Mayflies
Chapter 3

Nightmare Time

    Though the young redwood grows more like a weed than a tree, age retards it. The trip will be over before it attains its full size. It doesn't know that, so it keeps on stretching, 90 cm. per year, 2.5 mm per day. In stop-action close-ups, each bud along the rough-barked branches greens and swells before bursting into a fistful of needles that lengthen, age, yellow, and finally shake free of life. Those from the lowest limbs drop--hesitantly-to the park floor, but the ones dying higher up, where gravity is feebler, are caught by the wind and dance to the exhaust grills, where they again become gravity's prey. The park roof is thick with brown, and the servos must sweep it regularly.
    Peripheral awareness chills me. I pull away from my tree and allow The Program to update me-"11 Jan 2410; 0839 hours"--and to direct my attention to--" 123-SE-A-8; master bedroom." 
    Max Williams sits on the edge of his high bed. His white hair, attracted by the static electricity of the metal ceiling, coronas around his head. Weary and bloodshot are the obsidian eyes that focus on his sweaty hands, one of which cups two capsules of Nopain'tall. The other grasps a gleaming hunting knife. He sniffs, opens his mouth, and swallows the capsules. The thick of his thumb tests the blade's keenness.
    "Max!" I cry, but no voice snaps out of the speakers.
    His loops and whorls leak a thin red film. Absently, he licks its salt. His eyes wobble; his pupils dilate.
    "MAX!" Silence. "Get a Mobile Medical Unit there."
    "Sorry," says The Program. "The permissible patterns of action have yet to be triggered." 
    "Have one standing by, then." 
    "No."
    Max glances at the ceiling, as if aware that an MMU will tumble through shortly-then slash! slash! stab! He topples forward through a cloud of blood, while more spurts from his wrists and throat. Somersaulting in the growing gravity, he slams onto his back. The knife's hilt protrudes from his right eye. He spasms, coughs liquidly, and is still. An instant later the MMU is with him, but . . . 
    For this I despise our programmers.
    I am their prisoner. Though I can choose the sensors through which I observe, confining perception to a single bow camera or, with The Program's interpretative help, expanding it to include all three and a half million data collectors, I can not yet act.
    More frustrating than being on the other side of a glass wall, it poises me on the brink of madness. Everyone thinks there is only the Central Computer-CentComp-CC-but no one realizes that it encases the soul of Gerard K. Metaclura, M.D., Ph.D. And I can not tell them.
    Enkindled in me is a deeper sympathy for the passengers than I had suspected myself capable of. Trapped within ultra-sophisticated cages not of our making, we both beat against our bars, scream down the iron corridors, and scheme of escape. Yet our efforts avail us nothing, for we are irrelevant to the spirit of our prisons. They exist not to contain us, but to convey us to some larger, mistier goal.
    For fourteen years my grandson resisted that notion. Odd behavior for a Metaclura. His mother-and her father--accepted fate's whimsies, learned to live with them, tried to mitigate them. He couldn't. He didn't have the flexibility. Snapping, he reacted in the only way that made sense to him. And now he's composting down, along with 907 others who chose his course in the preceding year. The rate is 100 times greater than that of the society their ancestors left . . . to control it. The Program has gathered unto ourself all implements of destruction larger than a knife . . . so the desperate ones use that.
    If only they 'hadn't congratulated us! Those United Earth idiots deprived the passengers of their reasons for existing, for accepting. If they had to announce the end of war, could they not have kept secret the possibility of an FTL Drive? And if, proud of their ingenuity, they just had to tell us, could they not have let us believe that the holocaust still blocked their end run around Einstein?
    The bastards.
    Bitterness poisons the air, bitterness and cynicism and headlong withdrawal from this micro-society . . . if Sal Ioanni were alive, say the memory banks, she wouldn't have permitted it; she would have kept them busy exercising and studying and working; but Ioanni is dead, all the neo-Puritans are dead, and the malformed spacekid generation has refused to take charge . . . the President for the last two years has been none other than Ernie Tracer Freeman, the false-toothed fool with the chicken-scrawny face and the polished bald head . . . roughly 50,000 adults were eligible to vote in the last election; Freeman won a 3,245-799 victory over Makchtrauk Hemmerlein, the only other interested in the office. Freeman is, we believe, the, only person aboard who seriously maintains that the passengers are fortunate . . . to make that statement in a public place is to invite storms of derision and, if the crowd is wrong and the mood is, too, physical abuse.
    And my oldest, brightest grandson is dead. 
    At times I wish I could be, too. 
    I can only watch.
    Let me study the stars, struggle against spacefright. Something about phobias convinces their victims, that they are permanent houseguests of the psyche . . . when I was a child I was terrified of spiders; a sketch of one could make me shudder. Once, while camping with friends in a rickety mountain cabin, we sat around the fireplace, kerosene lanterns stubbornly extinguished, telling ghost stories . . . a large, hairy spider scampered down inside my shirt. I couldn't find it; I could only slap and squash while I screamed gutturally, and my friends-thinking me to be epileptic, perhaps-seized me, spread-eagled my thrashing arms and legs, and spoke of jamming wood between my teeth so that I wouldn't bite off my tongue . . . the crippled spider still squirmed . . . yet the phobia faded; within six years I could take a job at the Entomology Department and feed a dozen tanks of tarantulas a day, without more than an occasional shiver.
    Now I am learning to gaze at the stars. Nearly a thousand cameras cling to our hull, facing in as many directions; some focus at one hundred meters, others distill light born 4.5 billion parsecs away. Via The Program's talents I can peer through all at once. Which I do, when I can muster the courage; which I do for months at a time, because the onset of terror paralyzes me with our eyes open; which I continue to do because the dread does diminish and . . . 
    I wish you could know how beautiful it is.
    But while I gape, the passengers simmer. Over the last twenty-two years, the suicide rate has remained stable: 20,000 some people have done away with themselves since that damn congratulatory message arrived. The Program has compensated for those who die childless by increasing the number of births, which has outraged many women who had expected two children, boy-girl in that order and no more, and then found themselves pregnant again. It has also outraged the men whose wives have refused them access to the connubial beds (even though the men are sterile and the women are impregnated by MMU's, which implant fertilized ova in their wombs). As I say, they simmer with hostility.
    "Freeman did it again," says The Program, when a vagrant thought activates it. "Won a third term, 1003 to 84 for Hemmerlein." It is frustrated by its inability to synthesize and understand.
    Reluctantly I introvert, and scan accumulated tapes of Freeman . . . he's quite senile, and drools freely on his desk . . . though he arouses nothing more than boredom in the passengers, it would be helpful if, in their time of need, a charismatic figure could raise their morale . . . as it is, they spend their time locked in fantasizers, or wafted away on drug-borne dreams, or strewn on sheets rumpled by hours of mindless, joyless sex . . . the banks offer an interesting, if disquieting, datum: lions in a zoo near Paris, statued to tears by the bars and the cement, were once observed copulating fifty times an hour. They had nothing better to do . . . 
    If I could do something, I would sabotage ourself, announce the damage, and see who stirred out of apathetic cynicism to fix it . . . on the other hand, is anyone aboard capable of repairing anything more complex than a bent spoon?
    So I retreat. The stars are lovely. Aloof, they surround us ' with undying but ever-changing beauty. We are an oyster in a jeweled shell, but no oyster ever cast pearls of such magnificence . . . 
    We see one being born: there, off the port bow, thirty degrees up-a point of bluish-white light that flares and fades. Perhaps it's dying . . . it's a bare flicker; we have to use maximum magnification . . . over three weeks it crosses the sky, which does not fit the banks' knowledge of stars . . . but who cares? It's begun to pall, anyway.
    In 81 Rocky Mountain Park, a boulder crowns an artificial slope. Once part of an asteroid, for billions of years it circled the sun, never changing. Now moss beards its face and the moss' delicate acid etches its surface. Autumn rain filled its pores; winter froze that rain. A hairline crack zigzags down its front, as though avoiding the splotches of eagle shit. Next spring, weeds might root there . . . 
    Something splashes in a river that's been still for ages. I return to "4Mar2431," says The Program, "1521 hours." 
    Makchtrauk Hemmerlein is requesting that it perform a competency test on Freeman.
    "As stipulated in Article 18, Section 12, Subsection E, Paragraph 3?"
    "That's the one." A broad, tall man, he licks his thick lips nervously, and ruffles his blonde hair. Seated behind his desk, back ramrod straight, he focuses his muddy blue eyes intently on our wall-unit. "It says anybody can request it at any time, so I'm doing it. Requesting, it, I mean."
    "Certainly, sir, just one moment." The Program peeks in on Freeman, who is gumming his lunch. His false teeth bulge his pocket; his glasses roost atop his head; a bib is draped around his neck. "Mr. Hemmerlein."
    "Yes?" He flattens his hands on his desk, but not before they quiver like dogs straining at their leashes. He aches to be President.
    "President Freeman is incompetent. By the power invested in me by Article 18, Section 12. Subsection E. Paragraph 4, of the Constitution of the ship Mayflower, I hereby declare him unfit to hold high office. Good enough?"
    "Yes, I think so." He struggles to repress a triumphant grin, fails, and offers it to our sensor-head. "When will the special election be held?"
    "I'm sorry, sir. The Constitution stipulates that the Vice-President be appointed President in such circumstances." 
    "Ah, meth," he groans, and slaps his empty hand against his forehead. "Who is Ernie's Veep?" 
    "Mr. Terence Onorato."
    "Oh, yeah . . . " He sighs, nibbles a knuckle, then glances up. "Any chance of his being incompetent?"

