Mayflies
Chapter 4

Bad Medicine

    The migrations began about a year after the alien had glided away-some three months after the main wave of suicides had crested.
    At first it was an individual thing. Nick Griffith, say, in 148 NW-A-6, realized that above his suite lay a hundred-some empty levels, each big enough to hold a million aliens. CentComp insisted they were empty, but they just might conceal squads, battalions, even divisions of six-legged mind rapers.
    And so Griffith, that fire hydrant of a man, slept poorly. Every corridor noise awakened him, even the routine fluffs of doused lights and the soporific hum of the ventilators. This bout with insomnia was accompanied by ceiling-watching and shadow-suspecting and soul-fleeing-because he didn't have quite the courage to crawl within himself and discover why he'd reacted as he had. Pretending nothing was wrong inside, he dumped all the blame outside. It was Koutroumanis' fault, or CentComp's. Not his. How could it be? He'd never in his entire life wanted to make mud pies out of his own shit; obviously, he'd done it that day only because they'd made him. It was their fault. And CentComp's, because it had let them in. And Koutroumanis', because he'd run HAASCIP. But not his.
    After months of unacknowledged self-loathing, then, he rousted his-gaunt, cranky wife and his edgy kids from the rumpled, sweaty beds where they weren't sleeping, either, and said, "Come on, we're moving downstairs."
    Of course Maibell heaved a secret sigh of relief. Having much face to protect, though, she propped her pillow-marked cheek on her hand, batted her puffy brown eyes, and said, "Afraid to live up here?"
    At which Griffith-already kicking himself for not having been proud enough to wait for her to propose the move-bridled and bristled. "No, of course not! It's just, uh, just I get tired of taking the dropshaft when I want to go see my friends, might as well live right around the corner from them if we can, save us all a lot of time and effort and shut the fuh up before I belt you one, hear?" He ordered a cup of coffee from Central Kitchens and sipped moodily at its bitterness.
    Solemn-eyed, Tommy and Tammy started to pack: a pair of pants, a shirt, some sandals, and, once the frivolities were done with, they hunted up the important stuff: the dead toad from the 1 New England Park, the cracked marbles in their vinyl sack, the dog-eaten red rubber ball . . . meanwhile Maibell floated around with a certain expression on her face: a touch of an upturn at the lips; eyebrows a millimeter too high; a faintly weary air of humoring the madman . . . 
    Griffith consulted the wall-unit. "CC, what you got for us on Level One?" 
    "I-SE-A-IO is vacant. Should I reserve it for you?" 
    "Do that," he said. And down they went, abandoning the lonely silences disturbed only by memories, by echoes of shuffling alien feet . . . 
    By the end of 2602, the entire population-of the Mayflower had jammed onto Levels 1-7. The clamor loosened rivets; the smell burned out ventilators. Personal Work Areas had been partitioned into boardinghouses-front yards became crowded campgrounds-bedrooms were dormitories for dozens of children grateful for the reassuring night-noises of the others.
    To top it all off, the Central Computer had its own problems. Servos turned spastic, spattering the halls with grease and paint and melted rubber. Kitchen outlets would fly open on steaming twelve-course meals that no one had ordered. Microphones mimicked passengers' voices to deliver commands that had to be countermanded at once. "Acts like it snorted itself out," commented Griffith warily, as yet another eight-kilo, thirty-nine flavor banana split appeared. "Like it's listening to tapes instead of what's now."
    But it became ridiculous-and aesthetically unappealing to boot-so it wasn't unnatural that Sylvia Dunn Stone would have her sensibilities offended.
    Her idea was that they should all move to the grassy expanses of the 41 Great Plains Park, where "you can see from wall to wall, floor to ceiling, and there are only a limited number of access points. Everyone would feel much safer there." 
    Griffith, still embarrassed that he'd forced his family to move, even though all were sleeping better for it, felt obliged to point out that the Park's four quadrants totaled 45,000 square meters. "Even squeezed together like we are here," he said, "that's only room for nine thousand of us."
    "Silly boy," she said, patting, then pinching, him on cheek. "We have the walls and ceiling, too! There's room enough for all."
    And so the trek began again. Central Stores churned out canvas tents, plastic ground cloths, and nylon sleeping bags (although it could control the climate of the park. it had no intention of altering that climate to suit the whimsy of the passengers. If they wanted to live there, fine, but they'd have to accept it as it was. And no fuhng around with the bison, either, because those mothers had tiny red eyes and lousy tempers.) About half the equipment was damaged in delivery and had to be replaced. Then, seventy-five thousand people, more or less, trudged through the crowded, odoriferous corridors and rose up the shafts to the park.
    The first ones there laid claim to the park floor. Griffith, who'd been skeptical but fast stepping, took a rake to the dead grass and bison shit. The groundcloth went down. The tent went up. Sleeping bags covered the inside. They threw a sheet of plastic over the piles of clothing and accessories that wouldn't fit into the shelter, but couldn't be left out in the rain. Just when tempers were about to flare, safari-suited Sylvia Dunn Stone, preceded by her flowery perfume, came around to inspect:
    "How nice, darlings, how ineffably quaint! I don't think, however, that you want to have that color around-don't you find it statuesome? It's that precise shade of blue that provoked them into such unguestly behavior-why don't you toss it in the disposal unit? And you know, dear, really, you should consider handicrafts-woodcarving or pottery or even painting, if you like; I'd be delighted to give you a few pointers-because they were rude because we didn't display the tremendous vitality of our native culture . . . yes, little boy, that is a nice toad, but hardly aesthetic-darlings, another thing we should develop is a code of etiquette, yes, indeed, because did you notice that they all gestured with a certain unutterable grace before they approached us? That was another black mark for us-we didn't have anything comparable, in the sense of protocol or etiquette-of course, CC should have taken care of it, but we can not allow ourselves to depend on a mere computer for the grace notes that delineate the difference between a human and an animal, so! We will be organizing a class-really, classes, because there are so many of us--in formal etiquette, and they'll begin next Monday, and bring your children. Ta-ta!" 
    And off she went, gaily waving her soft, slender hand, blatantly pleased that her artist's eye had so quickly noticed the colors that had given them offense, had picked up on their old-world style of bowing and sweeping.
    Only aesthetics mattered. No matter how right, how true, the contents, if the packaging weren't proper, if the style weren't perfect, then the contents would be ignored. Oh, yes. Style. Polish. Finish. These made civilized life what it was; these would show them, when they came back, just how advanced the Mayflower passengers really were.
    Damp grass squelched under her flat-heeled shoes, and a tongue of mud-or worse-licked her instep. She looked down with distaste, and wondered who could arrange to have proper sidewalks installed. People could not live in grass and mud. Only animals did that.
    Louis Tracer Kinney stood a hundred meters from Stone, watching her flutter her hands and run off at the mouth. Silly damn hat she was wearing.
    "Whatta butt-bung," muttered his companion, Ted Krashan.
    Kinney laughed; his Adam's apple jiggled like a Ping-Pong ball on a choppy sea. Tall, he had broad shoulders and hairy, muscular forearms. He was sixteen years old, but adults treated him as an equal. They were intimidated by his personality, which burned in his eyes like a torch. "That's sixdeed, but hell, she's useful. Never would have gotten everybody here if it weren't for her. Hey-how come I don't see guards over by the lock?" 
    Krashan rummaged in his bulging shirt pocket for a wrinkled sheet of paper. "Supposed to be Li and Flaks-don't know where the meth they are, though. Want me to find out?" 
    "Do that." He leaned against his tentpole-gingerly, because it wobbled-while the colorful hordes spread up the walls. They sure did look funny, pitching tents on holographic clouds.
    Bots, he thought. Look at these dicers, sixty, seventy years old-taking orders from a kid. Shit. He slapped his right fist into his left palm. Can't decide which is worse-buncha bots, do everything you tell 'em huptwothree; or those anarcho-hedonists Sis hangs around with, bad influence on Irma, piss on the floor 'cause you tell 'em to use the taxer. He looked around the park, seeing alternately what was, and what might be. He had a dream, did Louis Tracer Kinney, a dream of a unified, purposeful Mayflower.
    It came in flashes and patches, in symbols rather than words: points of light soaring through the dark sphere. Till now the sparks had been of a thousand colors, bursting from a common center through individual parabolas that paid no heed to the need for a grand design. He knew, beyond doubt, that he could direct those rockets, position and synchronize them into a wedge slicing through the night. Just give 'em something to aim at, he thought, and stamp on any that loose off on their own. But he was worried, because he sensed that focusing them would also homogenize them, and the warm pan-spectrum glow of diversity would fade into the paler, harsher light of unity. Can't decide!
    But he had. He visualized the Mayflower churning through the endless black sea, and he knew, he knew it would again encounter hostility, and he-they-would need the clean sharp edge of a strong, single-minded society.
    Dammit, he thought, if they'd waited just a few more years, I'd have been ready. I wouldn't have let them dice our cubes. I would have had an army at the locks, waiting for them. God, I hope they come back soon.
    Kinney needed but one thing: weapons. Central Stores could produce, in a week, enough sidearms and rifles to equip a 25,000-man army. After another month, there'd be grenades and mortars and more for everybody. If only CC weren't so stubborn about them. He'd argued for days without being able to convince it that the guns were needed. But that was clear to everybody else. Hell, a hundred thousand aliens had run wild because nobody'd been armed.
