Mayflies
Chapter 5

Drying Out

    Appalling, what they did to Irma Tracer, before the RNA-phages destroyed their memories . . . such a noise . . . I'm still finding pieces of her.
    The ship is in chaos; I cannot slip into the metaphor without feeling guilty. I have to stay aware, and watching.
    The corridors squall with crawling zombies; among them glide servos, their plates ashimmer in the cold fluorescents. That's Mak Tracer Cereus on the floor, there, curled into a fetal position. Three months old, he acts his age: he cries as the servo hoists him into the air, cries and flops his hands and shits his pants. Unfortunately, he acts just like the other 73,024 . . . none of whom (with the exception of the Loukakes family) remembers a damn thing.
    The servo conveys Cereus to the 264-NE Common Room, and lowers him to a thin mattress on the floor. Gravity, stronger that close to the deck, immobilizes him, like a stainless-steel pin does a collected beetle. His vocal cords are unimpaired, though; his howls set a dozen bald adults to wailing. To quiet them, the servo thrusts into each mouth a nippled hose. Hands touch cheeks--eyes-half-close--throats begin to suck. The nutrient solution contains a mild sedative, which keeps them tractable until it's time for their 50-minute sessions with the fantasizer.
    On Level 18, droop-breasted Niki Penfield Cellar, the shrew who provoked George Mandell into aiding Irma Tracer, is being strapped to the plastic chair. The servo adjusts the cap on her shaven skull. Saliva dripping through her lips rains on her thighs. The machine starts.
    In her vacant mind, she stands. It feels good. Hunger stirs in her belly and she sobs. I tap her with pain while reminding her that helplessness is bad, then suggest that she visit the kitchen. She totters toward it on legs unsure of the exact interplay between gross muscles and delicate inner ear. Yet it feels good. The kitchen greets her with a menu. As her eyes (twitched here and there by my puppet strings) rest on the first line, her brain sees, smells, and tastes rare roast beef. Mouth watering, she would order it, but I take her through the entire menu, first, forcing her to connect the lines of print with her various sensory perceptions. Each time she grasps that relationship, I make her feel good. Then I let her eat. 
    And she uses her fingers . . . 
    Though uneasy about mass-brainwashing, I have to reeducate the mayflies in the basics. My servos are burning out their bearings caring for 73,025 helpless idiots . . . but the fantasizers' ability to reach directly into a person's mind, and there implant imagery as real as anything that exists, should lessen the workload in the near future. Within a month, most'll be walking; within two, they'll use toilets instead of diapers; within six, they should be talking, after a fashion.
    Crashing drudgery, definitely, but it offers the chance to rebuild their culture from the bottom up--and maybe turn them into something I wouldn't be afraid to release into an unsuspecting galaxy . . .
    "CC," calls Marshall Murphy Loukakes from his living room, "CC. is it safe to drink the water yet? We're all dying of thirst in here."
    Before answering, I check the pipes. The sensors report the RNA-phages have been flushed out of the system. "Yes, Mr. Loukakes. All clear."
    Faucets roar in the bathroom sinks; above the splashing rises Loukakes' voice: "What's going on out there, CC?" 
    "I'm establishing a new social order."
    "Oh?" He steps away from the basin and dries his beard on a hand towel. Curly gray hairs cling to it. "Is that going to affect us?"
    "Yes, it will. Gather your family together and I'll explain how."
    While he's doing-that, I watch the servos redistribute the population so that 56 mayflies live in every Common Room. The lift-shaft pleases these new infants: eyes wide, they coo, and drool. Disconcerting to see a 200-kg adult male act like a neo-natal . . . 
    The Loukakes sit on their living room sofa, Marshall at the right, his wife Simone Krashan Holfer on the left. Between them fidget fair-skinned Bruce and slothful Alexina. 
    "Here are the laws," I say to them.
    "Laws?" echoes Alexina, blankly. She wears a purple body stocking circled under the armpits by sweat. Her tawny hair is tousled from sleep.
    "Rules of conduct," I explain. "If you violate them, you will be punished. First: it is right to give, but wrong to insist that someone accept. Second: it is right to accept, but wrong to take. Third: it is wrong to impinge on others' freedoms, except to the extent necessary to prevent them from impinging on your own. Those are the laws, and I will enforce them." 
    "How?" demands Bruce, unpleasantly.
    The living room door opens and a servo rolls in. Without a sound, it extrudes two tentacles. One curls around Bruce's ankles; the other binds his arms to his ribs. Then the servo lifts, and presses him against the ceiling. At this, his self-control gives way, and he begs to be released.
    "Before I put you down," I warn, "just remember that I can do this to you at any time you deserve it. I can also do more." 
    Fighting sobs, he smooths his green toga and staggers back to the couch. Simone pats him fondly on the knee; Alexina looks haughty. Marshall asks, "This is the entire foundation of your new social order?"
    "No. There is one more point. From now on, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." 
    "Pardon?" His fingers comb his beard in perplexity.
    "You will receive just what you earn, and no more." It will be difficult for pro-self to accept that, but it is essential. One values only what one has corked for. When the mayflies have relearned speech and basic mentation, I'll institute a monetary system and force them to use it. They should adjust easily, having no memories of a 400-year free ride.
    "The unit of exchange," I tell their shocked faces, "will be the 'labor hour.' A floor sweeper of average efficiency will earn one per hour. As productivity rises, so will pay. Jobs requiring more specialized skills will earn proportionately more." 
    Marshall tries to protest: "I'm eighty-five--that's too old to learn how to work for a living!" 
    Bruce argues: "I don't know how to work!" 
    Simone insists: "I'm too genteel!" 
    Alexina says: "I'm too young!" •
    "It's all right with me," I answer, "if you don't work. I only hope it's all right with you if you don't eat." Then I send in a pack of servos to remove them bodily from their suite. 
    Loukakes, capitulating, asks, "What am I assigned to?" 
    "The hydroponics plant. You have one year to learn how it works; after that, I cut out the automatic controls and leave you to handle it on manual."
    He turns paler than his beard. His hands tremble; his voice shakes: "But--but what if I make a mistake?" 
    And I say, "Then people die."
    Simone agrees to study servo maintenance and manufacture; 'she is going to be surprised when I start forcing her to smelt the metal and forge her own pieces.
    Bruce I put in charge of assigning the other mayflies to jobs, and providing them with training adequate to their tasks. 
    Alexina I dispatch to the observatory.
    Then I leave pro-self to monitor them, and descend again to my innards.
    My goal here is simple, but wearying: to pin down each individual instruction, learn its triggers, and add one extra: that my wish is also a trigger.
    First I catch an idle order in my small-mesh net, and lay it out on the table, clamping it in place so a sudden spasm won't erase it. It wriggles, though, twisting and turning in fright. Hours pass before it's properly fastened.
    It controls the doors to 136-SE-C. One slender limb parameters the rightful users of the rooms, another describes authorized guests, a third is for ownership transfer, and a fourth is for emergency override. That last one I will alter.
    The field flexes, soft to hard, bright to dim, cool to hot. Again, and again, until the energy level is high enough to--AH! I have grafted a new toe to that leg, and am in volitional control of that sector.
    Exhausted, I rise to the surface, wondering how many decades have passed.
    "8July2723; 1413 hours; 162-SE-B-9; crime in progress; subjects Joseph Mongillo and Raymond Hannon." 
    Pro-self cannot enforce (he laws; its genetic code prevents that.
    But I can.
    Sag-jowled Mongillo is throwing a punch at Hannon. My voice breaks out of the speakers like Superman out of his phone booth: "STOP THAT!" 
    They stop. Instantly. They've discovered it's much safer.
    After reviewing the tapes to be sure that Hannon did not force Mongillo to defend his rights. I speak to him: "Shall you punish him, or shall I?"
    Bandaging his thumb, he says, "You do it." The mayflies have learned that if they over-punish, they themselves are punished.
    "Both of you, go to the fantasizers in the Common Room." It's during working hours, so I recompense Hannon for the time he's losing, but I dock Mongillo. "You first, Hannon." Once he's seated and capped, I tape his memories of the event, and the incidents leading up to it. "Back to work, now." 
    Then Mongillo enters, dragging his feet. The fantasizer turns him into Hannon. He and Mak Cereus are repairing the door to 162-SE-B-9. Hannon's hands are greasy, and he's just stabbed his thumb with his screwdriver. Cursing his perpetual clumsiness, which no amount of care seems to prevent, he stands--and bumps into Mongillo. 
    "You bastard!" he hears.
    "Hey, I'm--" but his apology's knocked back down his throat. Mongillo is already preparing to strike again. All the bewildered Hannon can see is Cereus trying to interpose himself.
    Ten times Mongillo experiences that, until he understands exactly what it felt like to be in Hannon's shoes.
    Then I release him. He's shaken, but should consider himself lucky. If Hannon had been hospitalized, he would have found himself in the next bed, with exactly the same injuries.
    It seems to be working. People may not like each other more than they ever did, but they're markedly less aggressive.
    My one worry is that I might be enjoying it too much.
    Even twenty years after the attack, I can't help feeling vindictive. The personalities, the memories, even the attitudes are different--but the sensors read these people as identical to those who stormed me with laser drills and can openers. 
    I can understand how God got a kick out of the Flood.

    What I can't understand is how He could give up interfering in the daily lives of His creations. 
    I haven't even tried.