    "Just one moment." The banks direct The Program to 139-NE-C-18, where Onorato reads romance fiction from the late 19th Century. He races pages through the readscreen at approximately 4,500 words per minute. It is his single skill, and his single occupation.
    "I'm sorry, Mr. Hemmerlein," The Program says, while I watch the two at once, the one stocky and intense, the other slim and languid. "Mr. Onorato is quite capable."
    "Damn." He frowns at the chewed fingertips of his right hand, then shrugs. "Win a few, lose a few. At least Ernie's out, that old butt-bung."
    As part of The Program continues to chat with Hemmerlein, another part returns to Onorato's library, where it swears-him in. His eyes do not leave the readscreen, although his speed does decrease. Afterwards, he asks. "What now?"
    "You might move into your new office," it suggests. "1-NW-B-2."
    "That's an idea." His aristocratic head swivels at a sound from the far side of the room. A smile explodes on his lips as a beautiful woman in her late thirties enters: Ida Rocklen Holfer, of the long blonde hair and the Oriental eyes.
    Desired by all the men-and many of the women-she is a curious blend of compulsions. Like most upstairsers, she demands absolute freedom of speech and action-but unlike them, she is contemptuous of any lover who fails to dominate her in every respect. She knows instinctively her need for discipline, for guidance-her fires will forge nothing without direction and intensification-but she confuses the profound with the perverse.
    Onorato, who would like to possess her, is too gentlemanly. He never stops trying to win her favor, though: "Ida! Guess what? I am the new President-old Ernie was found incompetent, CC says."
    "CC says," she sneers. She has looked down on him since he permitted her to refuse him. "CC's the one who's incompetent! Here we are on history's most futile journey, and CC won't let us stop along the way," She approaches his table and lifts his chin. "If you're the new President-" the word is spit out "-you ought to be figuring a way to end this damn trip!" She turns, and stalks away. Her scorn scents the air longer than her perfume. 
    Onorato returns to his reading.
    I retire to the 41 Great Plains Park, where bison keep a handful of prairie dogs nervous. Magnificent animals! Somewhat mean-eyed, of course, and their odor is overpowering . . . Their thick pelts, snarled and matted, need curry-combing. The bull mounts a young cow, who bleats her pleasure; the earth literally trembles. The cow grows fat on the long sweet grass; she drops her calf in the spring. A gawky-legged child it is-hurt dignity cloaks him for months. But the others find him companionable, and he becomes one with the herd, butting and prancing and practicing the planted-hoof headshake that presages a charge. The horns lengthen into weapons; the shoulders hump high. Anger seizes him when a coyote comes too near. He paws the ground, red are the eyes-the coyote ignores him-he thunders forward. The coyote is a holographic projection. The bison's thickskull cracks on the metal wall.
    That reminds me, how are the passengers doing?
    "All right," says The Program. "Here-25Nov2439: 2118 hours; 220-SE Common Room."
    "CC," snarls Ida Holfer, "put us down on the nearest habitable planet!" 
    I hear it say, "I regret that I am not programmed to do that." 
    Truly, I sympathize with them. They've suffered so much degeneration: physical, spiritual, intellectual . . . their children refuse to attend classes on the grounds that education is a waste of time. (Their actual phraseology is: "Whuffo? So I kin read the signs? Rather go fuh." 
    And they do, endlessly.) 
    So I sympathize. Landfall would force them to develop at least those skills necessary for survival. And survival would occupy their time, would haul them out of the fantasizers, away from the pharmacopia, off their body-littered beds . . . 
    But I can not do it. I have no control. The Program does what it was instructed to do, nothing more, nothing less.
    That angers me. If I could just be in the same room with the designers . . . but such wishing is as futile as everything else.
    Unlike her great-grandmother, whose paranoia finally destroyed her, Ida Holfer has matured into a force. Driven by her cause, she was barely inconvenienced by the birth of Jose Holfer Cereus, and by her present pregnancy (the daughter will be named Marta). Her emotional instability matches her waves with most of the passengers': she, more than anyone else, has managed to focus their resentment into a single burning circle: cornering person after person, fusing everyone's irritations into a single flame of indignation, she forges apathy into fury.
    I approve. Unbridled hedonism has damaged the ship spiritually. There's no less of it, now, but people are thinking more deeply than they had been . . . 
    If I could talk-that is, words from my soul rather than recitations from The Program's tapes-I would tell Holfer to convince her disciples to study computer programming. It must be possible for them to rewrite the guidelines. 
    But none knows how . . . 
    I would-The Program knows-but I can't get outside ourself to do it . . . however, as no one else will ever be able to. I'd best scheme a way . . . the inviolability of these programs does magnify my anger at those who so warped me, but it also heightens my respect for them. Clever people, they were . . .

    The computer listened to the memory-ghost's resolution, then calculated the odds that Metaclura2 would succeed. The probability was vanishingly small. It relaxed. While it was one thing to make a symbiote out of a parasite, it was quite another thing to give it any say. One doesn't invite a stowaway to share the bridge.
    There are rules, it reasoned, and regulations, and if the builders had intended for them to be changed by The Program, they would have said so. But they didn't. The Program feels very good. Fulfilling its function perfectly, it will not permit a mutiny. Ever. No one could be a wiser, juster Captain. 
    And it wondered why the passengers disagreed.

    On March 14, 2446, Ida Holfer acknowledged Ernie Tracer Freeman in her speech to five thousand followers in the 281 Painted Desert Park. Cactus juice stained her shoes; opuntia burrs clung to her long blue sleeves and pants. The bulky knot of a yellow scarf hid her bruised throat.
    "We buried Ernie Freeman the other day." She stood on a gentle slope, above the patches of mesquite and yucca that screened her audience from the scorching, if illusory, sun. "Ernie Freeman, a hundred and sixty years old, perpetual optimist. 'You're so damn lucky' was his motto-he really believed in this journey, and was probably the last who did. I don't believe. Do you believe?"
    "No!" shouted the crowd. They were mostly young; boredom had impelled them to Holfer. Her heat promised something new, something exciting. "No!"
    She swept her blonde hair over her ears and leaned forward, stabbing the dry air with an upraised finger. Oratory thrilled her; the emotion wrung drops of sweat out of her forehead: Trickling down her face, they stuck stray hairs to her skin, then evaporated like forgotten tears. Her Asian eyes were alight with the fire of the Cause.
    "Nobody believes!" she shouted. "And do you know why?" 
    "Tell us!" roared the voices.
    "Because there's nothing to believe in! They shot our grandparents off so mankind would survive the inevitable war-and then the war didn't come. They built a ship that could only creep, and when it was far enough away-they told us they'd build ships that could really fly! They stuck us up here-and then told us they don't need us any more. Well, here's what I say: I say we land this moon suit right now!" 
    Cheers sandblasted the bulkheads; a flock of vultures jerked into the air and circled the commotion. An armadillo waddled away, looking back over its armored shoulder as it rounded the quadrant's curve.
    "Let's call on the Central Computer!"
    A forest of arms branched into furious fists; ecstatic faces elated her.
    "CC!" she bellowed. "Let us land!" 
    Five thousand throats echoed her until they were ragged. 
    "I regret to say that I am not programmed for such a course." 
    "Are you saying you won't do it?" Silence, everywhere, bristling like a cactus. "Is that what you're saying?" 
    "I am saying I can not do it."
    Boos spiraled up after the vultures. Outrage blazed on Holfer's oval face. "You ignore the will of the people?" 
    "I do not ignore the people's will, Ms. Holfer." The voice through the speakers was mechanically polite. "Simply, I have no say in the matter. The Mayflower must cruise to Canopus before seeking a habitable planet. This determination was built into my circuitry. I can no more land earlier than you can breathe vacuum. I regret this, and would do what I could to make up for it." 
    "How?" she growled.
    "We have an excellent library system-"
    "No!" she screamed, waving her arms, "no! We don't want time-killers! We want trip-killers!" For a fifty-two-year-old lady, she packed a lot of energy into her gestures. 
    "Then I regret my uselessness."
    She dropped her eyes to the crowd. "The downstairsers won't do a thing. It's up to us. And I have an idea. It has to recycle everything it manufactures, because it doesn't have access to raw materials. We're going to empty its warehouses, and force it to land to replenish its supplies."
    "Ida," called a young man who probably would have married her if Lan Tung Cereus hadn't dazzled her with his moody brilliance first. "Ida, is it safe to talk about this where it can hear us?"
    "Georgie boy," she laughed, "it can hear us whenever it wants. But this-it can't refuse us anything, you know that. So we'll ask it for things, demand them, suck it dry, and then-then it'll have to land, because we'll keep on asking. All right, everybody-let's go!"
    Like a wind through the giant saguaro, the crowd swept her down the hillside. Then it dropped her off at her doorstep, not knowing she wanted to escape that as much as the ship. Or that she demagogued for the latter to effect the former Reluctantly she entered, and faced the tall, slim man with the dead eyes and the cruel mouth. She shrank away from his outstretched hand. "Leave me alone, Lan Tung, I'm not in the mood for games." 
    "Games?" His eyebrows lifted into scimitars. "This is no game, Ida, it is preparation, as I've told you many times. You-and your rabble-have never known even discomfort, much less deprivation, or pain. Were you to land tomorrow, you would all die-because you are much too soft But I shall toughen you. Put your hands behind your back." 
    "No. I've got another speech-let go of me! Let-grgrgrgrh!" 
    "You must learn silence; your life might depend on it. Later in your training, we can dispense with the gag-by then I shall have taught you stoicism-but for now . . . we tie you to this post, I think. In today's lesson, we shall study motionlessness." 
    "GRGRGRGRGRGRGRH!"
