the best joke of all. Nose, why don’t you tell us who you are when you’re not dreaming?”

“Should I?” Nose laughed. “Well, what does it matter?

My name is Wyeth. I was Wismon’s mentor some years ago, and now I am his enemy. That’s why I’m dreaming about him. He’s getting out of hand, I’ll have to do something about him soon. Possibly even destroy him.

Maybe this dream will show me the pattern I have to act within.”

“That was your mystic voice,” Wismon said. “Do you care to hear your other voices? I can call them up from the depths, if you like.”

“No,” Wyeth said. “No, I… no.” He was ashen pale. “This is what you have planned for me, isn’t it?”

“What are you two talking about?” Rebel asked. Wismon mockingly mouthed the words in perfect unison with her, but she finished the sentence anyway.

“Please try not to be so obvious, Ms. Mudlark. My mentor has just realized that what I can do to his simulation I can do to him, access to metaprogrammer or not. He can be made into whatever I choose. But the joke goes deeper than that: Perhaps this man is not my mentor at all, but merely some poor fool I’ve programmed into thinking he is. Perhaps Nose here is the true Wyeth.

Perhaps neither of them is.”

“Wyeth is Wyeth,” Rebel said coldly. “If he can’t trust his own sense of self, he can take my word for it.”

“Ah, but how does he know that you exist? After all, I control the dream.”

Nose laughed delightedly.

“What I don’t understand,” Wyeth said, “is how you’ve accomplished all this in so little time. You’re a brilliant planner, but you don’t have the programming skills to write up the personas. Where did you get the programmers? There’s months of detail work in these two characters alone.”

“Thus we come full circle,” Wismon said. He flicked a finger at Maxwell, who disappeared out the doorway. “You have not yet mentioned why you entered my domain in the first place, but of course you didn’t need to. You wanted to recover the child-savant you snatched from the Comprise.”

“Yes, we came for Billy.”

“You never tested him for his aptitudes. Most careless.

To me the possibilities were obvious. Are you familiar with the cant term ‘plumber’? It means someone with a natural bent for the mechanics of wetcircuitry. In this child, the instinct is squared, or even cubed. He is preternaturally talented, a superplumber, if you will. I need only describe what I want, and he can draw it up.”

Maxwell returned, leading Billy Defector by the hand.

Behind him came Fu-ya and Gretzin, and from the apprehensive looks on their faces, Rebel could tell they had been left untouched, so they could care for him.

“A thought has been germinating, mentor, for some time, and I think it has finally come to fruition,” Wismon said. Maxwell handed the child a briefcase. “Billy. Bring up that map we made of my persona.”

Billy looked to Gretzin, and she nodded. He touched the briefcase’s surface, and an enormous wetware diagram filled all of the court with lacy green. There were tens of thousands of branchings visible to the naked eye alone.

“Test it one more time for a kink, would you?”

Billy’s fingers danced. A small red cursor zippedthrough the court, following the major persona branches, then moved to secondary and tertiary circuits. It moved too fast for the eye to fix on it for over a full minute, and then stopped. The solemn-faced child said, “No kink.”

Wismon smiled.

“Well, it was inevitable that sooner or later you’d come to the conclusion that I’ve been bluffing,” Wyeth said. “But the fact is that I’m not. You wish to believe I am because you’re unwilling to accept me as your superior. But I could destroy you here and now with a single word.”

“Then do it,” Wismon said.

“Right in the middle of your traveling freak show?”

There was an acid edge to Wyeth’s voice. “Come off it.

They’d rip my head off.”

Heavy lids crept down over Wismon’s eyes, until he appeared to be trembling on the brink of sleep. His every muscle froze to perfect stillness. Then, through lips that barely moved, he said, “Everyone here is to obey my mentor completely, no matter what he tells you to do. Only my direct orders override his. Do you understand? The two of us will talk now. Everyone else must wait outside.”

Two rude boys took Rebel by the arms and swept her through the doorway. “Are you satisfied now?” Wismon asked. But Rebel was already outside and couldn’t hear Wyeth’s answer.

Time passed.

In the quiet of the corridor, the cat women prowled up and down the rope, endlessly fascinated by their eternally new world. Their movements seemed unbearably slow to Rebel, as if they moved through a crystalizing flow of honey. One of the rude boys broke into a hutch and emerged wearing a woman’s lace collar. He primped and postured while the others laughed. Every now and then one would glance at Rebel, wistful dreams of violence in his eyes. Nose chuckled to himself.

