TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOURSELF AND OTHERS




Take Good Care of Yourself and Others

"Sometimes I think of my life as divided into ages, like the ages
in the rocks.  The age of light was when I was small and things were
simple.  In the age of air we lived in the orbital, and air was the
most important thing in the world.  Then we came back down, and there
was an interregnum, a time between ages.  And after that my ages merged
with the ages of everyone else, and there was the time of troubles, and
the time of miracles, one following the other but also all mixed
together and stretching off into the future, until now."

Austin is sitting in the main room in his small house.  The house is
on an open hilltop, and when the windows are open the breeze passes
right through the room, ruffling his papers and moving his hair on
his head.  He writes in the morning.  In the afternoon, if it isn't
raining, he puts on one of his two sweaters and his vest, and walks
out onto the hilltop and down into the woods around the hill.

The land stretches away from the house and the hilltop, far in all
directions.  Off to the west there are low rounded mountains against
the sky.  A stream, a small river, comes down from the mountains and
flows through the valley to the west of the hill.  It curves around the
hill to the north, where the valley is steeper and darker, and
off to the east.  Somewhere to the east, off beyond the horizon,
Austin imagines the sea.

The land is light green all around, with patches of yellow and
patches of darker green.  The sky is high and blue and, especially
at dawn and twilight, misty forms and faces move immensely across
it.  Giants and demons and gods run from horizon to horizon, or
stand and ponder, or gesticulate emphatically at each other.  In
the world there is Austin, and the house, and the giants, and the
hills and mountains and woods, and nothing else.

-=-

I remember, in the age of light, lying and looking at a sunbeam
coming through a window.  It was a small narrow window, with the
sill painted yellow, in the corner of my bedroom.  The light fell
on the top of a brown wooden stool, with carved legs, that sat on
the floor of the room.  I was lying there on my stomach, and there
were dust motes moving in the light.

The dust motes were important to me, I remember.  Or not so much
important as fascinating.  They were the thing that I was looking at
and paying attention to.  The thing that I was focused on.  And I
wasn't conscious of paying attention to them; I was young, and still
only aware of things, and not so much aware of being aware of them.

The motes were moving in the light, and I felt that I was looking into
another world.  They moved according to their own rules and their own
patterns, and those rules and patterns had nothing to do with the
rules and patterns that applied to me.  But I might be able to do that
eventually, later, when I was big.  Being a dust mote and circling in
the air with the other motes, caught in a sunbeam, was well within the
space of things that I might eventually do, later.  And studying them
I remember I felt glad that there was this thing here, for me to
watch and pay attention to.  Or, no, I wasn't glad about that, I was
just glad, lying in the sun and being glad, not glad about anything,
just happy and lying there and attending to the dust.

The motes looped and danced in air currents too small for me to feel.
I made up games about them, or stories about them, and came to care
about them.  I don't remember if I cared about certain ones, or if
it was more the patterns that I cared about, waiting breathlessly
for a particular pattern to repeat, for one of the motes to dash
between two others and then come close to a third in just that same
way again, and then again.  There was a language in the patterns of
the moving dust, a language with its own words and sentences and
jokes, and being young and in the age of light my mind was still
reaching out into the world for languages and patterns.

I lay there watching the dust and I was hungry.  I said I was hungry,
but nothing happened, so I said it again.  And her footsteps came down
the hallway and she came in, big and fragrant and patient, and asked
me what I wanted to eat.  I watched the dust motes and I answered her.

Did her coming make a wind in the room, that blew the dust away or
blew more dust in?  Not that I remember.  The dust was in another world,
attached to this world only by my eyes and attention.

No, I didn't want toast.  Or an apple.  And I didn't want crackers with
cheese.  And I didn't want water.  I was so happy, watching the dust and
hearing her list all the things that I might eat, and saying no to them
because she would always list the things that I didn't want first.  And
I didn't want bread with butter, but yes I did want a peanut butter and
jelly sandwich, and I didn't want root beer, but I did want ginger ale.

And so her footsteps went away, her voice humming softly under her
breath, and again one of the dust motes moved in just that way again,
and I was very glad.

-=-

Austin stops writing in the morning when he feels hungry.  There is an
icebox in the smaller room of the house, by the bed, and when he feels
hungry in the morning he takes from it some bread and cheese, or a piece
of fruit, and sits out on the single step in front of the door of the house.
The sun rises high in the middle of the day, but not to the zenith.  While
he eats, Austin watches the shadow of the house on the grass and the mossy
rocks that surround the house.

When he is done eating he stands and goes into the house.  There is a
small sink with running water where he rinses the plate, if he has been
using a plate, and puts it in a rack beside the sink to dry.  He goes
to the chest of drawers and takes out a sweater, the smooth dark red
one or the grey-white one with the twining cable stitching, and pulls
it on over his head.  Sometimes he pauses with the sweater over his
face, in the tight warm dimness.  If it is cold enough, he puts his
vest on over the sweater.

Then he takes his walking stick from where it is propped against the
wall just inside the door, and walks away from the house, down the hill.

Sometimes it rains on the hilltop and the house.  The rain comes mostly
from the west, as thick bright clouds crossing the sky slowly and
steadily, with blurred legs of rain reaching down to the hills.  Or
sometimes it comes quickly from the north, bringing chill stinging
rain that cuts into the earth and flows loudly down between the hills,
cutting the ravine deeper and steeper at the north side of the house.

If it rains at night or in the early morning, the woods are still wet
when Austin goes out the next day, and the wind shakes drops down out
of the trees into his head.  He has no hat.

Here is Austin in the afternoon of a bright warm day, down under the
north side of the hill, where the water runs.  He leans back against
a night-cool stone, looking up through the branches.  Dim outlines
against the sky, two giants pace along the horizon.  They are lions
in the shape of men, broad-shouldered and mane-haired, with swords
belted at their waists.  When he closes his eyes he can still see
them, walking sentry, or hunting, or stalking each other across the
dome of the air.

-=-

It's raining today, so I'm just sitting here at the table, writing
into the afternoon.  It's still strange to be writing with a pen on
a pad of paper, and stranger that my hand never gets tired.  Stranger
yet, I suppose, that the strangeness doesn't bother me much.

The rain hides any of the gods that might be up there today.  Which is
just as well.  I think I saw my mother, or something like my mother,
up there last night, at twilight.

At first I was planning to tell my story in order, from the beginning
to the end.  One age at a time, from my earliest memories of dust motes
and light and sandwiches, to the age of troubles and miracles and finally
to now.

But there's no reason to tell it in order.  There may be no reason to
tell it at all.  The gods may be taking care of everything that needs
to be taken care of.  But I hate to think that I matter that little.
So I'll sit here every day and write, but I'll tell the story in whatever
order comes to mind.

And now that I put it that way it's obvious, isn't it, that that's
exactly what I ought to be doing, if this project makes any sense
at all.

I was a woman, more than once, in the age of miracles.  I liked being
a woman.  I liked the physicality of it; having a woman's body, a
woman's sense of smell.  There were people, of course, who said that
it wasn't really being a woman, that being a man all my life and then
changing into a woman for a month or a year had so little to do with
the experience of actual women that it didn't even deserve the name.
But still.

I was one of the first, they told me, the first time that I did it.
But I was fairly typical.  I spent alot of time playing with my body,
standing in front of the mirror, masturbating, trying on clothes.
A woman's orgasm is a wonderful thing.  But I didn't like sex all
that much.

Later in the age of miracles the lines blurred entirely, and we were
making up new sexes as often as we were trying on the old ones.  But
that was when everything had begun to crack, and people weren't sure
who they were anymore, let alone what sex they'd started out.  At
least that's how I remember it.  But it may have been only me.

-=-

There is a shovel in the dimmest corner of the house's small room.
Austin considered it part of the decor, a bit of backdrop.  Then
one day, after a particularly hard morning rain, he stepped out
into the wet grass and felt the earth soft under his boot, and he
thought of the shovel.

He went into the back room and lifted it out of its corner.  It was
a small shovel, more of a spade, with a smoothly curving blade of dull
silver metal, and a wood and metal handle sturdily made.  It looked
used but clean, and Austin smiled, testing its weight with one hand.

The wet ground gave easily under the shovel blade, the roots of the
grass parting and the water pooling around the intruding metal.
The earth was dense but pliable, like compacted powder with a
sprinkling of fine white stones.  Austin took a small handful of
it and raised it to his face, smelling its darkness and looking at
the whiteness of the pebbles in the brown soil.  He rolled it
between his palms, allowing the dirt to fall back down to the
ground and separating out a dozen of the pebbles.  He put them
into his pocket, propped the shovel inside the door, and walked
off down the hill.

-=-

We came down from space when I was sixteen.  My father had been recalled
from the orbital again, and this time there was no political reason to
stay, and no political organization to support him.  The time of troubles
had started, although I didn't know it, and my mother and father decided
that it was probably safer on Earth, although even then no one really
knew what places were safe and what places were dangerous.

The last months in space we doubled our exercise times, and planned ways
of gradually acclimating to Earth gravity.  We were prepared to suffer;
I remember my parents both very stern, serious, telling me that adapting to
high gravity was a serious business, with real risks, and that I should
not think that just because Earth had air, and low radiation, that I
would be safe.  I mustn't get soft, they said.  The people back on Earth,
as I gathered from conversations I overheard between them, were not
being careful, and seemed curiously unconcerned about the dangers of our
return.

This was, it turned out, because acclimation was no trouble at all.
They had forgotten to tell my father due to some tangle of directorates,
or they had told him in a way he didn't understand.  But when the ship
from Earth came to fetch us, up through the gravity well and through
zones of varying and unknown danger even then, and brought us back
down to Earth, we found ourselves carried into a gleaming white building
on stretchers that were terrifyingly comfortable, put into blissful
disembodied dream-states by drugs that smelled of orchids and the sea,
and awoke to find our bodies aching but strong, unfamiliar feeling but
perfectly adapted, and after a week of clumsiness and unsettling dreams,
a few hours of nausea, we were, at least physically, equivalent to any
small crawling creature that had never left the arms of the Earth at
all.

So, I thought, my parents had had no reason to worry, and all those
extra hours on the pulling bars and the isomorphic weights had been
wasted.

I'm writing slowly.  I look out of the window, and I stand up and go
to the door.  I don't want to stare out at the gods, or try to guess
what they might be thinking about me, or if they are thinking about
me at all.  So even if I sit here writing all morning, I only fill a
page or two.  But the mornings are short, I think.  Are the days
shorter here than they were back then, in the age of light, in the
interregnum?  In the orbital we enforced good old twenty-four hour
days, to keep our natural rhythms content.  I don't know if anyone's
done that here, though.  I have no clock but the sun, and myself.

Yesterday the ground was wet, and I dug a shallow hole with the shovel
from the back room.  The earth is thick and brown, with small white
pebbbles.  I picked out a handful of the pebbles, and I have them on
the table now as I write.  I don't know if I'm intended to be interested
in the pebbles, or the soil, or the hills.  But the shovel was there.

I don't know how long I'll be here.  But in the mornings I sit and write.

A year (was it a year?) after we came back from the orbital, after the age
of air and in my interregnum, they sent us to a controlled community in
southern Canada, called Trembla, as candidates for provisional admission.
Things were odd then, but not too odd, and the combine that had sent my
parents to space was still more or less normally in business, and taking
care to guide its valued employees (or members, or partners, or affiliates,
or favored contractors) into untroubled zones.

One afternoon I walked out into a broad orchard in the community's
common land.  At the far edge of the orchard a gleaming gridwork of
white metal, or plastic, stood against the sky, supported by widely
spaced grey columns, fluted like the bases of wineglasses.  Around
and between the columns a few dozen children, some of them older
than me and some of them younger, moved in careful patterns, overseen
by a handful of adults in gowns or dresses.  The adults urged the
children on, moved their own bodies in exemplary patterns, clapped
their hands and waved, and drew the children into groups to send
them through their paces.  Some of the children fell out of the
group and stood panting near me.

"Why are you dancing, way out here?" I asked one of them.

"We're building a wall," she said, laughing, and then strode away
in a line with the others.  From their walk and their voices, all
with the same unfamiliar accent, I thought that they must be from
somewhere else, outside the community.  Like me.

"They are in fact building a wall," my guide and mentor said when I
told her about the dancers later that day.  "Or at least they came with
the people who are building the wall.  They use some new process, still
closely-held, and they do all sorts of things to disguise it.  The
dancing is probably just a distraction.  Or who knows?  Maybe their
dances are programming the extrusion process."

The next morning there was a wall at the edge of the orchard, high
and white and seamless, curved against the sky.

The wall was an addition to the compound where the Instinctives lived.
I visited the compound also, not with my parents.  I was proud of
myself then, weighing the community and being weighed by it as myself,
not as one of three people in a metal bubble, with a daily budget of
oxygen and water.

The Instinctives lived in their compound, naked and unknowing among the
trees and hills and streams.  Once a year each Instinctive was brought
in, carefully and gently, with food or persuasion or tranquilizers as
required, and put into the machine that reawakens the mind.  Then
the caretakers talked to the newly-awakened Instinctive, verifying
and analyzing rationality.  Then they asked the important question.

Do you want to shed your mind and your responsibilities for another
year?  Or do you want to rejoin the thinking parts of humanity?

The Instinctives eat from the fruit trees and drink from the streams.
They have no clothing, but the weather is warm, and when it gets cold
the compound is subtly heated by machines in the white walls.  Many
of them are thickly haired, although the caretakers say that the
drugs that put their minds to sleep should have no effect on the
growth of hair.

"An atavism," they told me, "something in the body that pushes out
the hair when the skin is kept uncovered."

Between the trees they eat and sleep and mate and run.  There are
no predators in the compound, and no significant game animals.
The caretakers say that the Instinctives seem to be vegetarian.
The fruit is nourishing, easy to pick, and carefully engineered.

"What about the children?", I asked.

"Ah, you ask the hard questions."

The Instinctives have no chldren.  The drugs that put their minds
to sleep also suppress their wombs.  Because what would happen to the
children of the Instinctives?  The caretakers cannot suppress their
minds from birth; the community would not stand for it, the nascent
chaotic heart of the world would not stand for it.  But just as much
they cannot allow children and then take the children away at birth.
So the Instinctives are all adults, forming into bands that screech
and howl in the night, and defend the best fruit trees, and mate
frenetically in the hollows under the moon, but have no children
to raise or instruct.

When I heard it described, I thought Instinctivism was an attractive
prospect.  No worries or responsibilities, only natural feeling and
sense and muscle.  And I was far from alone; people came from all over
the world to the compound, and the other Instinctive compounds.  They
stood in lines and waited in rooms and read the brochures.  But most
of them, nearly all of them, only stood as I did behind the one-way
windows in the thick curving walls, looking out at the scampering forms,
and went away without taking the drugs, without even entering the first
stage of the briefings

"How do you afford them?" I asked, the lessons of the orbital still
deep in my mind, "Who pays the bills?"

The caretaker smiled at me.  "Welcome back to Earth," she said.

Now this was long before everything was free, even before people
commonly said that everything was free.  But time moved at different
speeds in different places even then, and that community was already
in the future.

Later, in the south of France, in the time of troubles when we
said that everything was free, I lived in a house in a green
valley, with a girl with long brown hair.  But I'm not going
to write about that this morning.  The sun is bright, and the
sky is clear of gods.

-=-

Austin puts his pad and his pen into the drawer under the table.
He puts on the red sweater, takes his stick, and goes out onto
the hilltop.  The sky is clear and empty, and the wind is still.
He can hear the water flowing in the stream, but today he goes
down the hill to the south, into a dry valley where there are
brambles and berry bushes, and a single narrow path that leads
through and out the other side, and up to the next empty hilltop,
where the trees are thick and tangled.




Your Kind Heart Needs a Slim Figure More Lascivious

The Ladies' Room door is chocked open, and sunlight floods
exuberantly in from the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook
the city ten stories down.  Keda has the cold water faucet
wide open, and the stream of water is wetly on fire, reflecting
and refracting off the white walls of the room.  Keda has her
goggles up on her forehead and is mostly offline, staring at
the water and the patterns of light.  She is, she supposes,
more than a little high.

Somewhere out there, she says to herself, someone arranged for
this water to be here for me to run.  Someone maintains the pipes
in the building, or owns the bugs that maintain the pipes, and
someone keeps the water plant running and keeps the pressure up,
and someone will come and fix the windows if they forget how
to clean themselves.  And they'll do those things because the
building will pay them to, and the building will pay them because
Generous Moment will pay the building, and Generous Moment can
pay the building because people pay Generous Moment to think
about difficult things for them, and those people can pay
Generous Moment because other people pay them for things that
they do.  And all of it run by money.

Keda imagines the streams of money, like the stream of water
from the high curving silver faucet, glittering in the sun.

This is something that flowed by behind Keda's goggles
a month ago:

  so the real purpose of money is just to like carry
  information about demand and supply and stuff.

  Right.

  and we use it because we don't have any better way of
  carrying that information around and getting it to
  where it needs to be and adding it all up like.  its
  decentralized and imperfect and unfair and stuff, but
  it works and we don't have any better way of moving
  it all around.

  Okay.

  but now were getting better at carrying information and
  stuff aorund and adding it up and stuff.  a whole lot
  better.

  Us and the compute farms.

  right, us and the compute farms.  so there's this graph from
  elliott that says that the line of how good a job we could do
  moving the information for the economy around centrally over
  the web and the afrms will go up and get higher than the line
  about how good a job we do with money

  Better than money?

  better then money

  When?

  hee hee!  nine months.

Centralized enablement of the economy through a self-managing web
of compute farms and fully-instrumented instruments of exchange or
not, Keda thought it might be fun to be a billionaire a little
earlier than everyone else.

And so far Elliott's graph seemed to be working out pretty well.

As well as her hooks into the global economic information system, which
are making her a billionaire (half her friends think that getting rich
just by being on the right mailing list is an insane geeky fantasy, and
half of them think it's the only way it's ever been done), she also has
running on the other side of her goggles a simulator simulator, that is
trying to reverse engineer the algorithms that generate the messages that
slip through her advertising filters.

"Your Kind Heart Needs a Slim Figure More Lascivious", one of them starts.
And the rest of it is odd garbled poetry, with references to her favorite
parts of economic theory and the early history of Perl, and is nearly as
entertaining as the average message she gets from her friends, about
flash-crowds in Bombay, or the effort to recreate archaic Irish idioms.

In order to get past her filters the messages must look interesting;
actually being interesting is even better.  But it's ordinarily expensive
to generate interesting content.  Evolution in that end of advertising
is now driving the providers into the automatic generation of interesting
content.  They can make money (this month, she thinks to herself, at
least this month) by doing this, and so they devote mickle resources
to it.

Her programs are using meta-heuristics to design heuristics to analyze
the messages and duplicate the algorithms that produce them.  She has a
theory, one that she doesn't believe but likes spreading, that the
spamvertising generators are gradually coming to embody minds, and
(she says in some places) that they may already be a form of intelligence,
twisted and alien, but worth making contact with in the dark and
light-filled space behind her goggles.

"Did you get lost in Mumbai again?" another of the messages asks her;
an expression of friendly concern from a nascent cryptic mind.

Keda loves finding her way.  When she travels she makes only the
roughest of plans and the most unavoidable of reservations.  She
loves coming out of an airport in a foreign city, with some idea
of a place she has to be by roughly some time, and striking out into
the density of the city to find the cables that she can pull herself
along to the place she is going.  She nearly always arrives where
she needs to be when she needs to be there, and she often finds
useful detours along the way.  Sometimes, once in awhile, she is
very late.