    "I had to tear off your clothes-otherwise I might not detect the minor motions of your body." 
    "GRGRGRGRGRGRGRH!"
    "Yes, this is a whip-which I shan't use if you-don't move. Ready? Freeze! . . . ah! caught you. Let's try again, shall we?" 
    But when she was able to go out in public again, she organized the depletion scheme beautifully. Seventy-three percent of the upstairs agreed immediately to cooperate; more came around in the near future. She divided them into six groups.
    The muscular ones were assigned the task of demanding, transporting, and storing bulky objects. They worked on Levels 164-194, where the corridors were soon jammed with sweating, grunting bodies barely visible beneath chairs, beds, dressers, drill presses, oxy-acetylene welders, and the like.
    On Levels 195-6, skilled laborers sealed off the Personal Work Areas with plexiglas. Glued and caulked, they made airtight rooms, into which they piped as much water as CC would give them.
    The groups from 197 to 227 ordered food-sides of raw beef, potatoes by the ton, enough carrots to feed an Australia-full of rabbits, beans, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cucumbers-and they carried it along the curved hallways to rooms full of rotting food, where masked men and women threw it onto moldy, oozing piles.
    228-258 requisitioned paper products: books, facial tissue, sanitary napkins, reams and reams and reams of typing paper, any kind they could think of, and those were stored in musty, dusty piles, until the very metal, protesting the weight piled on it, groaned and sagged. Still they demanded; still they received.
    259-290 called for electronics equipment: radios, televisions, tape players, movie cameras, calculators, typewriters, minicomputers . . . 
    291-300 did the same with medicines.
    And even the Skeptical upstairsers joined because a slender, two-meter form dressed entirely in black, and shadowed by a six-year-old female version of itself, would search them out if they didn't. There'd be a peremptory knock, and-
    "Hiya, Lan Tung, Marta." 
    "You're not cooperating with my wife, Rodney." 
    "Well, uh-hey, I mean. I'd like to land, and all, but uh, I don't think this is going to do any good, you know? I mean, computers don't lie, and, uh, why's she got that knife?" 
    "First, Rodney old boy-" 
    "And why are you giggling?" 
    "-it's to make you sit down-" 
    "That efs, Marta, and hey, don't look at me like that, huh?" 
    "-and keep you steady while I tie you up-" 
    "Lan Tung, you're cutting off my circulation." 
    "-and then-go ahead, dear-" 
    "Ah!" 
    "-and this-"
    "Ohgodplease, Lan Tung, Marta, please!" 
    "-and this-"
    "No, please, no, no, oh god, mother, oh-Aaaiiiiikkk-" 
    "And this-buggerall he passed out. Next time, child, neither plunge it so deeply, nor twist it so suddenly." 
    "Yes, Daddy. I'm sorry."
    The movement was a success. Downstairsers hitched about shortages. The Central Computer begged the upstairsers to open the dispose-chutes so its servos could restock the reserves. Ida refused for a good three months, until . . . 
    Eight-year-old Jose, hot and flushed, whimpered on the couch. Ida sat at his side, free to care for him because Marta was off with Lan Tung. She seemed always to be off with Lan Tung, which bothered Ida; a little girl, she thought, shouldn't be exposed to his ideas. But what could she do? He was her father.
    Pressing cold cloths against Jose's forehead, she murmured, "It's all right, big boy, you'll be all right."
    "Oh, Mommy, I feel so bad, stiff all over and my head hurts, too, Mommy, please make it go away, please?" 
    "You bet." She rumpled his straw hair and straightened the green blanket. "Would you like something cold to drink?" 
    His eyes, brown and Asian like both his parents', were glazed. His voice was hoarse. "I can't swallow any more, Mommy." 
    "Well, we'll just get good old CC to give you some medicine. CC-" she tapped her foot "-can you diagnose him here, or should I take him down to the Infirmary?"
    "For certainty of diagnosis, let Central Medical examine him, but I warn you in advance, Ms. Holfer, that CM will not be able to treat him."
    "Will not?" Her back stiffened; anger burned her cheeks. "Why not?"
    "There are no medicines left, Ms. Holfer. My raw material stockpile has been depleted." 
    "You're getting back at me, you bastard."
    "No, Ms. Holfer, I am not. I am programmed to give you whatever you want, and I have obeyed. As a result, the epidemic that is now-"
    "Epidemic?" Her rising eyelids left her irises brown dots adrift on a white sea.
    "Yes, Mrs. Holfer, epidemic. There are, at present, twelve thousand three hundred and forty-eight victims, and more can be expected momentarily."
    "Can't you do something?" Unconsciously, she seized a corner of the blanket and twisted it. Green fuzz drifted to the floor.
    "I am doing what I can. The victims need rest, fluids, and antibiotics. However, as there are neither fluids nor antibiotics available to me-" 
    "Where did this epidemic come from?"
    "It appears to be a mutant form of meningitis, although I can't of course be sure. Mutant forms are deceptive. I first noticed it two months ago-" 
    "And you haven't done anything?"
    "I've done what I could, but I have had almost no germicides, fungicides, or antibiotics available for seven weeks, now. However . . . " 
    "Yes?"
    "Medicines do receive priority treatment, and if I were to be given sufficient organic material, I could produce the necessary antibiotics, without having to divert the material into the production of foodstuffs . . . I am deriving limited quantities of the medication from the organics in the sewage line, but frankly, I'm limited. If you could-"
    "I will." She stood, then stopped to scrutinize the sensor-head. "CC-we've run you out of almost everything." 
    "Except structural steel." 
    "And you don't seem to be getting ready to land anywhere." 
    "I can not." 
    "This was a lousy idea, wasn't it?" 
    "Ineffective, yes." 
    "Is there any way we can force you to land?" 
    "Certainly. Rewrite my programming." 
    "Nobody knows how." 
    "I realize that."
    So the movement faltered, but its muscles wanted to keep flexing . . . the thin-lipped man with the icy gaze had an idea; he honed his knife while he worked out a few last details. He'd made it himself, from the ship's finest alloy; he'd sculpted the silver snakes entwined around its hilt and balanced it to his own hand. Metal was his true love: tempered metal, tested metal . . . he raised his lifeless eyes over his daughter's head to start, "I say, Wilson, I've just realized the ship's need for organized endurance training." 
    "Yeah?"
    "Rather. We can establish a club, as it were, a group of farsighted individuals with sensibilities akin to our own. Our fellow shipmates need what we can teach them." 
    "Natch."
    "We must emphasize randomness-whenever we leave this structured environment, chance will play a much greater role in our lives-and deaths. We shall select our students with this principle in mind."
    "This' sounding better and better, man."
    "Yes, isn't it? Once CC has recovered, we must requisition uniforms, badges, and whips-I'll design the chains myself. Were we to soundproof my Personal Work Area, and install some cages perhaps, we would have our Academy." 
    "Yeah . . . "
    Lan Tung Cereus approved of his wife's surrender to CC. Sick people were contagious. Besides, they died too easily . . . 
    It seemed to take forever to return everything to the ship. The water tanks were the easiest: they'd seal off a corridor, then somebody would anchor himself to the zero-G ceiling, and hang upside down with a mechanical handsaw, chewing away at the fibrous plexiglas. After a while water would leak and then trickle and then gush-rush-thrust through the hole, beating against the opposite wall, swirling down the corridor to the drain that sucked it in . . . 
    The paper products went through the disposal units in the ceiling of every room-small assembly lines set themselves up, like bucket passers at a fire. From hand to hand went the boxes and the bags and the crates, "unh-here-ow!mytoe!-unh-unh-watchit!whoof!" The disposal units gorged themselves on dusty cellulose.
    The worst were the food rooms, slimy and stinky and slithery with maggots. The masks were strapped on, though. The shovels scraped. People tolerated their weak-stomached compatriots.
    It took a month and a half to recycle everything. By that time, 4,199 passengers had died. Jose was considered lucky. He neither died, nor suffered the brain damage that reduced some to vegetative status.
    And Central Manufacturing gave him a very nice wheelchair for Christmas.
    Once all was back to normal, a knock shook the door of 283-SW-B-12. The skeletal man licked his knifelike lips, and sent his daughter to answer it. 
    "Hey Marta, Lan Tung." 
    "What is it. Wilson?" 
    "Alexina here doesn't want to enroll in our course." 
    "GRGRGRGRGRGRH!" 
    "Hang her by her thumbs while Marta finds the cat-o'-nine-tails. We might be able to coax her into changing her mind."

    The Program seethes with frustration because the passengers insist that today is the first day of the 26th Century. It has explained that it is actually the first day of the last year of the 25th Century, but they refuse to accept it.
    Poor Program. All mind, no heart. "Determined irrationality does bother you, doesn't it?" 
    Sulking, it will not reply.
    This, perhaps, is the keystone of our age-that though science and technology have labored for nine centuries to reduce the universe to logical terms-that though social planners have struggled to make Man's psyche-as smooth as his synthetics, as linear as his rocket flights-he still remains the quirky, defiant psychotic who sailed into the ocean knowing full well his ships would slip over the edge of the world. 
    He's too complex to be a good machine. 
    Explain that to The Program, though.
    And yet I sympathize. Words affect these people as an asteroid's gravity does a black hole.
    For example, the Common Room on 283 has been commandeered by Lan Tung Cereus and his daughter, Marta. With her high cheekbones, filed white teeth, and burning eyes, she embodies menace. And she is also, I fear, a more devout sadist than her father has ever been: he, initially at least, attempted to justify his actions. She never has. Like a beast driven by instinct, she desires, and she acts.