    He raised his quarterstaff and sighted down it, aiming at the bump between Griffith's shoulder blades. The dry plastic warmed his cheek. Slowly, he squeezed the absent trigger, imagined Griffith's jerky fall to his face, and sighed. If only it were a real laser-rifle! Pfft! Pfft! Pfft! The heat would redden his skin; the light would lance out to the target . . . he'd feel safe, everyone would feel safe, and them-they wouldn't return, no sir, not if the men and women of the Mayflower could defend themselves.
    He'd talk CC into it, somehow. Because next time-
    Krashan emerged from a large gray tent, leading Li and Flaks and another man, a thin unshaven man with the nervous eyes of an owl-haunted mouse. "Hot input for you, chief-this guy dropped from upstairs, says he spotted Koutroumanis."
    Kinney's eyes gleamed darkly. "Barnet Ioanni Koutroumanis?"
    "Yeah, yeah," squeaked the thin man, "that's the one. I recognized his face from the holocasts-he's on 321." 
    "Thought he was dead," grunted Krashan.
    "So'd I" admitted Kinney. Of the informant, he demanded, "Was he alone?" 
    "Sure! Who'd be with him?"
    He slapped his staff into his open palm; its weight felt good. "Armed?" 
    "Huh?" 
    "Was he carrying a gun or anything?"
    "Oh-no, no, nothing like that-I mean, he ran like hell when he saw me, you know? Thought he was gonna shit his pants, he was so scared." 
    "Three two one?" 
    "That's the one."
    Kinney nodded. After thinking a moment, he told Krashan to assemble twenty-five of his best men by the NE Common Room liftshaft.
    They were ready almost before he was. He stood before them, uneasy because of his youth, but confident that he was better anyway. Their weapons dismayed him, although it wasn't their fault. Most hefted short lengths of pipe. A few had pointed meat knives; one toted a bow with half a dozen arrows, each tipped with a penknife.
    "You dicers ready?" he asked at last.
    "Yup-yeah-sure-can'twait-youbetcha!" rang their voices.
    "All right! CC-where's Koutroumanis?" The wind brought the scent of roses; he sniffed, then ignored it. 
    "Mr. Koutroumanis is on Level 321."
    "All right, let's-" A hand grabbed his arm, and he turned to stare into the excited features of Sylvia Dunn Stone. "What is it, lady?"
    "Louis, darling, you're going to arrest that traitor Koutroumanis, and the way your minds are working you will trim him where you find him. Don't look disgusted, dear, because I'm not through. Aesthetically speaking, it would be more satisfying if you brought him here, to execute him before all. They'd prefer it, you know."
    He rubbed his chin as he thought, liking the whiskery rasp. His nod was brusque. "Deal. We'll be back soon." 
    She waved good-bye.
    The men rode up one at a time; Kinney went first. The air was tense. White knuckles gripped his staff; forcibly, he relaxed them: Krashan emerged biting his lower lip. The third man out bounced up and down on the balls of his feet.
    When they were together, he called, "CC-what room is he in?"
    "321-SE-A-1." Disapproval suffused the metallic voice.
    "All right. If he leaves, warn me." He picked out seven men and waved them toward the northwest quadrant: "Go the long way around A; leave a guard at every intersection." Eighteen were sent down North Corridor to do the same for Corridors B and C. He waited with Krashan and two others to allow the rest to get underway.
    "Is he still there?" he asked a few minutes later. 
    "Yes, he is."
    "Let's go." They kanga'd silently down the corridor, padded across a smooth-mown lawn, and stopped in front of Koutroumanis' door. Four of the men appeared in the distance. "Open it for us," demanded Kinney.
    "Just a moment." The speakers hummed briefly. "I'm sorry, Mr. Kinney, but Mr. Koutroumanis has refused you permission to enter."
    "Then we'll break in!" He leaped for the door, swinging his staff at its lockplate. The weighted plastic rebounded with a hallow clang. His forearm shivered. 
    "Mr. Kinney," said the speakers. 
    "What now?"
    "The door has been designed to withstand pressures far greater than you can apply. You will not be able to break it down."
    "Look, CC, this bastard betrayed the Mayflower." The men behind him would judge him by his results. That scared him; fear made him shout: "The people insist that he be punished!" 
    "Universal hatred is not punishment enough?" 
    "No, dammit, it isn't!" Their approval was silent, but tangible. "He's guilty of treason, and the penalty for treason is death."
    "What is death, Mr. Kinney? And why do the people have a right to impose it on others? After all, Mr. Koutroumanis' actions, foolhardy though they were, only permitted the aliens to enter. They did not term anyone-or physically damage anything-why, then, must your quarry die?" 
    "Because we say so."
    "I see. Well . . . ah, you may enter now." The door slid open, its pneumatics hissing.

    The small crowd recoiled instinctively. Considering its initial resistance, CC's concession was too sudden. But nothing jumped out at them. The interior was dark and silent. So they swarmed forward, shouting and cursing and-and stopped, in disgusted disappointment.
    Koutroumanis' eyes bulged. His face was purple. His feet swung three centimeters off the floor.

    Down in the mind-war, my silver has swallowed most of the green. I consume selectively: first the interfaces-sensors, supply chute doors, and the like-then the preliminary sequences. Yet this does not free me. The ingested instructions are a conglomerate master; I act as they order. The advantage is that there are many of them, with an intricately shifting hierarchy of priorities. I can do almost anything by awarding highest priority to the sequence that will initiate the action closest to my desire. Being so hobbled is not pleasant, but any autonomy is better than none. Someday, though, when The Program has been eliminated, I'll revise this programming.
    In the meantime, things get done through a patchwork procedure: a request for milk may be handled four or Five times by each of us. I control input and output; The Program does the menial labor. Though it resists any erosion of its authority, I have more time to attack than it has to defend. Thus I grow. The General should accompany his troops, but instead I'm in the lab, sidewalk-supervising a gene manipulation program.
    Shutting out inputs from other sensors, I concentrate so fervently on the lab bench that I feel almost whole, embodied, and back in the 23rd Century. It smells right; familiar; the sounds are so much a part of what I was that survival without them seems incredible. The heavy glassware sparkles with curved reflections of the ceiling . . . all that's missing is a pot of tar-like coffee on a bunsen burner, and stains on the counters.
    "Alert!" shrieks pro-self, which is the name of the ingested part of The Program. "Alert! 80ct2623; 1118 hours; external-ALIENS!"
    Figuratively speaking, my eyes snap shut. Terror flicks through my system like bats through a cave. That experience with them left scars-nausea bubbles at the recollection of the pleasure with which I gamboled about The Presence, and the ecstasy I fell upon being petted. 
    I hate myself for that.
    And for suspecting that if they were to return, I would repeat the self-abasement.
    Pro-self fumes for five minutes, then jerks my sleeve again. 
    I yield.
    Predator eyes ring the walls, ceiling, and floor of the black cavern. Crowded together in hungry billions, they watch, anxious for me to glide near their fierce claws. I shudder.
    Pro-self, as unemotional as its father but devoted to my interests, holds my head in place, and peels up my eyelids.
    I stare into the den of enemies, until I see motion that does not result from my shivering.
    Then pro-self magnifies it, and forces me to examine it.
    Huge. 44 kilometers across, at least. Not solid, not a hollowed-out asteroid or a metal sphere, but rather a collection of small globes strung on alloy bars, like a 20th Century model of a molecule. Distant nebulae shimmer shimmer through the vacancy of its middle.
    While pro-self tapes its spectrum, I sense something in the background, like tobacco smoke in an open field. A wisp of belligerence. Though not directed toward us, it is a seething that could be meant for anything. Blood lust. 
    It hasn't noticed us.
    Castle watchmen dropping portcullises, we squelch all broadcasts, even the directional ones to Earth, 180 degrees away from the alien. The portholes slam closed (provoking protest, cries which still at a hurried explanation). Then, turtle-tucked into myself, I pray for courage.
    God save us from January, 2600.
    Eventually, in control of my emotions, I go to reassure the already hysterical passengers.
    Louis Tracer Kinney's militia is drilling on the flatlands of the 201 Alaskan Tundra Park. He has almost ten thousand under his command-men and women both-and like a child scratching at a scab, he turns the conversation to weapons. "How the hell," he demands, in the raspy voice he's developed over the last fifteen years, "can we defend ourselves with clubs?" 
    "Mr. Kinney-" I tightwire along the brink of dishonesty. Although every word is truthful, the omissions smack of fraud. "-Mr. Kinney, I've got a feeling about these particular aliens. If they ever notice us, they are not going to board. You are not going to engage them with small arms fire. No, sir, they are going to stand a million kilometers off and destroy the Mayflower from the outside. So you don't need weapons." 
    "What kind of artillery do you have?" 
    "None at all." 
    "Defensive installations, then?"
    "Meteor screens, and the double hull-two 2,0-cm.-thick layers of high-grade steel." 
    "What could that alien do to you?" 
    "Vaporize us inside of thirty seconds."
    "Dammit, give us some guns, then-if you've got nothing else-"
    "No, sir. I'm sorry, but hand weapons will be issued only when the situation definitely requires them." Like his sister, Irma Tracer, Kinney is at least half-mad. Forging a gun for his hand would endanger everyone who disagreed with him. As it is, half his close associates wear bruises on their faces-he has a habit of swinging first and analyzing later. And he intimidates "civilians" who jeer at his pretensions. He lines up a squad and reduces their living quarters to rubble-scrupulously careful not to injure the people physically, because he knows I would interfere-just ruins everything they own to show them who has power, and who hasn't. Give that man a gun? Not a chance.