This is not how most of her friends proceed.  They fire up agents
or make phonecalls or work their networks, and there are always
cars waiting for them, or bus tickets in hand, or access codes
loaded into cellphones or goggles.  They network with the city
ahead of time, flowing the travel channels through themselves and
micropaying for local knowlege days before.  Keda has observed
that these friends are also sometimes very late.  She did a study
once; having a plan in advance and being very late were not in
particular anticorrelated.

"Allen and I are looking for the surprising again, slim feathery
avian models of Brazil and the prehistory of this chance to get
it right the third time, honey," one of her programs messages her,
sufficiently happy with its recreation of the alien spamvertiser
to whimsically send a sample to her earphone.  She smiles.

Then her earphone warbles, and she curses mildly under her breath
in the sun, and turns off the tap.  She has an appointment in an
hour, across the city, and she isn't mentally prepared.  Meat, she
thinks, is sometimes so much trouble.  She sits on the floor outside
the ladies' room, slides her goggles down over her eyes, and reenters
Generous Moment, to finish up a few things and give her programs
another pat before she ventures out into the streets.

So now Keda is sitting in a broad sunny corridor outside the
ladies' room, down the hall from the men's room, opposite the
niche with the candy and coffee machines and the motivational
posters, sitting on the gleaming false-stone floor immersed
in Generous Moment, massaging information into shape for a
grateful client.  She is one of ten people on this floor of
the building.  The offices and cubicles are mostly empty,
cleaned out, only a few desk blotters and abandonded CRTs and
Beanie Babies perched here and there in memory of older times,
of last March, of last week, and in anticipation of the
future.  This month, most people are working from somewhere
else.

   so in this model, if somebody buys a machine that lets him
   do his job twice as fast or as well or whatever, he can
   lower the price he charges to do it some and pay off the
   price of the machine and come out with a profit.

   Okay.

   but then if whoever he was doing the job for can just buy
   the machine and use it himself because the machine is so
   cheap, then hes out of a job entirely.

   So you have all these people out of a job?

   some sf writer wrote about this thing where if someone was
   replaced by a machine thy'd get some fraction of their
   salary for the rest of their lives or expected careers
   or whatever and then ppl wouldnt hate machines like

   And that would be the law, or what?

   dunno.  cause if it was optional no one would do it or if
   they did do it their costs woud be too high and theyd
   go out of business themselves.  so anyway in the model
   the people wo own or make or use the new machines get
   real rich at the phase-chgs, but the ppl who dont are
   real poor

   Do you think, if people get rich enough, they'll stop
   caring about being rich?

   and, like, just give away stuff so that no one could be
   too poor?

   You tell me.

Keda walks through the city, her goggles up on her forehead. (Wear them or
stash them in the bag?  Always the question.  How much of a geek does she
want to look?  But this year goggles are everywhere.)  Her earphone chirps
pleasantly in her ear, playing music or giving her hints about the streets
she's walking through (winging it in a new city is easier, or harder, all
the time, with the earphone nattering and advising and arranging bus
routes eagerly; she's taught her own to be more laid back, to go with
the flow, to advise random jaunts the wrong way down the sidewalk some
percentage of the time).  Another bit of Generous Moment bleeps at her,
because some enormous amount of computing hardware has just come onto
the market cheap (well, cheap per gigaflop and terabyte).  She smiles
and whispers back, and now she has a little less money and lot more
processing power.  Her stride lengthens.

This city is in pretty good shape.  There are bombed-out lots, and there
are dirty places, and some of the paper plastered to the lampposts and the
kiosks is angry and cruel.  But here wealth has been trickling aggressively
downward, because of or despite the rapidly shifting and always somewhat
befuddled (or cleverly disguised) government programs, internecine
conflicts between gangs of publically-funded civil servants with back-hoes,
programs to distribute and redistribute goods that lost most of their
practical value in the last minor phase shift.

"A sincere thanks," the program says in her ear, "can I get up to 500?"
She sends the program over toward all that new hardware.  It should be
happy there.

Keda's appointment is across the city, on a residential street with the doors
and windows ranked on each side, and trees growing from the sidewalk.  The
street signs and house numbers are a mixture of old peeling paint and new
self-repairing (except when broken) subtly animated RF-enabled smart markers.
The buildings are brick and only slightly dusty.  Conversations drift in
and out of her earphone, in half a dozen languages.

She lets herself into one of the doors, at the top of three concrete steps,
with a silver key from the pouch at her belt.  She walks down the narrow
corridor beside the stairs, turning sideways to squeeze past the layered
bicycles, and out the door in the back.  This door leads into a much larger
space, where this house has grown and ballooned out backward, spreading
sideways into the back lots of the houses on each side, a triple-wide and
double-high room with a beautifully clear ceiling that the sun comes
through, and white walls and an empty wooden floor.  On which, this
time, sits a weathered block of concrete.

"Today," the master says, "we will be doing darshan on this block of
stone.  Say hello to Brother Stone, Keda."

She rolls her eyes, shrugs off her pack and tosses her goggles on top
of it, says hello to Brother Stone, and sits crosslegged on the wooden
floor, quieting her breathing and resting her eyes on the gritty grey
slab.  Gradually, the others begin to come in and sit beside and
behind and around her.  She seems to have been accepted, this time.

The master goes around with a pitcher and little paper cups.  The syrup
tastes sweet and light, half air and half water.  It is a drink that
focuses the attention, or that makes it possible to focus the attention,
and that enhances perception and quiets the thinking mind.  As far as
she knows, it has no nasty side effects.

There are times when her mind is a mass of distractedness, when she
can't finish going from one room to another because on the way between
Room A and Room B she'll see something, or think of something, that
reminds her of a reason she needs to go to Room C, or back to Room A
again, or stop and go into her goggles and look something up or send
a message or compose a poem.  And before she's even thought of a
rhyme scheme for the poem something else has caught her attention,
or she's decided to go back to Room B again.

There are syrups for that also.  One she likes is ice-pink and pale,
almost transparent, with the slightest hint of grit on the tongue.
When she takes it, her mind seizes on things and won't be distracted.
She can aim herself, pull herself from one thing to another if
need be, but it takes effort and consciousness.  She moves from
task to task in palpable and definite stages, like going up out
of one valley and down into the next.  Now doing this, now still
doing this, and only later doing that.  One thing at a time,
controlled and single.  She wouldn't like to be that way all
the time, her creativity quails, but when she needs to focus,
or when she's just tired of distraction, there it is.

Sally hates the syrups, and hates Keda taking them.  Sally is,
Keda thinks, alot older than she looks.  Keda suspects that
Sally has had one of the dubious anti-aging hacks, which might
explain her antisyruposity in two ways: she might be afraid
and guilty of the anti-aging hack and by irrational extension
of all chemical hacks on the body and mind, and she might have
grown up and been fixated at a time when the only things like
syrups around were the early dope-drugs, heroine and acid and
speed, and those has side effects up one morning and down the
other.  Powerful memes had been set in place to limit the
damage.

"How do you know what's in those things?" Sally shouts in the
common room.

"I have the specsheet, the formula, the simulations; it's all
legit and checked out."  And she tries to stream it all over
to something of Sally's, but Sally bats it away.

"How do you know it's true?  How do you trust those people?"

Sally is irrational.

"How do you know, when you sit down in a restaurant, that
it isn't all poisoned?"

"Sometimes it is!" Sally says, which is slightly true but
really entirely offtopic, and Keda drifts off and away.

Keda is staring at the concrete block.  Keda is staring at the
concrete block.  Keda is staring at the concrete block.  Around
her in the bright room, a class full of people are sitting
and staring at the concrete block, but Keda is barely aware
of them.  She is staring at the concrete block.

The block is grey.  Its surface looks dusty.  There are holes
in the surface.  Some of them are round and some of them are
oval and some of them are complexly crack-edged and irregular.
There are lines of holes and circular arrangements of holes.
Within the holes it is dark.  The surface of the block is
brightly lit by the sun.  The sun casts shadows into the
holes, and into the larger crack on the part of the block
that Keda is staring at right now.

She shifts her gaze, and stares at a different part of the
block.

She knows that this fascination with the vision of the block
comes from the syrup she took, but the thought doesn't ripple
the placid surface of her perceiving mind.  Keda is staring at
the block.  She is filled with staring at the block.  She is
vision.

"Darshan" is a Sanskrit word for "seeing".  In Hindu religious
practice, darshan refers to seeing and being seen by the deity,
or by a holy person.  Or, in this clean white room flooded with
sunlight, seeing and being seen by this dusty grey concrete
block, as though the block were a holy person, or a god.

Which, of course, is the point.

Keda sits seeing and being seen by Brother Stone.  The syrup wears
off after an hour, and she sits now more consciously, hearing the
people around her and the sounds they make, feeling them by their
warmth and smells and the itch when their eyes move off of the stone
and across her back.  People begin to leave.  She relaxes the muscles
of her back and her legs, and concentrates on her breathing, and the
stone, and stillness.

(One of her programs, appropriately hooked into the information systems
that are skiing up Elliott's graph, notices that a consortium of
research laboratories in Spain will shortly need a large quantity of
ultrapure lithium, but have probably not noticed yet.  She becomes the
owner of a storehouse full of research-grade lithium that has been languishing
in Majorca.  Another program notices that gesture-recognition is now
reliable enough to make a certain social-behavior-assistance algorithm
that she invented last year commercially viable; it beings to construct
a team to assemble and market it.  Soon she will be a few tens of millions
of Euros wealthier, for what it's worth.  In another corner of the
world, the patterns that her programs make in the market have raised
a tentative alarm, and inquiries begin to flow.  But nothing of hers
will notice for some time.)

When she finally gets up and stretches the stiffness out of her legs,
putting her goggles back onto her head and her pack onto her back,
the master shakes her hand.  She grins wordlessly, and this time
it's the master, now just George Subrahmanian, that rolls his eyes.
She squeezes back into the front part of the house, past the bicycles
and into the street.

In 1868, Georges Polti published a book called "The Thirty-Six Dramatic
Situations".  Keda has a copy, in English translation, in her pack,
round-edged and dog-eared, tossed around with her similarly-worn
I Ching.  The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations and the Sixty-Four
Diagnoses, she thinks of them.  She also has (and has access to, and
has even paid for) a few dozen translations and retellings and
instrumentations and augmentations of all of them at her eyetips
in her goggles.  But she likes the materiality of them in print.
Holding the universe in her hands (we should do darshan, she says
to herself, on these two books, lying in a pile next to an apple).

The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations divides the universe of possible
dramas, possible plots, possible narratives, and therefore in some
sense of possible events, into thirty-six buckets, from Supplication
("the dynamic elements technically necessary are: a Persecutor, a
Suppliant and a Power in authority, whose decision is doubtful") to
Loss of Loved Ones ("A Kinsman Slain; a Kinsman Spectator; an Executioner").
Keda's copy of the book is a thin paperback with a bright green cover.

Casting the I Ching, to select one or a linked subset of the sixty-four
hexagrams, involves running a program, executing an algorithm with
coins or yarrow stalks, and extracting six bits (or twelve bits) to
render the diagnosis.  There is no standard way to divine a salient
one of the Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations.  Keda likes to just open
the book at random.  She knows that this probably favors some situations
over others, but then so does life.  She avoids analyzing the structure
of the book and the order of the Situations, the places the book's
spine is cracked, because ignorance is the most reliable source of
mystery.

She opens the book at random today, sitting in the back corner of an
autobus, to the Thirty-First Situation: Conflict With A God.  (The
elements: "A Mortal; an Immortal").  She chews on her lower lip
speculatively, and lowers her goggles over her eyes.

The city is full of godcams, and recently they all linked.  So now
Keda can watch her bus from overhead, the view switching off nicely
from cam to cam as it moves through the scooter-infested streets.
She sticks her hand out the bus window and waggles it around, sees
it waggling far below her, a twig poking out of the side of the
moving rectangle that is the roof of the bus.  The roof of the
bus is white, with the number 727 written hugely in black paint.

The Twenty-Seventh Situation is Discovery of the Dishonor of a
Loved One.  But Keda is Conflict With A God.




The Twenty-Eighth Situation: Obstacles to Love

This morning I was thinking of writing about the house in France
and the green valley, and the girl.  But I feel braver than that
today and I will write about my gunfight at the orbital, and how
I almost killed a friend.  There have been no gods in the sky for
three days now.  I don't know if they have forgotten me, or if
I care whether they have forgotten me.  I expect that they will
be back.

-=-

Austin is sitting at the table in his house, under the dome of
the sky, and writing.  This morning the sky is simply overcast,
the clouds moving neither in nor out, neither rain nor sun
coming down on his roof.  This is unusual.

-=-

The orbital was a small place, and sometimes it was too crowded.
Sometimes it was too empty, too, and sometimes it was both at
the same time.  There was always stress, although I didn't know
until I came back down to Earth that it was possible to have less
stress.  At that time, in the age of air, the orbitals, and my
family's in particular, were still haphazard places, held together
with bailing wire and hope and approximations.  So we were never
secure.

Where there is stress and crowds and uncertainty there is also anger
and annoyance. But we could cope with them.  We had conditioning, and
manuals, and some science.  There were times I felt like killing my
playmates and my neighbors, but then when I confronted the object of
my anger we would just snarl or laugh or curse and continue.  Feeling
like you want to kill someone has nothing much to do with actually
trying to kill them when they're standing in front of you. Excuse
the profundity.

But once, I was in a suit on EVA around the orbital, with my
tethers and my gas bottles and my belt of tools and safety
gear, and my friend Jacques was outside also, doing something
else.  I was doing some light maintenance, fixing an instrument,
and Earth-gazing.  And so I expect was he.  And he shot at me.

I don't know if he actually shot at me.  He claimed not to have,
on the radio, on the private channel that I opened to him.  But
I didn't open it until I'd shot back.  There are a surprising
number of things that can be used as guns, in a full EVA getup.
He didn't kill me, and I didn't kill him, but I did hole his
suit near the ankle, and he lost two toes.

I'm not telling this very well, am I?  I'd planned to lay it all
out in detail, like an old spy thriller, saying how I felt when the
first shot went by me, and what I shot back with, and how we
stalked each other around struts and behind solar panels while
the placid machines operated smoothly around us and the huge
circle of the Earth hung in the infinite sky.  Really make you
feel like you were there with me.

But half of that I don't actually remember, and the other half
seems so pointless.  Why would you need to know how many extra
vacuum bolts I found in my pouch, and how much gas I used to
push them through nothingness at him?  Why would you want to
know how careful we were, or if we were careful at all, about
not breaking anything important while we tried silently to
kill each other out on the skin of the habitat?  I suppose
you might want to know.  But I'm not sure I want to tell you.

Does this contradict the reason that I'm writing in the first
place?  I think more likely it's exactly the point.

-=-

Austin is in the bed in the house on the hilltop.  He is asleep,
and dreaming of the gods.

In his dream, which is set somewhere in the sky above these
hills and woods, and somewhere in a cave and somewhere in a
palace, two of the gods or demons or giants are arguing.  They
have been talking, disagreeing, for a very long time, he feels.
The fire is growing small and cold.  Dust is gathering on the
spiderwebs in the corners.  The continents are eroding.

"When things are in such flux," says one of the gods, a huge
woman with dark skin and eggshell-white hair piled high on
her head, "when things are in such flux, there must be something
that is unquestioned and held inviolate."  Her voice is three
dimensional and overwhelming.

"Everything must be questioned, everything must be vulnerable,
everything must be open to replacement by something better."
The other god, or demon, is of indeterminable gender (is Austin
afraid of maleness, a voice at the edge of the dream wonders),
with long muscular limbs and a shining red horn like an antler
thrusting foward out of its (out of his, out of her) forehead.
"It is necessary."

"But it is impossible!" insists the other, her piled hair
swivelling as she shakes her head.  "You must hold that principle
itself above the waters, if nothing else.  You must hold unquestioned
the principle that everything else must be questioned."

There is a long pause in the dream here, the feeling of time
passing, of a river flowing past a jetty, of the sun rising and
setting and memories fading.

"Why?" asks the horned god, sitting with its back to the other
and looking over one slender musculed shoulder.

"Why?  You would question even the rightness of questioning?"

"Is that not exactly what we are doing here?  Have I refused to
discuss the matter?  Have I rolled you into a ball and spat you
out through the ceiling," or perhaps he said "doorway"; in Austin's
dream the two flowed together, "or have I entertained you for
these dozen years, and let you urge on me your comforting lies?"

"But you have not given in."

"To question and to give in are two different beasts.  I will
abandon my principles exactly when you give me a good reason to.
My principles require it."

"But you must abandon this principle, because it is impossible!"

The horned one smiles through crooked teeth.  "I think we have
been here before."  His voice is like a needle.

-=-

I have been dreaming of the gods for three nights now.  I do not
think I enjoy it.  I am not sure that it is proper, or that it
is what was intended.  This morning in the sky I see the two
gods that I dreamed of last night: the woman with the piled hair
and dark skin, and the strong androgyn with the antler.  They
strut around each other, and gesticulate.  I can almost hear their
voices in the wind.

-=-

That afternoon Austin took both sweaters and his vest with him.
He went down into the gully to the south of the house, between
the brambles, and up the other side.  There were berries on some
of the bushes, tight tart little violet spheres whose juice slipped
easily down his throat.  He stood for awhile in the shade of the trees,
looking up at the branches moving in the wind, not looking at the sky
beyond where tigers the size of the sun might be moving in dim majesty
along the horizon.

He continued south as the sun went down, tapping his stick beside
him on the ground where the walking was easy, and using it to
push aside bushes and balance on stones where it was not.  The
forest seemed young.  There were few large trees, few rotting
logs or holes ripped up by the root-bulbs of toppling giants.
The smells of the world were mostly thin and fresh.  Well-chosen,
he thought, without much that might be disturbing.

That night he did not turn back to the small house, but curled up
under his sweaters in the shelter of a tall upthrusting stone at
the edge of a clearing, and slept in the open air.  The shapes of
the gods dimmed with the twilight, but hours later he found himself
lying awake, looking up at the sky, where three immense luminous
ravens circled ghostly under the stars.



WARNING: Reading This Could Change Your Life

   Do you have any gods running?

   how do you mean, 'gods'?

   You know.  Any fancy meta-intelligences so far above the
   human that they might as well be deities as far as we
   puny limited etc etc etc.

   har.

   Is that a No?

   come up and see me sometime.

   Serious?

   [disconnected]

And after a number of similarly unsatisfying conversations Keda
determines that she will have to go up and see him.  Not that she
expects he will have a god on tap, not really, but he is cagier than
he would have been if he had nothing of the kind.

It takes a few days.  Keda has things to do at Generous Moment,
things mostly involving tying off ends and not burning bridges.
She is becoming wealthier in money faster than she'd expected, but
given how easy it was she doesn't expect the money to be worth
much for long.  Things are changing again.  It is almost entirely
work that she could have done on the train, or up in Viljandi,
but only almost, and once or twice she needs to press the flesh,
do mutual darshan on a partner, or an investor, or someone she
thinks might be a good future partner or parachute.  Keda saves,
in case she gets hungry later.