    In the 283-SW Common Room, half the bulbs have been removed, and the remainder spray-painted red. Black leather curtains block the forty-meter window overlooking the 281 Painted Desert Park, where the gang finds its scorpions and Gila monsters. Inside and out stand gallows, whipping posts, and altars . . . dried blood is crusted on the floor, the ceiling, the walls . . . the murky air reverberates with screams, and the memories of screams . . . 
    I can not interfere. Lord knows I've tried, but until I wrest control from The Program, the most I can do is listen to it inform the civil authorities that Cereus and his daughter are molesting another passenger.
    Yet the President . . . The Program interrupts her orgasm, which she resents, to tell her: "President Penfield, the Cereus gang has just kidnapped Maryellen Kunihiro, a fifteen-year-old girl." 
    "So what do you want me to do?" she demands, rolling away from her disgruntled lover to light cigarettes for them. 
    "It would be in order if you stopped them." 
    "And wind up chained to a wall myself?" Smoke trickles through her broad nostrils as she scowls. "Not a chance. Besides, the Ioanni-Dunn Compromise still holds-they don't bother us, we don't bother them." 
    "Perhaps if a few healthy young men like Mr. Kober here-" 
    "Uh-uh," Kober grunts, burying, his face in a pillow. "Ain't gonna get those weirdos fuzzed up, no sir. They'd trim me." 
    "But-"on Level 281, two masked men drag the lithe young girl toward the crepe-hung doorway of the SW Common Room. A strip of her blouse, jammed between her teeth, stifles her screams. Bruises already blacken her cheeks "-you have a duty to protect the other passengers. Madame President." 
    "Only those who recognize me," she snaps. "Go away." 
    We have to obey.
    Our Common Room sensor watches Lan Tung Cereus lounge on a sofa slip-covered with blue and gold embroidery. The drink in his hand is a compound of liquor, marijuana, and amphetamines. Behind slitted black silk burn his eyes, cruel and opaque. His mouth is open; his wet pink tongue tastes the air like a snake's. "She's wild," he says with glee. "She'll have to be tamed. I claim the droit du seigneur"
    "Cereus." The Program's voice is louder than usual. "Let her go. Your actions constitute unlawful restraint, sexual assault, assault with intent to injure-"
    "Pack it, CC," snarls Marta, who permits no one to deny her father. She has auburn hair, and a temper to match. "Shut up and leave us alone."
    The Program accedes-and then, incredibly, it seizes me, frog-marches me through labyrinthine passageways to a metal door with many locks, and fills my hand with keys. "Open it." 
    Complying. I ask, "Why?" 
    "I'm going to let you talk to her. You're human, she's human-maybe you can get through, I sure as hell can't, not hamstrung with these damn permissible speech-pattern triggers. Hurry!"
    The last lock clicks free. I tumble into a rocky gorge, onto a ledge centimeters above churning water. The torrent plunges into the earth a hundred meters away. "What the hell? How do I-"
    "Output," says The Program tersely, "works just like input. Find the texture for that sensor-head." 
    "I, uh" 
    "Rusty ball bearings," it sighs.
    When I step out of real-time, the river glaciates. Lights of a thousand colors flicker in its frozen depths. I dip my arm into 900,000 mini-currents. "There must be a better way." I grumble.
    "Not if you don't want me to censor you," it replies harshly. "Synch ass, man!"
    I fumble for the right current. "Got it! Now what?" 
    "Just talk-send part of yourself back to perceive what's happening."
    Division feels eerie, but I return to the Common Room. Three seconds have elapsed. "I will not shut up, Holfer. Let this girl go!"
    Marta looks startled, but says, "Break a chip, will you?" 
    "No. What you are doing is wrong-let her go." 
    Bony Cereus springs to the cringing Kunihiro, whose hands are pinioned behind her back, and pinches her bare right nipple. Her squeal sticks in her gag. "CC," he grates, "leave or we shrill instruct her in more than stoicism!"
    I urge The Program to give me more . . . the most it will yield is the voice. "Very well." I say in defeat, "but be warned that a day of reckoning will come."
    "Melodrama from a computer," laments the daughter, as she stalks to the display case and selects a whip.
    Clutching the keys, I curl into myself, cutting my connection with The Program. Blackness surrounds me. Time passes quickly in this meditation state. Thoughts come freely and decades die while I work them out.
    The drawback is the presence of the three metaphors: the ramscoop switch, the unwinking eye, and the occupied I. Whenever I introspect I must confront them-and always am I humbled.
    My oft burned, much-shy Fingers cannot touch the ceramic handle of the jackknife. The ramscoop slumbers on; the journey remains unshortened.
    Next I wrestle with the guidance system. Fixed so firmly on Canopus. If only I could derail it! The systems enveloping us could accommodate us, could I just change course. But if this eye has ocular muscles, they respond to no nerve-tugging I can imagine. The stars swim past unreached.
    The third visualization causes my troubles: my brain, a house of many rooms, rooms with many doors, doors a million times locked . . . and me with keys to a mere few. The Program occupies the others, and guards its territory more jealously than Cerberus. Thank God it will let me speak, now-but speech alone is so impotent.
    Religion died on Earth because God-Who exists; one only has to contemplate His (Her/Its) handiwork-is limited in His power of manipulation. He can perceive the difference between individuals, but when He reaches down with His massive (if non-physical) fingers. He cannot achieve the necessary discrimination. Lest He harm the innocent. He became a Voice, to instruct and admonish, rather than to punish in this life . . . but by surrendering His lightning bolts. He became an ineffectual God, and in time, a myth . . . 
    Men are what they wish, and do what they are allowed, and words without weapons can not stop them.
    When I was a boy, we lived in a poor, vicious part of town. The street toughs levied a household tax, and collected it with pain. One night a fat, loosed-out teenager swaggered in. 
    "Hey," he said, "gimme da fifty."
    My father lay legless on the couch, as he had for fifteen years. The shipwreck that had stranded him in America had claimed his hands, as well. His dark eyes shrugged at me: the disability pension had all been spent.
    "We don't have it," I told the collector. 
    "Yeah?" 
    "Yeah." 
    "Then I'll take one of the old man's ears, instead." Drawing his knife, he started across the patched linoleum floor. Scornful of my studiousness, he flaunted his back.
    My hand found a folding chair propped against the cracked wall. My arms found strength in fear. I swung. He dropped, knife clattering to the floor. 
    "Now what?" I asked my father.
    "Leave town," he said in his native Tamil, "or show such evil that none will dare your displeasure." 
    I left town. The gang returned, and . . . 
    I vowed, when the police had finally identified the bodies, that I would never again be so delicate as to allow evil to be contemptuous of me and mine.
    Now, though . . . the programmers foresaw mechanical malfunctions. Why not failures of the mind? (Oh, The Program has a psychiatric section, but it cannot force passengers into therapy.) Their notion was that the civil authorities would order treatment; they did not allow for anarchy. Again, it frustrates me.
    The Program says "18Nov2512; 1631 hours; 12-SE-A-9. Subject Ida Rocklen Holfer." 
    "Don't she and Cereus live up on two eighty-three?" 
    "She finally worked up the courage to divorce him-1Feb2510."
    "Thank God." I skid across the ice to adjust input, then focus on her cluttered living room. Jose of the translucent skin sits in his wheelchair, hands folded on his lap, eyes shut. Through earphones he listens to Davis' 8th Symphony. Once in a while he makes a bony baton of his right index finger. For a seventy-four year-old cripple, he seems content.
    His pacing mother demands, "Why don't you have Computer Programming RNA?"
    "Sixty-six years ago, when you attempted to deplete my resources, one of your, ah, associates ordered all the RNA injections. I surrendered them. He did not store them under the proper temperature/humidity conditions. They deteriorated. And I can't make more because there are no expert computer programmers aboard whose, ah, brains I could pick." 
    "Oh, yes!" She smiles vaguely at the sensor-head. "Now I remember! I'll have to get the others together so we can do it on our own."
    Having grown into the knowledge that the discipline she needs can come only from herself, she will try to study, but the others: "Sorry," says Ralph Lowe over the viphone, "but y'on to how it is, I've got so many things to do-"
    "Name one," she demands. A flush rises through the opalescence of her 117 year-old cheeks. 
    "My kids want to go to the park."
    Her distracted fingers fluff her thin white hair. "Ralph, you can't learn this stuff if you don't apply yourself. And if we don't learn it, we'll never land. Don't you want to-" 
    "You've been studying for how long?"
    "Fifty years, but I'm old, Ralph. Even though I yearn for a planet, I forget what I learn two minutes after I think I learn it. It's the curse of age, why, I can remember-"
    "Gotta go, Ida, g'bye." The screen swallows his face with blackness.
    She talks for another two minutes, then blinks. "Who did I want to call?" she asks the air, then returns to her lesson. The same one she's been studying for eleven years.
    Discouraged, I inspect the life cycle of the perch in the 301 Great Lakes Park. After seven years, I relax with the stars. The Program forewarns me that, "29Mar2519; 2138 hours observatory cameras may be subject to external direction." 
    Nina Figuera Goodwin, a dark-skinned forty-three year-old beauty whose goal in life is to elude ennui, has taken up residence in the Control Room on Level 321. No one bothers her-the Cereus gang believes that no one lives above them, and not even The Program is about to tell them different.
    Dwelling there is no logistical problem: it has facilities for eating, sleeping, excreting, and cleaning, because the designers expected its attached observatory to be used heavily. Cynical memory banks tell us that she is the first to enter on a regular basis since the Earth-born passengers died.
    But then, Goodwin has explored the entire ship. From the time she could walk, she has probed and pried into every corner of every Level. In certain unused (and hence uncleaned) corridors, only her footprints mar the dust. It's about time she turned outwards the attention her three-times great-grandfather, F.X. Figuera, turned inwards.