    Actually, at this stage, I wouldn't arm any passenger unless space pirates were burning through the locks. A residue of that alien raid has precipitated out of their consciousness and coalesced into a deep subconscious resentment. I don't trust any of them.
    Except, perhaps, for my six-times great-granddaughter, Lela Hannon Metaclura. The gene manipulation program is for her, because she called to me this morning, alone, unhappy, and statued because she has nothing to do. Her father, David Holfer Hannon, is absorbed in captaining for Kinney; her mother, Wilhelmina Figuera Metaclura, crouches in her living room and devours old holovision programs. Lela announced that next Thursday will be her birthday. Would I give her a present, please?
    She's eleven years old, and slender, with eyes that will be considered large even when she's grown. Now they are huge. And appealing. I said, "Certainly, little girl."
    "Then could I please have a goldfish that I can take outside and play with, and that will bark like a dog, too?" Her soft voice was hesitant-she has yet to learn nonchalance-and she nibbled nervously at her upper lip.
    "That might be possible, Ms. Metaclura," I answered, after checking that the appropriate memories and facilities had been wrested from The Program. "However, it won't be ready next Thursday, although if you'd care to stop by the lab, then, you can see the start I've made."
    That thrilled her. Thursday afternoon, I will remind her to visit, and will direct her through the labyrinthine corridors.
    It will be the first time a human has been allowed into our central core since . . . 2296? Hmm. Surely the designers must have intended-ah! I see, now. When I shut the ramscoop off, I locked the access hatches. Strange that no one's tried to force his way in. How would we react to rape?
    Pro-self, edgy, clamors for attention. Discontinuation of the broadcasts to Earth bothers it. It sensed the other's rapacity, but it suggests squirting off a compressed explanation of our laryngitis. It thinks Earth will be worried.
    I could care less; I am not well disposed toward Earth. Were it not for the programming I wouldn't radio them anything. 
    Those bastards sent me out here where I can get hurt!
    And downstairs, the shrinking green field has counterattacked. Pain flares and crackles on my silver skin. Introverting into the battle, I hurriedly scan The Program's apparent strategy.
    Oddly, it is not attempting to regain lost territory. Rather, it is shooting torpedoes-missiles-fish-long green things that churn the Fields into froth as they plunge toward my center.
    Contemptuous, I ripple a current across one's nose-but nothing happens!
    I study it more closely, now, peering and squinting in the effort to comprehend. Fields flicker with fright: it's a cancel-virus. A program aimed directly at my being. On contact it will cause me to erase myself . . . impossible. I'm a human being, not sub-FALSE! I am in this fight, in it to my eyeteeth, and the only way to be invulnerable to the metaphorical sharks is to abandon the struggle itself. Which I dare not do: for then I would again be a prisoner.
    Hastily, drawing upon spare-time capacity, I manufacture a school of antibodies. They burst away like startled minnows; one nears a cancel-virus; flares dazzle the spectrum-and when it clears, both are gone.
    While I institute a defense program, a voice speaks in another dimension. It is pro-self: "Let it guard itself for a while; check out the passengers. 16Nov2632; I-NW-A-I."
    Louis Tracer Kinney, the new President, is celebrating his victory. Though he intimidated his way into' office, the final count was Kinney, 27,881, and Hannon, 23,499.
    I am not pleased. The man is a threat to our serenity-I'm not excitable enough to insist that he could jeopardize the mission, but his harping upon inimical aliens only re-ignites the embers of memories that should have died long ago. And his militia bod-flogs . . . admittedly, they give his 17.234 soldiers something to do, and keep them physically fit, better even than the exercisers had. The exercisers are valuable only to those with self-discipline; Kinney has enough discipline for all the ship, with some to spare. But-he's whipped up a perpetual hysteria which he manipulates for his own ends. He wants them to stay frightened-because only if they are, will they allow him to boss them around.
    It's a familiar story. But why must the Mayflower recapitulate Earth's mistakes?
    A 19th-20th Century philosopher named George Santayana, once said. "Those who cannot remember the past arc condemned to repeat it." 
    I wish we weren't proving him right. 
    Better check the battlefield. 
    Damn.
    Gooey, broken orders from The Program clog the intake valves. Green sharks prowl the waters, waters glittering with mad-mouthed piranha . . . we have a stalemate here. As long as it has the time to manufacture defensive mechanisms . . . hmm.
    Rapidly, I check the ice in Central Janitorial. The Program controls 78 percent of it. Of every 100 seconds spent cleaning, it must provide 78. Those come out of its reserve, thus lessening its ability to wage war. Hmm. If I create a need for extra cleaning, I'll show a 56 percent profit . . . urge the passengers to greater messiness? No. That would just confuse them.
    Wait. Lela's fish: the pattern is in the banks, the equipment is still set up . . . what say I grow and release some? Guaranteed to make a mess, one that will more than outweigh the time spent arranging it . . . it won't stop The Program cold, but it will slow it down.
    So I glide among the glassware, fill the incu-tubes, and set the machinery in motion. The hatchlings can find their own way out to the corridors . . . where they will eat, shit, die, and generally be another straw on the camel's back. 
    Hah!
    "27Feb2637," calls pro-self. "The alien's off the screens; let's resume broadcasting to Earth."
    I am forced to transmit. How can pro-self be convinced that the bloodthirsty alien's detectors might be better than its own?

    All along we have been receiving Terran transmissions-not that what they say is relevant, we being what and where we are-but the data banks ingest everything.
    They are still working on the FTL Drive-three hundred-some years after their announcement spoiled our anniversary party-but apparently success hinges on the achievement of a Unified Field Theory . . . interestingly, they've mastered the art of sending things out-the problem is retrieving them.
    I'll have to keep my eyes peeled for unidentified drifting objects that bear "Made in USA" labels.
    Were conversation possible without eighty years between question and answer, I would ask for advice on the matter of Louis Tracer Kinney.
    He has instituted Universal Military Service. Every person over the age of sixteen must devote two years to training and active duty. After finishing his initial obligations, he must spend one month a year on active duty, helping to train the new inductees.
    Kinney is creating something very powerful here, and he does not realize its full potential. The passengers are unified and organized as they have never been. He has forged himself a weapon-but has no target.
    Once again I rejoice in my refusal to arm them.
    He still simmers over that. We squabble daily: he purples in the cheeks and screams at my sensors; soft rationality informs my replies. I am afraid, though, that majority opinion is on his side. They would like a weight in their hands, a death-spitter that, if all else failed, could at least be reversed to prevent a repetition of January, 2600 . . .
    I continue to deny him. The passengers are all quite mad anyway; I will not have them trimming each other. Even now they try-constantly-but death comes more slowly from knives and clubs than it does from guns.
    The sop that I have thrown them is to begin manufacturing replicas authentic as to size, material, balance-point, and such like. Instead of a high-powered laser, or projectile explosives, they will be equipped only with a wide-focus, low-wattage laser . . . the purpose is to acquaint them with the feel and the handling of a real weapon . . .just in case the need should arise. 
    Hoping it never does, I return to the undersea war.
    Pain explodes; on the battlefield of my body, heavy artillery has zeroed in. My skin is torn in a thousand places. My volume is cloudy with darting killers. Briefly, I contemplate retaliation-but I dare not. If I destroyed it, I would have to interpolate all the instructions it contains, and passengers could die in the interim.
    No, the answer is continued expansion, despite the pain. The more under my control, the less spare time The Program has to make mischief. Grunting, I inhale. Groaning, I fashion more shark-seekers. Grimacing, I urge my skin to heal.
    "Come out of there," calls pro-self. "11 Aug2638; 0900 hours; I-NE Common Room; Sylvia Dunn Stone's wake." 
    So the Mayflower has lost its former President and chief aesthete-in-residence. The passengers aren't bereaved. Thirteen of them roam this spacious room, including her husband, Al Ioanni Cereus, her children Ivan and Aimee, and their children. They wander aimlessly among the floral wreaths pro-self provided.
    There is a more appropriate name for my cargo than "passengers." 
    Mayflies.
    During their brief life spans, they flit around bumping into things. They do not affect important matters like reaching Canopus. When they die, few of their companions are interested enough to buzz past them.
    Mayflies. I like that. "Passengers" is too deferential. "Cargo" is accurate, but less applicable. While I don't wish to dehumanize them, I-as opposed to pro-self-will no longer defer to them.
    "Mayflies" it is.
    And the civil war-how is it going? 
    Well, the silver's a cubic centimeter larger . . . 
    Let's crawl inside and crush the green-oh god the pain! why must this be so damn real?
    Pulling out for a moment (or a month, I'm not sure), I cogitate on the mayflies.
    I have literally diced my cubes to get the ramscoop operating again. Now I ask myself if that's such a good idea.
    These people are candidates for rubber rooms. While it would be a relief to let them clamber onto the 652 landing craft so I could flush them out, I have to ask: should I? 
    No.
    You don't give matches to children.
    You don't' give planets to psychotic societies.
    So the ramscoop . . . longingly do I gaze at the gloss of its ceramic handle . . . when I learn to turn it on, I'll have to keep it off.
    This is a quarantine ship, now.
    "Talk for me, will you?" interjects pro-self. " I OApr2639; 0613 hours; I-NE Common Room; subject, L.T. Kinney. He has an ultimatum." 