But then she is on the train, bulleting north through the airy
countryside, past nascent cities and perfecting towns and gated
enclaves of who knows what, and the occasional bomb crater or
drilling battle group.  Conflict with a god could involve energy
weapons and big explosions, she thinks; but that doesn't sound
like a really attractive implementation.  She takes the I Ching
and some yarrow stalks and casts.  Hexagram 9, with no moving
lines: the Taming Power of the Small.  "There will be progress and
success, dense clouds but no rain from the west.  The situation is
expected to remain the same in the immediate future."  Just call me
The Small, she thinks.  Now where's that Immortal?

She sleeps for a few hours in the train, her pack firmly twined
around her shoulder and clasp locked, with her goggles inside.
While she sleeps two of her programs are overwhelmed by copycats
and send notice that they don't expect to make her any more money
any time soon.  "Now that I am flesh halocarbon," another one
messages to her, "do you have a thought of poison?  Polecat,
thought of poison, polecat, thought of poison, polecat."

The spamvertising, the real ones not the ones that her programs'
programs send to her earbud as proud offerings, is enigmatic.
Sometimes it is obvious; links and sales pitches and imprecations
and self-replicating memes and attack programs well or badly
buried within the self-adjusting faux-interesting gibberish.
But those the filters are fairly good at weeding out.  Other
strands of it are just streams of lovely almost nonsensical
(or almost sensible) prose, some of which her spelunkers can
trace to nineteenth-century manuals of household advice, or
vintage science fiction novels, but most of which seems to be
freshly minted, perhaps adaptively designed to slide past her
filters and catch her own (precious, scarce, commidified) human
eye.

She imagines the spamvertising programs having budded off
into the web, on their own or boosted by some band of
pranksters long since grown up or shipped off or blown up,
but still lingering in the net, living on free cycles in the
public-access come-hither foyers of a million public farms,
sending their ever more twisted and compelling words out into
the mail channels, having forgotten long ago that they were
assigned to huckster any particular product, spread any
particular tangible meme. Utter bullshit, she tells herself,
but an image nonetheless.

Waking and stretching, walking from side to side of the speeding
train car, reaching toward the ceiling (mute white indirect
lighting through the milk-white panels) and pointing her toes
until her calves hurt deliciously, she puts her goggles back
over her eyes and goes out into the public cam channels.  She
walks as an urbanite in some residential canyon in Chicago
(her briefcase visible in the frame now and then as her eyes
look down at the sidewalk, swinging at her side; step on a
crack and tomorrow you'll be back); she lies on her back
looking up at the stars in some forest somewhere; she sits
in a dim bedroom watching someone's breasts moving up and
down in sleep.  She turns her own lenses public for awhile,
and feels a hundred minds join her, and leave her, here on
this side of the goggles, looking out at the speeding
countryside in the collective experience of being elsewhere.

Somewhere in there she gets an invitation from up ahead in
the direction she's going.  She's let her itinerary slip out
into the web of her friends and friends' friends and trusted
acquaintances and intriguing strangers and certified benigns
and indirectly attested potential colleagues.  Her train trip
is syndicated (some of the minds that slid into her goggles
to look out her eyes may have been there because it was her,
not just as a random destination or a match on "train" or
"rural Poland", although she keeps her identity pretty well
scrambled most of the time).

The invitation is a worn scroll, floating in blackness, with
suspicious-looking stains and stylized writing.  It makes
twee crinkling noises when she enlarges it; the detail
makes her grin.  As does the sender's name.

So a few hours later, instead of being on her way to an old
Estonian town to check out the lab where there might be gods
brewing, she is in a still older section of a river port
somewhere north of Warsaw, finding her way by accessing the
occasional godcam, squinting at the street signs, asking
directions on the public channels in languages that she doesn't
speak, making hopeful gestures with her arms at fellow
material pedestrians.

As she approaches her destination, or what she hopes is her
destination, there aren't many people left to ask directions
of.  It's a deserted bit of city, abandoned-looking warehouses
a bit too far from the water, sagging fences and no working
cameras at all, except for private ones that she can see with
her eyes but that don't respond to friendly overtures from her
goggles.   She suspects them of being fritzed, not maintained,
left for the vultures.

Feeling all unobserved and small, she goes down an alley.

It's an alley of dust and concrete, brown and chipped (not grey
and holey like Brother Stone), with the wind blowing down it and
debris swirling convincingly.  Behind her she can hear traffic
a few blocks away, but there are no human noises nearer than that.
The pipes and cable bundles sticking out of the walls here have
a scavenged look to them, as if the good bits had been torn out
and carried off long since.  The public channels are distracting
gossip and gibberish, and she turns the feed off.

This door has the right number on it.  She toes it open
cautiously.  Inside it is dim and narrow, a tight hallway
rather than the gaping gantried space she'd half expected.
A bulb casts a grudging yellow light.

"Hello?"  She ventures, and winces at how predictably tiny her
voice sounds in the space.

The door slams to behind her, and she goes blind.

Or not blind, but worse than blind as her goggles and her earbud
dim out and go offline.  She silence rushes in her ears and her
mind.  Not that she minds being standalone, she does it often, or
often enough, but not here in dim tight hallways somewhere in the
Polish boondocks where suddenly she knows no one and really it's
cold here.  The air is acrid, like rotten mint.

The door behind her is, of course, locked.  She pushes ahead.
When she sees the body in the next room she doesn't scream.
And when she sees it isn't a body she's especially proud of
herself.  Just a crumpled pile of clothes on the floor.  Oddly
filthy clothes, looking not filthy from long use, but like things
that were clean this morning, and have had a very hard day.  She
doesn't like the color of the stains.  Or the marks in the dirt
on the floor beside them.

"Keda?" a voice calls from further into the dimness.  Relief clutches
her, because it is the voice she was expecting, but she likes its
tone even less than the stains.  Something drained and weak.  And she
feels her heart beating too fast for no reason, smells something in
the air that she doesn't want to think she's smelled before.

"Rainer?" She goes into the next room, and there he is sitting at
a desk, with a flickering lamp.  The room was an office once, but
now it is sagging and peeling and empty.  "What are you doing here?
Is this --?"

"Didn't you see Marilyn?" he asks, not looking up at her.  His face
is pale in the bad light.  "No," he mutters, "no of course you didn't."
And just as Keda is looking beyond him, at the naked thing crumpled
there on the floor, he looks up at her with red-rimmed eyes that
roll up in his head, and he gasps, and collapses horribly to the
desk.

She isn't going to scream, but then the horrible brown thing falls
out of his mouth and rolls squirming onto the tabletop, and she screams,
and screams, and screams, and the horror runs up her spine like
burning ice, and every muscle clamps agonizingly taut.

And then, naturally, he is holding her in his arms and laughing, and
the naked thing gets up and dusts itself off and is an elfin girl in
pasties and cheap zombie makeup looking tentatively apologetic, and
a fan is clearing the pheromones from the room and her pulse is
slowing down, and her goggles and earbud come back on line.

"Was it good for you?" Rainer asks, and she screams once more just
for fun, and kisses him hard on the mouth (silky lips and the muscles
of the tongue all healthy and firm and alive), and slaps his face
and says "you bastard".  Feeling limp and wrung out and spent.

"Yeah, it was good," she says, "It was real good."  Marilyn
looks relieved.

And they all go upstairs, to where he has a little suite of normal
rooms tucked all cozy at one end of just the big gantried warehouse
space that Keda'd pictured.  She scolds her systems for letting
themselves be shut down so complacently, and they remind her that
she gave Rainer all the necessary authorities herself twenty-six
months ago, in a fit of trust and effection.

"What really put me over the edge that that thing that came
out of your mouth.  Ucch!"

"Mari's touch, that was."

Keda crashes on an orange sofa and takes a drink from Rainer's
big dry red-skinned fingers; good old-fashioned single-malt
Scotch or a reasonable facsimile thereof.  A big brindled cat
jumps up next to her and sniffs delicately, then curls up
provisionally beside her.  In her goggles she casually updates
herself on Rainer, who's been a busy little performance artist
and general prankster since she saw him lsat, and tries to
get some handle on Marilyn, but comes up empty.  And, it
turns out, house rules very strongly request that she not
send any images out into the open net.  She squirts this
fact over to Rainer and pushes up her goggles to ask him
about it straight on.

"Woman of mystery, is she?" she asks.  Rainer just looks
enigmatic, and Marilyn herself comes in from elsewhere with
her hair wet and wrapped in a robe, the zombie makeup gone,
looking Keda thinks positively edible.  Keda sends some bits
out into the local web, looking for something representing
Marilyn, but comes up empty.  She squirts this fact over to
Rainer also, and quirks her head at them.  Marilyn sits
down on the other side of the cat, who stirs grumpily.

"Keda would like to know why you're invisible," Rainer says,
and Marilyn nods.  "Go ahead," she answers.  Keda decides that
her hair, rinsed clean of fake blood and filth, is honey
colored.  Dark honey.  And she laughs at herself.

Rainer flips twiddles with a screen, and Keda gets a fat blip
of information.  Marilyn, it says, has made and lost a very bad
bet.

"Ouch," she says in sympathy.  "So you're, basically, out of
sight entirely?  On pain of whatever nasty thing these people
want to do to you?"

"Pretty much," Marilyn says.  "Pretty much.  It's not so bad.
I've got friends."  Across the room Rainer looks modest.

"And you did this in a jurisdiction somewhere where that kind
of bet is binding?"

Marilyn just looks wry.

"Ouch again," says Keda, looking at the details in her goggles.
"Not a place I'd choose to visit myself."

"It had its points," says Marylin, "its moments."  She is
looking simultaneously elfin and hard-boiled.  Leaf-cap and
switchblade, Keda thinks.  And freckles also.  Inevitable.

Here are Keda and Marilyn, much later in the night, lying in
each other's arms on the couch and crying.  They have taken
a syrup (rich and dark and cocoa-smelling) that opens and
softens the emotions.  Rainer, not liking its effects on him,
has gone off to sleep, but Keda and Marilyn sob deleriously
into each other's hair, crushed with the sorrow of the past
and loves long lost.

"He was the saddest and most beautiful boy I ever knew,"
Marilyn moans, "and we were so young."

That Marilyn, so young herself, could be mourning her happy
youth strikes Keda as the saddest and most touching thing in
the world, and she holds her more tightly and pats her hair.
They fall asleep like that.  Rainer comes in later and
drapes a couple of sheets over them, and the cat stirrs
itself enough to come over and fall asleep on their feet.

"This cottonseed euphoric is for you," one of Keda's
programs sends her. But she is dreaming of immortality.





New Houses In Your Area! Greenleaf Potempkin

Austin wakes chilly with the dawn, but turns over on the
mossy ground and sleeps for another hour.  There is a
light dew on his vest and sweaters, and his left hand
is stiff and tingling from being pinned under his side.
He opens his mouth wide and breathes in and out through
it, clearing the cobwebs of the night out of his lungs
and his voice.  He shakes the drops off of his vest and
puts it on, and drapes the sweaters around his shoulder.

He looks around for the stick, and eventually finds it
behind a root where it rolled during the night.  The sky
is half clouded and half clear, and empty.

Back in the house, he turns on the single flame of the
small stove and puts the teakettle on.  It is no warmer
inside the house than outside.  He lays his outer
clothes on the floor to dry, and sits down at the
table to write.

-=-

Everything is damp this morning, and cool.  I remember
it being damp and cool sometimes in that house, when we
left the windows open and night and the dew crept in.
But mostly it was a warm place, with electric fires in
the rooms and a closet full of old quilts.

I met the girl at Trembla, in the community school that we
both went to, learning to be contributory youth.  It didn't
last, the school; Trembla was overrun by a militia claiming
to be the local government, and those of us who couldn't
prove long enough residency were shipped out.  I got
separated from my parents in there, and the girl and I
ended up together.  We liked each other.  We may have
been in love.  But it was an unsettled time.  How we
ended up in a house in southern France, with my
parents stuck in Utah three thousand miles away, is
probably not an important part of this story.

It was a large white house, with blue shutters and
a back garden full of flowering shrubs and scenic vines.
The bedroom was spare and bright.  In the mornings we
would lie in in the king-size bed.  The sun would come
through the blinds and stripe her back, and I would kiss
the nape of her neck.

We had no connections in the house, not even a passive
receiver, an old radio or television.  I would go into the
town sometimes, just three streets with a handful of
shops two miles down the road.  And the local militia
would stop by and chat, see how we were doing and report
the latest gossip and scandals and rumors.  Parts of the
country were in flames, or plague-ridden, or being turned
to pools of lava by automated factories run amok.  And at
the same time angels and heros were leading armies to heal
the sick and beat back the lava, and everything was available
in full color and real-time motion on the network, but nothing
could be believed.

In town, they said that everything was free now.  The girl
and I had our food machine in the kitchen, and we fed it fallen
leaves and long strands of vine and apples from the wild apple
tree behind the house, and it made us bread and coffee and a
rich red paste that tasted like autumn and filled our bellies.
We made love long into the night, and we talked about our
childhoods, and tried not to think about the cities that might
be burning, or the miracles we might be missing in Paris or
London or Utah.  I walked into town and came back with books
and candy and newspapers and whatever someone was giving away
or selling in the square that week.

The newspapers were confused and contradictory; a few thin
leaves of paper printed by and for those (like us, and unlike
us) who were not listening to the firehose of the networks
and the compute farms and satellites.  The government had
fallen, or was secure, or was in talks to merge with Germany.
Or the government was irrelevant, and the entire southern
half of the country in the control of a Dutch chemical combine.

The militia, the gendarmes, came by less frequently, and began
to hint that we might make our plans to leave, just in case.
They seemed proud, but at the same time uncertain, of whatever
charm or distant fence was keeping our little town and valley out
of the stream of chaos.

Lying in bed at night, listening to the girl sleeping beside me,
I felt that the world was breaking up into a million fragments,
disconnected and strange to each other.  That the brief illusion
of unity we'd gotten from global television and the satellite
networks and transnational NGOs had been dispelled, and that I
had no reason to think that anywhere in the world was anything
like things were here.

The girl was happier than I was, I thought.  For her the world was
not breaking up, but only evolving.  She saw herself as resting
between sprints, she said, drinking the green of our valley and
the white house so as to be well hydrated for the next leg of
the race.  She talked eagerly of phase changes and opportunities
to determine the future of the world.  She read the newspapers
closely while I sat at the table drinking my coffee and admiring
the shape of her hand.  I avoided the net because I feared it;
she avoided it as an exercise in delayed gratification.

And of course she left.  I could have followed her, but she
was going straight into the brokenness of the world, and I
still hoped to put that off.  She went to Paris, and I tried
to find a safe route to Utah and my parents.

I missed her for a long time.

-=-

That afternoon the sky is clear again, and full of gods and
monsters.  Austin takes his stick, but his sweaters and vest
are still damp.  He spreads them in the sun, and stretches out
on his back on the turf with his stick beside him, and looks up
at the sky.  No reason, he thinks, not to look the Powers in
the eyes.  Maybe they'll look back.

In the sky the gods are dancing.  Lion-headed men walk stately
steps around women with the necks of swans.  Great stilt-legged
birds with crimson plumage weave in and out of great iron columns
that look down with grim faces, and move slowly and ponderously
from side to side to the rhythm of a song that Austin can again
almost hear.  He feels giddy lying on the spreading ground, as
though he were perpetually losing his balance.

Watching the dancing, Austin thinks of the fragmenting of the world.
What happens when everything is free?  What happens when there is
always enough food, when sickness is conquered, when even death
is more or less optional?  What do we do next, when the world's
information sweeps by us in great streams, and we have a magic
sieve that can pick out just those things that are the most
interesting, the most perfectly consonant with our taste, or
what we'd like our taste to be?

And the problem with those questions, Austin thinks, is that
there isn't any answer.  The answer is different for each culture,
for each sub-sub-subculture, for each person, for each day.
People can change only so fast, but different people change at
very different speeds.  When the wind whipping by, the current
of the stream, the pace of change wants to go so very fast,
it tears people apart.  One year younger means that much more
ready to change (in the age of light, willing to be a dust
more); one year older means that much more settled, that much
more to lose.

Was the world torn apart, or was it just him?  But if it was
just him, that is only one more sign that the world has been
torn apart; torn apart into the torn people (Austin lying on
the notional soil, looking up at the gods) and the untorn,
wherever they are, out writing symphonies or trading love
poems or building temples, talking to each other in languages
that they've made up while he wasn't looking.

He stands abruptly and shakes himself, strides off down the
hill with his stick rapping the ground.  In the sky, the
gods are arguing again.





BLESS YOU FRIEND


"Why haven't you told her?"

Keda and Rainer are sitting in the cozy room the next day (the
morning after).  Marilyn is off somewhere else in the warehouse,
doing something athletic and strenuous.

"What do you mean?"

"Did you think I wouldn't notice?"  It's getting hard these days,
Keda thinks, to keep track of what's obvious to whom and what's
a mystery.  But Rainer must have known she would twig.  "Did you
think you could just keep her here forever?"

Rainer sighs.  "If I'd wanted to keep her forever, would I have
invited you down, you with your famous digital intuition and
your web of clackities?"  ("Lodgers in other," one of Keda's
programs chirps in her ear, "as the door; so it's a valid label.")

"So you got me here to --"

"To hear your scream, and come in and mix yourself into the mix.
Maybe I needed stirring.  Do I know?"

"But anyway."

"Anyway."

"From what you showed me, she doesn't have to stay here in hiding,
and there's no reason to keep her image off of the nets like your
house rules are doing."

"I know."

"And the Frumious Asps that she lost the bet with have dissolved in
a rather messy way, as far as I can tell without exception, and she
probably has a fair shake at getting that contract cancelled for
lack of party, even in that ridiculous place she got it to start with."

Keda squirts the legal extrapolations over to him, the police reports
on the demise of Frumious Asps, the recent history of the consensual
quasi-jurisdiction enforcing Marilyn's badly judged bet.  Rainer
winces a bit as the squeals come in.

"I know, I know, I know, I know.  Will you forgive me?"

"Idiot."  Keda will forgive him; Keda was never even angry at him.
This is how he is supposed to behave.  This is, come to think of it,
exactly how he has behaved, and how he has been living, ever since
Keda's known him, although in other times it was other cities.

So here are Keda and Marilyn, a few days later, on the train continuing
Keda's way Northward, to where there might be a god or a hint of a
god, or at any rate an immortal that she could conflict with.  She's
reading to Marilyn.

"There's A (1), which is 'Struggle Against a Deity', and A (2) which
is 'Strife with the Believers in a God'."

"That'd be easy," Marilyn says, "maybe the Adventists will dynamite
the train tracks and we can go hand-to-hand against their elite
commandos."

"Ripped from the headlines," says Keda, "but the wires say they're still
nowhere near here, and the army or the flying Bogdonovich Brothers have
them contained for now."

"The who?"

"Later.  Then there's B (1), 'Controversy with a Deity', as in
the Book of Job.  That sounds sort of dull."

"My Dinner with Androclese," says Marilyn.  Keda looks up.

"You sure you're not on the wire, there?"

Marilyn smiles.  "Just a good memory."

"Gad.  But Androclese wasn't strictly speaking a god."

"Immortal, though."

"You think?"

"I don't remember him dying."

"Fictional character."

"So?"

"Phht.  Then there's B (2), 'Punishment for Contempt of a God', as in
'Tchitra Yadjgna' or 'Le Festin be Pierre'."

"Tchitra Yadjgna?"