At last the sheet metal door shivered and groaned and swung open. Wyeth swam out of the court and gestured to Fu-ya, Gretzin, and Billy. “Escort these people to the sheraton,” he told the dumbfounded rude boys. “The cat women can wait here.” He took Rebel’s arm and kicked downpassage. Maxwell stared unbelievingly after him, then dove into the court.

“You weren’t bluffing, then. You really did put a kink in him,” Rebel marveled.

Wyeth shook his head. “You don’t need a kink to destroy a persona, if you know its weaknesses well enough.

Wismon’s blind spot was his conceit. He had to prove that he could best me on my own turf. It made him overlook the obvious.”

“But what did you do?”

“I snapped his neck,” Wyeth said. “Come on, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Behind them, Maxwell found the body, and screamed.

It took a full day for Wyeth’s samurai to scour the tanks clean of Wismon’s creatures. In dribs and drabs, pairs and dozens, they were brought to the sheraton to be restored. The task would have been impossible without Billy Defector. Under his fingers, the elaborate programs needed to repair the damaged personas flowed magically into existence. Fu-ya or Gretzin could coax the child into working for two or three hours before he turned cranky.

Then he would be allowed to play for a time before being returned to the task. Twice, he put in a night’s sleep.

Rebel fine-tuned a programmer, slid in the therapeutic wafer, turned to the next gurney, and realized that they were done. She stretched, looking about the conference room. Where the topiary garden had been, Constance’s team had resodded the floor and installed a croquet lawn.

An antique pink Martian sky played monotonouslyoverhead. It had been forty hours since she’d slept last.

“You know what? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to think of this room without loathing.”

“I know what you mean,” Wyeth said. With a sigh, he slowly sat down. An attentive pierrot slid a chair under him just in time.

“I’ve been cured of the urge to create new minds, too. I mean, just seeing the monstrosities that Wismon created.”

“Yeah, well, it’s been rough on both of us. But I still feel that new minds are necessary if the human race is going to face the challenge of Earth. We can’t just walk into the future with wetware evolved sometime in the neolithic and expect…” His voice trailed off, and he slumped back in his chair. “Hell, I’m too tired to talk about it.”

Gretzin returned from the goldfish stream, where Billy had been playing. The child slumped in her arms, his head hooked over her shoulder. Seeing them both seated, she said, “You done with Billy now?”

“Oh,” Wyeth said groggily. “Okay, sure. Why don’t you find someplace to put him, and then you can hunt up the paymaster and get your money. I’ll have them give you double pay. You deserve it after all you’ve been through.”

“Yeah, right,” Gretzin said. “Tell you what, I’ll take Billy back to the village first and get his things. Fu-ya is there now, getting them together. Pictures and crap. Won’t take but an hour. I can pick up my pay when I get back.”

“Fine.” Wyeth waved a hand of dismissal, and Gretzin left.

“Be right back,” Rebel said, and followed after. She caught up to Gretzin in the lobby. Billy was asleep on her shoulder, looking like a shavepate angel. “Listen,” Rebel said. “You can borrow my broomstick, it’s as fast as any.

I’ve got it tethered at the hub.”

Gretzin’s harsh face twisted almost into a smile, and she leaned forward to brush lips dry as old leaves across Rebel’s cheek. “Goodbye,” she said, and stepped into the elevator.

A few minutes later, back in the conference room, Wyeth straightened abruptly. “Hey! Why does she need to take Billy with her to pick up his things? She could leave him sleep here while she did that.” He pitched his voice for an intercom line. “Has the village woman come through there?”

“Yes, sir,” a samurai replied. “She took a broomstick toward the orchid some five minutes ago.”

“Damn!” Wyeth lurched to his feet.

“Wyeth,” Rebel said. “Let her go.”

“What are you talking about? That kid’s got a brilliant future ahead of him. It’d be a crime to waste a talent like his. We can’t let him grow up in the slums without any kind of training.”

When they got to the orchid they found Rebel’s broomstick abandoned by its fringe. The path markings were gone. They were just in time to see a dim, distant figure snatch one last rag from its place and disappear into the gloom.

The village was lost for good.