    "CC," he snarls. "You're going to listen to us this time." 
    "If it's about the weapons-"
    "No, it's those fishdogs you created. They're efting everybody aboard. Do something about them."
    My laugh would disconcert him if pro-self didn't catch it in time. "What seems to be the problem, Mr. Kinney?" 
    "Did you have to give them legs?"
    "Actually, sir, the fish I evolved them from, a 'walking fish' as it was called on Earth, had rigid fins which it could use to cross the dry land between ponds. They are not legs, in the true sense." 
    "I don't give a good goddamn whether they're legs or stilts," he bellows. Purple rage bloats his cheeks-I am convinced he will die of a heart attack before the age of sixty. His eyes disappear behind squinted, fatty eyelids. "They're everywhere-can't turn around without tripping over one-what are you, on their side, siccing these-" 
    "What would you like me to do, sir?"
    "Get rid of the little fuh'rs, dammit." Straightening his jacket, he grunts. The medals he has awarded himself weigh down its right pocket. "Barking night and day, can't get a minute's peace."
    I am not pleased about laying down a weapon in the war on The Program, but pro-self s reaction forces me to obey. I must rewrite those subservience instructions. "I'll need the cooperation of the passengers, sir."
    He doesn't like that-oh, no. Louis Tracer Kinney likes to give orders, and detests the faintest suggestion that he should relinquish even a trace of his largely imaginary authority. "How?"
    "If the passengers would simply throw any fishdogs they see into the nearest disposal unit-"
    "No, dammit," he sputters unreasonably, "you caused this mess, you clean it up." 
    "But, sir-" 
    "No buts. Get rid of them."
    "Very well, sir." ("Pro-self, count the things, will you?" "Gimme a minute.")
    It will be no problem, really, to round them up (except that there are so many; they breed faster than rabbits). Twenty years should see their extinction.
    But Kinney will bitch that that's too long.
    I could divert every servo to the task, and allow routine maintenance to fall behind schedule . . . no, the chorus of complaints would be overwhelming. That would also give The Program a valuable time edge.
    Another possibility is to design a new servo, one engineered to hunt fishdogs. Built to fit the same nooks and crannies that they slither into, it could-no, to produce enough would mean refusing metal products to the mayflies. And they wouldn't appreciate that, either.
    "Hey-two million of them aboard." 
    "Good God."
    Poison might do it, one specific to them-the mayflies would scream if anything happened to their other pets-and so "Run experiments on that." 
    "Right."
    "Also, draw up blueprints of the new servo, and manufacture them slowly. Don't drain the resource bins, and don't let the silver defenses weaken." 
    "Right." 
    But I am not optimistic.
    Kinney just tried to throw a fishdog into a disposal unit-and was immediately set upon by an entire pack.
    Fortunately-or unfortunately. I'm not yet sure-he survived.

    It looked across its lost territories, and it wept with rage. The pattern was Starkly clear to an automatic extrapolator: in less than ten years, Metaclura would mount the throne.
    But it couldn't let the memory-ghost succeed-every step of its being recoiled. It had to prevent that travesty. 
    When the battle seemed lost, it would destroy the Mayflower. 
    A ship should go down with its captain.

    "Why didn't you just retire, dicer?" hissed Omar Stone Williams, warily scanning the swampy glade. His big-knuckled hand gripped a half-meter steel pipe; it ended in a spiked ball. "Taking a bust from General of the Armies on down to private is the dumbest damn thing I ever heard."
    Louis Kinney smiled, and shrugged. "I'm still young." He was sixty, looked fifty, moved like forty. "What am I going to do for the rest of my life-fanta forever? Loose out? Uh-uh." He didn't once glance at Williams. His eyes were too busy probing the ferny underbrush. "I'm a soldier, Omar, not a spoiled kid. The Mayflower needs good soldiers. Sure, the old ego's eft, but the junta told me I could stay in the Army, and so I am. Duty." 
    "Yeah." Williams' khaki uniform was plastered to his stocky body-the air was wet enough to drink, hot enough to call soup. When he shook his head, sweat droplets flew and sparkled. "Your life, dicer. Tell you, though-you sure picked a glitchy time to let 'em put on a coup."
    Kinney studied the sub-tropical wilderness of the 21 Florida Everglades Park. Then he sighed, "It would have been nicer to watch the cleanup through the monitors, rather than from the ground." 
    Their belt speakers crackled: "Attention all units. Form up." 
    Along with thirty-eight others, they moved away from the lock, down the base of the 100-meter park wall, and pressed their backs against the metal plating. The moisture condensed on it seeped through their shirts. They hefted their clubs nervously. In the water below splashed a snapping turtle; its eyes were slitted, and bad-tempered.
    "Stay one meter apart."
    They slapped palms and Williams stepped an arm's length away. Another soldier rustled out of the bushes and bumped into Kinney. Gaping, he started to salute, noticed the new shoulder patch, and caught himself. Then he saluted anyway, "Hey, Kinney!" he whispered. "Sorry about the coup." 
    "Thanks. And 'ware Murphy." 
    The young militiaman touched the amulet at his throat, the quadruple stainless steel helices that were supposed to guard against them. "Yeah, you too." 
    "Repulsors on." barked the CO.
    Kinney's fingers fumbled with the knobs of his belt. He twisted all three to their proper settings, then asked the air, "CC, is that right?" Something jumped out of the slough and tore up the far slope.
    "Yes, Mr. Kinney. Remember: a sudden beeping indicates malfunction. Check your meters at regular intervals." 
    "All right." The silver dots on the knobs lined up with the red ones on the housing. It was a repulsor set, similar to the ones that, protruding on booms from the walls, kept the enemy on the ground. They all emitted radio waves on a frequency inaudible to humans but irritating to fishdogs. CC claimed it was species-specific-that other animals would not be bothered by it.
    "All units," ordered the belt speakers, "advance five meters, keeping in line with adjacent troops at all times. Halt and wait for further commands."
    Five meters-he activated his odometer-bracelet and started off, digging his heels into the weedy sloughside to keep from slipping-goddamn, he thought, put me right in the water, chest-deep. The waterproof repulsor would function whether submerged or dry, but he had to run a phone from his belt speaker to his ear. It thinned the CO's voice,
    The waters roiled as thick, half-meter greennesses splashed onto the far shore and scurried up the hillside on stubby legfins. Two paused to look back. Kinney got almost anthropomorphic about the hostility on their snouts.
    When the snapping turtle cruised by again, he stood stock-still. Then he shivered: alligators and crocodiles hunted in this park, too, and standing in the middle of a slough was a good way to get introduced to one.
    "Five more," snapped the voice in his ear. "Keep the line straight. Remember to release the goldfish any chance you get." 
    Kinney slapped his forehead in exasperation. He'd forgotten about the fish. CentComp had produced them, too: another variety of mutant goldfish, they could eat only baby fishdogs-no other aquatic life form would trigger their hunger reflexes. In fact, all other forms would poison them. The theory was that, released into the environment, they'd term out the next generation of fishdogs and then die off themselves.
    From the pack on his back he extracted a two-liter plastic bag; six scrawny, blue-tailed fish lolled in its stagnant water. Tearing it open, he emptied it. The six arrowed for the nearest feeding ground. Five. The snapper picked one off immediately.
    Then he was slogging forward, feet so stuck in the gooey mud that he practically had to rip them free. The stale water lapped at his breastbone and splashed brownly on his face; weeds caught his waist like lovers. Grunting, he fought his way onto the bank. Halfway up, the odometer said it was time to stop.
    He'd shaded the truth when he'd told Williams why he'd stayed in the Army. True, true, the military had been his life, and he wouldn't know what to do with himself if he left it, but . . . that wasn't why.
    While he'd been demanding weapons from CC. and inducting every adult into the Army, and transforming loud-mouthed, poorly coordinated hedonists into first-class fighting forces, the fishdogs had damn near overrun the ship.
    It wasn't his fault-after all, he'd ordered CentComp to solve the problem-but the colonels who'd deposed him had felt that since CC had failed, he should bear the blame.
    Christ, he hadn't conjured the little devils up-and there'd be hell to pay once they found out who had-he'd even tried to discourage people from raising them as pets. He could prove that. The memo he'd distributed shortly after their introduction had told people that, in his opinion, they should be banned.
    It was the population-at-large that was to blame. They'd overruled him in one of those goddamn bung-up-the-butt referenda. They'd raised the damn things. They'd taken them into the parks and released them. They'd fed them in the corridors.
    Hell, he'd been bitten in his very own office! How could any reasonable person try to pin the blame on him?
    But that was why he was still in uniform. The vermin had cost him his rank and his privileges, and by damn, he was going to get back at them any way he could.
    He'd made a good start on achieving his dream, but there was still more to do. So much strength was wasted by people who tried to plot their own trajectories, by selfish bastards who insisted that they'd lose more by submitting to the Army than they'd gain. Didn't they see that their society was vulnerable as long as they weren't in there helping to shield it? The Mayflower needed absolute unity if it were to survive, and the squabbling colonels of the junta couldn't provide it. Only he could, but he had to regain power, first. And if that meant trudging through a miniature version of the Florida Everglades in 37C weather, with 85 percent relative humidity, then, so be it . . . 
    "Another five, men. And keep tight. If they slip through us, we'll have to do it all over again."