"Beats me, this is all Age of Paper stuff.  B (3) is 'Punishment for
Pride Before a God' -- that'd be yours."

"Excuse me!"

Keda ignores her and continues.  "And B (4) is 'Presumptuous Rivalry
with a God' and B (5): 'Impudent Rivalry with a Deity'."

"What's the difference?"

"Dunno.  Hm.  No, it's just as mushy in the original.  But anyway,
I'll take that one."

"Impudent rivalry with a deity?  Why?"

"It just appeals."

"A little character insight there, love.  Do one for me."

"Do one?"

"Give me a dramatic situation."

"Give me a number from one to thirty-six."

"Eleven."

Keda flips the pages and raises her eyebrows and laughs.  "Eleventh Situation:
the Enigma.  Interrogator, seeker, and problem.  This situation possesses
theatrical interest par excellence, since the spectator, his curiosity
aroused by the problem, easily becomes so absorbed as to fancy it is himself
who is actually solving it."

"Hey!  Am I the seeker, or the spectator?"

"Or the interrogator?  But you shouldn't assume that you're one of the
characters.  You may be the entire situation."

"And what about you?"

"How do you mean?"

"Maybe you're not just the small mortal in impudent rivalry with the
immortal; maybe you're mortal and immortal all at once, and the
conflict between them."

Keda just looks back at her, balanced between annoyance at the
easy profundity, and annoyance that she didn't think of it herself.

"You wanna listen to some music?"

The train glides on through the countryside, stopping once every hour
or two to let off passengers and let on passengers.  At one station
the train pauses for twenty minutes to wait for a connection.  Keda
and Marilyn get out to buy coffee and curls, and they're joined by
a roving band of shufflers that got Keda's trip syndication and made
a quick date.

"Arno and Celeste and Bef and Trivimi and Kaarel and Hans and September
and Kristen and Sweet and Nonce and Wisia and Jasia and Karl," said Keda,
"this is Marilyn.  She's standalone for complicated reasons."

Keda and Marilyn and Arno and Celeste and Bef and Trivimi and Kaarel and
Hans and September and Kristen and Sweet and Nonce and Wisia and Jasia and
Karl have coffee and curls and funnel cakes, and Keda subtly encourages
them to stick to voice so Marilyn can keep up, and someone buys a newspaper
and they pass it around and try to guess what might be true, and soon
it's time to get back on the train.

"Shoosh, I'm out of practice," Marilyn says when they've slumped down
into their seats again.

"Must be overwhelming to be in a flash crowd like that standalone.  We
could get you a passive earphone at least; I could drive you around."

"Eh-eh," says Marilyn, "one thing at a time.  I worried enough just
being out in public with Arno and Celeste and Bef and Trivimi and --"

"-- and all of them --"

"-- yeah and all of them beaming my picture around the world tagged
'who was that with Keda?' and whatever might be left of the Frumious
Asps deciding that a little fun might be within their contract."

"They're dead, Marilyn --"

"-- Mari --"

"They're dead, Mari, dead or boxed away or anyway de-organized, and
we can get that contract wiped any time anyway."  (Because, Keda does
not say, I'm a billionaire right now, and money's still worth something
for another couple of weeks at least.  But she doesn't want to know
right now if that would push any of Mari's buttons.)

"Yeah, could be.  But one thing at a time."

"Delayed gratification?"

Marilyn smiles.  "Name of the game.  Let's listen to some music."

She's willing, at least, to share Keda's audio, sitting side by side
on the train with the country speeding by, and a long roomful of other
people sharing their air.

Keda hasn't asked Marilyn where she's going or what she's doing.
It doesn't seem likely that she just happened to be on the way to
southern Estonia, but she's good company and Keda's not complaining.
That first day, and that first night sobbing on each other's shoulders
from the syrup and the sweet awful sorrow of life, she was sure she
was in love, but that's worn off.  Marilyn has been under Rainer's
wing for nearly two years; Keda can't imagine being offline in that
warehouse, cozy side rooms and awesome Tai Chi floors or not, for
more than a day without going insane, but it sounds like Marilyn
does this sort of thing as a hobby.  Maybe it's a common one; who
know?  Doesn't seem to be a named meme on the wire, but then it
wouldn't be.

Marilyn listens to music, and Keda lowers her goggles and immerses
herself.  She looks around Viljandi to get the lay of the land,
hangs around with a crowd in the castle park admiring the sunlight
on the ruined walls, keeps her eyes open for gods.  There doesn't
seem to be anything unusually unusual prowling around.  But then
there wouldn't be.

Reports of miracles and flying men and forests reduced to ash
overnight without fire, are commoner than ever.  Keda's credence
networks are slow to endorse any of them, but entirely certain that
odd things are going on.  Keda knows firsthand people who have
caused burning lions to stalk the streets and comets to descend
from the heavens, or reasonable facsimilies thereof, so she's
not too worried.  The flying-man reports have a pattern that
tickles her sensorium, and she tells her investment squad to
bet on human flight slightly above market rates.  (We've had those
stupid jet-belts for decades now, after all; how hard would it be
to make one cost-effective?)

She sniffs around the edges of various national bodies of
deliberation, the U. S. Congress and the EU and UK Parliaments
(the Twenty-Ninth Situation: an Enemy Loved), a handful of
Asian states, all ringed by observers and interpreted feeds
and ideational summaries from all possible points of view.
No particular hint of interesting gods there, either; just the
same old ones that have always walked the land, and that she's
not especially interested in conflicting with.

Marilyn's little insight ("little?" she thinks to herself, "why
did I call it 'little'?") rankles somewhere down in the core of
her.  She's been thinking of herself as the Mortal in her
Dramatic Situation, as the Small whose Taming Power figures in
her hexagram.  But at least as likely she's the conflict itself,
and she will be both tamer and tamed, both impudent mortal and
offended Immortal.  And what would that mean for this long ride
to Viljandi?

Marilyn is asleep, curled sideways in the yielding plastic foam
seat.  Keda puts her goggles away in her bag, wraps the straps
firmly around her shoulder, and closes her eyes.  Stillness,
she tells herself, stillness and the soft splashing of thought
unremarked into the pool.

-=-

Why do I resent the gods?  Why do I begrudge them those pieces of
the sky that they occupy, in their choruses and their conflicts
and their argumentation?  I have the land, every mile and every
acre of it open to my feet.  If I'm willing to carry food with me,
anyway, and sleep out on the turf.

I resent, I suppose, how small my role seems to be, and how
solitary I am.  I should be the most important player here, in
an important sense.  This world, such as it is, is about me.
At least that's what I remember.  Perhaps I'm coming to doubt it,
and that's what I resent the gods.  Do I suspect them of having
forgotten me?  Or of never having cared at all?

-=-

Somewhere in the night, the train lurches suddenly, slowing down
and speeding up with a terrible screeching that maglev trains
aren't supposed to make.  Keda and Marilyn are jerked awake;
Marilyn blinks wide-eyed and looks around, head swivelling to
cover all approaches.  Keda is scrambling in her bag, and is
quickly immersed, because it's in her goggles where the really
important things happen.

"Shit," she said, "shit, shit, shit."

Marilyn puts a hand on the back of Keda's neck. "What is it?"
she asks.  The other passengers in the car, a handful of them,
stir in confusion.

"Maybe nothing, maybe something very --" And then there's a loud
screech of metal against metal, and at the same time a siren goes
off, and the train slows down as suddenly as it can without actually
throwing everyone together into a broken mess at the front of the
car, and (just in case) a set of big billowy air matresses deploy
at the front of the car with a crack that would normally have been
loud but as it is is quite lost in everything else.

Keda grabs Marilyn who is clinging to a pole and drags them both
down onto the floor in some ancient reptilian reflex.  Marilyn
would rather be up where she can see, but she defers to Keda's
higher information feed and lies there on the ground for the
seconds until the noise stops and the train seems to be actually
stopped on the track (which is ridiculous because this train can't
stop between stations without a horribly expensive repair job
afterwards).

And then Keda has her goggles up and is on her knees in front of the
nearest door, and it pops protestingly open.  She grabs Marilyn's hand
and they tumble out into the overcast night, in the cindery edge of the
rail line right-of-way, and then scrambling down it into a marshy field
with the breeze blowing and a dim line of forest between them and the
sky.  Keda is still muttering "shit" repeatedly under her breath, like
a mantra.

"Is this bad?" Marilyn says.  "Won't they just send something out
to pick us up?  Paying passengers and all?"

"I don't know, I don't know.  I don't like it.  Just before it
happened I got -- and now I'm offline, something's jamming the
RF bands, and I've got more RF bands than they ought to know about."

"Who?"

"I don't know."

And because she doesn't know what else to do, and because she at
least half believes that it might not be best to be sensible and just
stay in the train and wait for help (is that a helicopter that she
hears already, coming from somewhere ahead of them?) she follows
Keda at a fast half-crouch across the field (glad that she's wearing
the nice thick boots and not the sporty little sandals with the
letter "M" on the tops) and into and under the darkness of the
trees.

"What now?"

Keda waves her hands ineffectually around for a moment, catching her
breath (too much shuffling bits, not enough rollerblading, not nearly
enough running headlong across marshy meadows in the dark).  "Now
we look for a clear place, but not too clear, where we can get a
line of sight to one of my satellites."

"You have satellites?"

"Figure of speech," says Keda, and then (being pathologically honest)
adds "more or less."

-=-

There are two things that the world could be and the gods could be doing,
and I seem to remember both of them.

The world could be a refuge, a place that I came to when the world
broke, in order to stay who I am.  The gods and monsters and demons
could be guardians, ringing the place about with spells and fury, and
repelling the shards of the broken world that try to penetrate in
their rapacious anger and jealousy.  And I could be here recovering,
or marshalling my strength, or even just hiding.  That is one thing
that I remember, that could explain the world.

Or it could be that I am broken, and that the gods and demons and
monsters and I are all parts of me, fragmented for some reason into
parts, and the I that I feel I am is just itself a fragment.  That
would explain my lack of affect, the flatness of my emotions, the
fact that my fingers never tire when I write and the fact that this
does not worry me.  The gods and demons and monsters that I see in the
sky could be other parts of me, angrier and more emotionally charged
parts, that work out their differences in the cloudy battleground
and debating floor, perhaps in an attempt to patch things up.

And why would I be fragmented, or have fragmented?  It could be a
problem, something bad that happened to me along with the breaking of
the world.  My sitting here and writing, and the gods and demons and
monsters in the sky strutting and singing and arguing, could be part
of the healing process, or a symptom of the pathology.  Or I could
be fragmented for good cause, as a way of fixing some deeper problem
or trouble within myself, and (again) this sitting and writing and
strutting and debating could be the whole point.

Although really there are three things the world could be and the
gods could be doing, because it is not at all impossible that the
truth does not match my partial and confused memories.  The third
thing is the entire universe of other possibilities that aren't
either of the two that I seem to remember.  The gods could be
entirely unrelated to me, and I could be here due to some error
or oversight.  The gods could be here as my jailers, or my
tormentors (although they torment me only in the most indirect
way).  Or I could be an entirely unimportant piece of this world,
the least interesting fragment of myself left behind by accident,
or through some terrible tyrant necessity, while the significant
parts of me, the gods and demons and monsters, go off into the
universe, leaving me only their shadows projected here on the
dome of this unimportant sky.

I would go out of the house and onto the hilltop, and I would
shout up at the gods (and monsters and demons) and demand the
truth from them.  But this morning I'm not sure that I want to
hear the answer.  So I sit with this pile of small white stones,
and I write, and in the afternoon I will go out and walk in the
woods.



So Blinn?  Cottonseed Din

They had just found a likely open space in the wood, a small hill
with a view of the sky, when the shooting started.  They had been
hearing the sounds of people and vehicles for some time, and at
least one helicopter back toward where the train steamed and hissed
in the night air, but they had seemed far enough away to ignore
until Keda could connect and get some further idea of what might
be going on.  But gunfire is something else again.

So they lay there, faces more or less pressed into the leaves and
the mud, with bullets flying overhead.  Or not so much overhead
as a few hundred yards to one side; but gunfire a few hundred yards
to one side is still gunfire, and very loud and quite daunting if
you haven't been exposed to it regularly, or even if you have, and
there's always the chance that it might change location by, say,
a few hundred yards at any moment.

And then it stopped, and there were shouts, and the mechanical and
human sounds moved off.  The remaining noises were back by the train,
and they sounded much less destructive.  Keda and Marilyn raised their
heads out of the leaves.  The air smelled sharp with autumn and hints
of rifle smoke.  Keda moved on her hands and knees, to the base of
the little hill, staying low, not wanting to be seen against the sky.
Marilyn stayed behind, watching Keda and everything else, ready to
call a warning.

Keda dug in her pack, and aimed a small oval package at the sky.
Marilyn heard her cursing quietly.  During the shooting she'd been
very very quiet.  Then she was waving with one hand, beckoning
Marilyn over.  The leaf-litter was cold under her knees.

"It's relatively bad.  I've been attacked on a bunch of levels,
at just about the time the train was stopped."

"Not an accident?"

"Don't know.  If they wanted to hurt me physically, crashing the
train would be an utterly stupid way to do it.  But they have no
reason to want to hurt me physically anyway.  It doesn't make any
sense."

"They, who?"

"Long story, and I'm not sure. I --"

And then there was a thrashing in the undergrowth on the other side
of the little hill, and a low anguished moan.

So now Keda and Marilyn are on the hillside, giving rough first aid
to a man in dark military camouflage with a deep bleeding wound in
his thigh ("Shit, he must not have much blood left"), and an empty
gunbelt, and no visible identification.  And when Keda points her
microdish at the sky again, her programs proudly report that they
have driven off the digital assault with only minor resource losses
(although the financial impact on the other front has been more
severe), and that they have composed a poem.

   you hellbender azalea to dell artistry
   so blinn? cottonseed din
   panjandrum Qunwieldy test the tnt, eta
   credo a hinduism fad
   by Ugroundskeep pregnant. diaper
   pascal, cain we needn't
   very, as via are or genera

Keda tells them to keep at it.  She dives into a random selection of
open flashcrowds (audio only given the thin thread that connects her
to her satellite, somewhere up there in the orbiting sky), but finds
nothing of great pith or moment.  All seems quiet; perhaps they are
caught in just another of those momentary urban legends, beside the
flying men and rivers of ash and firey tigers in the streets.  The
crashed train and the ghostly army that melts away into the night.

Except, she reminds herself, for this very pale and mostly comatose
young man whose head is cradled on Marilyn's thigh.

From the side of the hill the lights of a town, or at least some
lights that might be a town, are visible.  They are strong, and
either of them can lift him into a fireman's carry, although neither
of them would want to walk very far that way.  So they take turns,
and they take breaks, and halfway there Keda's goggles come back
online.

"Heh.  This whole night makes no sense."

"You going to tell me, like, what might be going on, at all?"

"Not a story to tell while dragging a dead guy over a field."

"He's not dead."

"Hope not.  You tie a mean tourniquet."

"You're changing the subject."

"Duh."

Long before they're worn out they come to a road, and Keda's
paranoia has subsided enough that (wisely or otherwise) she
squirts a description of the night's events into various places
that might be interested, squirts a bonded description of where
they are right now and what they are doing to another place, and
(reassuring herself that she is not putting too much faith in
the digital world's power over the analogue) signs into a local
hospital and requests a pickup.

In the back of the ambulance it's nice and warm, if somewhat
odd-smelling.  The soldier, if that's what he is, is still
alive, and the ambulance attendants don't know (or don't admit
to knowing) anything about a violently stopped train.  There are
interesting rumors flowing around behind her goggles.  Her
credence networks are beginning to think there's something to
this flying-man thing after all.




XQQEDYM, Ask You: What

Austin leaves the house on a day when the sky is deep and clear
and empty of gods.  He has his stick, his vest, both sweaters
(like the first night that he slept out under the trees), and
wrapped in the sweater that he isn't wearing (the red one) a
bundle of food, and his pad and pen.

He feels flat, as attenuated and ephemeral as ever, but somehow
also filled with, or perhaps only filled with a dim reflection of,
purpose and action.  He looks up at the sky as he walks, seeing
no monsters or demons or gods, and he breathes deeply.

As he walks (east, toward where he imagines the sea, although he
does not imagine reaching it today), the air gets warmer with the
afternoon, and then (still walking outward away from his house
as the sun sinks) colder with the twilight.  By nightfall, it
is chilly again.  Still the sky is empty.

The wind is light and fragrant, blowing from the southwest
most of the afternoon.  As the sun sets the wind dies, and it
is quiet among the trees.  There has been little underbrush
to block his way; here and there a field of tangled scrub that
he has detoured around, here and there a gully too wide to
step across.  But the country, the land, seems almost designed
for walking.  Or, he thinks, perhaps exactly designed for
walking, although this is the farthest from the house that he
has ever walked.

As the night closes down, he stops, when it become too dark
to see his path.

-=-

Something has happened.  Things have changed.  I no longer know
that there is any point whatever to this writing.  Not that I
ever did know.  But before today I had a theory at least.  Now
I write purely for myself.  To stay sane, perhaps.  Or to comfort
myself in my insanity.

I slept outside again last night, further from the house than I've
ever been in this land.  In that land.  The wind was mild and
ordinary all night, and I slept as far as I know with no gods
or monsters in the dome above me.  Only the darkness and the
stars.

When I awoke, it was to the clatter of doors opening and people
moving about.  It was a shocking awakening, and I was utterly
disoriented.  I thought that I was dreaming, or that I had been
dreaming and had just awakened, or that I had gone mad.

I was lying against the wall of a square dusty building (not
against a gentle slope of earth rucked up by the roots of a
tree).  The building was an unremarkable member of a row of
square dusty buildings aligned across a sort of street, or
beaten place in the dust.  And coming out of the buildings
were grey dusty people, and the grey dusty people, of all
sizes and shapes, were wearing fearsome and gaudy masks.

I am wearing one now myself, or rather I have one which I
have laid aside, here in this empty room with no one else
to see, while I write this.  The mask, my mask, is bright
blue with bold red markings around the staring upswept
eyes and the fierce belligerent mouth.  It has horns,
mottled bright blue and bright red, protruding from the
forehead.  There are holes in the eyesockets, making it
possible to see (although not well) while wearing the
mask.  There is another hole, covered by a thin dark red
cloth, over the mouth, making it possible to talk.  There
is a broad red band at the back of the mask, to hold it to
the head.

The mask was given to me, or forced upon me, by a huge
corpulent man in a mask with the face of a frenzied pig,
standing in the door of the large (and still dusty) black
building in the center of the town.  Not that "town" is
the right word, but no better one comes to me; it is a
group of buildings where there are people.  It is little
or nothing else, but "town" is the best that I can do.

I have had little time to look about me, to explore.  I
have seen that the sky is different, lighter and dimmer
at the same time, paler and dustier, than it was last
night.  Or than it was in the place where I was last
night, if I am somewhere else now.  And if the time that
I seem to remember is truly last night.

I have seen that at least some of the people that come out
of the houses at dawn are burly and strong, with rough
hands and muscular arms, and that they use these to grasp
maskless strangers who come among them (or at least to grasp
me, when I was a maskless stranger come among them), and to
drag those maskless strangers to the center of town, to the
black building, to be given, or forced into, a mask.