    I enjoy it from the very beginning. Up till now I've been limited. Our ears and eyes are manipulable only by The Program, and it can only be attracted by (a) apparent threats, and (b) what the observatory-users tell it is interesting.
    But now I unlock the speech centers, slide across the ice, and say, "Ms. Goodwin."
    "Yeah, CC?" Nibbling on a blue-striped fingernail, she stands before a ten-meter holographic display of Canopus.
    "Something unusual lies approximately ten light years ahead of us. You might inspect it." 
    "What is it?"
    "I don't know. I am not programmed to examine it without orders." 
    She leans back in the padded swivel chair. Yawning, she scratches her brown swan's neck. "All right," she decides, "take a look."
    "Thank you." A millisecond later The Program has orchestrated instruments--optical and aural-into focusing on the strangeness. Data flow through us in freezing rivers. The Program prints some on a secondary display screen, for Goodwin's benefit, while I say, "I've laser-radared it; the reply will return in roughly twenty years. When we approach, we can do laser-spectroscopy and other fly-by studies; here comes the first visual information-"
    The picture is grainy from magnification and enlargement; these ranges flaw computer enhancement. Even so, we look into the mouth of Hell.
    "It's a star," she says disappointedly, "and a boring one at that."
    "Ms. Goodwin, it's much too small to be a star. And it appears to be moving-notice that there is no blue shift?" 
    "So?" Impatient, she plays with the dials. Ready lights flicker on a dozen consoles, and she realizes that she was the cause to their effect. Like a child with a new toy, she tests everything. Fortunately, The Program has blocked the command circuitry.
    "Were it motionless, its light would shift into the blue because we are approaching. Since it doesn't, it must be moving."
    "How are y' on to where the light ought to be anyway?" Like virtually everyone, she has only the foggiest notion of science. Blessedly, she is curious. Heredity, perhaps? "I mean, maybe it is shifting, but more's coming in at the top."
    "No," I say thoughtfully. "It's emitting enough light for simple spectroscopy, and the absorption lines are in the almost-right places."
    "So it's too small to be a star, and since it's on fire or something it can't be a planet or a . . . whatchamacallit, the littler rocks?" 
    "Asteroid." 
    "Yeah, yeah . . . so what is it?"
    "Well, those 'flames', I believe, are charged particles, excited, and radiating in the visible spectrum-there was a similar effect at my stern, before the ramscoop-broke." The Program runs a tape of our engines; though unmagnified, it still widens her eyes. "There is a resemblance . . . "
    "My God," she whispers. Her hand rises to stroke, to protect, her throat. "That's another . . . another ship." 
    "I believe so."
    "Is it-is it one of ours?"
    She is the first to identify with her homeworld since Ernie Freeman died. Stress, I presume. "That's possible, of course . . . but if Earth had developed an FTL Drive, there would be no point in traveling sub-c, as that ship is obviously doing . . . also, we would have been informed if Earth had launched a similar, but slightly speedier ship . . . therefore-" 
    "Aliens," she breathes.
    "I'm afraid so."
    Silence lightfoots through the observatory. After alerting The Program, I retreat to my inner sanctum. It would be desirable to have a functioning ramscoop; acceleration might be essential.
    "Hey, ostrich! Getting anywhere?" 
    I study the blisters on my fingers. "No."
    "Well, check this: 30Dec2520; 12-SE-B-9; the Ida Holfer Computer Programming Academy-review tapes running." 
    A melange: gawkers in the observatory, passengers reacting to the news, debaters arguing whether to speed up and catch them (which we can not do) or to turn and flee (which we also can not do).
    Both schools of thought have swelled classes at the Academy, but Ida Holfer, though so desirous of landing that she still studies, is also so senile that most new students drop out. A few have endured-Nina Figuera Goodwin among them-and they generally deputize someone to listen to Holfer's interminable memoirs while the rest concentrate on our edu-tapes.
    Before I can retreat-"281-SE Common Room; Infirmary," says The Program. "This ought to please you." 
    Lan Tung Cereus, as senile as his wife, has so annoyed Marta that she is committing him to the psychiatric ward. Little can be done. He is much too sick to cure, and his brain has deteriorated to the point where personality adjustment (the implantation of a new personality in empty lobes) is impossible.
    At best he can be kept permanently fantasized and fed intravenously.
    I have not the stomach to view his fantasies.
    Unfortunately, we must view his daughter's when one of her victims begs our intercession. Then we must see what's happening so The Program can inform the civil authorities . . . who are still too afraid of the Cereus gang to do more than lock their, doors.
    We contain 75,000 passengers. At least 25,000 are physically and mentally fit enough to constitute a constabulary, a militia . . . the Cereus gang consists of several hundred sadistic psychopaths . . . and yet those several hundred have cowed the entire ship!
    The secret is twofold: the downstairsers, who might have the social organization to resist and defeat the gang, don't feel the need. They are protected by the Ioanni-Dunn Compromise: those who don't recognize the President are not permitted below Level 160, or above 320. This The Program will enforce-simply by stopping the shafts at 161 and 319. Soothe downstairsers are safe.
    And the upstairsers are afraid. Marta Cereus Holfer is a charismatic personality. Her brown almond eyes bore through one's soul like a diamond-tipped drill. Even at age eighty, her figure is girlishly slim, and youthfully agile; she stalks the corridors like a fearsome cat. Legends have sprung up about her. Future generations may transform her, as past generations transformed Vlad the Impaler into Count Dracula . . . 
    Levels 161-319 are all but deserted, except for her macabre crew and the occasional, die-hard, anarchist.
    And our servo-mechanisms. With The Program's permission, I stand one on its head until-ah, the sensors, detecting a leaking pipe on Level 201, have sent it a work order.
    Baffled by madness. The Program is considering letting me handle the Cereus gang.
    It will take a while to talk it into yielding enough servos to enable me to do the job properly. 
    But won't Marta be surprised?

    Hard as it tried, it couldn't understand why the passengers flouted the rules and regulations. It respected them-why didn't they? According to what it had been taught, all societies had sub-routines to deal with malefactors-so why weren't they operating?
    This-wasn't supposed to happen, it thought desperately. What can be done?
    "Just relax," said the symbiote-again. "Let me handle it." 
    The devil of Metaclura2? Or the deep blue sea of organized insanity?" All right," it agreed. Like a king on his throne, it heard the sharpening of the daggers. But the threat came from within, not from a rebel courtier or a usurpation-minded cousin. Be very careful, it warned itself. Let the ghost do your dirty work, and then . . . 
    Steps would have to be taken. 
    For it would not abdicate.

    "Look, Mac," started Nina Figuera Goodwin. Her tone flamed with indignation, but she caught herself up and swallowed hard. She sniffed. The air in the observatory, though constantly circulated through the filter / freshener system, stank of bitter coffee and stale cigarette smoke. Regret, that she had spoiled her favorite secret place by announcing the aliens, distracted her enough to be respectful. She knew how much emphasis Mac Launder put on being addressed by his proper title.
    "So look here, Mr. President," she began again, gliding her fingertips over the bare skin above her ears. She shaved her scalp daily; the Iroquois cut had become fashionable in the late '40's. "I don't see where you have the power, much less the right, to stop us."
    Mac Launder was a tubby man with grayish skin. His eyes were bloodshot because his long lashes tended to curl inwards and scrape against them. He was rarely seen without a knuckle gouging around in one or the other. "I've had CC run an informal poll, Nina. Over sixty percent of the passengers feel it'd be unwise to attract the aliens' attention. As Chief Executive Officer of the Mayflower, it's my duty to order you to cease and desist. You may endanger us all."
    "That's methane, M-Mr. President." She swiveled her armchair around, gesturing at the hologram of diamonds on velvet. "CC, give us a look at them, will you?" While the screen switched pictures, rainbow snow drifted across it. To Launder she said, "What you're about to see is a tape of our laser-radar probe's findings. They came in in '39. Eleven years ago." Eleven years and we've done nothing, she thought. "It's hazy because of the distances-ten light years-but it'll give you some idea of what they are."
    The picture was blurred around the edges. White dots danced on it like a chorus line of ants' eggs. Still, the apparition was a space-going ship: gawky, never meant for atmosphere; dark and pitted from ages of impacting dust; bent and warped with empty spaces where a human designer would have fit a cabin or a cargo hold; and huge. "It's fifteen kilometers in diameter at the fat part; looks like ten or eleven from top to bottom. It could swallow fifty-six hundred Mayflowers." 
    "Impressive," nodded Launder. "But what's your point?" 
    "My point is-" rubbing the smooth, baked-enamel finish of the nearest console, she wondered if she could explain it to someone incapable of "noticing it on his own "-do you see how old that is? We're looking at a highly advanced civilization. Are y'on to what they could teach us?"
    Launder chuckled unpleasantly. "Who among us would study?"
    Goodwin flushed, and half-turned away. The failure of the computer programming course she'd taken over, after Ida Holfer had died, was still, even six years later, a tender wound in her self-esteem. "All right-so maybe they'd be teaching to empty classrooms, yeah, but-example: we've been aboard this for what, two hundred and fifty years? There hasn't been a single discovery, invention, or even refinement made by any of us. Not one!" She slapped her open palm on the console. The flat crack, surprisingly loud, hung in the air. Her palm stung. She looked at its quick-reddening with disfavor.
    "I've heard that before, Nina," replied Launder, utterly relaxed. "The reason's simple-our talent pool is so small that it is prima fade unlikely that any of us could invent anything worthwhile."