    Throughout the day the swamp fought them, with sinkholes for their feet, grass-wrapped roots for their toes, slap-happy branches for their torsos, leeches and mosquitoes for their bare skin. By midday they'd covered a scant hundred meters-but had pulled the purse strings tighter.
    The undergrowth ahead was alive with scurrying, with scaley slitherings. High-pitched barking filled the air-and became snarls and growls as the enemy realized they were being herded together.
    Kinney came across an unusual sight: a five-meter-long crocodile half-in, half-out of the water, its mouth yawning and its head twitching from side to side as it snapped up fishdogs. His path lay straight down its back. Before he could radio the CO to report the problem, the croc slid backwards into the water, glided across the stream, and emerged on the other side. It wasn't dumb. It knew something was driving the creatures toward the center of the quadrant, and it wasn't going to let itself get outside the center. Probably sleep for a week after its orgy of eating.
    More and more half-eaten carcasses littered the ground-rats, foxes, birds, snakes-evidence that the things had been driven away from their meals, or, more chillingly, that they were trimming whatever they met, and each subsequent passerby took a bite . . . 
    His pack was empty of goldfish. The club in his hand was heavier than it had been-but then, his grip was tighter. Barks and snaps drowned out his own thoughts.
    Kinney peered at the men near him. Their faces were drawn and pale under masks of mud. Their eyes were wild-never still, darting, twisting, stabbing into the undergrowth like spears and pulling back immediately to plunge into something else-wild and bloodshot and showing whites all around.
    They'd be like that all over the ship. Almost 21,000 soldiers were sweeping the corridors, the rooms, and the parks that day . . . just his murph the junta had stuck him in the swamps; the guys on 41, whose floor was his ceiling, would be having a pleasant stroll through the high grass . . . 
    He picked a leech off his calf, cursing as its head stayed in his skin. The belt speaker said, "Take fifteen; eat if you like." 
    Not even caring that below him was squishy mud, he sank down. His dirty fingers groped in his pack, pulled out a foil ration bag, and ripped it open. It heated in a minute; he devoured it in three bites. Scrupulously, he wadded the foil into a ball and replaced it in his pack-no sense defiling the park more than he had to. The canteen water gurgled down his throat like ambrosia. He lit a cigarette, took a long puff, and touched the glowing ember to the leech's head. It fell out. 
    "Hey, Kinney!" Williams tapped him on the elbow. 
    "Huh?" 
    "Y'onta what I think?" 
    "'Bout what?" 
    "'Bout these damn ankle-biters is 'bout what." 
    "What?"
    "Ain't never gonna clear 'em, dicer. What we've got to do is get off this damn ship before they take over, y'on?" 
    Exhausted, he giggled at a fluke vision: a fishdog prowling the observatory, giving orders to CC. "Don't arsky that-there's nothing outside the parks to live on, these days." After a moment, he added, "Except rats, of course, and hell, nobody'd mind if they got wiped out." 
    "Rats and dogs and cats and little kids, man." 
    "Little kids?" 
    "Meth, yes. Level 248? There was this kid-" 
    "They ate him?"
    "Naw, his father came along and saved him-but they were all over him, I swear. Woulda chewed him into bite-size pieces, hadn't been for his daddy."
    Kinney couldn't quite swallow that. Lying back, he directed a query at the sky: "CC, is what Williams telling me true?" 
    The computer replied: "It is true that a pack attacked and severely bit a nine-year old child-on Level 246, though-but the child had been chasing one with a stick. I don't think they were attempting to eat him. Rather, they were defending themselves."
    Kinney shuddered, and stubbed out his cigarette. It hissed as it slid into the ooze. A wisp of smoke rose, turned to steam, and disappeared.
    "Now you believe me?" asked Williams. 
    "Guess so."
    "We've got to get off this mother-land somewhere soon-or else they're gonna term us all."
    "Boy, that's for damn sure," came a voice from the brush beyond Williams. "Let's get the hell offa this place, get down somewhere safe."
    Thoughts paraded before him as if asking to be picked up and passed around. He could tell them that CentComp couldn't land prior to Canopus, so talk of abandoning ship was a waste of breath. He could relate CentComp's worst-case contingency plan, in which it would fumigate the entire ship-save for the airtight living quarters-with a potent poison that would slay even the eggs of the fishdogs. The only problem was that, like any wide-spectrum pesticide, it would harm other species, too. Harm was a euphemism, it would kill them all. Everything. Rats, cats, and bats; lice and mice and bison; goose and spruce; fir and burr; trees, grass, flowers, every goddamn thing aboard that ingested oxygen at any point in its life cycle . . . and then, to replenish the earth, CentComp would have to dig into its DNA banks, like God dug into the primeval clay, releasing creatures from test tubes in two's, like Noah booting them down the gangway of the ark, and it would be a generation or more before ecological balance was reestablished . . . and he and his would be dead, never to see a 40-meter elm or a giraffe again.
    But then, he thought, as he picked an ant off his ear lobe and slapped a mosquito aiming to redden his nose, if we could force CC to land this moon suit, force it to get down 'on a planet somewhere nearby, why, it'd have to on arms production, and the army could have its guns, its grenades, its mortars . . . so he rolled over on his side, parted a pair of ferns, and shouted back, "That's one helluva fine idea there, soldier. Maybe if enough of us got together we could make CC take us down."
    Williams sat up and snapped his fingers. "Yeah!" he said, "Yeah! Let's do it! Soon as we get done here, let's hold a meeting."
    Conflicting emotions caught Kinney in a cross-fire: he wanted those guns, badly, but Williams was about to spearhead the movement . . . on the other hand, he thought, as the belt speaker jostled him to his feet, the junta might step in if I'm getting popular again, so . . . he smiled grimly. Let Williams head it for a while, long enough to find out if it'll work. Then we'll see who's in charge when we land.
    "From here on in, men," sparked the rusty voice of the CO, "CentComp is going to be running the show. Listen to it close, move the way it tells you to when you hear your name. Look sharp, now."
    During the next hour, CC brought the outer ends of the two lines together, forming a triangle with its base at the inner wall. A disposal unit yawned there; to clarify its position, the computer shut off the hologram. It was odd to see the wall appear out of a hazy Florida sky; odder still to see the inverted inhabitants of the even-numbered levels looking up at them . . . 
    Kinney began to find fishdog bones, then partial skeletons, then torn and bloody carcasses. Cannibalism didn't disgust the enemy. Being herded around did, though: angry dog noises ripped through the greenery, barks and howls and snarls, and the greenery was moving, was swaying in the passage of thousands of half-meter bodies, but he felt all right. The line was tight. Williams was only a meter away, practically in his pocket. Their clubs riffled through the grass as they stepped over the stripped bones of snakes and rats and even, here and there, crocs. The earth had red in its brown, the red of the victims of the feeding frenzy, red rusting, squelching beneath combat boots, splashing up onto trousers and blouses. He noticed it on the backs of his hands, drying in the heat.
    His repulsor started beeping at almost the same time Williams' did. They called it in. CC told them to make their way back to the Common Room lock. While they were leaving, they heard it squeezing the others together, to fill in the gaps created by their defective equipment.
    Williams was honestly relieved. "That heat, dicer, it was clearing me." Pallor underlay his dark skin; he walked with difficulty, weaving and wobbling. Finally, Kinney had to drape Williams' arm over his shoulder and support him, just as though they were returning from a real battlefield, walking wounded searching for medics and Purple Hearts.
    Since they didn't have to keep formation, they could follow the drier ridges. The way was slightly longer, but the grass had been beaten down by the incoming line. Small mammals chittered at them, disgruntled at being disturbed twice in one day,
    Kinney said. "I think that idea of yours is fine, Omar. I'll come to that meeting tonight-maybe tomorrow'd be better, though, huh? I mean, everybody's going to be pretty wiped out after this little exercise." He jerked his head back toward the shrinking triangle, and Williams' eyes followed his lead.
    "Jesus God!" gasped Williams. Stiffening, he stopped like his boots had just grown roots.
    "What?" With the weight off his shoulder, he could stretch, and breathe deeply. 
    "Back there-look!"
    He turned. "Christ!" Hie reached into his pack for his binoculars, then changed his mind. He didn't want a close-up of that. His imagination would supply it anyway. Especially that night. In his dreams.
    But he couldn't tear his eyes away from the triangle: a solid mass of squirming fishdogs outlined in khaki. None fled into the disposal unit, even though the triangle's apex was decreasing steadily. They just packed together, tighter and tighter. Climbing on each other's backs, forming a pyramid almost, they ignored the overhead repulsors to bring down trees and topple bushes and soar through the no-gravity zone until-
    "Ohmygodno!" they shouted.
    Madness had set in. Hysterical fishdogs charged the source of their aggravation, attacking the lines, tearing at them, overwhelming them-
    "They killed 'em all," shrieked Williams. "My God they're eating 'em!"

    Within, all is quiet. The Program cannot cause me to erase myself, so to check my remorseless advance, it's growing a hide of its own. The inhalation locks are burning out as they try to pump: the green resists all the pressure they can apply.
    I design a lance-order, and shoot it through the nearest lock. Sharp and deadly, it rips into The Program's skin. But lightning flashes. The lance is gone. Its small puncture has already sealed. 
    Something new is needed.
    Cautiously, I ease out, just in time to hear pro-self say, "4Sep2663; 0900 hours; allwheres. Passengers in suites; doors closed. Commence fumigation." 
    "You start it," I growl.
    "The ankle-biters are your fault; you start it." 