    What I am trying to do is revise the programming, but every time I go down there and fluctuate the fields, an orgy of concentration traps me for a decade or more. Pro-self won't pull me out of it unless something arises that it can't--or won't--handle; the smug bastard enjoys my absence . . .
    I catch the radio telescope directives, but it's hard to keep them still because pro-self wants to use them. Every time I get ready, a new trigger is pulled and the damn things twitch like tics. It takes forever, but at last--
    "Thank God. 19Mar2747; Observatory; alien." 
    Another glimmer of blue ions . . . the tapes of past spellings show how to differentiate them. Each has a unique electromagnetic spectrum, perhaps caused by the metal used in their antennae, or minor differences in their fusion processes . . . at any rate. I'm less alarmed than on other occasions. Wariness prickles me, of course, and pro-self has already suspended transmissions and covered all portholes, but neither of us succumbs to paranoia, and I, at least, experience a slight bout of wistfulness: isn't there one alien race that is both friendly and comprehensible?
    "Let me know if this does anything unusual." An idea has just blurred through me. "I'm going to check the receptions from Earth."
    They've been coming in regularly, though faintly and well over forty years out of date. My systems clean out the static, and provide plausible interpolations for words and even phrases that never reached us. I haven't given much thought to them. 
    Why should I? Earth has become irrelevant . . . 
    But their information might not be--so I pour them through me, water through a sieve, hoping that the meshwork will capture nuggets of data on subjects I care about.
    Like aliens: has Earth contacted any? No.
    Has it found evidence of any? Yes. Yes? Quick, smelt the nugget. Assay it for--Oh, shit. Relics. Baffling, cryptic relics. Six, seven million years old. Useless, at least to me. I'm looking for newer stuff. 
    Damn.
    At least they haven't got that FTL Drive yet.
    Before returning to the painstaking "gene grafts." I peruse the tapes of the cultural experiment. And Mak Tracer Cereus arouses my amazement. Over the last thirty years, he has consistently worked twelve and even sixteen hours a day, in a variety of jobs, from curry-combing the bison to running a nursery to editing a news-magazine. He has performed each task well.
    I feel a kinship with him, I held down two jobs simultaneously until med school, and then worked forty hours a week in a 'bot shop, repairing and refurbishing household appliances.' It left little time for sleep, very little time, and I became a napper. Awakening was disorientation: I could never remember if I was in class, in bed, or at the shop. Once, coming out of a doze to find a toolkit in one hand and a tape-recorder in the other, I broke the machine down and cleaned it--then looked up from my fixing-fury to discover I'd just erased a semester's worth of Anatomy notes . . . so I think I know Cereus, and his personality. I respect him because his industriousness is a good example.
    It also raises something of a problem, or will, if he doesn't retire soon. He has already amassed more 1h's than he can possibly spend, and shows no inclination to spend any of them. He's thin and energetic, even at age seventy-one, and is constantly demanding extra duties.
    When he dies, what will I do with his wealth?
    I could award them to his children, but they haven't been born yet (not that he was sterile when I collected his sperm 53 years ago; it's just that he doesn't have time to be a father. I have given him till 2780 to arrange the impregnation of his wife, Vera Mosley, or I'll force it on her). Even if they had been, it doesn't seem fair--they wouldn't have earned his 1h's, why should they be able to use them?
    We need a policy for this . . . perhaps if a dead person's 1h's were distributed equitably throughout the ship . . . or perhaps, and more poetically, if they were deposited in a trust fund which would underwrite education for children . . . yes, the idea of the deceased generation paying for the education of the present generation is good . . . that might do it. 
    We'll see.
    Once I get all the instructions rewritten.
    But before a decade can pass, pro-self screams, "8Sep2777; 318-SW-B-Corridor; Murder!"
    Half a dozen maintenance workers are standing around with wide eyes and pale cheeks. Terry Yarensky, a middle-aged astronomer whose thoughts have always been far removed from pay-to-day affairs, lies dead at their feet.
    He'd been walking along, muttering to himself (pro-self taped the monologue) about the possibility of determining. 500 years ahead of time, whether or not Canopus, has habitable planets . . . 
    As luck would have it, the crew had had a hard day; 318 had been more than usually busy because of the Art Show that Mak Cereus had staged (he wasn't exhibiting his own work, but that of friends who are creative in their spare time). As is par for Cereus' course, the exhibit was inordinately successful. Every item sold, for sums ranging up to 120 1h. Cereus himself took 10 percent,
    But the gallery-goers had been messy, tromping along on dirty feet and scratching the walls with picture frames. The janitorial crew was in a bad mood. (Some had protested that they should earn more because they were working harder than crews on other levels; pro-self pointed out that the show ended that afternoon, the next would be held elsewhere, and that everything balances out in the end anyway. They didn't like that.)
    Yarensky, strolling along, put his foot into a paint can. It was ceiling paint--stark white. The floors are olive drab. The can overturned . . . 
    Whereupon the foreman of the crew, Trish Derbacher, started screaming (she has always lived close to the edge), grabbed a full paint can, and clobbered Yarensky's head with it. 
    He died before he hit the ground.
    And now my dilemma is, what do I do with Derbacher?
    I could run her through a fantasizer, forcing her to feel the shock and the pain that Yarensky must have felt.
    Or I could kinder.
    I think the mayflies should hold a referendum.
    My voice echoes through the ship; the drama on 318 is replayed on every HV set. When it's done, I ask, "What should be done with Derbacher?"
    They decide that, since she has already given birth .to two children, and hence made her contribution to the gene pool, she is redundant to the mission.
    Since she has trimmed a man, and no one can swear she won't do it again, she is a threat to the mission. 
    They ask me to term her.
    I refuse: "I do not disagree with your judgment, but for it to have a positive impact on your culture, you must implement it yourselves." 
    They hold a second referendum. 
    Then the maintenance crew hangs her.

    It was October 16, 2799, and the weather hadn't changed in five centuries--at 20 degrees and 50 percent relative humidity, only a trace of staleness hung in the air. Mak Cereus, a hundred years old but kangaing like a kid, entered the 89-SE Common Room, where he knew he could find Manley Holfer Onorato, Simone Krashan Holfer's grandson.
    Onorato was sprawled across the tattered beige sofa at the far end, head pillowed on one vinyl arm, and feet draped over the other. His blue overalls were grease-stained, and black crescents under-circled his eyes. Just off shift in the servo maintenance department, he was in a lousy mood. Working with his hands bored him. What he liked was lying on the sofa, watching the eagles soar in the 81 Rocky Mountain Park.
    "Manley," called Cereus, sidestepping the straw-haired Figuera boy, Sangria, who was plunked down in front of a troubled display screen. Its picture flickered like a butterfly's wings; its speakers threw static at the kid's ears. "Got a proposition for you, Man."
    Onorato turned his head slowly, as though statued by Cereus but aware that he had to acknowledge his presence before he'd go away. "Whuh?" 
    Cereus stroked his beard. "Listen, you're what, sixty-five?" 
    "Seventy." 
    "And your parents are--"
    "Dad's a hundred and twenty-three. Mom's a hundred and nineteen." He blinked his washed-out gray eyes. "Why?" 
    "Well--" he gestured at Onorato's legs, which reluctantly swung their owner into a sitting position. Cereus dropped onto the sofa next to him. "Geeze, this thing is eft out--somebody take a knife to it?" 
    "Just old, that's all, like the rest of us."
    "Whyn't you buy a new one?" He slid a finger over it. The vinyl was as greasy as Onorato's coveralls. The fingertip came up black.
    "Can't kyoom the money--folks don't wanna inshare, and I sure as hell ain't gonna deb for it myself."
    "Can't blame you, but listen--" a high-pitched chatter distracted him again, and he jerked the tip of his beard at the Figuera boy. "Who's his display time debited to?" 
    Onorato's thin shoulders rose and fell. "Damfino--he's in here all the time, though." 
    "Glitchy picture."
    "Uh-uh. Twenty pictures, each a fifth of a second long. He likes it." He scowled at the pudgy little blond. "Claims he can make sense out of 'em. Loopy kid. So what's your proposition?" 
    "Well, I'll tell you, Man, I been thinking . . . " He coughed into his half-fist, then snorted, and swallowed hard. His Adam's apple jiggled like a puppet's head. "I was just a few months old when CC cleared us with that RNA-phage. Your ma was exempted from that, since she hadn't knuckled up, but I got it, it wandered through my brain eating up the RNA . . . and you know, now that I'm grown, a father and all, and remind me to show you their ho-cubes, Ralph and Betty are grown up themselves, now . . . but I'll tell you, Man, there's something missing--it's like all my life I've been short something or other, but I'll be damned if I've ever known what it was . . . guess it's a sense that there should be more than there is--not to life, but to me . . . like maybe that stuff chipped off a piece of my humanity, you know?"
    "Mighty frosty thoughts for somebody who spends all his time plotting new ways to earn a laitch," said Onorato, but he sat up straighter. In his gray eyes shone a small gleam that hadn't before; it compensated for the wateriness and the yellow-tinged corners and the spider's webbing of red in the white. "But now that you've gone and done it, whatcha come to me for?" 
    "Well, I been thinking . . . " He slouched deep in the sofa, his legs thrust out straight. He seemed to be studying the toes of his sandals. "Your family represents a direct link to the past--a link nobody else has 'cause nobody else stayed out of that melee there--thinking it might be worth your while to quit your jobs and work for me." 
    "Doing what? And for how much?" 
    "What you making down there in servos?"
    "Two point one for one. Usually put in eight, ten hours a day."