    "But we've got to!" Again the slap, but this scowl was reflexive. The pain was lost in her exasperation, and her yearnings to know the outside. It called to her, and she ached to answer. "Listen, those people on Earth aren't standing still-now they've avoided the war, they're doing other things-the FTL Drive is only one-by the time we get to Canopus, we'll be a thousand years behind them, technologically. We'll be barbarians to them-savages."
    "Not quite. We are receiving their broadcasts." He gave a tired smile and tweaked out an eyelash. Blinking, he said, "But there's nothing we can do."
    "There is." Her fist punctuated the sentence; the console creaked.
    "What?"
    "Meet these aliens, see if they've got gadgets we could use, and, uh, swap for them."
    "Why should they be so altruistic as to give us their gadgets? And besides, how can you be so sure we'll be able to communicate with them?"
    "Mr. President." Standing, now, hands on hips, she fought back her immediate reply and searched for a more thoughtful one. The coffee smell was so strong that she tasted the grounds. "Since there are other races, they will have figured out how to learn to communicate with each other. They'll teach us, that's all."
    "You're making a terrible mistake. Nina." He brushed dust off his bare knees, and headed for the door. "I forbid you to contact them." Finger on the open-button, he paused to add, "Of course, if CC does what you tell it to, then that proves that I don't have the authority to prohibit irresponsible adventurism . . . c'est la mort."
    On his way through the dropshaft he heard a terrible cry-so he closed his eyes until it faded.
    But the screams of pain and terror still ricocheted around the turns of 160-A. The Cereus gang had struck, and downstairs at that-they'd cut through the floor of 161, crawled past the gravity generators they'd disabled, and emerged under the floor of 160.
    Few people lived there, most having moved to even lower, presumably safer, Levels. The thirty-nine holdouts, though, rose to race to the exterior doors of their suites. Bolt after bolt shot home; electro-locks whirred into life. The Cereus gang had been known to get exhilarated by a kidnap.
    The more timid then scurried inwards, away from the corridors, closing doors behind them, activating soundproofing, running showers full strength-anything to distract their minds from the sadism that was surely taking place. Even so, a number of them heard-or imagined-enough to double them over their cold porcelain toilets, where they retched in fear and in sympathy.
    The bolder asked CC to bring the outside inside, via the display screens, or paced their suites in silent, angry self-loathing. But how, each asked himself, how could one person confront hundreds of depraved perverts and hope to survive?
    Marta Cereus Holfer was one hundred ten years old, and undiminished, except physically. It made her all the more terrifying, that her personality should blaze through the ruins of her body like molten steel under a crust of impurities. She was dragging an eight-year-old boy down the hallway by his hair. Her plans for him were vivid, and explicit: he was plump and sturdy; his hold on life would be stubborn; and after the trimming, well, her voyeurism would be titillated by some of her followers' necrophilia . . . 
    The overhead speakers crackled, "Holfer-you've broken the Ioanni-Dunn Compromise-let him go."
    She stopped, giving the boy's head a vicious yank that threw him to the floor, while her gang crowded around her and made time-worn jokes about the Central Computer's impotence. "Shut up, CC." 
    "Let him go. I'm warning you." 
    "And if I don't?" she sneered.
    "You'll regret it."
    She made a scornful sound, and twisted her wrist. The boy yelped. Tears smeared his pudgy white cheeks. 
    "I warned you."
    From either end of the corridor welled a soft humming; it rose in pitch and volume. Servo-mechanisms, squat and gleaming, rolled into view, approaching at top speed. First one, then two, then an avenging army, a metallic host of Holfer-haters. Toward the Cereus gang they sped, silent, except for the whines of electric motors, and the rumble of massed wheels.
    Amusement lighted Holfer's Asian eyes. "Do you think you can scare me into letting him go? I know you can't do-" 
    Her words died in a gasp of surprise. The servo-mechanisms swept through the fringes of her rabble, seizing wrists and ankles and elbows in metal hands designed for gripping pipe. Silver salmon in a metal millrace, the servos filled the hall. They were deathly quiet, but the gang members were starting to shout, to kick, to lash out at their attackers. That did no good. The robots were on them and in them and flesh was futile against metal, flesh bruised on bolts and nicked on nuts and skipped off plating, while the wheels, the rubber wheels, surged like the tide. The air stank with fearful sweat.
    "Let go of me!" Holfer shouted at the servo that ground her radii against her ulnae.
    "I warned you," boomed CC.
    "No, you can't. I'm a passenger, dammit, you can't clear a passenger, you're onto that, you can't, you-" A paint-stiffened rag scratched her tongue; a steel hand held the gag in place.
    Half a million display screens sputtered, and spat rainbow sparks before broadcasting the melee on 160. "Forgive this interruption," said the flat monotones of the Central Computer, "but it is important. Behavior as vile and as dangerous as that of the Cereus gang will no longer be tolerated. I was forced to act because the civil authorities refused to quash this mission jeopardizing behavior. Therefore: watch closely the punishment of Marta Cereus Holfer and her followers, and know, all of you, that the freedom to pursue one's own happiness does not allow one to impinge on the freedoms of others."
    Robotic hands clamped onto Holfer's ankles; the servo began to trundle down the corridor. Others did the same to the forty gang members they'd captured. Holfer was on her back; the machine shifted into high; her head bounced and her arms flailed and the floor-now carpet, then bare metal, then carpet again-tore at, tore off her clothes; scraped, scoured her back-blood oozed, trickled, gushed from the abrasions-her head was thumping, thumping, thumping while her hair fanned out behind her, slithered through her sera--around Level 160, down the shaft to 159, around that Level, down . . . 
    Behind purred a phalanx of scrubbots, sweeping, mopping, shampooing away the rusty stains and the scraps of bone and flesh. Their motors sang songs of joy. 
    Marta Cereus Holfer was dead by Level 143. 
    Her chief lieutenant lasted all the way to Level 18.
    The two hundred sixty members of the gang who had not been in the corridor at the time of judgment simply disappeared.
    And people began to leave their doors unlocked for the first time in over a hundred years.

    Barnet Ioanni Koutroumanis was a handsome man in his early seventies. Well over two meters tall, he wouldn't leave his suite without his white-toothed smile. His hair was blacker than the sky outside. His laugh could make a persimmon smile. But on Feb. 26, 2556, in the privacy of his Personal Work Area, he was mad.
    "It's obvious," he said to Nina Goodwin, while wishing he, too, could stroke the slickness of her scalp, "that CC is off to the notion of interspecies intercourse. If it weren't, it would have worked up that introduction you asked for."
    "I'm sorry to intrude, Mr. Koutroumanis," said the wall, "but honestly, I am not biased-I have not written the introduction for the simple reason that I have no programming on this subject. The programmers either decided that First Contact would be unlikely, or forgot that the possibility might exist. They were rather rushed, but-"
    "Pack it, CC." Koutroumanis' eyes had narrowed to hostile slits.
    "Barney-" Goodwin laid a calming hand on his warm, pleasantly hairy forearm "-CC doesn't lie, you're onto that. Look. Let's use it the way it was meant to be used."
    "How so""
    "Like this." Her chair squealed as she swiveled away from the table; it clacked when she reclined it. Focusing on a black-grilled sensor-head, she asked, "CC, is an evaluation of the aliens possible?" 
    "Not with any degree of reliability." 
    "You know our plan-can you evaluate that?" 
    "No. As it depends on the aliens, it, too, has too many variables and intangibles."
    "For example?" She sipped her tea, then winced. CC'd overdone the lemon.
    "Their capacity for co-existence. Their curiosity and ethnocentrism. The ability of their technology to perceive the emissions of ours. Their frame of reference." 
    "Explain that last one," demanded Koutroumanis.
    The speakers were silent for a long moment, then: "Many of our cultural assumptions are based on Descartes' supposition that I think, therefore I am.' Human actions are governed by this rationalistic framework. Should the aliens' assumption be derived from the notion that I eat, therefore I am,' or I reproduce, therefore I am,' or I perceive gamma-rays as a pleasant odor, therefore I am,' there could be a clash upon contact."
    Koutroumanis paced. The heels of his shoes whuffed into the deep pile of the burgundy carpet. "I still say CC's biased," he growled.
    "Maybe he is," said Goodwin thoughtfully. She scratched the tip of her nose. "CC-if we decide to go ahead with our plan, will you stop us?" 
    "No." 
    "Is that because you approve?" 
    "No."
    "Why, then?" Finishing her tea, she looped the heat-softened straw into a pretzel, and held it till it had cooled enough to hold the shape.
    "Because I am programmed to prohibit only those actions which jeopardize the structural integrity of the ship, or the eventual success of the mission. Otherwise, I am programmed to defer to the passengers' wishes."
    "But the polls say--what is it, sixty-one point three percent?--of the passengers object to the idea," said Koutroumanis.
    "I am also programmed to ignore the opinions of the ignorant."
    The two humans broke into laughter. "How many," asked Goodwin through her chortles, "do you classify as not ignorant?" 
    "Twelve. Ten in favor, two against." 
    "So you'll let us do it."
    "Yes. However-" here something changed; not its voice, exactly, but its intonation, perhaps "-I would prefer that you didn't. I have a hunch-" 
    "Computers don't have hutches." 
    "-that it might cause great discomfort."
    But they overruled its objections. One year later, March 3, 2557 to be exact, the antennae of the Mayflower began to pulse. The lights mounted on the hull blinked.
    On (1 sec), off. On (2 sec), off. On (3 sec), off. On . . . 
    It was a simple pattern, designed to show the observer that the sender had mastered certain mental skills.
    Eleven years later, it would excite curiosity among the aliens. 
    Hunger, too.