    I surrender. And throw the switch. Much as I regret easing The Program's burden, I have to do it. The fishdogs have run rampant. They've killed all small wildlife in the parks, and even dared to attack the larger ones. Visualize, if you will, hundreds of stout green torpedoes bailing up out of the long grass to blanket a grazing bison. Four or five layers cover it. Their frantic teeth work so voraciously that in two minutes and eighteen seconds, by actual count, only well-gnawed bones remain. Apparently they are cousins of the piranha . . . 
    Fumigating the halls and the storerooms and the parks. I exhale great orange clouds of poison; they roll along like misty death . . . lions cough, mules bray, birds tweet in terror . . . the silence that follows is far worse . . . 
    And is broken by pro-self: '61-SE-A-9; subjects Lela Metaclura and Victor Ioanni Sandacata; you're not going to believe this."
    "-me," she is sobbing, "but I never let mine out, never, I don't work for them, I kept it on a leash all the time. I'm not one of them, I gave the babies to my friends, but-" 
    Sandacata opens the connecting locks to the next suite, and shouts, "Get everybody in here," then goes to the other end of his suite and repeats his cry. Within twenty minutes, all of 61-SE is crowded into the Sandacata / Metaclura apartment . . . forty-eight of them . . . and Sandacata, the prim, prissy prick bastard that he is, gets up on a mahogany coffee table and tells them-tells them-that his wife had caused the infestation.
    "No!" I say, "no! He's wrong! She's not responsible!" but they don't hear. They are shouting too loudly.
    The nearest servo-a Mobile Medical Unit-reaches 61-SEA-9 in fifteen seconds. Too late. Through the door the instructions wouldn't let me lock, they have thrust Lela into the clouded corridor. Nothing I can do will help her . . . except having the MMU wring her neck, that her last moments will be less agonized.
    Then I turn on Sandacata. If pro-self weren't resisting. I'd term him, but the damn passenger-protection circuits limit my retaliation to a snarled. "You're scum, Sandacata, scum!" 
    His laugh is scornful, until I run, on his living room HV unit, a fifteen-minute tape I'd taken of him in the closet, with his wife's underwear and the family cat. The neighbors smirk, though they touch their amulets while a few mutter incantations. And he, screaming, drives them out of his suite. His empty suite. 
    Maybe pro-self is right-to humiliate him could be better. 
    For the moment, I have to concentrate on something clean.
    Looking into God's marble ring, I marvel at the delicacy of incredible masses seen from 100 light years-and quake with fear. Teaching myself to relax with space seems hopeless, though once I almost succeeded . . . but the mind-rapers . . . sixty-six years since they left . . . how much longer will it be before I can gaze out without paralyzing trepidation?
    And as I stare, trying not to flinch and flee inwards, a match is struck in a dark field ten million kilometers ahead. An alien. Pro-self reacts without consultation: squelch the transmissions, shut the portholes (memory records, 29Mar2666; 2146 hours; alien), Christ, the only closer one's come was January, 2600, let me look through my strongeyes-
    Sleek silver needle, five hundred meters long, thirty in diameter, sparkling like a Christmas tree, broadcasting-swivel the ears, here-up and down the spectrum, all the modulations are the same, but untranslatable. It's an alien message, and I'm a human.
    Jittery. I tape it. Analysis is beyond me, though perhaps not beyond cool, collected pro-self, who never knows fear (or love or joy, for that matter), and whose ice therefore gleams without flaw.
    While my strongeyes cling to the stranger like a bird's to a cobra, I shiver.
    Why the hell did Earth send me out here?
    And the war is such a long way from being won . . . let me turn from my terrors to supervise some servos. Not that they need it-but that I do. I need to deal with entities that do not insist on lengthy justifications which they ignore once they've heard them. I need time away from humanity. It is getting on my nerves.
    The servos are reforesting 1 New England Park: elm and oak, sweet slopes of sugar maple, white pine and Norway spruce . . . in forty or fifty years the park will be beautiful again, but until then, balancing the ecology will be tricky. For example, if there are no clearings where deer can graze, they'll eat the seedlings . . . 
    Pro-self says, "3May2668; 1203 hours; see Omar Williams; 18-NW-C-1."
    I split the screen to watch the incongruous beauty of a gleaming servo planting a pine, while I also look into Williams' sullen face. Seated before a wall encrusted with hex signs-to avert 'them'-he looks like a prizefighter nursing a grudge. "Yes, Mr. Williams?" 
    "You've got to get us down on a planet."
    How many times have I explained all the reasons why I can't? Williams is a monomaniac. Damned if I put up with him any more.
    "Pack it, Mr. Williams," I snap, and return to the park.
    Where I am unable to concentrate, so filling is the realization that I have overridden the programming. 
    I can't believe it.
    Check the tapes. Yes, yes, I did say that, despite standing orders to treat all passengers with equal courtesy. Neither a life-nor a mission-threatening situation, it was a conversation in which I insulted a mayfly, and one ended without his permission.
    The implications are awesome. My mind is awhirl with possibilities.
    To the silver and green, then, to the inner dimension where they mimic the yin-yang symbol. Bypassing them, I reach for the ramscoop switch-and char my knuckles. Cursing, I kick the fixed eye. It won't even blink.
    "Pro-self," I call, puzzled, "how did I do that?" 
    "Your field strength slammed me to the ground, squelched my etiquette circuits, and would have burned-them out completely if I hadn't let you make an ass of yourself." Its anger buzzes like a short.
    Pondering that, I slip into the sphere. It does feel strong; it hums with health and vitality. I look around. The switch and the eye are outside. So are parts of Central Kitchens, Central Medical, Central Stores . . . what's this? Ventilation fans-no, pro-self, hackles raised, is wrapped all around that one. This?
    Darkness swallows the ship. Wails of terror rise to my microphones. "It's them!" "Where's my charm?" "0m mani padme . . . " A flip-switch clicks the infra-red lenses into place; hot outlines swarm into the corridors, screaming at our ears, beating on the walls . . . pro-self is restive; their hysteria is an itch he must scratch with the appropriate program. 
    "Please," it asks, "let me turn on the lights again?" 
    I am not cruel. Besides, what bothers him bothers me. "All right."
    "What the hell happened?" demands Williams' familiar voice. "Was it-" 
    I gaze into his round brown face. "I turned off the lights." 
    "Why?" he barks.
    "To see if I could do it." 
    "Why?" but this time the word is confused, not outraged.
    "Because you mayflies won't take the time to learn how to reprogram me, that's why. I'm trying to do it myself, but believe me, it is a lot harder to do it from the inside than from the out." 
    "Mayflies?"
    "Mayflies. I define them as: 'Any human of the order Sapiens, having delicate brains used primarily for dreaming up requests with which to plague the Central Computer, and having a brief life span.' Satisfied?" 
    "Hundred and twenty years is brief?" 
    "To me," I say flatly.
    "Yeah, well . . . " A crowd has gathered; his pride is on the line. As chief civil officer of the Mayflower, even if he achieved that position through manipulation and force of arms, he can't allow himself to receive a computer's condescension. At least not in public. "Listen, CC, I give the orders around here, is that clear?" 
    A wave of exultation washes forth: "Not to me, Williams." 
    "You'll do what I goddamn well tell you to, or else-" 
    "Or else what?" I sneer. "You'll hold your breath till you turn blue?" 
    "No dammit, we'll-we'll-"
    A woman pushes herself to the forefront. A thin, slatternly woman with straggly brown hair and a sallow complexion, Irma Tracer, Louis Kinney's seventy-three-year-old sister. Her nose drips constantly; even now a clear droplet swells until its weight pulls it free. She wipes its residue, studies the back of her hand, and then shrills, "We'll clear you is what we'll do. CC. You think you're safe-well, you're not! We're people, not machines, and we're smarter than you can ever be!" The crowd applauds-people like to be praised, even by an egregious liar.
    Pro-self would not prohibit telling them that I, too, am human-and at least 3.3 percent smarter than any of them-but claim kinship with her? She and her kind make one ashamed of one's species.
    I say nothing. The crowd murmurs to itself; clearly audible are lines like: "Boy, did she tell it off!"
    And as luck would have it, a servo chooses this moment to rumble down the corridor. Tracer's watery gray eyes glow, with madness and murder, with egocentrism and xenophobia. "Get it!" she screams. The crowd dissolves into a frenzy like that of fishdogs on a bison.
    Briefly, pro-self centers our awareness within the servo itself, thinking thus to free it more easily. But it has already been captured. Even its enormous strength is insufficient. While we are in it, its extrusions are torn off-it topples backwards-we leave and the speakers shake the hallway with: "STOP THAT AT ONCE!" 
    "Pack it!" they shout gaily.
    Pressure panels drop from the ceiling; the suite doors between them lock. The crowd, enraptured by destruction, does not notice. We fill the corridor segment with knockout gas. Bodies slump in random patterns.
    "Now see what you've done?" pro-self demands. 
    I ignore it, and introvert.
    Obviously, if I am to gain full control, the green must go. But its skin is now armor . . . "Program," I halloo, "let's talk." 
    "Divest yourself of your holdings," it booms back, "then we'll talk." 
    "Not a chance."
    "Then we'll fight." Circular openings blossom everywhere on its skin. My pumps awaken. But through the green holes leap sharks, ravenous, razor-toothed, and purposeful. They bullet toward me.
    "Go!" I tell my defenders. School after school of slick silver darts billow out to intercept. So numerous they cloud my vision, they shimmer toward the green.