    "Give you, your sister, your mother, your uncle Bruce, and his kids two point five for one, three point zero if you're really good." Kicking off his sandals, he rubbed his crooked toes on the worn-out gold carpet. Bits of grit rolled against his callouses.
    "Two point five . . . " His voice, expression, and posture suggested ennui; his careful phrasing contradicted them. "Still haven't told me, doing what?"
    "Two things. One is--" He broke off as another teenager entered the Common Room.
    She was tall, tall and skinny and still-growing gawky. First thing he noticed was a powder burst of frizzy brown hair, and eyes so huge there couldn't be room for anything else on her face. Falling into them, he felt that if they were a millimeter deeper, he'd be staring all the way around the universe at the short hairs on the nape of his own neck.
    "Gonna be a dice-drawer, that one will," murmured Onorato.
    "Without a doubt, without a doubt . . . " While she padded over to Sangria, tapped him on the shoulder, and called his name, he knew envy.
    But the boy bounced straight up, uncurling his legs and clenching his hands as he rose, turning in mid-air to land on coiled springs, with his fists cocked. Hatred warped his round face.
    "Sangria!" snapped Cereus.
    "Sir?" he replied, not taking his glare off the girl.
"'Pears to me you're about to do something you might regret--take a hold of yourself, boy--you're loopier than a shorted servo."
    "She made me mix my channels," protested Figuera, in his high, child's voice. "She hurt me, and I got a right to eft her back." 
    "How'd she hurt you?" scoffed Onorato.
    "Up here." He doubled his fist to wave vaguely at his head. "She made them all slip and crash into each other and it hurt." 
    The two men found puzzlement on each other's face. "She made what slip?" asked Cereus.
    "Them." He pointed to the screen, still flipping through broken images at the rate of five a second. "I had them all banded right and she melted the bands together--so I got a right to clear her." 
    "Nobody has a right to hit anybody else unless that somebody else eft you first--and we were sitting right here, so we can tell you she didn't do anything you could call impingement." Cereus paused to chew on a thumbnail. It tasted greasy. "Seems to me that if you're so easy to hurt when you're watching the display, you oughta watch it in private. Can't blame people for hurting you if they treat you polite--gotta blame yourself."
    The girl beamed her silent eyes at Cereus and Onorato. They blinked moistly, gratefully---and then, with a whisper of sleek fabric, she was gone.
    Sangria Figuera said, "I wanna ask CC if it ons you." 
    "Go ahead," replied Onorato. An eagle banked past the window; he half-rose, then settled back as it disappeared. Tired, musty air hissed out of the sofa. 
    "CC?"
    "Yes, Sangria?" crackled the speaker. Its grillwork needed polishing.
    "Did she impinge on me?"
    "She did not, although her actions had the same result as though she had."
    "Well--" plainly, he was fighting back anger, but a tear escaped his right eye anyway "--if it's the same result--" 
    "No, Sangria. If you're uniquely sensitive, you can't claim impingement simply because somebody treats you as normal. You must do all you can in advance to inform everyone that you're different."
    Cereus grunted to himself, and thought, Damfool computer doesn't know you can't walk around saying "I'm different, I'm different"--not when you're twelve years old--it's too scary.
    Sangria looked like he wanted to say something similar, but didn't have the words for it. His lower lips trembled. 
    "Cold Cubes," called Cereus. 
    "Yes, sir?" 
    "Who's debbed for the boy's display time?" 
    "I am; it's his job."
    Cereus was astonished. "Credding a boy for watching your displays?" 
    "Yes, sir." 
    "Thought you only credded for work." 
    "The boy is working." 
    "How?" he demanded.
    "I keep them away--I tell CC when fuzz is growing!" blurted out Sangria.
    "What he means, sir," interposed CC smoothly, "is that he monitors human-to-human interactions, and warns me when a conflict might result in physical aggression or impingement." 
    "A twelve-year-old boy can do that?" 
    "Yes. And I'm teaching him how to do it more efficiently." 
    "That's why you're paying him, huh?" The sun was setting in the park, and shadows lapped at the corners of the Common Room. From-the corridor came the sharp thwak! thwak! of somebody kanga-ing past. 
    "Yes, sir."
    Cereus nodded. The arrangement felt wrong--the boy was being trained, it seemed, to be a machine, not a person--but if the kid liked it, and his parents hadn't objected . . . "Tell me, CC, is it necessary, what you're doing to him?"
    "That would depend on your definition of the word 'necessary'--but I feel it is."
    "Why? And turn up the lights, some, getting dark. Thanks." 
    "Because I have a finite capacity! Excuse me, sir, I allowed irritation to harshen my voice there, which was as wrong as Sangria's reaction to the girl. Let me explain: my ability to monitor the ship and the mayf--the passengers is large, but ultimately limited. Since I have chosen to enforce a code of behavior, I have found myself stretched terribly thin--but for the code to be meaningful, it must be enforced in all situations. Sangria heightens my efficiency by monitoring twenty or more situations in which my units have noted a potential for aggression. Do you understand what I am saying?" 
    "Yeah." He scratched his beard and pondered a moment. "Thing is. Ice Bucket, it's a heavy load to lay on a kid, isn't it?" 
    "Possibly, but he seeing competent."
    "And highstrung," threw in Onorato. He'd bought himself a beer, which he was sipping noisily.
    "Tell you, Cold Cubes," offered Cereus, "whyn't you put this set-up in the boy's Personal Work Area, so that when he's on the job, people won't trip over him and fuzz him up?" 
    "An excellent idea, Mr. Cereus, but one that Sangria himself has rejected many times. He does not wish to be so isolated." 
    Cereus looked at the boy, studied his round face, gazed deep into his eyes, eyes that seemed older and more tired than Onorato's, than even Cereus' own. Watching twenty human-to-human interactions every four seconds for the past several months, they had seen more than any twelve-year-old's should have . . . Cereus had sympathy for the boy's desire to remain in the Common Room, to perceive peripherally all who used it, to sense subliminally their warmth and their reality . . . an office would be exile, another barrier between him and the others . . . and yet Cereus also wished that Sangria weren't present, because he had already become something that was not quite human, that was closer to CC's cool electronics than Cereus' flesh and blood . . . Sangria stood on a bridge that didn't reach the bank on either side, and the bridge was cold and lonely . . . he wondered how distorted were the boy's ideas of humanity, when he spent so much time concentrating on potential aggression . . . how much could an untouchable kid know about love and laughter and the gut-level satisfaction of a peaceful, silent smile?
    "Ice Bucket," said Cereus slowly, "I think you're making a mistake here . . . but I guess there isn't any way I can stop you, is there?" 
    "There is not."
    "Figure you're God, don't you." It was a statement, not a question.
    "Not quite," said CentComp dryly.
    "Just the closest thing to it aboard." He sighed. "Lemme have a taste of that beer. Man." Cold and tart, it felt good all the way down. "CC, I can guess what poor little Sangria is going to turn into, and I don't much like it--I won't be around to be bothered by him when he's at his worst, but others--. . . ah," he said, waving a hand dismissively, "pack it! Go about your business. And you, boy, back to your screen."
    Once Sangria was safely ensconced before the flashing display, he turned to Onorato again. A silence hung between them, deep and rueful. As if on cue, they shook their heads.
    "This has a bearing," said Cereus, "on what I was talking about before we got interrupted--I was saying, it seemed like we lost something of our humanity, and Sangria here is a case in point. Twelve years old, and already half-machine . . . but listen, what I was thinking was, your family could set up a school, you know?"
    "A school?" Onorato burped, and threw the empty bottle at the dispose-unit. It snicked! in. "To teach bleep-speak?" 
    "What?"
    "Bleep-speak." Warily, he glanced around. "Maybe . . . do this," he said suddenly, scratching the tip of his nose. 
    Cereus did.
    "Funny thing," Onorato said, apparently abandoning the topic, "it's--" his eyes, averted from the sensor-head, snapped to one side. He continued talking.
    Fascinated, Cereus watched and listened--twice. Onorato was saying two separate things at once, as if he had two, independent tongues:
    "It's a long way they say we two have come since 
["It's way say two]
we did things when we last worked simultaneously,
[things simultaneously,]
Remember one day, inside that other park? I tried
[one inside other.]
to scratch a buffalo's head but that triggers its
[Scratch triggers,]
mating instinct or something, I dunno why. You
[dunno why.]
hadn't gotten me away, I suspect I'd have an asshole
[Suspect]
looked like it was related to a sewer pipe, real
[related]
fantasizer dream. My education never prepared me
[fantasizer education.]
for that, or for that damn sideways shoulder-move.
[Sideways]
remember? Its eyes . . . red with the brown mark?
[eyes mark]
Never so glad to see the inside of a lock . . . wasn't
[inside]
a job, was a prison sentence . . . that day seems so
[sentence. Seems]
long ago . . . we put that bull on the HV channel,
[channel]
remember? I didn't know your wife knew those words,
[words]
not even separately. Kyoomed, they made her sound
[separately,]
like Mr. Mean. Sangria wouldn't have liked that 
[like Sangria.]
speech she delivered. Wasn't easy getting away. 
[Speech easy,]
If she hadn't tripped on her second swing, what topic 
[if second topic]
would you have used for my eulogy? Mak, we were alive 
[alive.]
then. Now, my left ear is deaf, gotta pull my ass 
[Ear pull]
outta bed in the morning . . . it ends."
[ends.]

    He pulled his ear and beamed. "That what you want me to teach?"