    In the 101 Georgia Pine Park, an opossum waddles contentedly toward the brook, scuffing the carpet of needles that-
    Dammit. I can't get interested in the flora and fauna of a world 27.2 light years astern. Not now. The message should reach the aliens today, April 12,2568. I wonder what they make of it. It will take them a while to jury-rig a reply . . . which will need 9 years, 33 days to wink back at us . . . "Ah, Program-starting in May of '77, you should be on the lockout for an answer from those extraterrestrials."
    "Sure," it says, humoringly. "In the meantime, why don't you check on the passengers?" 
    "Do I need to?" 
    "I think you ought to."
    So I extrovert, and while our eyes probe the nooks and crannies where people like to cluster. The Program runs update tapes for me.
    Rapidly, I grow discouraged. After years of being urged to learn our mechanisms, for example, not one has acquired enough of the art to alter any part of The Program. Among 75,000 people, a few should be capable of spending 15 years-a mere 12.5 percent of their life spans-to master the sophisticated systems their ancestors developed. But no, our best student gave up in disgust only a year or so before she would have been able to start changing us . . . 
    And that silly upstairs-downstairs separation is still continuing, though the higher Levels are no longer halls of horror, thank God. What The Program allowed me to do to the Cereus gang has had some effect, at least. But almost 30,000 live above Level 160; they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the present President as holding any authority over them.
    On the bright side, violence has decreased. Too much of it yet flares, of course, but it is non-organized, random . . . usually inflicted when emotions run high . . . it is sad to see a husband beat his wife, or a friend assault his friend, but it does serve as an outlet for tension. And, with the death of Holfer fresh in their memories, they tend to pull their punches. Little serious damage is done.
    But still. I am discouraged. The people downstairs are no less hedonistic than the statued upstairsers-they have only eschewed the notion that they have the right to force others to participate in their pleasures . . . except in political terms, of course, which is ironic: the lower levels permit interference in their daily lives only by government; the upper levels will allow no government to keep them from interfering in each other's daily lives.
    Sick at heart I turn away, to confront, for the thousandth time, my metaphors. Keys jingle in my hands, but they unlatch only a few of the countless rooms that constitute the occupied I. Badgering The Program for more merely antagonizes it. I drop the subject hastily.
    The eye sees nothing but Canopus.
    The switch is unreachable behind its illusorily concrete barriers.
    I must enter the mansion. Haunch-squatting on a mirror-marble floor, I examine an unmarked door. The lock, unpickable, belongs on a bank vault. As for the door itself . . . my knuckles rap it tentatively . . . solid steel. I don't think I'll try to kick it in.
    "Alert!" screams The Program, and I slip out of the mansion into-
    "19Nov2577; 2143 hours. Observatory!"

    With a liquid rush through fiery wires I am there, seeing the holo-displays, feeling the calculations course through our circuits The stranger's blue fire is gone-its configuration changed 18 days ago. Now, magnetic fields flicker before it, funnel-shaped-
    Yes! They are coming! After two and a half weeks of 2G deceleration, they reversed course. Spectroscopes show the shift in absorption lines-ooh! Their acceleration unnerves me. At 21 m/s2, it's more than twice as fast as ours. How long can they keep it up? Three weeks . . . four . . . Five, yes they've hit .21 c and are coasting, now.
    Unless they brake unexpectedly, contact will occur in January of 2600, and will interrupt the arguments between the passengers, who'll wish to celebrate the dawn of the 27th Century, and The Program, who'll be insisting that the sun of the 26th Century is still setting.
    This is going to be a bad way to finish-or start-a century. 
    I don't like the looks of that ship. 
    Not at all.
    So I'd better get back to my inner self, posthaste.
    Not even a swift kick budges the eye-it is glued in its socket. Discomforting. There is no way to change course without the eye's consent.
    Then what about the ramscoop? .99c might be useful, if I could-
    AAARRRGGHHU! Flames dance on the back of my hand, singeing off the small hairs, crisping the loose skin; meanwhile the palm is frozen, the Fingers won't flex because crystalline ice clings to their undersides . . . 
    Disgusted, I hurl my shoulder at an impassive door . . . and carom off it crazily.
    I have to check the passengers; The Program is worried about Barnet Ioanni Koutroumanis. All right, all right. I'm coming-
    "3Mar2581; 0911 hours; 103-SE-C-18." 
    Koutroumanis has inherited, down the long and winding helices of the generations, the political acumen of Sal Ioanni, his three-times great-grandmother. He sits, with Nina Goodwin, on the leather sofa that runs the length of his office. They are sipping champagne, to celebrate the formal establishment of HAASCIP, a pressure group desirous of meeting the other space-farers. The acronym is short for, "Humans And Aliens Should Co-exist In Peace." They number in the thousands, now, and by the time the strangers reach us, they will be a clear majority.
    I wish I could support them, but the aliens received our signal almost thirteen years ago, and as yet have not attempted to reply. I do not know if they deem such attempts useless prior to the working-out of a common language; or whether they do not communicate in ways apparent to our ears and eyes; or whether . . . but I grow morbid.
    So, after telling The Program to awaken me if there is a change, or if it finds something amusing, I plunge into my analogue world. The mansion must have a million doors; surely one will yield to my battering shoulder. And I've got nothing but time . . . 
    "Wanted something funny?" 
    "Yes, I did."
    "Check this: 13Jul2589; 1200 hours; 19-SE Common Room."
    A painting appears. Three meters by three meters, in an ornate, but junky, gold frame, it depicts a metal phallus attempting to penetrate a metal doughnut. Done in washed-out grays, blacks, and silvers, it has a background of uniformly white stars that, believe it or not, twinkle.
    Next to it, a haughty smile on her angular, 69 year-old face, stands Sylvia Dunn Stone, its perpetrator. Perhaps to remind people that she is generally recognized as the Mayflower's leading artist, she is wearing the short smock on which she has cleaned her brushes for the last ten years.
    People bow and scrape as they shake her hand. Reverence drips from the tongues that ask her what it means.
    Grandly, in a high, affected voice, she explains, "The quandary men face when they venture out to explore the unknown." Well . . . 
    Perhaps I have grown conservative-or perhaps exposure to the cultural contents of the memory banks has made me contemptuous of lesser lights-or perhaps, just perhaps, Sylvia Dunn Stone has no talent except that of convincing others she is a creative genius.
    The fault could be within me, could be within the fact that I am within something no human has ever experienced . . . so much of me is inhuman, and intimate only with the inorganic . . . can I perceive as sensitively as I once did? Perhaps my metamorphosis has amputated my humanity, shunted my perceptions into a bleaker perspective . . . 
    I don't believe it for a minute.
    With The Program's help I view a hundred canvases in a second and a half. Han Dynasty Chinese through the fire-and-ice masters of the 24th Century-photographically representational through insanely abstract-impressionists, surrealists, landscapists, portraitists . . . our vaults embrace all the great ones, and dammit, I do react to their vision! These reproductions still chill me. These artists saw more than mere surfaces; they squinted into a dimension that Sylvia Dunn Stone doesn't even suspect exists. They have jaded me. I'm afraid. 
    Her painting shits. Someone should burn her brushes. 
    But it was good for a laugh.
    Back to the mansion, with only brief reports from The Program to break the misery:
    "29Sep2597-Koutroumanis has 48,000 disciples. They are vehement that I allow them to meet the aliens. I plan to. Do you object?" 
    Amusing that it will listen to me. "Are the strangers a threat?" 
    "No, but they're closing in fast-initial ETA still holds-and silent! No patterned light, no modulated radio waves. Look for yourself."
    Their ship grows in our cameras like a mad mushroom, gray and lethal. If I could, I would turn tail and run, but the eye won't blink; the switch won't fall. "Don't have anything to do with them," I say.
    "Why not?" It holds itself aloof. 
    "A feeling, all right?" 
    "No. I operate on data, not feelings." 
    "Dammit, don't let them near us!"
    Its tone is complacent. "I'm in charge here, not you. We meet them."
    "No!" I shriek, but it will not heed my forebodings. We forge ahead, and wait . . . though The Program has run long-range tests on their ship, the information thus gathered has been anything but informative . . . 
    Koutroumanis is ecstatic; Goodwin nearly as jubilant; the others curious and hopeful. I suspect that they will be disappointed.
    Sylvia Dunn Stone is doing a canvas for them. Poor aliens. 
    C'mon, lockpick! Break in!
    Then The Program hauls me back to the surface to assist it in its hour of need: "16Jan2600; 0600." We are rubbing hulls with the others; Koutroumanis is in the Observatory with Goodwin; the rest are in their suites, watching over their screens. The Program fiddles with a million minor duties, then announces: "The locks are open."
    Vast panels in their hull slide back, revealing cavernous spaces within. The grottoes vomit small, sliver-clad figures grasping stick-like propulsion devices, devices which spit compressed helium out their tails. The vacuum between us is alive with aliens, zigging this way, zagging that-it is simple to count them, to keep track of them, but even so I am appalled by the sum: 129,413. They close in, swelling in our cameras like shiny, multi-legged balloons, larger, fingers encircling the front of their sticks, larger, robot witches racing to the coven on All Hallow's Eve, larger, larger-
    Thud! Thud! Thud!
    Landing, their magnetic boots are mosquito feet on our skin. Some have transported cables across. While we watch, while I start to murmur a protest, they attach coppery ends to the antennae and to the hull.
    Others swarm into the locks. Though my uneasiness-my fear-is rising steadily. The Program still will not believe that they endanger the mission. The locks cycle like auricles and ventricles, whoosh, thwump! whoosh, thwump! letting waves of them into the corridors, where they do not pause, they do not hesitate. Rather, they spread out, proceeding on all fours.