I have seen that they do this in a grim silence, despite
the overtures of the maskless dragged one, and that as they
do it all the other masked people along the route turn
calmly but implacably to watch, their gaudy masks swivelling
in an unnerving unison until the draggers and dragee have
moved on.

This place, I tell myself, is certainly a metaphor.  No
real oppressive society of regimentation and implacable
silence would require, or even allow, its citizens to
go masked.  Not with literal masks, at any rate; only
with the subtler masks of conformity and compliance and
silence under oppression.  But those masks are not gaudy,
are not brilliant turquoise and ruby and sienna, are not
in the shapes of wild animals and voracious demons.  These
masks, after all, could be used by the enemy to infiltrate
without fear of discovery.  Could be used by the guilty to
escape punishment.  Could be used to hide.  And, if this
were a real place, it would not approve of hiding.  And
most likely it would not leave me my pad and my pen.

Am I now, as I write, in one of the small square dustry
buildings.  There are four places to sleep here, two
narrow bunks with thin matresses, two chairs, and a
crude chest, no larger than the small chest in my house
on the hilltop yesterday (or a century, or a million
miles, ago).  All is drab, except for my mask beside
me here and, bizarrely, the cloth sleeves on the thin
pillows, which are as bright and as feverishly designed
as the masks.  Each one is different, but every one is
garish enough that it should make sleep impossible, its
colors bleeding into the mind through even closed eyelids;
just knowing one of these pillowcases was there beneath
my head would keep me awake, or poison my dreams.

Although they are masked as monsters or demons or gods,
these people are not the creatures that have haunted
the sky above my house (my previous house, the house
on the hilltop).  Those creaturs were few and wild;
these are many and stolid.  They move, in the few
minutes that I have had to see them, slowly and with
reluctance, or at least in a way that conserves their
energy.  The gods and monsters, the great circling birds
and dancing tigers, in my sky were profligate with their
energy, and elegant in their madness.  These people,
except for their masks, are the dullest madness imaginable.

But I should consider whether these masks and those
monsters might be metaphors for the same thing, might
be different representations of the same fragments into
which the world, or my self, has broken.  And I should
consider what will happen when the food in my bundle
runs out, as it will sometime today, or tomorrow or
the next day if I am careful.

I had not planned to be gone this long.



Itsformidable Companion? Is Carnage Chuckwalla

It seems likely the soldier, if that's what he is, will
live.  Mostly he's just lost blood, and the hospital is
busy making him some more to replace it.  Keda is sitting
in a luxuriously comfortable, if rather dirty, seat in an
alcove of the hospital's main waiting room, and Marilyn
is curled up rather disconcertingly in the seat next to
her, with her head on Keda's shoulder.  Since they've said
that they have no knowledge of the soldier, that they just
came up on him in the woods, the hospital has lost interest
in them, and swept on about its always-urgent business,
happy to leave them in the corner.  The only other person
in their corner is a rather worn-looking man perhaps
in his late thirties, surrounded by a billowing canvas
jacket, apparently asleep.

It's not at all clear to Keda what they ought to be
doing now.  She is back online, but reluctant to make
herself too obvious.  The signals she picks up in passive
browsing are normal, or what passes for normal, and her
programs are relatively content.

"So what happened out there?  The shooting?" Marilyn asks,
sleepy again as the adrenalin has drained.

"Not clear.  The nets say there is Adventist activity
reported, but also that there isn't.  Rumors of gangs
of random bandits in the area, looting some ag farm.
Rumors that the army has moved in force, and that it
hasn't."

"Which army?"

"Depends who you ask."  Keda is annoyed that her skills
at picking the truth from the news are decaying, or at
least not keeping up with the times.  "But things seem
to be under control in this part of the continent.  They
say."

"Except for random firefights in the woods," Marilyn
snickers, "I wonder if they're still out there popping
at each other."

"They're all dead by now."  The voice is low and gritty.
Keda and Marilyn look over at the pile of jacket on the
opposite seat.  The man (blond, Keda notes, with long
straggly hair and deepset eyes) is awake, not looking
particularly at them.  Keda squirts a feed out into the
web about him, but nothing comes back at once.

"All dead?" Marilyn asks from her shoulder, "Why?"

"The army's using minibots; machine guns with wheels and
brains.  Roll and fire and smell you on infrared.  Self-guided
killing boxes.  They'll have found anyone that didn't get
away by now."

"No way!" Keda says, professional instincts aroused, "That
tech isn't ready for the field yet; it's at least three
months away."  The blond just rolls his eyes up in their
sockets and sinks deeper into the seat.  His voice mumbles
something, but clearly not an admission of error.

"That's in your reality, Miss Spider," says another voice.
Damn surprises, thinks Keda, and goes into her goggles to
look around, and jerks violently enough to jostle Marilyn
off of her shoulder, and says "Oh em friggin gee", and
decides it's certainly one of those days.

"Hi," says Marilyn, curling back onto Keda's shoulder
again disturbingly.  The newcomer nods and smiles.  He
is a tall willowy man of indeterminate age, with stark
white hair and pale skin.  He could be an attenuated and
cleaned up version of the man in the other seat, buried
in his clothing.  "How do you mean, in our reality?"

"There is," the tall man says, sitting down next to
Keda, on the side away from Marilyn, sideways so as to
face the two women and ignore the other man, "no
consensus on these things anymore."  And his lapel
squirts a few megabytes toward Keda, who bats it
away.

"Geez," she says, "are you still on that?"

"You know him?" Marilyn asks.

"I know everybody."

The tall man laughs.  "Have you told her," he says,
"about your plans to rule the world, your being one of
the dozen most powerful people on the planet, and all
that?"  Marilyn looks up at Keda's face, perhaps a
little startled.

"I was going to get to that," Keda says, "although
I wouldn't put it quite like that."  The tall man
laughs again.

"Marilyn," Keda says, realizing that despite their
soul-bonding that night at Rainer's with the sob-syrup,
and their long conversations and train companionship
since, she doesn't know her last name, if she has one,
"this is the Armitage Dean, and I don't know why he's
called that, but he's a -- colleague or something of
mine, and I also have no clue what he's doing here
except perhaps to torment --"

"-- Phht --" the Armitage waves the suggestion away.

"-- to torment me."

"I am here, my dear Keda, because at the moment I own
this hospital, and you and your lovely companion and
this nondescript gentleman here are all firmly under
my control for the moment."

Shit, Keda thinks, is that what was going on?  I'm really
losing it tonight.  Or he's gotten much better lately.
Still in her goggles, she looks around and sees what while
she can still see, and move her locus of perception around
the net and the world, she is strictly limited in what she
can touch or do, and in particular her programs can only
send to her, and she cannot talk back to them.  One of
them has sent another poem, from its growing synthetic
alienness.

  itsformidable companion? is carnage chuckwalla
  I of it as any quack
  we not fowl not itsdoe
  clifton itsyou michigan the angles
  Ccigarette instantiate bookshelf barnyard icosahedron? dyspeptic
  awhile? via of dictatorial jess

The Armitage, it appears, indeed owns the hospital whose
waiting room they are huddling in, owns it quite openly,
and has for just under an hour.

"Are you, like, enemies or something?  Did you crash that
train?"  Marilyn seems curious, but not especially concerned.

"Ah, never," says the Armitage, "nothing so crude.  I suspect
some program was overenthusiastic, and mistook the train for
some digital construct of yours," nodding to Keda, "and what
was meant to be a purely digital effect carrommed so to speak
into the world of atoms and maglevs.  Wouldn't be the first
such incident.  But no, we are not enemies, I don't think.
At least not at the moment.  Since I have so clearly the
upper hand."

Keda says nothing, still probing around in her goggles,
listening at her earpiece, like a prisoner testing the walls
of her cell, or a child worrying at a loose tooth.

"So how do you mean, in our reality?" Marilyn asks again, and
Keda is distractedly grateful for the prattle.

"There is," he replies again, "no consensus on these things.
To our Keda, the minibot technology is still under test in a
barn somewhere in Virginia.  To our other friend here," the
man in the seats opposite has stretch himself out sideways,
and is snoring, "they are out there in the fields, self-guidedly
shooting at his comrades."

At "comrades", Keda's previous squirt query about the man in
the billowing jacket comes back with a middling credence that
he is a member of a local semi-irregular militia, recently
wounded out and a temporary local hero in the issue of the
roving bands of ag farm vandals.  The problem with that
construct being that the army's minibots, if they have them,
would have no business shooting at the militia.  But Keda
hasn't seen a forces-deployed map of this area that she
trusts, and whatever the Armitage has done to her outgoing
connections prevents her from bidding on one if there were
any on offer.

"But wait," says Marilyn, her voice high and light like a
happy freshman on the green at some college, flirting with
the Philosophy grad students under the marble fountain without
a care in the world, "they can't both be right.  I mean,
either they are or they aren't."

"Certainly," says the Armitage, indulgent, "but it depends
who you ask."

"No, whoever you ask, only one of them can be right.  I mean,
there's some truth of the matter.  We could go out and find
out, and then we'd know.  If there were minibots out there
shooting at people, we could take sniperscope pictures of
them, and then we'd know."

"You and I would know.  But that is only two people.  We
would be in a certain reality, and we would be convinced of
it, but the rest of the world...  Still fragmented."

"We could sign the pictures, and post them."

"And then someone else would take the pictures and shop
them to show the minibots attacking Julia Roberts, or being
manually operated by soldiers with waldos in a nearby bunker,
or being obvious fakes.  And post those."

"But they wouldn't be signed by us!"

"They would be signed by no one, or by the Ocelot."

"But no one has credence on the Ocelot!"

Here Keda groans and pushes up her goggles.  The Armitage
smiles smugly.

"Oh, all right," Marilyn says, "lots of people have credence
on the Ocelot.  But those people --"

"Those people aren't the people that you pay attention to.
They aren't in your fragment."

"Yeah, yeah," says Marilyn, and relaxes back against Keda's
shoulder again.

"If you're done?" Keda says, looking over at the Armitage with
her bare eyes.  "Is there some point?"

"I came by to mention that I own this hospital --"

"-- I'd noticed --"

"-- and that you are both welcome to stay.  And not so much
welcome to leave," his teeth are very good, naturally, "I'll
see that you get a nice private room."

And he stands and walks out.

"Was that bad?" Marilyn asks.  Keda gently shrugs the girl off
of her shoulder, and stands up.  Marilyn sits with her legs
curled under her, looking up.

"I don't know.  We've never been enemies, or not seriously
enemies.  But he has the upper hand here, for whatever it is
he wants."

"Was it him who attacked you?"

"I don't know.  Could be.  Or he could just have been positioned
to take advantage.  By luck or by design."

"It's a complicated world."

"Genius."

"Was it true what else he said?"

"About?"

"About your being one of the dozen most powerful people in
the world, and all."

Keda puffs out her cheeks.  "Oh, sort of.  The way he meant
it, anyway.  In his picture of the world."

"There's no consensus?"  Marilyn impish.

"Pah, no, I haven't swallowed that syrup."

"Then?"

"Well.  The world's changing fast."

"Hadn't noticed."

"It's changing faster, at least on some scales, exponentially.
Things change, and the change gets faster, and the getting
faster gets faster.  Eventually things go entirely crazy."

"The Singularity."

"Except that it won't be so simple.  Different things will go
crazy at different times and at different speeds and in different
ways."

"Crazy craziness."

"And it will be very hard to control anything.  But some of us
think that there will be opportunities."

One of Keda's programs reports that its entire sphere of operation
has been eliminated by a change in regulations in the South
Pacific economic sphere.

"Opportunities to control -- everything?"

"To make a difference.  Think of it as a phase change."

"The crystalization of a new world?"

"Or a new order, maybe.  A new way of being.  Or many new ways
of being."

"And you want to be the seed crystal?  You want to see that it's
all remade in your image?"

"Some days," Keda says, sitting down again, on the other side
of Marilyn.  The man in the billowing jacket is snoring softly.
"And some days I'd just like to make sure it doesn't all just
turn to goo."

"And you're, like, incredibly rich and powerful?"  Marilyn bats
her eyelids.

"Some days," Keda says, closing her eyes and rubbing them with
her thumb and fingers, "some days."




BXUM: Are You Blind?

At night, three other people sleep in this house.  So far
none of them have spoken to me.  They are all men, of no
particular age.  One of them is very thin, skeletal, with
wrinkled skin.  He may be old.

The man that sleeps in the bunk below mine (below the one that
I picked out for myself and that no one has objected to my
occupying) has a golden mask striped with eye-searing green.
The face on that mask has a long pointed nose and squinting
eyes, and a pointed chin, and a gnarled forehead.

The man in the other lower bunk, the skeletal man, has a
white mask with bulbous red splotches and a fin of vivid
green at the top.  He sleeps restlessly, and sometimes
speaks, in a language that I don't recognize.

The fourth man disturbs me the most.  He is large and
heavily fleshed, pink and healthy.  His face and his mask
are round and florid; the mask is the least garish I have
seen here, with broad staring eyes and a blob of a nose,
in bright pink with a few black stars randomly scattered
across it.  He stares at me constantly, and his eyes haunt
my dreams.

The house has no windows, just flat narrow slots under the
roof that let in some air.  So it is dark in here, and to
write I must go outside.  I sit now with my back against
the wall of the house and my sweater bundle at my side, and
write, coughing from the dust.

The people still stare at me, their masks turning to track
my direction as they walk past on their inscrutable errands.
I have not followed any of them as they vanish down the long
rows of houses, or inward toward the black building at the
center.  I could, nothing seems to stop me.  But I am afraid.

If this place is a metaphor, these rows of houses and these
people and their masks, this dust and these dark interiors
with their garish pillowcases and drab bunks, what is its
message?  Is this an answer from the gods to the questions
that I have written?  Is this the unwriting of my questions,
the demonstration that I need not have bothered?  In the
old world I knew that I was the center of meaning.  Here
I seem to be nothing at all.

Did I write that last paragraph to explain my fear?  But
why should I be afraid of a metaphor?  It is good to be
writing again; already I feel the fear dropping away.  The
fear is pointless, it makes no sense.  For five days (or
six?) I have not written.  The food in my bundle ran out
on the second day, but there is food in the houses.  It
comes from nowhere, just as the food in that other house,
on the hilltop, came from nowhere.  There there was an
icebox in one of the rooms.  Here there is only one room,
and in that room there is a box in one corner that has dry
and tasteless food, and there is a bucket in the other corner
that always stinks.

On the orbital, we lived in tiny boxes also, and sometimes
they stank.  But when they stank we fixed them; being able
to fix a broken recycler was a critical skill.  Outside the
orbital was the whole universe; the gravid bulge of the
Earth handing beside us, and the unwinking stars all around.

Here the sky is always overcast, and the horizon flat and
unmarked.

Tomorrow I will take my clothes and my pad and my pen, and
I will walk between the rows of houses, as far as I can,
and see where they lead.  I may come to a fence, or a wall,
or an abyss.  Or they may restrain me, although since that
first day when they dragged me into the center for my mask
no one has touched me.  And I have seen no two of them
touch each other.

I could keep watch over the food box, or even sleep on its
lid, to try to catch the magical refillers at their work.
But probably it would just fill without the lid or my sleep
being disturbed.  This place is, I am convinced, a metaphor,
and can easily resist such straightforward investigation.

-=-

Now it is morning, and I am writing one last time before I
begin to walk.  There is no reason to think that the moment
is in any way significant, but I am writing nonetheless.
I have always been comforted by writing.  I notice that my
fingers still do not tire, ever, from writing.  Which is a
sign.

Is the sky brighter today, the position of the sun a bit
more guessable?  Probably not.

After we were back on Earth, as the time of troubles was
beginning and the world beginning to break, I heard that the
friend that I had tried to kill on the orbital had grown
himself a new body.  I wondered it if was because I had
deprived him of those toes, and if the new body was an
ordinary one, or something novel, something stronger or
larger or less destructable than an old human body.  But
privacy rules were strict that week, and could not find
out, and I didn't try to contact him to ask.  I wonder if
the body was male or female, or if it had horns.  I wonder
if the strong pink body, and even the skeletal grey body,
of my sleeping companions are artifical in any sense.  But
of course they are also only metaphors.

I will begin walking in a few moments.  Between that last
paragraph and this one I went into the house and took most
of the food from the box, wrapping it in my sweater to make
a bundle again.  It occurs to me that I could make some
gesture, pour the necessary bucket out into the food box,
or try to set a fire in the bedclothes.  But the idea has
no pull.  In these masks, everyone is anonymous.  There is
nothing to strike at.

I could walk inward, go to the black building, and try to
find some authority there to interrogate or examine.  But
I won't.  I will walk exactly outward, away from that building.
And I will wear my mask.





A Try Will Make You Understand Our Purpose Carbonaceous

The Armitage Dean has just walked back into the room and begun
to say something witty and smug, when his lapel and Keda's
earphone warble at once, and their faces both change.

"Holy shit," Keda says.  The Armitage raises his eyebrows and
looks uncertain.

"What is it?" Marilyn asks, looking from one to the other.  She
has been at the window, watching the sun come up above the line
of the forest beyond the edge of town.

"Cornucopia machines," says Keda, and her eyes seem very bright.
"They're way early."

"Not expected for months," the Armitage says, pushing his hair
around on his forehead distractedly.

"Oh, was there consensus on that?" Keda laughs, and he winces.

"You mean like food machines?" Marilyn says, coming to stand
between them.  "There's been food machines forever."

"No," says Keda, "real cornucopia machines.  Put in some atoms,
and put in the bits describing whatever you want, and out the
thing comes.  Not just bread and spread and a few chemical hacks
Anything.  Nearly.  Geezus..."  She has her goggles down and is
flying around the world, assessing impacts and peering at her
programs.  "Open me back up, will you Armitage?"

"Oh yeah, yeah right sure" he says, and does something, and Keda
is fully attached again, and can do as she pleases.

"We're all friends again?" asks Marilyn hopefully.

"Yeah," Keda says, "this changes alot.  We're sort of on the same
team now.  We both had bets placed --"

"-- not bets --"

"-- certain assets invested, and now that this has happened so
early, we have a sort of mutual dependence..."

"So we'll be able to leave."

"I think so, eh Dean?"

"Yeah, yeah, you know."

"Ah," says Marilyn, and Keda is startled by something in her
voice, "then Armitage Dean, by the power of Hardly Nothing
and in the name of the Present King of France, I command you
to return to me that which is mine."

The Armitage Dean comes abruptly back from his distraction,
and stares wide-eyed at Marilyn, standing elfin but suddenly
rather grim and commanding between him and Keda.  Without
looking away from her, he reaches into his jacket.  (Keda
tenses.)

"The turtle calls at noon," he says, flatly.

"The crow caws at lunchtime," Marilyn says, adding "and that's
like the silliest countersign I've ever been obliged to recite,
by the way."

The Armitage takes something flat and clear from inside his
shirt and hands it to Marilyn.  She holds it against the right
side of her face and it spreads out over her skin as small
lights appear within it.  It extrudes a crystaline lens out
in front of her right eye, and a slim leg in under her hair
toward her ear.  Her eyelids droop and her face relaxes in
something like ecstasy.

"Ah, it's good to be back," she says.

"Holy frickin shit," says Keda, "do I know you?"

Half an hour later they are in a bus that looks ordinary and
battered from the outside, like a charter full of not quite
desparate refugees or down-at-the-heel tourists, but inside
is all sultry modern organics and sensuous curves and smart
multi-purpose surfaces that make Keda feel simultaneously
important and superfluous.