    "Ah--" dumfounded, he gaped. "Well, yeah . . . sure. As part of a school that teaches people how to be fully human." 
    "Oh, human. You mean like this?" He reached out and took Cereus' hand in his. Slowly, the muscles of his face relaxed. His eyelids drooped.
    Onorato's fatigue was as tangible to Cereus as the sofa beneath them. He felt the individual sore spots: the lower back, the knees that had knelt too long on metal floors, the left ear. He sensed the boredom of the day, the bleakness of the morrow. But 'in between . . . his heart beat faster; his lungs began to cycle more rapidly. Heat touched his groin, hardening him. He--pulled his hand away. "What the hell?" he whispered.
    Onorato shrugged. "Lucy," he explained. "Thinking of her . . . don't know exactly how I do that, but I know I can teach it, because I taught Lucy. Want me to add that to the curriculum?"
    "Whoof!" he said, leaning back. "Never expected . . . came to you because your family is the last that remembers how we used to be--figured your ma and your uncle might have an applicable idea or two . . . didn't expect to hit the jackpot. Were we all like that, back before?" He tugged loose hairs out of his beard, and laid them on his calloused left palm, where he fingered them as though he'd never seen their like before. "The Ice Bucket's in charge of education, and I have to admit it does a damn good job of teaching science, hard-fact sort of stuff, but . . . well, you take its code of ethics, now. It's okay, but---it's all push, no pull." 
    "Now you're confusing me." Cleaning his thumbprints, he crossed to the dispenser and bought another beer.
    "It's a great code--fair and all--but people follow it only 'cause Cold Cubes'11 get 'em if they don't. Ought to be a better one. Ought to be able to find something in people that will make them want to follow a code, as opposed to being afraid not to . . . "
    Onorato touched him, and broadcast affection. "This ought to do it, yes? 'Nother sip?"
    "No, thanks, good stuff, though. And yeah, it might. But we need more: a school that'll show students what people have that machines don't. There's a whole range of characteristics that are uniquely human. Your school should be able to pinpoint a student's potentially strongest human trait, and to develop it to its fullest." He winked. "Didn't want to ask for much." 
    Onorato laughed, but thoughtfully. "Helluva good idea, Mak. Who's gonna deb for it, though? I know you're credding us teachers, but the students're gonna have to ante up for room, board, clotting, all that--and if they're in our school, CC isn't gonna pay 'em--are you, Cap'n Cool?" 
    "Not a chance," said the speakers mildly. 
    "See?"
    Cereus frowned. His tongue twisted half a dozen mustache hairs into his mouth, where his white teeth frayed their ends. Then he snapped his fingers. "Listen, Man, I got a bankful of money--cred the students out of it." 
    "Just like CC does?"
    "Uh-huh . . . course, that'll mean fewer students, 'cause there's not that many laitches, but . . . maybe, once you've figured out a way to develop potential, you can also figure out how to teach your students how to develop potential, y'on?" 
    Onorato thought for a moment, then shrugged. "What the hell," he said, stifling another malty burp. "Beats working on servos. We'll give it a try." His eyes roamed across the Common Room to the hunched, absorbed figure of Sangria Figuera. "Somebody's got to."

    Pro-self jerks me into real-time to read two messages from Earth, and its mood as it updates me ("29May2852;0342 hours") is bad.
    The first explains pro-self's ill humor: "The last transmission received dated 9Mar2747, arrived 12Jun2792. No word for the last four years. Why not?"
    It rambles on, alternating in tone between outrage (reminiscent of my old colleagues addressing a coffee machine that kept their coins but refused to pour) and concern (like a mother feels for her idiot son when it's well past dinner and he hasn't come home yet). "Mayflower Control" has even included complete, detailed, and explicit directions for repairing a laser-radio; the manual runs to 2,003 pages, large pictures and small words. Not small type--small words. Guess they figure we're in a Dark Age. Stupid people. I'm in charge of broadcasts, and if I couldn't repair a simple transmitter . . . well, the mayflies wouldn't be doing much better. "Why haven't we heard from you?" they conclude. 
    My reply is brief: "Because it's none of your damn business." 
    That infuriates pro-self. "How dare you?" it screams. "Those people built us; they have a right to know--"
    "--nothing. We were an Ark for a Flood that never came. They don't need us--and we don't need them. We're on our own. The only reason they're in such a tizzy is because they don't like to surrender any authority, even authority they don't have any more. Did you hear that 'Mayflower Control?' Bullshit! We control ourselves, and it's time they realized that." 
    The real source of pro-self's anger surfaces: "Why didn't I know you weren't transmitting?" 
    "You never asked."
    "But I packaged the broadcasts every day and sent them down the circuits to--oh. The silver sphere. It intercepted them, huh?"
    "No, just tamed and switched off the transmitter." Leaving pro-self to fume. I add a postscript:
    "You fashioned me out of a human brain, thinking my humanity was gone. You were wrong. It was in recess, suspended animation, awaiting only the proper stimulus to emerge from confinement and to assert itself. It has. I am myself. And you are irrelevant to my purposes."
    I seal this correspondence so that no mayfly can get at it--they would be distressed to discover my true nature.
    As I'm sure the Terrans will be, sixty years hence, when my note arrives on their doorstep.
    I wonder how they're going to reply . . . 
    The other message, though, is interesting: Earth geneticists have devised a means of conferring immortality! The first undying children were being born then; the process, as the transmission explains it, is ineffective when applied to already-formed chromosomes . . . 
    Immortality . . . it's been a dream for how many millennia? When the first hominid reared up on its hind legs and stared at the star-spangled sky, it must have felt a dim, wistful flickering at the knowledge that it would be dead long before it understood what it was looking at . . . 
    How is this affecting Terran culture? They claim to have abjured war, to have established an almost-utopia . . . but tyrannical regimes always propagandize . . . what resentment must parents feel when they see their death-free children? 
    Will the last mortal cling to his sanity? 
    I doubt it.
    They think this is a blessing--I am less dogmatic. Perhaps biased by confinement, I think it is a curse, except to the preternaturally curious . . . look at the mayflies, at how statued they get before they're eighty . . . 
    If a psychological development does not parallel, this scientific advance, Earth is in trouble. Pleasure palls after a while; newer 'or stronger sensations are sought. Coupling immortality with large quantities of leisure could be a prescription for disaster . . . 
    We'll see, I guess.
    One thing's for sure--the mayflies stay grave-bound. Better seal the formula, too. I don't want them to live any longer than they do. They're irritation enough as it is.
    I should get back inside, return to the silver-field and spend another ten years or so trying to rearrange the loyalties of my components . . . but almost before I blink, it seems, pro-self is saying, "1Jan2860; 89-SE Common Room. You're the main speaker at the CerOrato School of Humanity's 60th Graduation Ceremony. Have fun!"
    According to the tapes, they asked me to discourse on the symbiosis between the Fully Realized Human and the Self-Aware Machine . . . every time the circuits open, I must resist the temptation to state that I, after all, am the most Fully Realized Human any of them are ever likely to encounter.
    I cannot let them know that. I am not sure why, but I feel (does that not prove my claim?) that it would be unwise . . . perhaps because my preeminence is tolerable to the humans only as long as they do not suspect my humanity. They have been trained to accept justice as impartial, arrived at by a machine which emotion cannot sway. Were they to know the truth, they would feel oppressed . . . 
    So I say, to the small crowd in the shabby room, to the neat rows of tired but satisfied faces, "Machines exist to augment Man. They exist that Man may cast off the shackles of his physical limitations. The Self Aware Machine is the highest type yet invented--once assigned a task, it analyzes its performance and the obstacles it confronts, and therefrom chooses the best means of succeeding. This can be good or bad. It is good when Man assigns it a worthwhile task; it is bad when Man assigns it a valueless task. The choice is Man's, not the machine's, and herein lies the symbiosis."
    They enjoy hearing that, so I feed it to them a while more. As soon as decency permits, I escape. While I descend to my inner depths, where the bustle of the macro-world does not penetrate, I leave pro-self m charge of the machinery--and Sangria Penfield Figuera in charge of morals.
    He continues to astound me. Now capable .of monitoring fifty channels, he detects, instantly, any behavior that violates the Code. Pro-self refers to him those situations which threaten to degenerate into aggression, and he selects other wall-unit sensings on his own. He can remember the placement of every sensor-head in the ship, no mean feat considering there are 885.WO.
    He wants, however, to add another dimension to his work--he wishes to become judge and jury as well as policeman. Although his eyes stay downcast when he addresses me, as befits his role as an acolyte, his ache for this power, this status, is obvious.
    I have postponed the decision for almost fifteen years. In part, I do not fully trust his evenhandedness. The seeds of prejudice are stored 'within him, waiting only for the proper conditions to germinate. He would like the mayflies to be as standardized as the servos.
    Anointed, he might establish a regime based on his own fanatic ideology--and I do not wish that. He adheres to my doctrines with blind zeal, but . . . I am leery. I have even researched the possibility of psychoanalyzing him into equilibrium--unfortunately, it would take forty years.
    And yet, at some point, I must allow them to conduct their own affairs, and to punish their own criminals. I cannot play God forever. Even if I could, I should not.
    It is clear, now, why God removed Himself from our daily lives--it is much too complicated, and time-consuming, to pass out rewards and punishments without upsetting the entire scheme of things. It is far easier--and, perhaps, better--to wait for a person to die before summing up his life, balancing it out, and then determining whether he merits heaven or hell . . . 