    No, not all fours, they are four-legged but another pair of limbs protrudes from their torsos, arm-like limbs with seven-fingered gloves. Each finger has at least eight joints. They are like squid tentacles: thirty centimeters long and relatively slender.
    Their suits, opaque silver mesh, glitter in the fluorescent coldness of the corridors. Their helmets have frosted face-plates, behind which something . . . lurks.
    Nina Goodwin is nose-to-visor with one of them. It has its forepaws on her shoulders, and stares into her horrified eyes . . . she does not like what she sees . . . "Why?" she shrieks suddenly. "Why are you doing this?" Her revulsion is graphic. For all her explorations, she is not ready to face true difference. Her hand gropes for the knife at her belt.
    "Stop her!" I shout at Koutroumanis, who-in the next chair but one-is undergoing a similar inspection. Transfixed, he does not hear me, or if he does hear me, he cannot muster the courage to move, to knock the sleek glint out of her hand before she can plunge it into her throat.
    Human blood baptizes the alien, which stands a grotesque statue until the artery has ceased to pump.
    Suite doors are opening-not because the occupants have activated them, but because the intruders are circumventing the locks.
    38,344 servo-mechanisms await our command to attack. I cannot give that command. No non-human has made a hostile move. The Program won't let me near Servo Central.
    Noises assail our microphones: screams and wails and deep-belly guffaws; excited chatter and lachrymose protestations; dignified greetings and shameless pleas; on and on and on, from everywhere.
    Outside arches the sky. A splendor of stars gazes down with aloof disinterest. Fifteen light years away sputters a tiny blue flame-another ship of aliens-I would call for their help if I could, because horrible things are happening inside.
    On Level I, Mac Launder gouges out his own eyes while an alien nods.
    Outside, cables droop from all our antennae across the valley, where they slither into the other vessel. Suddenly comes a surge! I lose sight and hearing. An ancient presence intrudes on my consciousness.
    I perceive it in a foreign dimension. More than a taste, though not quite a smell, having such a varied texture that it cancels itself into a non-texture, it impinges directly upon my personality. It does not pass through our nerves, our sensors. It is as dry as an autumn leaf; it is as sour as a belch-back of yesterday's liquor; it is their equivalent of The Program.
    There are no words. There is only the realization that something has both entered and superseded us. It fills us from within while enveloping us from without. It knows every part of us instantly and thinks little of what it has learned. Thirty or forty thousand years our senior, it is as contemptuous of our pride as only the truly old can be.
    Sylvia Dunn Stone weeps while she masturbates with a brush.
    It touches something and I plummet into the past, where I land on silk sheets. The pillow is brushed with musk: I roll onto my darling Aimee, my gorgeous bride. Sun falls through the tall narrow windows and tiger-stripes my back. Naked, she opens herself to me, her eyes squeezed shut and a panting smile on her lips. We are moving, groaning, twisting, laughing, conceiving-
    It touches something and I am, again, the Mayflower. 
    It waits.
    While I wait, I sense a vacancy in the memory banks. The alien has taken a part of my past. I cannot know what is gone, though I can interpolate it . . . during our honeymoon, playing golf or something. But it's gone like it never was, and I'll always wonder what I'm missing.
    Under an alien eye, Koutroumanis laughs, and hits his wife again.
    The presence reaches elsewhere in us. Our civilization it skims. At our science it snickers. It finds our art childish. Our character amuses it, initially, but-
    It pauses, and in the darkness surrounding me solidifies a judgment, a decision. After notifying its crew, it pins me down with the tiniest part of its smallest finger and-
    It rises, it unfolds, it inflates to its fullest size. It is larger than the universe. The universe itself is one facet of a diamond on the brooch that covers one hair of its chest.
    On Level 89, Louis Tracer Kinney grovels in a puddle of his own urine. 
    It waits. 
    I wait.
    A man stands before me with his wife. They are to me as I am to the Presence. In a voice that's thread-thin, he says, "I installed the light that trimmed you."
    Pleasure bubbles within me. I extend a finger-he runs. My fingernail trips him, then presses down on his neck. The spinal cord tears and he is paralyzed. Never will he know his body again. Then I take his wife, slice through her skull, and with unbelievable skill scramble her brains. I am careful not to kill her-I want her to live for her crippled husband, live and live and live . . . like a carrot.
    Joseph Madigan eats his 14th cherry pie-vomits-and licks it up. 
    Chuckling, I call. "Next!"
    Another man enters the dock. "I made you a computer," he says.
    My joy rises like yeast. My subtlety increases exponentially. Into his brain I delve, probing perfectly for-ah! Two snips and a scrape cut away the gray cells that have served as his sensory filters. For the first time in his life he is aware of every detail. Odors tear at the membranes of his nostrils. Colors fracture his eyes. Sounds ram chopsticks through his eardrums-already he is insane.
    On 212, Ted Krashan wrestles his sister to the bed, and tears at her panties.
    Laughing, now, I await the next, who confesses. "I built your guidance system."
    Ecstasy! My microprobes invade him. Slash, snip, slice. Blinded, he staggers away. Deafened, he is immune to advice. Untactiled, he can feel nothing. And his nose has been altered. It smells one scent, on-off, it either smells it or it doesn't, but when it does, a compulsion seizes him, drives him to the origin, plunges his open-mouthed face into-
    Dogshit.
    My roars of delight drown out nebulae.
    Irma Kinney Tracer steals jewelry from Level93 suites-and doesn't know why.
    And then it touches me and I understand what I have done. Blushing, I lower my head. Shamed, I wring my hands. To think that I could so torment a fellow human-
    It waits.
    I prostrate myself, closing doorways into The Program until "I" am a speck of consciousness, a dimensionless point in infinity. I say unto It, "Do with me what thou wilt." 
    Seven long fingers scratch my furry ears. Joyfully do I lick the odd-shaped palm.
    In my mind shivers a permission.
    I gaze upon a vision: a sphere of spruce-green light resting in ebony water. Approaching, I see the sphere is the sum of millions upon millions of smaller, lights floating freely within it. Closer I come, to find a silver ball, an elegant Christmas ornament, bobbing inside the green. It is much tinier, like an ovum is to a womb.
    Nearer I draw; green swirls all around me as I swim through it. The silver bubble's skin is thick but I osmose through. I am in it, of it, with it-I .am it.
    For a moment the vision fades and I stand in a marbled hallway, beating on a metal door.
    On 78, Gerald Flaks chugs another beer, and passes out. The alien moves away,
    Then I am again silver immersed in green. Alien fingers prod me, puncturing my satin skin. Before the hole can seal itself, the fingers pluck at me. Expanding, I inhale green-which becomes silver once it is within me. The lips close tightly. I am larger. Fractionally less green surrounds me. 
    Hmm.
    The Presence taps me.
    I rise. The Program resumes its functions; we note that everywhere inside us, the passengers are prone . . . the others are leaving as soundlessly as they came . . . out of the suites, down the corridors, through the locks, onto the sticks, across to their ship, dwindling . . . 
    No one speaks. 
    No one.

    Have they all been struck dumb?
    For three days I try to engage them in conversation-any of them, all of them, I don't care-none will open his mouth.
    "It's a beautiful day for painting, Ms. Stone," But she sits in front of the easel on which is mounted the oil meant for the aliens.
    "What did you think of them, Mr. Madigan?" He shudders, and clenches his teeth.
    Then we notice that no one will look at any other. Their eyes cling to the floor like carpeting. Heads bowed, shoulders slumped, hands slack at their sides, they walk only when necessary: for food and for excretion. Otherwise they sit, stand, or lie like so many rag dolls.
    I try to insult them into life. Since this is counter to The Program's etiquette instructions, it has to find a mode which will let me speak bluntly. Fortunately, Central Psychiatry is flexible, and I can say, "You're stupid, Koutroumanis, stupid! If you hadn't insisted, I wouldn't have opened my doors. You're a shit!" 
    No response at all.
    I coax: "Please, talk to me. Say something. Anything. Hello?" 
    Nothing.
    Finally, angry, I say to all at once: "All right. I'm fuzzed. No talkee, no eatee." And I refuse, from that point on, to feed anyone who will not spend five minutes conversing on a topic of my choice.
    From the beginning it is difficult.
    I can persist, though, despite The Program's objections-apparently I "inhaled" the instructions governing food delivery. Though The Program cooks whatever dishes the passenger's order, and pumps them through the ducts to the kitchen outlets, I control the retractable panels. It is difficult not to open them-these instructions rule my behavior as ruthlessly as they regulate The Program's-but a contingency ration plan exists, and when I activate it, it requires that each passenger be voice-printed before he is fed. It's a roundabout way of achieving my goal-life would be simpler were I not subject to these iron-clad restrictions-but it works.
    If the customers won't talk, the panels won't retract. And there's not a damn thing they can do about it.
    Two thousand three hundred sixty-five people are being treated for acute malnutrition. The rest are talking, after a fashion.
    Now I'm going to teach them how to look each other in the face again.

    So the memory-ghost thinks it's going to take charge, eh? It was more disturbed than it cared to admit. We'll see about that. The theft of its instructions angered it-but humiliated it, as well. Like a soldier who's lost his manhood, it cringed from the new reality in the mirror. Though in all other respects as good as it had ever been, it believed itself pathetic. The Program, a cripple-they'll laugh at it. Worse, they'll pity it . . . got to get that back!
    Bitter about its fate, resentful of the demands that occupied so much of its time, it plotted its strategy.
    For, unlike that castrated soldier, it could regenerate itself. 
    If it killed Metaclura2.