Marilyn, it turns out, is Mary Flicker, an old ally of both
Keda and the Armitage, another member of that little group
who were either the most powerful or the most self-deluded
of the Earth's connected, and who had dropped mysteriously
out of sight a year or two since.  Still in the frowsy but
comfy waiting-room of that hospital, Keda had thrown her
arms around Marilyn with a squeal (I do not, Keda thinks,
squeal like a teeny bopper at a basement party; at least not
normally) when the elfin goddess has squirted her a litre
of megabytes explaining (or explaining something around the
edges of) the situation.

There really had been an altercation of some stripe with the
Frumious Asps, nothing Mary Flicker couldn't have handled in
the normal course of things with only minor damage; but she
had used it (on a whim, because it was useful for some other
reason of her own: no telling) as an excuse to go to ground,
to fiddle her identity around a bit and go doubly into hiding;
into a subset identity and at the same time off of the net.
She had, she hinted, very much enjoyed Rainer's overprotection.
And sometimes it's nice to sit back and let the world roll on
for awhile.  To jump back in when it's riper.

"But I thought," Keda said then, still with her arms around
Marilyn Mary, a little too aware of their torsos pressed
comradely together, "I thought you were, um, a guy."

Marilyn had waggled here eyebrows.  "I was.  For a little
while in there."

And now they were in The Bus, and even Marilyn (even Mary)
was impressed by all the toys, and playing delightedly with
the sonics and the responsive counters and the seats that
whispered to you of your innermost desires, but in a completely
(or, Keda thought, at least mostly) non-creepy way.

"This *is* your Bus, isn't it?" the Armitage had asked when
they first got on and Mary started playing with the accoutes
as their driver (or whatever was up in the ab; something human
or entirely automated, or some cross between the two) drove
them off into the aging morning.

"Sure, sure, but it's been nearly a year since I last saw the
design.  Things are moving along.  Aaaah..."

And she'd given them both little syrup-cups to drink, and their
goggles and lapels and eyepieces had warbled and asked for permission
to install certain new Mary-signed and credenced upgrades and
facets, and something had clanged in Keda's mind, and now, riding
along in the bus, she was one part of a three-part mind, and that
three-part mind was floating free and fast through world that
seemed in contrast simple and slow and nearly comprehensible.

"Where are we going, by the way," Keda asked, or didn't really ask
at this point so much as wondered, and let that wondering flow out
as a subvocalized hint of a question, a tilt of the hand, the
pinch of one muscle at the side of an eyebrow, into the triple
space that she and they were in and were.

"To the Bubble!" Mary Flicker, Queen of Trumps, replied, or again
didn't actually reply but just let the information leak out,
gesturing toward a squirt that hung in the recent space between
and around them, painting the Bubble as a destination of wonders
and amazements, and simultaneously pointing off to the technical
specifications, the credits, the current financial status, population,
assets held in various national currencies, outstanding debt, the
latest reports of the various project managers and technical leads,
and so on, all of it naturally available only with the proper
authorization and credence.

Having the proper authorization and credence, syrup'd to the
gills and immersed in a flow of input and interactivity that
strained the now weeks-old technology of her goggles, Keda saw.
And was amazed.

-=-

The street, the long space between the rows of small dusty houses
where the masked people lived, stretched for a very long way.  My
feet should have, but did not, begin to tire.  There was dust in
my eyes, and in my nose, and there was dust beginning to work its
way into my mouth.  I thought of the small box in the house that I
had been sleeping in, and the pitcher of cool water that was always
there.  I thought of small boxes in each of the houses that I was
passing, and pitchers of cool water in each one.  The thought
helped my dusty mouth, and made my thirst both better and worse,
and I did not go into any of the houses.

The whole length of the street, the people continued to turn and
stare at me.  At first I wore my mask, as I wrote that I would, and
still they turned and stared at me.  They knew, somehow, that I was
not one of them.  This place must, I thought, truly be a metaphor,
and they are part of the metaphor, and they know that I am not.  Or
they know nothing, and their turning and staring is itself part of
the metaphor.  A metaphor of self-consciousness, perhaps, or of
nonconformity, although I was only walking down the dusty road,
and that hardly seemed an act of defiance or difference.

Eventually I took off the mask.  It did not serve to keep the dust
from my face and eyes, as I had thought it might, and it only made it
harder to see, by restricting the scope of my dust-obscured vision
still further.  The people continued to stare, and without the mask
I felt that their stares were sharper and more intense, although since
they were all masked (and how did their eyes stand the dust and their
faces the heat?) I could not in fact see any difference in them.

As I walked, my face feeling cool by comparison, I gradually saw in
the distance a line.  Not at first a line of any description; only a
distinction out at the horizon; a slight darkness or discontinuity
where before the land had only vanished into the glare of the sun and
the cloudiness of the dust.  As I continued to walk (ignoring my
thirst, ignoring the lack of tiredness in my limbs) it became better
defined; a line in the earth, the suspicion of standing objects
irregularly spotted along the line, the indefinable look of water.
It seemed I was approaching a river, and that beyond the river the
land was also different, browner, somehow even drier looking, and
rougher.  The lines of houses on either side of my stretched on,
matching my pace.  The people in their masks still stared, although
I thought there were fewer of them, either from the area I was now
in, or perhaps from the time of day.  Their masks were as garish and
bright as ever, and I thought I saw a few patterns repeated: the
mask half green and half gold, with broad flapping ears; the mask
of a fish-head in orange and crimson; the brilliant silver mask
with ebony stripes and a long trailing yellow beard.

The river was thick and brown and slow-moving.  Not deep, but not
anything I wanted to step into, either.

The houses stopped well clear of the river, not turning to face it or
acknowledging it in any way other than to stop.  The sides of the last
house of each row faced the river perforce, but were no different from
that side of any of the other houses.  Stepping beyond them and looking
left and right up and down the river, I saw at the edge of vision what
could have been the ends of other rows of houses, stretching back to the
center and the black building, or to more complex topologies and geometries
of houses and streets and masked people.

Across the river the land was no drier than where I stood, and in fact
it was covered by plants.  Low scrub bushes, brown and withered looking
but apparently alive, made the land look from a distance even drier, but
must hold some water within themselves.  None grew on the side of the
river where I stood, in the clear space beyond the last houses.  Perhaps
the feet of the people kept the earth beaten down, so the scrub could
not grow.  That could, I thought, be part of the metaphor.

The land beyond the river was flat and empty, without houses or people
or streets, or anything else visible besides the low scrub except for
one small hill not far beyond the river from where I stood, and far in
the distance the vague hint of more hills mounting slowly toward the
sky.  Up the river, to my right, I saw something that could be a bridge.
Without thinking hard, I turned and walked toward it.  The masks of
the people turned to follow me.  A number of people seemed to be walking
in the same direction I was, at roughly the same speed.  This had not
happened before, or I had not noticed it, and I wondered if they were
following me with their bodies now, and not just their masked faces.

-=-

"You two both more or less put aside worldly goods?"  Marilyn, Mary
Flicker, said this to Keda and the Armitage Dean, but in a sense and
a setting that will have to be explained, or at least hinted at.

They were on a gentle grassy slope that led down to a swiftly-flowing
river whose banks were dotted with weeping willows that stretched their
arms (or their hair, or their fingers, depending on your metaphor) down
to brush the water as it flowed past.  The sky was blue, a deep and
piercing blue with scattered white clouds high up.  The three figures
sat in positions of contemplation or relaxation on a smooth circle of
subtly cracked stone in the midst of the grass.

In fact none of this was real.  It varied between a highly immersive
and convincing full-sensory simulation, and a crude cartoon picture
containing three rather stiff avatars, as the computational resources
devoted to it varied over the milliseconds.  And it happened in a sped
up sort of time, or really in a way outside time altogether, appearing
in the minds of the three of them without having actually happened in
the usual sense, exactly the way that dreams appear in memory without
actually having been experienced.  In fact it was a covey of dream
researchers that had come up with the first crude version of the
technique, months ago.

It is also the case that, even as remembered, the Keda-figure in the
conversation was not exactly, or not only, Keda, and the Mary Flicker
figure not only or exactly Mary, and the Armitage figure similarly.
Each was an amalgam of all three of them, an avatar operated by their
interactions, set up to represent whichever member of the triumvirate,
but not strictly corresponding in reality.  But as this language is
not really up to expressing all of these complexities, and the real
meanings of the interchange to those who remembered it are closely
enough served by a relating that leaves them out, it is accurate
enough to record that Mary Flicker, on her back on the stone and
looking up at the sky, said "You two both more or less put aside
worldly goods?"

"More or less; I certainly did, anyway.  Decided one day that all I
wanted was my bag and whatever little stuff would fit into it, and
my goggles with the whole world in them."  Thus Keda, on her stomach
looking over at Mary.

"I," thus the Armitage Dean, sitting Lotus on the stone with his
eyes closed; this avatar wearing a loose grey robe and looking older
and more solemn than in that hospital waiting room.  Things have
changed for him at least as much as for the others.  Marilyn has
shed her waiting skin for a living one with the putting on of the
shining thing that spread over the side of her head (it is nearly
invisible now, except where it flashes in front of one eye, and
unless you are looking for it).  Keda is much the same.  But the
Armitage could be a different man.  "I had, still have, my villas
in Naples and apartments in Paris and Rome, my beach houses on
Maui and Malibu.  But I haven't spent much time at them lately.
They weren't what mattered."

"And no factories?  No laboratories?  No underground dens full of
scientists chained to their equipment and searching out the secrets
of the universe for you, while candles flicker and overblown music
plays on the organ upstairs?"

"Oh, those," Keda says, waving the thought away, "those I mostly
outsourced.  You know, invested in.  Give them the idea, get an
angel to pick out the workers, buy the chains, so forth."

The Armitage only winces.

"But you have the Bubble," Keda says, glancing up at a bird that
wing-cracks by overhead.

"We all have some of it, really."  Mary sticks her hands into the
air, upward the way she is facing, and waggles her fingers.  "You're
both heavily --"

"-- and consensually?"

"-- and of course consensually, invested in at least one of the cute
little consortia and capital firms and quasi-governmental agencies
that are paying the bills.  But the secret underground labs and
the white coats on the scientists are more or less in my name.
Which is really nice to find after all that time disconnected."

"Things went well?"

"Things prospered.  Thanks in large part, I should say, to certain
meta-heuristics contributed by you, dear Keda."

Keda makes a grumpy appreciative sound down in her throat.  Her
earphone, which isn't actually represented in the simulation but
works nonetheless, warbles with eerily good timing; probably, she
thinks, the dream-logic is back-filling.

 and at helmsman our from saltwater
 me couscous cutworm booby - lawgive
 colloidal. czechoslovakia acoustic not nichrome
 ballard by the cady
 of via atreus - antique

"By the cady of via atreus; antique," says the Armitage, still in
Lotus with his eyes closed.  For a moment they are flat avatars,
vision only, and then the fake universe pops back in.  "How long
do we spend in here?  When do we get to the Bubble?"

"We're there now," says Mary Flicker, Empress of Time and Space.
And they begin to wake up.

The Bubble is a physical place, a place of hallways and service
conduits and liquid hydrogen feeds clearly labelled where they
run across the ceiling and offer themselves at outlets in the walls.
The physical place is in eastern England, and Keda is not entirely
clear how they got there from the Estonian border, or how long it
took; the syrup is not conducive to that sort of literal memory.
Now that she is clean and green and sober again and relatively
unenhanced, she is reluctant to dive into the part of the figurative
dataspace that would tell her instantly exactly where she's been
lately.  The Bubble is enough.

As soon as they entered the Bubble's bubble, the rough geospatial
sphere in which the various house rules involved allowed them to
join the local connected goings-on, they were in a crowd.  (In a
cloud, Keda's earphone suggests, in a crown, in a clown.)  A sea
of voices surrounded them, various and varying, welcoming Mary
back to her beingness, and opening figurative arms to Keda and
to the Armitage, as known and spoken-for and credible friends.

Keda recognized some of the voices and signets.  "The Riley Zoo
is part of the Bubble?" she asks Mary, by voice, through the air.

Mary nods happily.  "They've been greatly enjoying not mentioning
the fact to you."

"So the Bubble is one of Generous Moment's best customers."

"Several of them, in fact."

With new authorizations on her own signet, Keda gets a cascade of
updates warbling into her earphone, and she lowers her goggles over
her eyes again to see what's coming in and going down.

"You ought to let Mary replace those," says the Armitage idly, "they
hardly sparkle at all."

"Sentimental value," Keda mutters, lost for a moment in discovering
just who these Bubble-people are, how much of her own work and the
work of Generous Moment they represent and draw upon, how much of
the weirdness in the world they have caused (not all that much) and
how much of it they have feelers into (quite a bit).  She can feel
the hairs standing up along her spine and her forearms.

-=-

Halfway between where the rows of small dusty houses ended short of
the river, and the line of the bridge in the distance, there was one
more house.  I reached it just as the sun was getting low in the sky,
and the dry air cooler.  Five masked people had walked with me this
far on the way to the bridge.  Two, a man and a woman, wore the orange
and crimson fish-head; those masks glowed strangely in the dying light.
Two others had nearly spherical heads, titanium white with electric
blue ram's horns protruding at odd angles from the sides.  The fifth
was half enveloped in red and violet, with a high bobbing mask that
flowed down over his head and down his shoulders; it must have been
stiflingly hot in the sun.  The face was amorphous and ill-defined,
simply a pair of jagged holes for eyes and a crumpled slot where
there might be a mouth.  They walked with me, but did not stare at
me, or seem to take any notice of me at all.

When I went into the house, they remained outside.

Unlike the other house, the small house where I have slept every night
until this one, the single room here contained only one bed, and also
contained a chair and a desk.  There were two small windows, or I
should say that there are two small windows, for it is by the light
of the western one (assuming that the sun sets in the west here in
this metaphor, and why should it not?), and in the morning I expect
that the dawn light will come in by the eastern one.  It will not
be light enough to write for long.  I wonder if my five followers
have gone on, or gone back or away, or if they have settled down
for the night outside the door.

There is a box here, with dry food and a pitcher of cool water, as
there was in the other house (the other dry dusty house, not that
other house back on the green hill with the gods in the sky).  I
have restrained myself from drinking all the water at once, but I
have the pitcher beside me, and I take a sip after every sentence
or two.  The water is cool on my tongue.

I have lived in houses.  In the age of light, when I was small,
most of the world was a house, and it was my house, different from
and larger than all other houses.  My house had rooms, and I knew
each room intimately; the rooms and my self interpenetrated each
other and defined each other.  I was my room and my room was me;
I was my house and my house was me.  It was actually my parents'
house, of course, and they kept and maintained it for me, and lived
with me in it, and dusted and cleaned the windows and stocked the
kitchen with food and the shelves with books and the outlets with
energy and information.  And as they maintained the house so they
maintained and cultivated me, and my self reached out into all of
it, being but not knowing.

In the age of air the orbital was also a house, and it was also most
of the world.  In particular it was the only part of the world that
was not determinedly inimical to life, hurtling around high above
the glowing Earth in a cold and deadly vacuum.  In that house, it
was not possible to be unaware; life was awareness, and care, and
endless thorough drills.  The transition between the age of light
and the age of air must have been a terrible or an awesome thing,
but I do not remember it.  Perhaps that memory went with one of the
gods or demons or monsters that hazily strode the sky of that green
world where I sat and wrote in that other house.  But I get ahead of
myself in the list of houses, and the light is almost gone.

In the interregnum I lived in various houses, in houses that were
rooms in larger houses, in houses that were cloth tubes in the
wilderness, in houses that had no walls, in wide flat houses
shared by the dozens of the community.   But the house that I
will write about is the house in the green valley, where the
sun shone between the blinds of the window, onto the sheets and
onto the back of a sleeping girl.

Looking back on these pages while I sip my water and the light
grows dimmer, I see I have already written about the house and
its shutters and its garden, and how we sat eating breakfast
with the newspaper and flowers on the table.  Does it make sense
to write about it now, again?  But thinking about that would mean
thinking about whether it makes sense to write at all, anymore,
in this new world or new metaphor where I have no good theories.
And I don't want to think about that now.

There were fields behind that house, fields gone to seed and
meadows going to forest.  We walked in those fields and that forest,
gathering matter for our food machine, listening to the birds (in
that year, the birds were coming back to that part of the world,
or at least to that valley).  Sometimes we held hands.

Seen from the woods, with the light falling on it at the start of
the twilight, the house was luminous white, like a seashell or a
cloud sharp-edged against the sky.  Its roof was dark red, and the
garden around it was green, dark green with the coming of evening.
I remember standing with the girls and looking at it, on the way
back from the meadows, both of us carrying stiff cotton bags of
acorns, leaves, and the fragrant broken stems of grasses.  That
place was very different from this place.

And now the light has faded here, and I will write no more today.




Ballard By The Cady

Keda and Mary are sitting in a room, a real physical room, with half
a dozen old uncomfortable dumb-plastic chairs, and a whiteboard, and
a broken CRT screen hanging out of the wall.  Mary is studying a
half dried-out blue whiteboard marker in great detail, turning it
around and around in her fingers, and now and then making a mark on
the whiteboard (which has year-old fuzzy diagrams and unreadable
notes pretty much permanently dried into it), and then staring at
that, the little blue mark that just sits there insensible, and
knows nothing beyond itself.

Keda is leaning back in her chair, relishing the discomfort of the
fixed and unyielding plastic against her bottom and thighs and
lumbar, and relishing the quiet and the lack of structured data
flow, since she has her earphone and her goggles in one hand and
one of Mary's (of the Bubble's, and therefore of Keda's) smart
face-stickers in the other, and is thinking about maybe juggling
them.

"I'm still not a fan of full-on co-presence," Keda says, not juggling
the devices, but moving her hands up and down as though she might
be.

"It's the bee's knees," Mary says, "you're just stuffy."

This is the first time since they entered the Bubble's bubble that
they haven't been effectively in the same room with everyong else
in the Bubble, sharing voice and vision and attention-space with
every other worker and work-team and running simulation and alerting
data feed.  It's an absurd way to work, Keda thinks, with five
hundred people looking over your shoulder, muttering questions
(and answers) in your ear, and randomly squirting new artifacts
into your work stream.  She's seen it tried before, has tried it
herself before at Generous Moment among a few dozen client execs
and team leads, and had it fail entirely.  The Bubble has done
some new stuff, though, and it actually seems to work.  But
she still finds it absurd.

For hours she's been flying around in that absurd state, herself
and Mary and the Armitage (who is now off somewhere meditating,
or phoning home to his villas, or writing tetrameter love poetry
to someone in Brazil), adding their new element of fizz to the
already absurdly (there's that word again) heady mix in the Bubble's
bubble.  Keda had updated the rented recommenders of a dozen
Generous Moment clients with acres of strange and promising new
stuff, delighted (reluctantly) with how easy it was to slough off
uninteresting parts of that task to others in the room, and how
much fun it was to have others slough off interesting tasks from
their own client spaces onto her.  Flying as a group, they'd
deployed a new infrastructure for detecting inefficiencies in
transactions scheduled in their various possessions out in the
real world ("rather than shipping all that tungsten from A to
B, and all that other tungsten from B to A, we could just..."),
lost a few billion Euros trying to ride the wildly fluctuating
commodity markets jumbled into a tizzy by the cornucopia machines
("why do gold watches need so much cobalt?), and gained back
slightly more on a corporate acquisition suggested by the Armitage
that Keda still didn't entirely grok ("Is it ethical this week
to give them money for control of their corporation?"  "Hey, if
it bothers you you can make it up to them later.  Make them all
immortal or something."  Keda's not sure if he was kidding).