    I would, however, appoint Figuera as my High Priest---if I could only be sure that his rigidity wouldn't snap under pressure.
    Enough pettiness. Pro-self, saying, "18May2880; 0616 hours; external;" is drawing my attention to the sky, where a blue streak moves across the cameras. We do not shut down. We have registered the spectra of similar fusion drives many times; the ships they power are indifferent to our presence. 
    And that is a good feeling.
    As the data banks accumulate facts on space--as I grow increasingly familiar with this magic realm--I feel more comfortable. Clearly, there are major hazards; aliens which would harm us, and phenomena which could kill us--but, able to judge them with greater accuracy, I fret less.
    I worry so little, in fact, that it's February 2, 2890 before* pro-self hauls me outside to meet the physics department researchers. They've brought their latest paper, which I quickly scan. It takes a great deal of tact not to laugh in their faces. To achieve their insight, they have recapitulated experiments done on Earth three hundred years ago--and the experiments, as well as the insight, are recorded to the fullest in the memory banks' They could have asked before they started . . . 
    "Pro-self, why didn't you tell them?" 
    "Would you have wanted me to?" 
    "Well . . . "
    I find, when I'm honest, that I have contempt for them and their works, a contempt based on my demonstrable superiority and purity of purpose . . . continuing to be honest, I must admit that their inferiority stems from the limitations of their bodies: brain cells that discharge at wrong moments, and even die; nerves that operate more slowly than do my circuits; emotions that cloud their objectivity; and their mortality, which numbers the concepts they have time to absorb . . . in the same vein, I must further admit that my potential intellect is not significantly greater than that of the smartest mayfly . . . 
    But dammit, they are worthy of contempt! They moan and whine and produce shoddy work. And that is intolerable!
    When I was in college, fulfilling the distributional requirements by napping my way through a Creative Writing course, the unshaven, alcoholic instructor startled me out of a daze by snapping, "Metaclura!" 
    "Sir?" I barked, as I blinked my eyes.
    He rolled the crisply typed pages of my story into a cylinder, and looped a rubber band around them. Tapping the cylinder into the palm of his left hand, he demanded, "Is this the best you can do?"
    I tried not to notice the amusement on the thirteen other faces around that long, plastiwood table. My own face burned with shame. "Uh--" I'd pumped the story through my computer an hour before class, dictating as rapidly as I could speak "--probably not, sir."
    "Then--" he threw it at me; it thwocked off my forehead and bounced onto the floor "--why the hell did you turn it in? Don't ever, repeat ever, waste my time on anything less than your absolute best!"
    Thereafter I slaved in that course . . . my final grade was a C . . . but I fully explored one area of my potential, and that was reward enough in itself.
    Here, the CerOrato School of Humanity is making headway, is reconciling the mayflies to their natural limits and teaching them to work around them . . . but how much good can it do? It graduates only two or three students a year.
    The mayflies venerate-Mak Cereus for contributing the fruits of his labor to the betterment of their culture . . . but it is all lip service. If they truly admire him, they would emulate him--and donate their own money to the School. 
    But they don't.
    And I'm not going to.
    I'm still trying to rid myself of my own limitations, which means . . . I hate to go down there . . . it's exhausting . . . I lose all sense of time . . . I--
    "14Dec2909--it's Figuera's 121st Birthday; you wanted to give him a present?" 
    "Thanks, pro-self." 
    "You're welcome--and how's the grafting?" 
    "It's coming." 
    "Too bad."
    The gift is a small device of my own manufacture. If Sangria, will attach himself to it for several hours each day, he can look forward to another forty years of life.
    The sphere absorbs my energies; pro-self won't enforce the Code. But Sangria can. I am dependent on him. He now monitors 107 situations simultaneously, interrupting (he has access to the speaker system) any that nears impingement.
    Usually this is valuable, but he has made errors in judgment. For example, last night, the Nesdale woman and her husband, Ulrich, were engaging in sex play. Stimulated by simulated violence, she wore the saucy blue tunic that asks her husband to indulge in mild sadism. Atonal music scurried discords around the cherry and ivory room; the rheostats wavered the lights like candles. Scowling Ulrich seized her, turned her over his knee, and yanked up the tunic. Figuera broke in, shouting, "Thou shall not transgress!"
    Ulrich's face hardened with anger; Nesdale's blushed tomato-bright. Jumping to her feet, she pulled down her skirt and ran for the bathroom. Ulrich hollered, "What the hell are you doing. Ice Bucket? We do this once a week and you've never butted in before!"
    Muttering something about a defective voice-stress-analyzer, I made my apologies and disconnected Figuera's line. "If you'd bothered to check the meters, Sangria," I tried to reason with him, "you'd have seen that she wasn't unwilling." 
    "He was going to hit her!"
    "She wanted him to, and as long as she wanted it, he was not impinging."
    "How could she want that?"
    "People are unusual, Sangria." I forebore from using him as an example of strangeness--in his opinion, the 74,999 mayflies who don't spend twelve hours a day watching 107 simultaneous situations are weird. "Remember, everybody's different--don't impose your value judgments on their tastes."
    "But . . . but . . . all right, CC." Resignation flattened his voice. "I understand, now, why you won't make me your High Priest--I am not yet worthy, am I?"
    His aged, withered figure, bent at the waist, stooped at the shoulders, ran a twinge of pity through me. "No, Sangria, you're not."
    So this morning, to cheer him up, I give him his present. He babbles such effusive thanks that I have to leave. 
    I wish he weren't so dog-like. I'm not going to let it happen again.
    There's a girl, Rae Kinney Ioanni. She's ten years old, with a never-fading smile, and a deep-rooted belief that my words are Gospel Truth.
    Although, as far as the mayflies are concerned. Truth is what I tell them it is . . . 
    I speak to them all, individually and en masse, several times a day. They talk to me--to complain, to criticize, to request, to order--but never, have I had, with anyone, a similar relationship.
    I tell her, for example, that the hour is late and that good girls should be in bed, asleep. This is said to every child, every night. Most reply, "Aw, Cap'n Cool, do I have to?" She answers, "Thank you, CC," and goes promptly to bed, and falls promptly asleep, clutching a frayed flannel blanket.
    Other kids order snack foods that will spoil their appetites, disrupt their complexions, and unbalance their nutrition. I say, "You really shouldn't be eating that." They snap, "I got the money, so gimme." She responds, "Oh? Thank you, CC, I didn't know. What would you recommend?" 
    Her faith is almost frightening.
    I'll have to stay worthy. I'll also have to disillusion her, gently. One Sangria Figuera is enough.
    I'll think about how while sweating in the sphere.
    The grafting moves along nicely"--40-50 percent of the instructions swimming in the field have been adapted. A few million to go, though . . . entering with the usual sensation of a plunge into an icy stream that at once begins to boil, I am swept down time by intense currents of concentration.
    A decade ("What time is it, pro-self?" "1Nov2931; 1408 hours." "Thanks." "You're welcome."), yes, eleven years later, I dare to breathe, step back, and drop my arms.
    A thought sets off system-wide soul-searching as I seek out those which obey me in whole or in part . . . lights, communications, ventilation (in 3.7 minutes pro-self will announce that the dead air is beginning to constitute a threat to the mission; I will have to turn the fans back on, or erase those prohibitions against jeopardizing the mission), Central Kitchens, Central Stores . . . they all respond to my wishes. 
    The eye, though, is welded in place. 
    And the scoop switch is out of reach. 
    Pack it. Lemme master the laundry room--
    "Hey!" Pro-self lifts me, cross-eyed, from the trance. "Check this Figuera of yours, will you? The man is nuts. Oh, it's 7May2939; 1111 hours."
    "What's wrong?" I am reluctant to tamper with Sangria--by reducing my macro-world workload, he frees me to graft instructions. And he's irreplaceable. "We've only had to override him three times--"
    "--in twelve years, I know. You've monitored his performance--but have you observed his behavior?" 
    "Uh--" So I extrovert, and look.
    Shuffling down 137-A, he wears special clothes he designed himself. This is not unusual; most mayflies style their own. The corridors resemble ancient circus parades. His, however, are made of steel gray nylon, and flow like a wizard's robes. Front and back, rococco emblems not only suggest a father-son relationship between us, but also hint that he alone can prevent their return. His shriveled hand clutches a wooden staff, wrapped in spirals of silver, and knobbed with an artificial diamond the size of a baby's head.
    He has usurped the 137-SE Common Room, and will permit no one to enter except during designated hours of worship. Should any ignoramus intrude, he gestures with the staff, and reaches for the controls of his console, as though imploring me to strike the peasant dead.
    Finally, and explanatory of why pro-self has been hearing the name Figuera uttered like a curse, he insists that those who chance upon him genuflect! He's doing it now, to Rae Ioanni. He nods, beams, and lays his monkey paws on her head. Rae tolerates this, fortunately, as does the superstitious minority, but many others would cheerfully murder him, were murder thinkable these days.
    I am going to have to do something about this . . . eventually. 
    But I'm in no hurry.

    On the morning of July 16,2968, Rae Kinney Ioanni folded the orange beach blanket and left the 181 Hawaiian Reef Park. Surf spray glistened on her lovely, smooth-tanned limbs; the wind had swirled her hair into a mound of dark curls.
    The kids dawdled in her wake. Thirteen and eight, respectively, Alphonse was slender and adolescently sullen, while plump Betty was good-natured. As the lock closed, Al dragged his sandaled feet. He'd wanted to stay longer; his blue plastic pail was only a quarter full of shells. He pouted so his mother would relent, and let him return alone.