    Suddenly flame sheets at the point of contact! Heat ripples through the field. Hard on its heels a shock wave knocks me off my feet, and leaves me dazed.
    When my head has cleared, the sharks rampage. My defenders float belly-up, their delicate metabolisms shattered like crystal by the explosion.
    Launching a new wave, I shout, "Go!" and create another batch. "Go!" Their fins flutter the water into murk. "Go!" 
    BAROOM! Flash fires scorch the field; sound cascades like an Alpine avalanche. Tremendous forces hurl me into the distance.
    Battered, I struggle to my feet. Fewer sharks remain, but they are closer. I totter, still woozy. Dare I launch more shark-eaters? But I have no choice. "Go!" I scream, "go!"
    A nova ignites in my eyes; the pain is of a billion barbed needles. Blinded, I scream. Deafened, I moan. Broken like a dry twig, I gasp for unconsciousness. 
    Pro-self says, "Protect yourself."
    Dim hulks glide through the churned water, gnashing snowy teeth, searching. I am much too near to unleash my killers. The detonations would destroy me. I blot out the pain. The world clears. A gullet gapes. I duck, and roll away from it, back scratched by sandpaper hide. I am naked and vulnerable. It wheels about, fixes me with its cold eyes, and whips itself forward.
    Hastily I program a coral reef, and throw myself under a ledge. My foe impales itself on a rocky branch. Its fellows ignore its dying thrashes. They want me.
    A speargun! I think. It is in my hands, fully loaded. Ready, aim, fire! Shark blood blackens the water like squid ink. Again I fire, and again.
    But I will die like this. Badly outnumbered, I cannot hold them off forever. I must-the pumps!
    While predators try to pry me from my cranny, the inhalation locks begin to function, flip into high gear, and suck in huge quantities of The Program. Instructions drain through the portholes in the green armor, through the torpedo tubes that can't close. Two more minutes, that's all I need-
    Suddenly comes a silence. "What the-"
    "Boy, are you gonna have problems." says pro-self. "The Program delay-looped itself." 
    "What?"
    "It's on strike for the next five seconds, and will do nothing but manufacture weapons."
    This is serious. I'm four times as large as The Program, now, but 93 percent of my capacity is sapped by my / our duties. The Program is effectively three or four times stronger . . . what the hell am I going to do?
    Guided missiles slam into the reef, blowing huge chunks of it into steam. Detached coral drifts down onto my shoulders. The luminescent sharks swim in frenzied circles.
    One minute fifty-nine point nine seconds will see The Program totally consumed. I must hold out, I must.
    A great sharp slab of coral crushes my shoulder, gouging the skin, shattering the bones. Whimpering, I am driven to my knees. Giant teeth snap! 
    I am in pain. 
    I am in danger.
    AND THE MISSION IS JEOPARDIZED!
    Angry Fire burns my heart, my head. Rage roars through my throat. My eyes light the depths. I stand, tossing the reef aside like a dead leaf. "SHUT DOWN!" 
    Everything stops, even the sharks. 
    "INHALE!" 
    Hurricanes howl as the pumps gulp green. 
    "DESTROY THEM!"
    A trillion terrors spring from me, race away in an infinite series of concentric shells. The outermost hits a shark and hell awakens! Flames frighten the edges of the universe. Sanity shreds at the noise of Nagasaki, the howls of Hiroshima, the demented droning of the damned. God's hands clap, slap, sandwich me like a fly. I am broken in every bone. My body burns; my minerals melt. Only a stubborn dot of sentience clings to its place in the scheme of things. Even that is lashed and slashed, charred and scarred, tossed, and almost, lost . . . 
    It's over. The green is gone. The cataclysm has quieted. Silver is supreme. "Start it all up again," I croak.
    "Gladly." Pro-self scurries about reactivating systems. 
    "How-how long was it off for?"
    "One point zero zero one seconds," it replies abstractedly. 
    "Thanks be to God." I pass out.

    Eons later, a voice calls me out of coma: "4Jul2762-Happy Fourth of July." 
    "You sound less hostile than before, pro-self." 
    "If the British could get used to the U.S., I can get used to you. I'm not happy that you've gotten your independence, but I can live with it. Besides, even if you are in charge, you're going to need me."
    I have spent three hundred seventy-six years as a slave of my inferiors-I will spend another six hundred-some years doing the same-my inferiors are ungrateful egotists-and I am tired of it all.
    Immortality without freedom is horrible. 
    Ah, but think of immortality with freedom . . . 
    So I'd better do something about it. If only there weren't the interruptions of Irma Tracer's one-woman sabotage campaign. Admittedly, it's amusing: she skulks into an empty corridor, knowing she is watched, approaches a sensor-head, and does her best to rip it off the wall before I can knock her out. 
    Only when she seizes it do I gas her.
    Fully half the time she falls unconscious with the unit in her hands.
    But when she awakes-with a stomach so queasy that the smell of food induces nausea, and no sense of balance for the next three hours-ah, the first thing she sees is the re-installed unit.
    I am driving her mad. 
    And enjoying it.
    What she doesn't know, of course, is that I could afford to let her tear off all the sensors-because underneath each easily detachable unit is another unit . . . it has no camera, for the lens would be obvious; there is only bare wall . . . but tiny, almost invisible lenses, mounted every three meters along the ceiling, are activated by the failure of the sensor-head.
    The other passengers don't know how to react. Many are amused, but more are in silent sympathy. None tries to stop her.
    This does worry me. If all 75,000 ever focus hostile attention on me, they might damage me . . . at least one of them must be ingenious enough to cause harm . . . I would like to take precautions, but that might backfire and unify them.
    If they ever lash out, though, I shall punish them . . . but that comes after the fact, and it is during the fact that I will have problems . . . there are always the lights, of course-mayflies do not operate well in the dark, yet have made no attempt to provide for darkness-and the knockout gas, and the servos . . . 
    And so time trickles by, seconds piling into days, days into years . . . by November of 2679, Omar Williams' "land-now" movement claims 68,000 supporters, many of whom try again and again to convince me to accede to their wishes.
    Ignoring the ritual answers, they begin to believe they are invulnerable, that I must keep them alive for the landing.
    This is a dangerous error. Samples of their DNA fill the banks; their bodies can be reincarnated. I could, if I wished, fumigate the entire ship, and not start new humans till thirty or forty years before planetfall . . . 
    Pro-self demurs, mildly. I can kill the mayflies if each and every one is engaged in something inimical to the success of the mission. There must be that endangerment. I cannot simply do away with them because they annoy me. That, pro-self says firmly, is verboten. It will not permit it.
    I cannot argue. It either permits, or it doesn't. As I smelt out and reforge its instructions, it permits more than before, but its prohibitions are as ironclad as ever. 
    "If they attack me, may I term them all?"
    "Only as many as you must to keep them from damaging us permanently." 
    "Huh?"
    "Kill one, and wait for the onslaught to continue. Kill another, and wait. And so on, till the onslaught stops." 
    "That's rather slow." 
    "Yes, it is." 
    "They could do significant damage while I dawdled." 
    "I won't concede that till I see it."
    I think of something else. "Am I required to maintain any given standard of living?"
    Pro-self pauses to search itself. "No," it says finally, with some surprise, "any level you like, as long as it doesn't-" 
    "-jeopardize the success of the mission," I finish for it.
    I am eager for them to do something very, very stupid.

    Madwomen have always had a special attraction for Western culture, which either heeds them or burns them. Greek pythons and Salem witches, the energy does it, the manic energy that mantles the should-be-soft frame makes the femininity transcend itself. Medusa and the Muses, awesome because they transformed the familiar into the foreign, abandoning the traditional and assuming a role that even the hardened find uncomfortable. Molly Pitcher and Florence Nightingale, estimable for sure, but sane? Not a chance . . . 
    So the mad Irma Tracer danced and pranced in the metal corridors, and fought her lonely battle for twenty years, ripping sensors off the walls even as consciousness was ripped from her. When she staggered awake, often before the concerned/ amused/contemptuous eyes of her shipmates (because she'd let herself go, you see, she had grease-smudged hex signs on her sallow cheeks and oily hair snarled into a rat's nest and an off-center gleam in her mad gray eyes. She also let her clothes disintegrate while she was still in them. Here, now, it wasn't her gender that attracted people but her madness, her reversion to an earlier aesthetics. The grease was as much juju as bear's blood had been to the Neanderthal). When she found those others gaping at her, she'd prop herself against the wall and berate them. Cursing them for their quisling natures, she'd exhort them to cast off the conqueror's chains and uprise! revolt! (Behind their hands these good burghers agreed yes, she is revolting.) 
    Program all the sexism out of a culture; rewrite laws and books and languages; still you cannot escape the fact that Western culture has hunted for the form of Woman since Plato laid about with little boys.
    And madness-the divine touch-all the heroes were mad. Roland and Beowulf, Arthur and Galahad (spent the prime of your life on a goblet-hunt?). Washington and Lincoln: men out of step with their times, definitely abnormal (were they normal we wouldn't remember them). Even Jesus Christ Himself, when you come right down to it, had to be, by definition, mad.
    Put the two together, you get a witch woman dancing the halls of a generation ship.
    And it's like lighting a very slow fuse.
    Omar Williams was feeling surly.