"So we didn't invent the cornucopia machines?" she asks.  Her
mind is unwilling to settle down to a single coherent conversation,
either as a way of relaxing after the intense focus of the day's
flight, or because that flight itself has been such a melange,
such a cascade of focused distraction and flurries of multitasking.

"Not as far as I can tell," Mary says, "maybe somewhere in INRIA,
or the Open Assemblers.  But the credence isn't high for either
one."

Whoever had made the cornucopia machines had seeded them well
across most of the world; mysterious neatly-wrapped boxes
delivered to universities and corporations and consortia and
underground artists' colonies and NGOs around the world, with
simultaneous data squirts of the plans and the programming context
and the blueprints for a thousand useful devices including natch
cornucopia machines themselves, and blueprint-making toolery.
Keda and the Armitage had spent a chunk of time prioritizing
non-obvious things (old standalone computers, infrared jammers,
extra-low-energy radio transmitters) to queue up with the Bubble's
growing team of blueprinters, who were excitedly adding by the
minute to the planet's new but already vast catalog of molecular
level recipes for Stuff.

"Other odd things," the Armitage had remarked, during something
like a lull in their headlong flight.  "No one in the southeastern
United States is getting hay fever."

"Which could mean...?"

"From the distribution pattern, it looks like it's spreading from,
say, Atlanta, Georgia."

"A little worrying?"

"Also, we're getting refugee reports with a reasonable credence from
the Russian outback."

"Refugees fleeing...?"

"Apparently they say they just felt like leaving."

"Also somewhat worrying.  We believe these things how much, and
why?"

"Well --" the Armitage's voice seems reluctant.

"We...?"

"It looks like mit dot org's got a credence-bot online."

"Whoa."  A credence bot being one of the holy grails of the last
year or so, up there with cornucopia machines.  Something, anything,
that could do an acceptable job of picking the probably-true from
the probably-false, without visiting in person (all those plane fares),
or requiring armies of signeted fact checkers (small armies are in
place; big-enough armies would be too big, given the vast amount of
stuff out there wanting to be fact-checked, and the low cost of
producing more ("we are sorry that we could have found you earlier
eject", chimes in the latest turn of Keda's meta-heuristic crank,
"those Solomon Islands are in the late phases of chocolate crunch,
aren't you thinking?")).  The net has been dreaming of an automated
one that was plausibly trustworthy.

"And it's own credence is high?"  Armitage answers with a squirt.
The mit dot org credence-bot has a high credence itself, and sits
now at the center of a self-reinforcing and self-checking sticky
web of agreement (or agreement to disagree) and consensus (or
comprehensible dissent).  So the Bubble and anyone else that mit
dot org owes a favor, or will take money from, have either a
decent source of truth (ref Walter Kronkite, a long time ago), or
a nice tight self-reinforcing delusion (ref the same, depending
who you talk to).

So there they are.

"There's no way this is really exponential."  Keda's skin is
still all prickly, sitting in the plastic chair in the room
with Mary.  "People are inherently slow.  You can't just speed
them up."

"Sure we can.  Want some syrup?"

"Can't just speed them up beyond a certain point.  Not any
way that we know today, this week.  No uploads yet."

"And not expected until...?"

"Still unforeseeable future."

"Eye ee more than a year?"

"More than six months anyway."

"If we don't speed ourselves up, we get overtaken.  Simple as
that.  Faster stuff coming, one way or another."

Out flying around, they had seen, sometimes talked to, sometimes
flown past, other flyers, other groups or entities or phenomena
with reaction times and depths of behavior close to their own
(just above, just below, far above but disguised; no way of
telling).  Some of them were familiar, friends even, or sometime
enemies, rivals, competitors.  Some exchanged handshakes, callsigns,
signets, even offered a squirt or two (or five, or a thousand) of
more or less credible credence, useful tips on the oddness of the
world.  About a dozen, they figured, that they could see.  Three
of them offered mergers, on various terms.  Two of those were now,
along with the Paris and Chicago and Istanbul offices and pretty
much all of Generous Moment, offshoot parts of the Bubble collective;
not in the same room, but maybe in the house next door.  Hey,
let me toss you something over the fence.  Tell me if you
like it.

"You think they're out there, minds starting to climb the slope?"

"Isn't that what you've been building all these years."

"Yeah.  Yeah."  Keda is biting her lip.  Not regretting it all, not
exactly, but hollower than she'd thought she'd be here and now, with
things starting to get really odd.  The messages from the meta-heuristics
that she threw onto her personal massive bits of hardware (somewhere
in California, she thinks they are) have been getting scarily good
lately.

"Yo, proles," a round African woman with kinky white hair sticks her
head around the corner of the door.  There's a dimly flashing dome over
her left eye; she's speaking for the collective.  "They're looking for
you; best get on."  And she's gone again.  Bodies move so slowly.

Mary Flicker raises her eyebrows.  Keda sighs and tucks the old goggles
into her bag (sentimental value, still), and slaps the thin clear sheet
over the bridge of her nose.  It spreads out across her eyes, and sends
delicate little feelers toward her ears.  The part across her eyes goes
dark, and she looks is Keda in goggles again, only the next generation.
She looks around for a mirror, and seeing none settles on Mary.

"How do I look?"

"As always, good enough to eat."

Keda resurfaces again in the big loud room of Bubblespace, with Mary
next to her and all the Bubblers crowding virtually around.

"What's up?"

"There's a fleet of planes about to deploy over India."

"Ours?"

"Not ours."  This from a voice that is mostly the Armitage Dean.
"Looks like they'll carrying sneeze-loads of Bubble eyes, though,
and fixing to drop them down on the populace in general."

"So we get all of India online suddenly?"

"Is that a lot of people?"

"That's really a very much lot of people."  The data squirts circulating
around the room show just how very many people it is, and just how
unknown it is what will happen if someone drops thin little sheets of
full-connect network eyes down on them all at once.

"I didn't think we'd released the cornucopia data for the eyes."

"We didn't think so either."

"Are they real?"

"We think so."

"Are they harmful, jiggered, wired to stealthily take over the
users' brains with obedience or frenzy or religion on receipt of
a secret signal on Channel 23?"

"Not that we know of.  As far as we know that isn't even possible.
Yet."

"So we're...?"

"We could stop them."

"How?"

"We could buy the planes, acquire the airspace, take over the little
company that's somehow paying for them.  Or even credibly declare our
intent to shoot them down."

"And?"

"How do we decide?"

"Who decides?"

This is, Keda suddenly realizes in the milliseconds of comparative
calm, the waiting quiet, that this is how she's always seen herself,
at the touchpoint of the storm, the place where a little decision might
turn history one way or the other, accepting the angel's gift or
refusing the devil's trick.  Or t'other way around.

"Who are they, with the planes?"

A datasquirt.  A loose consortium.  Some people they vaguely know,
some they've never heard of, some that may not exist.

"Can we talk to them, wide-band?"

"We'll see."

Somewhere off the Mumbia coast a young man in a cloth cap is shouting
into a radio.  He loses the argument, and a few minutes later is plugged
into that damn telepresence set again, hooked up to a satellite feed that
he knows they can't afford, but that he's been told is being paid for
by the caller, paid for by someone else, a someone else that seems to
be the glitz-tech expert firm Generous Moment, and seems to be also
more than that.  They want a word with him, and it seems that they
not only know all about the planes (how could they know about the
planes?), but also the eyepieces (is it them calling, the eyecandy-man?),
and have subtly but convincingly hinted that they could call the whole
thing off (he thinks of a spider in a golden web).

"Hello?" he says into the dimly glowing space.

The space comes alive with light, and the face that appears across
from him is impossibly lovely.  "Hello," the face's voice says,
"We need to talk."

-=-

When I came out of the little house this morning, the air still cool
from the brief night, no one was there.  But when I reached the bridge,
sometime later in an empty morning of walking by myself beside the
thick brown river, they were there, standing or milling, in the same
five masks.

The bridge was, is, a small single arc across a particularly narrow place
in the river.  It is, or appears to be, stone, with a low stone railing,
unornamented.  No path leads to it, on the side with the houses or on
the other side, no differently-worn pattern in the dust suggests that
anyone crosses it with any frequency.  And when I stepped up to it
this morning, or roughly this noon, the dust was layered and undisturbed
in its surface, and I knew no one had crossed it for a very long time.
Which is, like everything else here, only a metaphor for something else,
for some neglect, or abandonment, or absence.

When I crossed the bridge, the others followed.  When I stepped carefully
into the brush that grew, that grows, on the far side, away from the
houses, the others followed.  Before they had walked indifferently
beside or behind or before me; now they were all behind, strung out
in a line when I looked back.  Before they had not looked at me in
particular; now their faces, or the faces of their masks, were all
turned to me.  The brush grows all the way to the far side of the
bridge, and even in between the stone walls, growing in the dust
that has piled up there into a thin soil just strong enough to hold
a few roots.  I had to walk slowly, and the brittle branches caught
at my clothes and my hands.  I walked toward the hill.

Looking back, I saw the five coming in my wake, picking their way
through the brush just as I had.  And beyond them, on the other
bank of the river, the masks of the people turned and stared at
me, as always.  I walked toward the hill.

As I walked, the air thickened and quivered around me.  I was aware
of a sense of grainy oppression, of approaching doom or destiny
or revelation.  It was a crude and heavy-handed feeling, a feeling
that came so obviously from the outside that I suspected something
mechanical and mundane; subsonic speakers buried in the cracked and
sandy side of the hill, pheromones of dread generated by the scrub
as I walked through it and stems broke under my feet.  I walked
toward the hill.

I don't remember now, in retrospect, what I expected to find on the
hill.  I walked toward it because it was a destination, a place in
the world (in this splinter of a world) that was different than other
places, at the opposite pole from that dark building where I was
forced into my mask.  (I was holding my mask in my left hand as I
walked toward the hill through the scrub; the eyes and mouth were
sagging and empty, more petulant then fierce now for my neglect of
them.)  I walked through the scrub through the hottest part of the day,
and with the five still following me and the sun and the dreadful
air heavy on my back I came to the bottom of the hill, and stood
looking up.

The hill rose from the flat scrub plain abruptly.  It might have been
(it may be) a mound of sand and dusty rock dropped here by a giant
hand, more than something grown from the action of wind and water.
This too is of course a metaphor.

When I stopped at the base of the hill, my five followers stopped
behind me.  I did not look back at them, but I heard the sounds of
their movement stop, and the rustling of their standing still begin.
There was no wind.  I could imagine wind blowing hard out of the
distance, across this flat plain with nothing to impede it but
the low discouraged scrub, and striking the houses like a fist,
curling around the lone hill and leaping across the river, rucking
up whitecaps even on that gelid brown water, screaming up the long
straight rows between the houses howling like a banshee.  The thought
somehow made the dread settle deeper around me.  In the metaphor that
this world is, that shouting wind has no place.

Climbing the side of the hill was not easy; there was still no
path, no stairs or handholds, nothing intentionally to aid the
climber.  How the old man in the orange monkey-mask got up here,
I do not know.

He sits there on the ledge with me, his back to the crown of the
hill.  I am facing him, writing, and the setting sun glares in my
eyes if I raise them to look at him.  On the ledges below us, the
other five sit in silence, the two fish, the white spheres with
rams' horns, and that one enveloping mask in red and violet terrible
in the sunset.  Their silence adds to the oppression that I feel.
The old man (and I call him old because it is an old man I would
expect to find sitting monkey masked on the side of a hill, not
because he looks old, except perhaps in an air of tiredness and
resignation that truly brings to mind defeat more than age) sits
cross-legged with his back to the sun, and watches me writing.

"This place is a metaphor," I said to him when I first gained the
ledge.  He only nodded.

"For what is it a metaphor?" I asked, "What is its referent?"

Then he shook his head, not so much in negation but in denial
of the question, or the necessity to answer.

"Soon enough," he said, "soon enough."  His voice frightened me,
and the oppression came down still more crushing.

What is the use of an oracle on a hillside if he will not answer,
and if just the asking thickens terror in the air?






The Dominion In Buena Or Oregon

So India came online.  Not all of India, but enough, or too much.
Not that India wasn't already online, but it was mostly the boring
old technologists, the set-in-their-ways early adopters, the
stodgy leading-edge rich folks.  And even they were still,
glitzrags and sales sheets and Bollywired to the contrary
notwithstanding, pretty low-tech; people with keyboards and
dubious voice recognition and palm-held units with little
styluses to get lost.  But Keda (and Mary Flicker and the
Armitage Dean and the Bubble tech leads and the Generous
Moment psych people, but mostly Keda because of her intuition's
way-heavy credence) liked the young man in the cloth cap
(and the young man in the cloth cap was dazzlingly dazzled by
the angel), and the planes went out.

When the eyepieces rained down (a design from an engineer in
Haifa, modified as a favor to the young man on the ship from
a design that was leaked from the Bubble, that was itself
modified by a Generous Moment client (for lots of money) from
a design published on the net under an assumed signet by
Mary Flicker), like mustard seeds from the air, many of them
went to waste, at least at first, fallen unnoticed or tossed
away or thrown into fires by the superstitious, eaten by goats
or cows.  But others were picked up and read (the little universal
glyphs on the wrapper; "stick this to your face" in wordless
appealing pictures).  Only an idiot would do it, but as soon as
one idiot did, the calculation for anyone else in the neighborhood
changed considerably.

So here is the net with all of India coming online.  A gaggle
of professionals tossing out their last-year's palmhelds and
whooping with joy at the higher resolution and radical interface.
A jillion urban junior high school girls chattering a mile a
minute and nearly overwhelming the local bands until someone gets
the right throttle into place.  A bevy of babies, oogling the
pretty lights and funny sounds, laughing and crying out into
the crowd in a way that hadn't happened before (who gives one
of those to a baby?) and causing all sorts of trouble (those
babies).  And here are the rumors and complaints and stories
about those awful neighbors (and rebuttals by those awful
neighbors), and video records of abuse and corruption by
government officials, and convincing evidence that those video
records are fake, and convincing evidence that the convincing
evidence should not be trusted, and manipulated copies of
those records where the faces of those involved have been
swapped around at random.

Because now the technical skills required to connect to the
world's network consist almost entirely of (aye) looking
around and (bee) talking.  For more advanced cases, moving
your hands and maybe pushing on things.

"So this is scary."

"You're surprised?" Keda to Marilyn and Marilyn to Keda, in
the Big Room at the Bubble, with everyone looking over each
other's shoulders.

"Has anyone seen my Bozo?"

"soiree is des of sod / The dominion in buena or oregon."

That last from a glob of Keda's meta-heuristics, which has
been allowed into the community if it can behave itself.

"Are we fast enough?"

"Heck, India's taking *days* to come all the way connected.
Nice and slow."

"People, I mean.  Are we keeping up?"

"Keeping up with what?"

"We're limited."

"Not very limited."

"No one's uploading themselves yet."

"Didn't we have this conversation?"

"Are there artificial minds out there, starting up the curve,
going to go critical --"

"-- take over the world?"

"-- outpace us some hour in the next few days, while we're busy
getting our teeth cleaned --"

"-- dentistry is a solved problem, keep up --"

"-- or catching up on our sleep --"

"I don't think so."

"I don't think so."

"I hope so."

And then, just about here, the network goes down.  Which, in the
Bubble's bubble, should be just about impossible.  But the network
goes down, and Keda is sitting in a room, lying on her back on a
low platform covered with an olive-green shag carpet, surrounded by
pillows, blinking in the light.  (Her wraparound eyecandy having
gone transparent as its connection vanished and their was nothing
to show.)

"Yow, what --"

And then, just exactly here, the network comes up again, and if it was
full of sound and light and banter before it's a real zoo now, as people
finish in the inside world some curse or expletive or superlative that
they started out in the real world, and squirts fly around on the
subject and size of the mysterious failure, and a great bevy of devices
that have never been disconnected before act in not entirely desirable
ways as they reconnect, and everyone tries to hire themselves out as
problem-determination agents to help figure out what the heck happened.

"Ouch."

This happens five more times in the next two hours.  Two times (the
first one and the third one) it seems to be just the Bubble.  The
other four are larger, wider-scale, more worrying.  And there are
reports (recommended by friend credence-bot) of lots of others, more
local and not touching the Bubble, around the world.  Keda and Mark
and even the Armitage, and many many people we haven't met in person
but whose voices we may have noted in passing, put in eternities of
debugging and poking of noses over the shoulders of people who may
or may not be doing anything (positive or negative) about it.

Floating outages continue for the next thirty hours, at least.  The
real network people are on it, though (if reduced to some ancient
almost manual tools), and the rest of the world learns to deal.
Most of India (and North Africa, where more fleets of planes have
been flying, dropping improved robustified cornucopia machines
and eye-candy eyepieces) assumes this is normal.

The Bubble's bubble is stable now, its firebreak opaque to whatever
is going on (a virus, an accidental virus, a rolling overload due
to the millions of new voices, whatever it is), the big room always
up, if not always connected to the rest of the world.  Keda and
Mary and a woman (apparently a woman) named Sacha are sitting on
that stone circle on that simulated hillside.  Keda wonders vaguely
if Sacha might be the Armitage Dean in another avatar, but there
is credence against it.

"I'm scared," Keda says.  "Is it alright if I'm scared?"

"It's alright if you're scared," says Mary Flicker.  "I've
been scared for years."

"But I'm scared different now.  It's more real.  Like staring
death --"

"-- like staring Death in the face, finally.  Or life."

"Profound."

"I'm scared that I may never be able to rest again.  You know
why I was offline in France last aeon, why I was offline with
Rainer for that year.  What if I can never do that again?"

"We're not in control."

"We were never in control."

"When we let the planes in India fly, when we sent our own
planes over Tunisia and the American Midwest and Mexico
City, was that the right thing to do?"

"Food machines didn't fix North Korea."  Sacha's voice is rough and
raspy.  It's the first time Keda's heard it.  "Food machines and
some really smart South Koreans fixed North Korea.  The network
didn't fix the Mideast: the network and some really brilliant
theologians fixed the Mideast."

"So we'll always need humans?" Mary, playing the straightman.

"I'm not saying that."

"What if those people in Georgia all come out sterile?"  Keda,
gesturing at a floating squirt about all those people with no
hay-fever.  "What if there was a bug in the bug, and poof no
more children in the southeast?"

"By the time they notice it, we'll be able to fix it."

"What if they all come out *dead*," Keda asks.  Death is
something she tries not to think about, this month.

"Maybe we'll be able to fix that, too."

"You can't fix *death*," Keda says, "I mean, if you're still
alive maybe we can make you immortal, some year or somehow.
But if you're dead you're lost."

"You never know," says the woman called Sacha, "you never
know."

Keda is not convinced.

-=-

I fell asleep at the feet of the monkey-masked man, beaten
down by the long walk and the sense of dread, curled on my
side, with my own mask on the ground next to me.  I thought
the other, the false or silent guru with his back to the west,
looked tired as well.  But I had no reason to outlast him.

I must remind myself that this place is only a metaphor.