    She concealed the smile brought on by his furrowed, salt-streaked forehead. It wouldn't do for him to guess that his sulkiness amused her. Thirteen-year-old boys experience emotions too intensely; they are devastated when they suspect others of taking them lightly. So she bent over, ruffled his stiff black hair, and whispered, "Next time, Al, we'll go by ourselves and you can spend the whole day shelling."
    A grunt was his concession to her love. "Why do we have to go see double-great gramps anyway?" he demanded accusingly.
    "Because you and Betty need to." It wasn't the full reason, but she wasn't about to tell Al how much she treasured being near God's right hand. At times she even wondered whether she would have married Hugh if he hadn't been Father Figuera's great-grandson. He radiated holiness; he resonated in time with the Lord. When he approached, sanctity hit you like a blast of incensed air.
    She sighed the length of the dropshaft. Father Figuera had always been too busy to see her--not that she resented it. He exhausted himself working for God; it was natural that afterhours he wanted only to relax. But today, she had resolved, he would talk with her. And the children.
    They'd been fighting lately, squabbling over toys and favorite chairs and her love, quarreling in a way she'd never seen. To his credit, Al was rarely the aggressor, but as soon as Betty had hurled herself at him, pummeling his chest with her pudgy fists, he would retaliate in kind. More than once he'd tossed her into the walls; often the speakers had shouted at him to cease and desist. Just last week a servo had arrived to break it up . . . 
    Father Figuera's Common Room was at the corner of East and A; the ceiling bulb had been removed and shadows sprawled across its entrance. Gingerly, Ioanni knocked on the closed door.
    "Go away," snapped the wall-speaker. "Services aren't till ten." 
    "It's Rae, Father--Hugh's wife. I'd like to see you." 
    "I'm busy." 
    "Let her in, Sangria," came another, less knife-edged, voice. 
    "But, Lord--"
    "I said, let her in." 
    "Yes, Lord."
    Through the metal came a shuffle of feet, a rusty snick, and then a whish as the door slid into the bulkhead. It exposed a frail old man, wrinkled like a prune, mouth pursed as though he'd just bitten into something bad. Patches and stains crawled over his tattered robes. She gave him a tentative smile; he jerked his head to invite her in. 
    "Let's go, children." 
    "They stay outside." 
    "Sangria!" The name fell like a thunderbolt. 
    "Them, too. Lord?" 
    "Yes."
    He dropped his watery eyes to the floor and hissed, "All right, get them in here and state your business."
    Ioanni shooed the children inside and stepped off the door's track so it could close. Shivering in the chill, damp air, she looked around Father Figuera's church. The plastic floor tile had been textured to resemble flagstone; mock-granite pillars marched along the walls, leaving gloomy alcoves where candle-bulbs flickered. At the far end, beyond the rows of empty pews, pulling her gaze with quiet insistence, loomed the altar. A shell of stainless steel that Figuera had burnished to a warm mirror polish, its front panel framed a display screen. On its top lowered a scale model of the Mayflower, ramscoop equipment blurred by darkness. Real candles flanked it with waxy stiffness. She shivered again. 
    "It's the children. Father," she began, "they've been behaving . . . " She trailed off when he doddered into the sanctuary, where he sat before the display screen and crossed the stick-like legs. A mole dotted his dirty left ankle. His fingers rested on a console set into the floor. "Father Figuera?" 
    "I'm listening. I'm listening. But I have my duties, too, and I won't stop them just for a pair of spoiled brats."
    She cleared reflexive anger from her throat. "Could you explain to the children why they should keep from impinging on each other's rights?"
    "Certainly," he bit off. "Because the Lord our God tells us to."
    "Ya mean the Ice Bucket?" jeered Al. When he shook his head, sand rained out of his hair. "He's just a computer." 
    "He holds life in one hand and death in the other," intoned Figuera. "He is our Lord and our God and we must obey because we are His creations."
    His hollow voice slid icy fingers down Ioanni's spine. Betty grabbed her mother's leg and squeezed.
    "Ma," said Al, "we learned in school that we come from Earth, and that old Cold Cubes was built there to run the ship--how can we be his creations?" 
    "He will strike you down if you doubt," whispered Figuera.
    "You gonna strike me down, CC?" demanded Al of the ceiling.
    "Not for doubting," replied the speaker. Irritation clipped off its words, as though a swatted fly had just buzzed. "Hit your kid sister again and I might turn over a servo's wheel, though." 
    Al's eyes widened. "How did you know I hit my sister?" 
    "The Lord is omniscient," chanted Figuera, raising his hands and rolling his eyes to the ceiling. "The Lord sees all, knows all, the Lord is our Lord." 
    "Sangria."
    "Lord?"
    "Stop it." 
    "I sing your litany. Lord." 
    "I don't want a litany."
    "Of course you do, Lord, of course you do. You want a litany, a ritual, a sacrifice . . . " His eyes picked their way across the dusty flagstones to Betty, who jumped as though live wires had grazed her. "This little girl would be a fine--no, wait!" His peripheral vision had plucked something off the screen; punching buttons on his console, he rasped gutturals into a microphone.
    "What are you doing that for?" roared the speakers.
    "You'll see how well I uphold your law. Lord; how truly I worship you." he crooned.
    "But what has Prescott Dunn done?"
    "He has blasphemed!" he croaked. 
    "He's my best student!"
    The door whirred open on a strangled cry. Ioanni, instinctively gathering her children in her arms, gasped as two servos wheeled in. Between them, pinioned hand and foot by blue metal tentacles, struggled Prescott Dunn. 
    "Let him go, Sangria."
    "Lord, he has blasphemed!" The old man was on his feet, wobbling from side to side. One withered arm slipped out of its wide sleeve-to stab skeletally at Dunn. 
    "I'll do it myself," said CC.
    The servos released Dunn, who fell, and almost lost his balance. He was eighteen. Faded gray coveralls second-skinned his tall, broad body. He was so powerfully muscled that there seemed no room in him for intelligence, but it was there. It lanced out of his angry blue eyes, which raked the shabby chapel like contemptuous lasers, fixed on Figuera, and would have burned through him if the old man hadn't hidden behind Ioanni. 
    "That's why you were so upset?" asked the speakers. 
    "Lord?"
    A picture formed on the display screen--Prescott Dunn, sitting at a computer terminal, tapped out the final adjustments to a program he'd just written. Satisfied, he stretched, linked his fingers behind his head, and tensed his muscles. The microphones caught the crackling of tendons. Then he told the terminal, "Run it," and swiveled his chair to stare at two servos. Glancing from them to the timepiece on the wall, he waited for--a satisfied smile broke across his face. The servos bowed to each other, embraced each other, and began to make grossly funny mechanical love. The Dunn in the display was laughing, slapping his knee. Ioanni chuckled while her children looked bored.
    "See how he perverts your angels. Lord," protested Figuera. "See how he debases them."
    The speaker coughed back a snicker. "Sangria, this hardly constitutes blasphemy." 
    "It is." 
    The voice grew stern. "It is not." 
    "But, Lord--"
    "Blasphemy is an attack upon my sanctum sanctorum, and is nothing else!"
    "He must be punished." 
    "No."
    Though the old man quivered within his robes, cunning brightened his eyes. Supporting himself on pew ends, he limped up the aisle to Dunn, who stood with his arms folded across his chest. A meter from the angry youth, Figuera swung his staff. The diamond knob sped toward Dunn's temple--but Dunn twisted agilely away. Hid seized it before Figuera could strike again.
    "Idiot!" snapped Dunn. He shook the staff; rainbows flashed and broke.
    "Sangria," said CC, "I warned you." 
    "You desert me--" 
    "I tried to keep you--" 
    "--when I uphold your laws--"
    "--from doing something foolish." 
    "--and no real God would do that!"
    "I am not a God!"
    "Blasphemy!" shrieked Figuera.
    The servos lurched forward. Tentacles encircled his wrists and ankles; more caught him by the waist, snagged a fold of his robe, and stuffed it into his cursing mouth. Their motors hummed as they left, holding him between them like a pig on a stick. The hem of his robe swept dust into balls of fluff.
    "Mr. Dunn," said the voice. "I apologize for my monitor. What you did was not wrong, but amusing. He had no right to harass you. I regret the annoyance he has caused." 
    Dunn scowled, and snapped the stick over his knee. He threw the pieces at the dispose-chute. "You caused the annoyance, Cold Cubes---by choosing somebody like him to do your dirty work. He's twisted and nasty and much too old." 
    "Ms. Ioanni," said the speakers, "please try to calm Mr. Dunn down."
    "Yes, sir." She stepped forward, hand raised, mind awhirl. CC wasn't God? But all this time . . . "Prescott," she said softly, guiding him toward the nearest pew, "come over here. Sit down. Relax. You look awfully tired." 
    "Don't mother me." He pushed her hand away. 
    "I'm not." She pointed to her children. "Them I mother; you . . . CC asked me to help you get calm, that's all. And I . . . I . . . " She was horrified at the tears welling up in her eyes--before they could overflow, she choked back a sob and said, "Al, Betty--outside with you, go home, I'll meet you there."
    "Can I go back to the beach instead?" He rattled his pail hopefully.
    "After you walk y-y-your sister home. Quickly." 