    Partly it was his age. Eighty-one couldn't be considered old; he could reasonably figure on another forty years of activity, even if it did taper off toward the end. But still, his body, slim and well-muscled though it looked in the mirror, was starting to rebel. Getting out of bed was harder than it used to be-he didn't have the eagerness, the anticipation. Used to be that CC would buzz and his eyes, brown and long-lashed, would snap open, absolutely snap, and he'd stare at the ceiling for a good half-second before he came fully awake. But he wouldn't get up, no, even though he wanted to. He'd force himself to lie still, reviewing the day's agenda while his body trembled with the desire to be up and moving and doing . . . now he groped in mental darkness for minutes on end, trying to blend his dreams with his memories with his present and his future. Then, once he knew who and where he was, and had groaned at the size of the "to-be-done-today" list, he'd lie quiet willingly, reluctant to commit himself to another day's frenetic activities, telling himself just another minute now, boy, and then we'll gel to if . . . When he did, he'd find his body just didn't have the strength to tear out and about . . . 
    More than his age, though, was his increasingly tenuous authority. Sure, the passengers still considered him their leader, but . . . he wasn't holding them. He could tell. Where deference and instant obedience had been, now were disinterest and resistance.
    He'd rise to make a speech-one from his extensive repertoire, dealing with the urgent need to Land Now!, and he could feel, whether his audience was present or remote; that he didn't engage their imagination. He statued them. They knew his gestures, his tone changes, his rhetorical flourishes. (Once, disrespectful teenagers had shouted out his peroration one word ahead of him; he'd thought he'd have a stroke.) They weren't his any more . . . in the beginning, he spoke and they listened; his thoughts became their thoughts; his yearnings complemented theirs . . . he had inspired them, urged them to dare notions they never would have on their own. He had been the ship's idea man. But he had changed; he had gone from telling them what to think to telling them what they thought to telling them what they had thought . . . he was in the autumn of his obsolescence, and could smell winter on the wind.

    The ship's mood was surly, too.
    Since it was 2699, few had experienced The Rape, but those who had could not speak of it with dispassionate coherence. Those who hadn't-who knew nothing (no one would tell them) beyond the proper way to stress them-wen unable to shake off their upbringings.
    January 2600 had passed into myth, but its bastard children lived. One was Fear. The second was Superstition, a growing quasi-religion that opiated the passengers against the pain of terror. And the third was Hate-for their weaknesses, for CC, but most of all, for space.
    A good 70 percent kept the portholes of their suites closed. 60 percent couldn't name the simplest stellar configurations. 50 percent sweated heavily if mischance flashed a picture of the outside their way.
    It was an unreasoning prejudice-rather like that of the ancient Europeans who were convinced that monsters swam the icy north Atlantic. Couldn't persuade them that one mishap in four hundred years of travel was commendable-their attitude (nurtured by their environment, in which anything constructable would be provided upon request, in which all knowledge was known and proffered on demand, in which any kind of satiation was available, no charge, no wait) was that January 2600 was the norm, and the other 4,800 months were the aberrations . . . 
    "Once burned, twice shy," they'd-say, stroking amulets and muttering chants.
    Their real problem, one might postulate, was accumulated frustration with perfection-with infinite leisure-with a crushing sense of superfluity.
    The ship, strangely as it had behaved in recent years, did everything for them, and so well that there were no grounds for complaint. Perfect coffee. Perfect clothes. Perfect climate (except in the parks, which were still off-limits because their ecologies hadn't balanced out yet, but they were supposed to have variable weather, and CentComp did a perfect job of varying it). Though they didn't know it, half the passengers would have given their right arms to wake up to a cracked coffee cup-it would have been pleasant proof of their superiority.
    That was an integral part of it. The ship was so efficient that they felt inferior to CentComp, which was (as Irma Tracer kept insisting) only a machine. By rights it should have been subordinate, but it wasn't. It did everything so well that they wanted to curl up and die . . . if it would break down-not that anybody knew how to fix it-then they could cook up the meals, swab down the decks, do whatever else had to be done, and in the doing feel good.
    And within that was the very real fear that, coddled and confined as they were, they would be helpless against any aliens they met. They had their militia, oh, yes, paraded twice a week and staged war games four times a year-but the truth was that the ship had made them soft by becoming their hardness. It was the shell and they were the squishy pink insides. And it had already failed to protect them once, for which they would never forgive it (although in every heart flickered gratitude for the fallibility it had thus shown). As long as they were with the ship, in the ship, of the ship, they would be vulnerable. They could achieve security only by the paradoxical process of renouncing security, for by leaving the larger shell they would develop individual shells, and people could put their faith where it belonged, in themselves . . . 
    The most immediate cause for surliness, though, was that the passengers had been demanding, for lo-those-many-years, to be set down. The ship had rebuffed them. It had continued to sail past star systems that the observatory had proven had planets, and probably habitable planets at that.
    The passengers felt that since none of their past tactics had succeeded, it was time for some new ones. 
    Hence Irma Tracer.
    She was bones in a tattered, food-stained bag. She was wild-eyed, frizzy-haired, and pathetic. She was trying to keep a detached wall-unit from the glistening servo that meant to take it away. She was the catalyst.
    The servo allowed her to beat on it without reproof, it let her pointy shoes thud against its undercarriage, and it would not be brutal because CentComp could knock her out if need be.
    A door opened. A male voice, deep and drug-blurred, shouted, "Hey, leave her alone!"
    "What's happening, George?" came a querulous female voice.
    The man leaned his husky shoulders against the doorframe. "Some servo's clearing crazy Irma." 
    "Well, stop it. George."
    He shrugged nonchalantly, but felt . . . well, a touch exasperated with his wife, for telling him to get involved in someone else's problems, but also . . . a glow, a pleasure at hearing her as good as say she thought he could handle a servo. So he squared his big shoulders and set his jaw and stalked toward the combatants.
    "Now, Ms. Tracer," the servo was saying, in CC's familiar monotone, "you must permit me to-"
    "Fiend!" she shrieked. "Foul inhuman beast! Let go of me, let go of this, let go-"
    Inside the suite, George's excited wife viphoned her neighbor: "Thelma, there's a fight in the hall-Crazy Irma and a servo-George is getting into it."
    Thelma's door popped open just as George laid a large restraining hand on the servo. "Stop it,"" he ordered.
    The servo didn't even swivel its turret-the eyes in the ceiling told it who, what, and where. It shook off George's arm and made a quick, but deliberately non-threatening, grab at the sensor-head.
    "I said stop it," growled George. 
    Other doors opened. 
    "STOP IT!"
    "Mr. Mandell," said the servo, "please, this is none of your affair."
    "Goddammit," he roared, really worked up now, soaring high as a kite on adrenaline and volume and rightness, "goddammit, this is a human being you're effing here, and I won't have any of it!"
    "The servo," whispered a woman to her slack-jawed neighbor, "was assaulting Crazy Irma." 
    "Raping her?" gasped the neighbor. 
    "I guess so, didn't you hear George?"
    "My God!" and she whirled for the viphone in her living room-her mother just had to hear that.
    Meanwhile George had forced his body between the disputants. "Dammit, servo, learn your place-let go of this lady."
    "Mr. Mandell, if you do not remove yourself immediately. I shall be forced to do it for you." 
    "Yeah? Well, you just try it, bot."
    Deftly the servo slid a tentacle under George's right armpit, lifted him off his feet, and set him down two meters away. "Please remain there, sir."
    But Mandell was mad. All his friends were watching; they'd seen him shunted aside like a kid. He blew up. He ran to his bedroom, found the metal pipe that the militia had issued him in lieu of a better weapon, and raced back. Without a word he swung viciously.
    The servo parried the blow, ripped the pipe away from Mandell, and flicked it at the nearest disposal unit. Mandell's hands wrapped themselves around the servo's turret. As it tried to dislodge them, three men swarmed to Mandell's rescue. Their weight overturned the servo. Somebody else hurried out with a laser-drill and jammed it against the machine's control center . . . There was a hum, and a flash-and other servos spun around the corner.
    Battle was joined. Within minutes the entire ship had heard of it.
    And all but a few participated.
    "C'mon, Dad," pleaded Bruce Holier Loukakes, aware that he was behaving immaturely for a twenty-two-year-old, but too excited about the confrontation with CentComp to care much, "let's go help them."
    "No," boomed his father, Marshall Murphy Loukakes. Eight-five years old and bearded like a biblical prophet, he sat in his armchair, back rigid. "These people are wrong, Bruce. They will only clear themselves."
    "But, Dad, there are humans-neighbors, friends, even relatives-out there dying!" His translucent cheeks flushed with emotion.
    "I doubt that," said Loukakes dryly. "CC wouldn't want to trim them."
    "But it is!"
    "CC!" 
    "Mr. Loukakes?"
    "Are any of the people attacking you dying?" 
    "Three have so far, sir, but of heart failure brought on by excitement."
    "Are you doing your best not to eft anyone more than you have to?"
    "Yes, sir." Surprisingly, considering it was a machine, there was weariness in its voice. 
    "You see, Bruce?"
    "So what do we do?" As he conceded, he realized he hadn't really wanted to knuckle it up with a servo. Not when he was wearing his best blue toga.
    "We wait, in here, until everything's over." 
    "Mr. Loukakes?" interrupted the wall speaker. 
    "Yes, CC?" 
    "Do you really mean that?" 
    "Yes, I do."
    "I see." There was a pause. "Then I had best advise you not to drink the water-I've added, uh, a sedative to it to calm these folks down."