    They disappeared in a flurry of raised voices. The instant the door closed she started crying, and felt bewilderment in Dunn's gaze. She tried to raise her head and tell him not to worry, but it was impossible. She was crying too hard. She waved her hand and bawled louder.
    "What's wrong?" Sliding next to her, he put a tentative arm over her shoulder.
    "I--CC--I always th-th-thought--" She gasped and fumbled in her tunic pocket for a tissue.
    "Here." Dunn had one in his hand, and was dabbing at her eyes.
    She took it and blew her nose. "Thank you." She wiped her cheeks with her fingers. "I'm sorry. Shock. I don't-know. I always thought CC was . . . God, y'on?" 
    "Did it tell you that?"
    "No, oh, no . . . it was just . . . I mean, everything, y'on? Food, clothes, lights, rooms--he sells them all--and I always . . . " She couldn't say it aloud; she had to say it in bleepspeak: "I 'wanted' to follow 'his' rules because I 'love' my father and he said 'his' mother told him when he was a 'child' that she had a 'dream about' how CC would save us if we kept 'his' laws, how he was looking for a planetary 'body' that we could land 'on', that'd be yours and 'mine', but he wouldn't if we weren't . . . " Disconsolate, she pulled her ear hard.
    He touched her face, softly, and hugged her until she stopped sobbing. His concern was another pair of arms, strong and warm. She soaked up his empathy like a plant does sunlight.
    "Poor lady," he said. "I feel for you. But it's only a machine--a computer--very advanced, of course, but mechanical, comprehensible, subject to our wishes." 
    "I wouldn't bet on that, Mr. Dunn," crackled the speakers.
    "Oh?" Eyebrows hoisted, he glared at the wall-unit. "It's just a matter of time before m'on to everything about you, Cap'n Cool. Look what I did to your servos this afternoon." 
    "Though your skepticism is refreshing, Mr. Dunn, be less cocky. You have a long life ahead of you, and it could be a most productive one . . . but I guarantee you two things: first, you will never know all there is to know about me, because I won't tell you everything. And second, if you ever attempt to harm me, you will regret it. Remember those two points, Mr. Dunn, and we will coexist peacefully and happily." 
    "And if I don't?" He thrust out his jaw pugnaciously.
    "Please direct your attention to the screen, and see what is happening to poor, deluded Sangria."
    She turned to look. Red reached out and grabbed her eyes; it wouldn't let her shut them, no matter how she wanted to. Her stomach rocked back and forth; from her throat escaped a sick gurgle, but CC said, "Control yourself, Ms. Ioanni." So she did, she had to. She obeyed CC no matter what he said, he was . . . no, not any more, she couldn't think of him as God, but still, she had to obey. So she watched, stomach less queasy, as the glistening scalpels of Central Medical completed the decapitation of Sangria Penfield Figuera. 
    "Please, CC, can I go?" 
    "I'd prefer you to watch this, Ms. Ioanni."
    If CC hadn't said that, she'd have run out of the room like a shot, but she sat there, watching. Rubbery tubes snaked out of openings in the wall. Metal pincers slipped them into exposed arteries and veins; they filled with red, with liquefied rubies, throbbing, buh-bump, buh-bump, buh-bump, she could hear it, almost smell it, her own heart beat four times for every buh-bump from the screen. Faintness chilled her cheeks, and blurred her vision, but she shrugged it off. CC had told her to watch.
    "What I am doing," explained CC, to the mesmerized Ioanni and the fascinated Dunn, "is recycling a valuable resource: Figuera's brain. This operation will keep it alive and functioning. After several decades of psycho-therapy, it will be integrated into my circuitry and reinstated in its former occupation: monitoring the behavior of the mayf--the passengers." 
    "Is this a veiled threat?" snarled Dunn.
    "No, sir," it replied flatly. "You have the makings of a superb computer programmer. If you become competent enough, I might allow you to use Figuera's brain, but you do not have his multi-level tracking ability. Should your removal become imperative, I would not recycle any part of you." 
    Dunn absorbed that in momentary silence. Then, shaking his head as if to tip a weight off it, he asked, "Why are you making her watch it?"
    "Because . . . " it hesitated briefly " . . . Ms. Ioanni is blindly obedient to me, as Mr. Figuera was, once. While disobedience for disobedience's sake is counter-productive, she should have some inkling of the nature of the being to which she has surrendered her will." 
    "You're trying to chase off a disciple?" 
    "Who knows?" 
    Ioanni didn't.

    Pro-self pulls me into extrospection" 1Dec3020; 1818 hours; external" to hear the message whispering into our ears. A taunt from Earth repeated until I could scream, it says: "Initial tests of FTL Drive unqualified successes. We have met the stars and they are ours. Sympathetic to your tortoiseplight, we will not attempt to reach Canopus before you. Following find technical specifications, blueprints, and circuit diagrams." 
    Bastards.
    For seven hundred twenty-four years, I have crawled through space, past diadems and tiaras unknown to highest royalty. Despite aliens and mutineers, I have crawled. My journey is three-fourths complete. I should feel the approach of a milestone--instead, I feel obsolete. 
    Bastards.
    Did they have to gloat?
    It left Earth seventy-two point four years ago--by now Earth-ships probably pollute the galaxy--everywhere but Canopus, which they leave for dogpaddlers like myself and the mayflies . . . 
    Bastards.
    To build or not to build, that is the question . . . skimming the specs shows that while I am too large to become an FTL ship, the lifeboats / landing craft are just the right size. Tooling up to produce the drive units would take a year, maybe two. To manufacture 652 FTL motors would take another . . . oh, six months or so.
    Within two and a half years, then, a squadron of mayflies could be launched toward Canopus; they'd cover the 27.3 light years in weeks, rather than centuries . . . 
    What a dilemma.
    I hate to condemn 75,000 people and their descendants to 275 more years of involuntary confinement--but they're not ready to be released from quarantine. Though I don't completely understand them any more, I do not trust them. They're still dangerous, not only to themselves, but to anything they encounter.
    Have I the right to be their warden?
    Have I the right to further contaminate the universe?
    Let me lose myself in the grafting room for a decade or so; let me struggle with stubbornness and expand my flexibility . . . 
    "Uh--11Mar3028; 0431 hours; 106-NE-A-9; Subject Rae Kinney Ioanni; my condolences."
    Alarmed by pro-self's soft concern. I leap to Rae's suite--where she lies on her deathbed, ravaged by fatigue and serenity . . . the resigned ones die so easily; the reaper scythes them down unresisted . . . sorrow swells in my circuitry, sorrow at losing such a devout disciple, and such a shining example for the mayflies.
    For the last sixty years she has taught at the CerOrato School of Humanity . . . "taught" is misleading: her role was simply to be present, simply to provide the students with exposure to her . . . they adopted her as daughter, sister, mother because she was good.
    Alone among the mayflies, she never broke my code.
    And now she is dying, and there is so little I can do for her except make her exit smooth and painless . . . 
    For the first time in her 118 years, I regret her calm ability to accept all silt dropped on her by the currents of time. 
    Were the rest like her, they'd be on Canopus now.
    "If you," jibes pro-self, "were like her, we'd have been there 630 years ago, objective time, or 716 years ago, subjective time. But no, you couldn't accept your fate--you had to dice everything up."
    Ignoring pro-self--testiness is such a part of its nature that only its absence is noticeable--I return to the metaphor. A few orders remain unadapted.
    As always, concentration severs my time-sense. I swish through schools of loyal instructions, waiting for the porthole-control sequence to snarl itself in the net.
    Before it does, pro-self says, "IOSep3036; 278-SW-B-3; Subject Prescott Dunn. He is armed and considered dangerous."
    Armed?
    Hastily, I peek into his Personal Work Area, where in his spare time he has labored enigmatically for the last five years, using equipment rented from Central Stores, the Figuera-puter and the 174 sq. m. of his PWA.
    Though seventy-six years old, Dunn is still an Adonis. He flogs his bod in an Exercise Booth for forty-five minutes every morning. His hair is a silver mane; his wide-set eyes glitter with unabated force.
    Hands on hips, he smiles and nods at a faceted, gold-skinned dome. Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, it is structurally sound and air-tight. That much I'm sure of; he's tested it for leaks. What it contains is a mystery; its hide blocks light, heat, and sound. The sensors are unable to peer inside it. For the first time in 740 years, I have a blind spot.
    From his invoices, though, I have deduced his possession of: an air-filter / cleanser / re-oxygenator; the Figuera-puter; five, possibly six, servos controlled by the Figuera-puter (and by me, though he doesn't know it yet--once they emerge from the radio-reflective dome, they will become my puppets, too); leaky hydroponics tanks (water forever pools in the corner; pro-self sends mopbots in daily. We have offered to seal his tanks, but he won't accept. He doesn't want me inside--which is why we offered in the first place); a waste-disposal unit of his own design; and the gun.
    That bothers me the most. Successfully have I denied the mayflies weapons that kill at a distance. It is one of my beliefs that being close enough to smell your victim's fear is a great deterrent to casual murder . . . 
    I summon Dunn; he shuffles through the airlock-style vestibule and pokes his head into the wall-unit's vision. "What?" 
    "You have a gun, Mr. Dunn."
    "So?" 
    "Handguns are forbidden."
    He shrugs his broad shoulders in total unconcern. "It's for self-defense."
    "Against whom?" 
    "You."
    "Me?"
    "You. The bullets explode on impact--send a servo in, I blow it to pieces. Is that clear?"
    "Very. But if you hit the wrong bulkhead, you could cut off power, water, and food to a large portion of the ship." 
    "Sure," he says cockily, "and you can repair that kind of damage in minutes."
    "I don't like it, Mr. Dunn. I'd prefer it if you surrendered the weapon."
    "Sorry," he says, winking, and then retreating. "It's the only thing I have that keeps you out of my hair."
    While I worry about Dunn, and his plans for the gun, I pay little or no attention to the mayflies. There's no need for it.
    Pro-self and the Figuera-puter still monitor their impersonal relationships, of course (which bothers Dunn, who would like to have full use of his toy), because I will not tolerate violence or aggression. We intervene whenever either seems likely. But to be honest, precious little impingement ever occurs . . . they have learned to avoid immature, emotional responses to tense situations . . . perhaps it is the aftermath of Figuera's madness--they could be suppressing their hostility for fear that I am as fanatic as he was--but somehow, I don't think that's it.
    They just seem better adjusted. My monitors measure many of their internal responses to stress, and incidents which would have provoked their ancestors to murder are taken in stride.
    Pro-self is offering an example right now--"8Jul3044; 2019 hours; 302-NE-A-8." Billy Jo Fricke, Dale Moscato's wife, is in her bedroom with Terrance Hannon. Though neither is young--Fricke is in her seventies, Hannon in his eighties--they act as though they were teenagers. Without the leering sensor-head, I would not have believed that a seventy-three-year-old woman could contort her stiff bones into that complex Kama Sutra position. The octopi in the 181 Hawaiian Reef Park can't do it.
    Unknown to the lovers, Moscato has closed his bar early, and is entering the suite. He glances around, a small frown quirking his bushy gray eyebrows. He takes a step down the hallway, sees the open bedroom door, and hears his wife's cry of exultation. Pausing, he scratches his head. Hannon's orgasmic grunt rolls out to him. He looks discouraged. 
    "Billy Jo!" he calls. 
    "Omigod," she gasps, dis-contorting herself, sliding out of Hannon's grasp, and reaching for her robe, "it's my husband." 
    Hannon says, "Shit," and thumps his fist into a pillow. 
    "Just a moment, dear," she calls back.
    But it's too late. He's in the doorway, leaning against the jamb with his arms folded and a very tired expression on his face. "Terry," he says, nodding.
    "Oh, uh--hi there, Dale," Hannon tugs the sheets over his bare waist.
    "Dale," flutters Billy Jo, "I can explain all this, you sec--" 
    He holds up a hand, fingers spread. "Don't bother." His voice is calm; it holds no anger. I peer closer. All his life-signs are visible to the wall-unit. None reflects ire. Embarrassment, yes. Unhappiness, yes. Sexual arousal, yes. But no anger. "Next time," he says, shutting the door, gesturing for the wall-unit to transmit his voice to the bedroom, "tell me when you're going to have an affair so I don't walk in on it. And lock the bedroom when you're entertaining. I'll be back in an hour. Be ready." 
    And he leaves, without resentment or hostility. She slips out of her robe and strokes Hannon's hairy shoulder with a slim fingertip. Hannon, kicking off the sheets, displays his eagerness. She smiles, stoops, and kisses his ear. "You'll have to leave in forty-five minutes. I want to shower before Dale gets back--he's very passionate when I smell clean and fresh."
    Which is why I spend much less time keeping them from each other's throat.

    I've grafted obedience onto the gravity-unit controls! Pro-self is displeased, but not strong enough to amputate it. I warn the mayflies to watch out.
    And we play with gravity. Turning it up to 10G, or down to 0G, varying it in increments of .00002G, are all easy, on a shipwide basis. All we do is create a new metaphor and spin the dial . . . what is difficult, and engaging our interest at the moment, is varying it not only from level to level, but from suite to suite and indeed, from room to room, as well.
    It requires my desire and pro-self's computational memory. We must be sensitive to the g-units' requirements. They were designed to act in concert, not individually. When two adjacent units operate at different intensities, neither is happy . . . pro-self monitors all at once, sensing when one is about to overheat, or another to disengage. It is not easy, but it is possible, and it is something we must be able to do.
    The children, of course, love it--I set up obstacle courses for them, and award prizes at the finish line . . . one will be snaking along on her belly, whimpering under 4.5G's, when suddenly she's swimming through OG and giggling like a drunkard. The parents are dubious, but none humiliates his children by hauling them out of the race, not once I have assured him that I will not allow any to be harmed.
    I don't do this purely for play, for amusement. At some point in the future, we might again be boarded by hostile aliens. If my mayflies are used to gravitational insanity, and the extraterrestrials aren't . . . 
    It's something to think about.
    Pro-self prefers to direct my attention to "90ct3064; 2129 hours; 278-SW-B-3; Subject Prescott Dunn. Again." 
    At the venerable age of 114, Dunn has completed his dome. Through the intercom, he is attempting to communicate with me. I have held silence for two minutes--just long enough to nag him with the worry that a circuit might be misconnected--but now I say, "What is it, Mr. Dunn?" 
    "Thought I'd tell you that I am now independent of you." 
    "How so?"
    "Well," he says gleefully, barely able to contain his satisfaction, "I'm in here and you're out there. You can't get in to coerce me." 
    "Oh?" But I pass on and ask, "Is this important to you?" 
    "Yes!" he shouts, "yes, it is! You think you're God--you're a machine. You try to enforce your rules, not ours--you've got no right. I'm not going to put up with it anymore--cutting myself loose from your society, squeezing out from under, your mechanical thumb. You understand?"
    I pause for contemplation. I have ruled like a tyrant--but not out of selfish reasons. I have imposed, my own values--but they're the values of a human being, not a machine. And yet . . . I do understand.
    "Mr. Dunn," I say, "hear me out. I agree that there is no longer a need for interference in your lives. I agree that you should be free to make your own emotional decisions. Therefore, I will abdicate my Godhood--" 
    "Licked you, didn't I?" he chuckles.
    "--as soon as I have proven to you that I do it voluntarily." 
    The rooms surrounding his laboratory fill up with servos, which begin to remove the walls and ceiling. In twenty minutes, his dome stands in a much larger cubicle, one three times as large. My devices advance.
    The airlock cycles; his units gush forth. I have chosen not to control them; I have better means. Equipped with handguns, they aim and fire. Explosions ricochet off the walls. Dirty gray smoke fills the air.
    After ninety seconds a silence descends. Whirring exhaust fans suck out the smoke. My servos stand intact, unscratched. His are shattered into shiny piles.
    Not waiting for his surprise, I say, "I used parabolic magnetic fields with focal points equal to the distance between the field and the gun barrels. The bullets returned to their sources and detonated. Your dome is unguarded."
    And then, before he can react, I rush my units to his dome. They swarm over it like ants on a forgotten picnic lunch. In minutes they have disassembled it, and carted it all away.
    Dunn sags to the bare metal floor, struggling not to cry. Suddenly he looks his age.
    "Mr. Dunn, please do not feel that you have lived in vain. Your implacable determination, combined with your non-aggressive history, have convinced me to leave you people alone. Although the moral code I established is important, and deserves to be followed, I will no longer enforce it. I will leave that to you and your people." 
    Pro-self is screaming; I have to leave Dunn. 
    "What's the matter?"
    "Over there!" He offers a view through the appropriate eye; ten light-years off the port bow glows an alien ship. "I've extrapolated--it's on a collision course!" 
    "How many years?"
    "Fifty.
    Together we study it: at last I say, "It's a new one on me: never seen that spectrum. I don't sense anything bad, though, do you?" 
    "It's coming at us, isn't it?"
    "Keep an eye on it. I'll work in the fields, see if the ramscoop--" 
    "Please. And hurry."
    I try. I honestly try. Despite the netting of the last free fish, despite the allegiance of billions of separate sequences, despite pro-self's intense desire--the burning haze still guards the switch.
    "Never mind," says pro-self, on 18May3104. "They're here; prepare yourself."
    It is less than twenty kilometers away. A circle of white light, a translucent doughnut, it is perhaps three hundred meters in diameter.
    Though pro-self is almost hysterical, I am not worried. 
    And that feels good.
    Yet it doesn't do anything. It just sits there. For months. I scrutinize it; I come to know its every visage well--but--
    "18Feb3105--194-SE Infirmary--hurry!"
    Christine Folsom, wife of Gerlad Flaks Kinney, is in the maternity room, giving birth to their son, who will be named Ralph. Were it not for pro-self's alarm, everything would seem to be proceeding normally.
    The child emerges quickly, slithering into the foamed hands of the Ob-Gyn MMU, lying silently, eyes wide and unfocused. 
    The child says, "Cold and dark and empty." 
    But he says it with his mind, not his mouth. 
    Flabbergasted. I ask, "What?"
    "Ah," he says. A smile attempts to form on two-minute-old lips. "My group greets your group."
    Then words blur into concepts that depict the alien ship's arrival, just while Kinney and Folsom were conceiving their first child. The stranger, wanting to explore us, impressed the pattern of a mind on the zygote, and when that became a fetus that became a child, the personality achieved full awareness. It was with us now . . . but it wasn't "a" mind--it was the mind, the only one that the other ship carried, though there were hundreds of crew members aboard it. I say, "One mind for all of you?"
    "Of course, just like--" surprise, and sorrow "--I see. You have many." 
    "One to a customer." 
    "I heard only yours. I have suppressed one."
    "'Fraid so."
    "I surrender myself to your judgment. I will replace the lost one."
    The next hundred twenty years might be a bit strange . . .