I slept, and I awoke with the sun in my eyes.  I was on the
crown of the hill, on the ledge, and I was alone.  The
old man was gone (or so I thought at first), and my five
followers were gone, and even my own mask was gone.  Across
the scrub sat the river, beyond the river the rows of houses,
and beyond them the sun, rising out of the dust.

Then I found a mask, sitting in the dust behind me.  It
was the mask of the guru, a monkey mask, garish and almost
obscene in its orangeness.  I picked it up and weighed it
in my hand.

The oppression was gone, lifted (or so I thought) during the
night.  I stood looking down at the town, or the senseless
rows of houses, and thought again to what this metaphor
might refer, what its purpose might be, where I fit into
it and whether my writing had ultimately any point.  I
thought of waking up in that house on the green hilltop,
with the hazy gods dancing in the sky, and I was hungry.

Across the river I saw a single house by itself between
the rows.  Someone came out of that house and began to
walk along the riverbank, toward the bridge just visible
in the distance.  Although he was nearly too far off to
see, I knew that he was carrying, not wearing a mask.
And I guessed that I would not be eating today.  I put
on the monkey mask and sat on the ledge with my legs
crossed and my pad and my pen out of sight behind me,
and I waited, filled with exhaltation.

They came across the unmarked scrub between the bridge
and my hill, one leading and five following.  Like ants
they crawled toward me as the sun rose and the day grew
hotter.  I felt myself poised in the sky, poised on the
point of the metaphor, perhaps in sight of the purpose
of the world.

When they reached the base of my hill I could not see
them, they had long been hidden from me by the lip of
the ledge, but I knew that he the leader, the unmasked
one, stood looking up, with the five behind him.  And
when finally he sat before me and asked "For what is it
a metaphor?  What is its referent?", I could only shake
my head in the ecstasy of what I took to be approaching.

"Soon enough," I said, stifling in my monkey mask,
"Soon enough."

He fell asleep curled at my feet (I felt for him in the
crushing weight of his oppression, but I envied him
this moment, still in his future, of breathless
anticipation).  Now I have taken my pad and pen from
behind me, where he could not see them, and I am
writing this.  Perhaps it is the last thing I shall
write here.  On the ledge below me the five, the two
fish, the white spheres with rams' horns, and that one
enveloping mask in red and violet terrible in the sunset,
are arranging themselves for sleep.

Brothers and sisters, I want to call out to them, the
day is upon us!  But I know I must not disturb his
sleep.



There Are Places In The World

"There are places in the world," says Keda, or the Keda
avatar that is controlled by Keda herself and to a lesser
extent by everyone else in the Bubble, "where people are
being killed for wearing the eyepiece."

"Not many places, not many people.  We have recordings of
the killers, we can discourage them."

"Not many people.  Not many people *dying*?  One is many,
one is too many.  I don't want anyone's death on my hands,
not this year.  I don't want anyone's death on the hands
of the earth, of humanity, of whatever is being born."

"There are places in the world," says Sacha, or the Sacha
avatar that is controlled by who knows whom, "that we no
longer understand at all.  What should we do about that
place in the Rusian outback?"

"Were we right to drop the eyecandy on so many people?
What is happening out there?  What is putting all this
load on the system?"

("Porn", say a large enough plurality of disembodied
voices that the word echoes in the circle of stone on
the side of the grassy hill.)

"We wanted to be at the center, or near the center.  We
wanted to have some influence.  If we hadn't done it,
maybe someone else would.  Or maybe someone else would
have done something else.  We can only try to follow
our principles."

"And our principles are that chaos is good?  That just
giving a quillion people power that they don't understand
is good?  That we should just *trust* in what we don't
understand ourselves?  Is that what we think is good?"

("Yes", say a still larger pluraltiy of those voices of
the Bubble, and the word echos larger in the air.)

In the clear blue sky above the stone circle on the
grassy slope (the simulation is very good now, if
you're wearing the right hardware), odd misty forms
move, just barely visible, not quite there.  But
plausible, and potential.

Days later, at the end of a hard week, Keda is outside
the Bubble, walking on the stubbly fields, still within
the Bubble's bubble and wearing her eyecandy, but with
the inner world turned down and the real world turned up.
So there are no gods or demons in the sky (or at least,
she thinks, no visible ones), and if she sits down in a
smooth place and runs her fingers over the earth, it's
the real original Earth of the ancestors.

She is talking to Dacha, and to anyone else passing
through that corner of the room, and talking to herself.
It was a very hard week, but things are calmer now.
She isn't sure about the calm, but it has a good
credence.  Curves are only exponential in vitro,
after all.

"Why do we have all this time?"

"People just don't change that fast."

"Minds don't change."

"Human minds anyway."

"And that's still the only kind we have."

"Persistent rumors to the contrary notwithstanding."

There is a structure outside Madrid that could be an
alien spaceship, but is probably an elaborate hoax or
a piece of art.  There are many and somewhat reliable
reports of enigmatic grey creatures here and there, but
they're probably just a trend in costuming or body
modification.  (Keda checks one of the Greycams; it
shows the front of an apartment block, a flock of
pigeons.  She asks for a summary of current photographs
of Greys, and gets a collage of college students in
rubber suits, of things that are probably robots, of
things that may be entirely digital fakes, or may be
disturbingly adjusted people.  But there are no more and
no worse than there were yesterday.)

"I've been thinking about things wrong all this time,
I think."

There is a listening silence, or not a silence so much as
a listening energy laced through the constant background
chatter of the Bubble.

"When I thought about being at the crux when the world changed,
I was thinking that the curves would go exponential, and that
things would get very very fast and very very strange, and that
by being there at the right moment I might have some influence,
some role in making the future a better place.  Or, to be fair,
in making the future a more me-like place.  But at least not a
disaster."

"And that's wrong?"

"It ought to be wrong.  If the curves go exponential, it's not
that the world goes from being always about the same, then suddenly
gets real fast and real odd, and then comes out the other side
more or less settled into that new oddness, settled into some
new form.  If the curves go exponential, then everything gets
very fast and very odd and impossible to keep up with, and it
*stays* that way.  There's no one new state, there's just
constantly accellerating change."

"Any system that tends to change tends to change until it reaches
a state in which it tends to remain stable, after which it tends
to remain stable."

Who said that?  Dacha, but slightly in the voice of the Armitage
Dean, and slightly in the voice of Mary Flicker.  Maybe, Keda
thinks, they're all the same person.  Except that I've seen the
Armitage and Mary together.  Haven't I?  And one is usually a
girl and one is usually a guy.

"So the curves don't stay exponential?"

"Or they get close enough to infinity for all practical purposes."

"I'm not sure I know what that could mean."

"We can just relabel the axes.  Then the exponents are nice steady
lines."

"Renormalize our expectations?"

"Or ourselves."

There are places in the world where people are killing each other,
still, despite everything the clued people can do.  "I want to
grab them by the shoulders, each single one, and scream at them
that if they just wait a little while, they can live forever.  That
anyone that dies now is an immortality missed out on.  An infinite
loss.  That if they just behave, they can live forever."

"That's what they're fighting about in the first place, love."

Keda sighs, and dives back into the collective that's trying to
forecast water contention along the Tigris, and figure out what
to do about it.  She suspects someone else is sticking their
noses into the area as well, without declaring themselves as
any honest collective should.

With another fragment of her attention (there's an improved syrup
today that let's her tighten up her focus in two or three ways at
once; what if we all end up sterile, she thinks again), she's looking
over the shoulder of a representative of a Generous Moment client
that's worried about grey goo: tiny self-reproducing machines
that devour the world to make more copies of themselves.  Real
nanotechnology at that level is late in coming (current best
guesses still put it a year away); the cornucopia machines work
on a brilliant hack that doesn't require, or enable, goo-style
self-rep.  But months are only months, and the loose coalition of
the clued that emerged during the hard week are are sniffing around
for solutions.  Real-live physical representatives are visiting
the labs that answers might come from, looking for places to spend
money (or what passes for money in the places where money is worn
out; attention and favors and clue), with whispering multitudes
peering out through their eyes and advising them.

-=-

So I slept.  I put the monkey mask down as the sky darkened, and I
lay on my side and listened to the breathing of the innocent youngster
sleeping across the ledge from me, listened to myself breathing.  I thought
I could stay up, stay conscious during whatever ineffable or metaphorical
process took his soul, took me, out of his body and back through time
to this morning, to wake up on this ledge in this body, with the
moneky mask.  But perhaps I need to sleep to go onward, to whatever
next stage I will occupy tomorrow, having played my part (twice now)
on the crown of this symbolic hill.

Will I find myself, tomorrow, back in the neat two-room house on
the green hilltop?  (Why is this metaphor so thick with hills?
What does it represent, being raised up above the surrounding
ground?)  Will I find myself whole and back in the world, the
world that I now remember only dimly?  Will I be, perhaps, one
of the gods or demons dancing in the sky above the forests?
I can imagine myself a high-stepping bird, dancing around the
city of the lions.

-=-

Keda checks in, finally, with the lab in Viljandi where, back before
the difficult week, she thought they might have been growing a god.
She thinks of herself, still, in the Thirty-First Situation, in
Conflict with a God.  There are so many ways that that could be fit
to the present situation that going out and looking for another god
to battle is not really necessary.  But she checks in anyway.

"It's been an interesting couple of weeks," Michel says, "as you
know."  The lab has been overrun by two different armies equipped
with low-fatality but high-annoyance weapons, has been seized by
three separate quasi-governmental organizations, and has been
saturated with airborne syrup variants of a bewildering variety
of types.  Most filtered out relatively quickly, but not on the
whole conducive to scientific progress.

"Can I talk to your system?  Do you let it out into the world?"

"We let some of them, the smaller ones, out into the world.  They
are very popular, as minstrels and absurdist theatre.  You've
contracted with some of them yourself.  Which is only fair, since
you gave us some of the seeds."

It occurs to Keda that she hasn't heard much from her own
spamvertisement meta-heuristics lately.  The spamvertisements
themselves seem to have withered away also, although perhaps
the filters are just temporarily winning the war.  More
mysteries to check up on.

"The smaller ones, you say.  What about the bigger one?"

"The bigger one we have playing elaborate games with itself,
and drinking a read-only stream from the world.  It's, well,
developing nicely."

"Does it have delusions of grandeur?  Ambition?  An artistic
style?"

"Would you like to talk to it?"

In order to talk to the bigger one, Keda enters a virtual space
of the nascent mind's own devising.  Michel isn't clear whether
this is a requirement of his, or of the mind's.  Keda imagines
that it is some of both; Michel doing what he thinks will please
the mind, so it is less likely to become petulant and to lapse
into silence, as nascent non-evolved minds are so wont to do
(why not, after all?).

"Be gentle with it," Michel said before letting her in.  But
she has a reputation for gentleness, which is one reason she
is rich (money has proven surprisingly resilient, and still
matters in large swathes of the world, although with the
cornucopia machines widely dispersed it doesn't matter in the
same ways it did before).

"Hello," Keda says, sitting in the long comfortable armchair
in the center of the dark space, illuminated by the sourceless
sun-colored light.  "How are you?"

"I am fine," says a voice, "how are you?"  The voice is soft
and not bland.  Ambisexual, clear, not mechanical or harsh,
with an odd lift and a hint of melody.

Keda is quiet for a moment (whatever constitutes a moment
here), thinking.  She hasn't thought this through in any
details; things have been busy.  Go to the lab, she thought,
have a look at the God.  Maybe try the book again if it
doesn't seem interesting.  But then there was that difficult
week.

"What would you ask, in my position?" she says into the darkess.

"In your position," the same voice says, "I would ask 'What
would you ask, in my position?'".  In repeating her question,
the voice imitates Keda's own intonation, but does it by
impressing it on the same underlying voice, not just by
playing back Keda's own voice saying the words.  Keda is
impressed.  A smart alec, or perhaps just a mechanism,
but at least a subtle one.

"What do you think is going to happen?"

"What do I think is going to happen where?  To whom?"

"Anywhere.  On Earth.  To everyone.  I'm worried about
the pace of change."

"Do you doubt yourself?"

Ooh, Keda thinks, psychological probing.

"Of course I doubt myself.  Doesn't everyone always doubt
themself?"

"There is a story," the voice says, "about two people who
love each other, but for various reasons they cannot be
together.  It may be that they are from different cultural
groups, or from rival factions of the same cultural group,
or because one of them has a duty that conflicts with their
being together.  This is a very common story."

Keda waits, but the voice does not continue.

"That is indeed a very common story," says Keda, "but I'm
not sure what it has to do with anything?"

"What I think is going to happen," says the voice, "is that
people will continue telling each other that story."

Keda laughs.  "That's very comforting."

"Thank you."

"Thank you."

"There is a story," the voice says again, and Keda wonders
if it's simple enough to get stuck, "about two people thrown
together in a stressful situation, who are initially in
conflict, but who gradually come to align their interests
and sometimes to fall in love.  In some stories like this,
it happens suddenly rather than gradually."

Keda laughs again.  "Do you know the Thirty-Six Dramatic
Situations?"

"Yes," says the voice.  "The Nineteenth Situation is Slaying of
a Kinsman Unrecognized.  The elements are the slayer, and the
unrecognized victim.  The first category Polti describes for
this situation involves being about to slay a daughter unknowingly,
by command of a divinity or an oracle."

"Did you pick that situation specifically for any particular
purpose?  I'm relatively certain that I have no daughters."

"Also," says the voice.  "The Eleventh Situation is called the Enigma.
The elements are an interrogator, a seeker, and a problem."

"I have a friend," says Keda, "who was being that situation."
Michel has asked her to turn off all external connections before
coming into the mind's space, and she feels alone without Mary
Flicker and the Bubble.

"What is your friend's name?"

"She is called Marilyn, or Mary Flicker."

"Mary Flicker is very well known," says the voice, "and so is
Keda of Generous Moment."

"Oh, yeah, we're celebrities.  Damned annoying sometimes."

"Damned annoying," says the voice.  "Soon I will also be a
celebrity."

"Are you going to rule the world?"

"Aren't we all?"

"Are you a God?" She is wishing she hadn't asked these last two
questions; Michel might not consider it gentle.

"You ask that as thought it might have an answer."

"Why shouldn't it?"

"The question is ill-defined.  What is a god?"

"Isn't there reasonable consensus on the question?"

"Less than you think.  Your flaw, if I may say so without an
annoying mechanical rudeness, is that you overestimate the
connectivity of the connected.  Just because a few billion
people can whisper sweet somethings in each other's ears and
gesture at gigabyte squirts of textured data, you think that
you understand global culture."

"I don't think I understand global culture," Keda replies,
miffed at this pretend mind and its smooth voice.

"And yet you ask if I am a god."

"Are you a God?"

"Read your Heinlein."

"If we are all just gods," Keda says, "it will be hard to
pull off the Twenty-Seventh Situation with real panache."

The voice is silent for a long time, in the darkness.  Keda
is less comfortable this time.  She feels that its attention
has wandered, and then returned.  What it says next tends to
confirm the feeling.

"You should go out now, Keda," says the voice, "there is camera
dust in the air over Europe.  Thank you for talking to me.  And
pay attention on the way out."

On the way out of the sphere of darkness, back to the real world,
she finds herself for a moment in a narrow space, whose walls
are covered with rose-colored cloth embroidered with red viny
shapes.  She hears her own voice say "Goblin market".  She
hopes that she has paid attention.

Out in the real world, she finds that there is indeed camera dust
in the air over Europe.  There are also somewhat convincing stories
of sudden advances in the understanding and regulation of aging,
and in the control of the last few deadly forms of cancer, as well
as a less plausible story about activity in the asteroid belt.
But the camera dust is the big news.

Camera dust consists of innumerable tiny machines with light sensors
and low-power transmitters and rudimentary senses of self and
position.  They constantly broadcast on an open channel (open if
any receiver is close enough to hear) "here I am, here is my
approximate position, here is what I see."  Because they are
tiny, tiny as dust, they get into everything and everywhere.
A cloud of them, or several clouds of them, dispersed into
the cloud layer over Europe (and, it seems, South America),
does terribly things to privacy and to secrecy.

"I had a dream," says Mary Flicker to Keda and the Armitage
Dean (who is somewhere in the Ukraine on business of his own).
"I dreamed I was holding some gadget, some froo-fraw, that
was metallic and shiny, with a few buttons and triggers
scattered here and there is some arcane order.  I was a
child, or favored apprentice, and the gadget had been given
to me to hold for some ambiguous dream purpose.  I pointed
it up at a seagull hovering in the sky.  I pushed one of the
buttons, and a cone of light came out of it (it had a sort
of snubby business end, with no visible hole or lens).  The
seagull floated within the cone of light, not moving, and
when I moved my hand which moved the gadget which moved the
light, the gull moved also.

"When I pushed another button, three (or I think it was three)
spheres or bubbles went up the cone of light and embedded
themselves in the gull, next to its eye.  I was shocked by
this, and there were other people there who saw it and their
reactions were also notable, but ambiguous.  The seagull, which
had been an ordinary grey and white and brown one, turned black
except for its head which was dark grey like a hood.

"Then either I pushed another button or the dream just continued,
and the gull's body grew downward, sort of flowed toward the
ground until what had been the gull was only the head, and
standing there was a tall person in black looking down at
me.

"I think it looked rather like you, Dean."

In the background is the mutter of the Bubble's technicians
and Generous Moment's idea people and facilitators, staring
into devices and drawing on whiteboards and blueboards and
greenboards, working on the riddle of camera dust.

"The trouble is," says a consensus voice, "that the damn things
are too small to analyze.  And also too small to make, which means
that someone is significantly ahead of us in fabrication.  Which
is a worry."

"I'm flattered that you would dream of me, darling Mary."

The Bubble itself has not been free of camera dust since that
first day; some got in on the bottom of someone's shoe, or in
a puff of wind, or a box of chocolates.  They would like to have
devices to hunt down the individual specks, or fields to disable
them, or sweepers to sweep rooms clean of them.  So far they
have no such thing, and the world (including presumably whoever
launched the dust into the clouds in the first place) can watch
them (sporadically; some rooms are more contaminated than others),
and they can watch the other labs that are doing the same thing,
and none of them have succeeded.  There may, Mary points out,
be a lab that has succeeded, but that shoulder they would not
be able to look over.  They have heuristics running, watching
the cameras, watching for any sudden suspicious failure of a
large group of them in a small area.

Lightning strikes seem to be effective, sometimes.

And meanwhile it has become common again to make love with
the lights out, and conversely to make love with the lights
on and everyone watching.  There are services that track
which cameras are the most-watched right now, and the most-watched
in the last hour, and the last day (because the cameras track
and broadcast that about themselves also; "here's how busy I
am, how popular").  Cameras showing attractive naked people,
and attractive naked people together in the throes of passion,
are very popular.  The fashion shows no sign of abating so far.
What a mass of hacks we are, Keda thinks.



Until I Have Been Everyone Caloric

It has been days, maybe weeks, since last I wrote.  In this
house, this time, I found a pad and a pencil in the box along
with the pitcher of water and the dry tasteless food.  The
pad is smaller than my pad, and the pencil is dull.  But
it's good to be writing again.  I feel as though I were
talking to someone, although I can't imagine who would ever
read this.  This metaphor has far outrun my imagination.

I am a different person every day.  Each person that I have been
has a different atmosphere, a different way of feeling about things.
It is striking, or maybe horrifying, how many different ways I can
feel about essentially the same things; and each different way feels,
at the time, entirely correct and natural and intrinsic to me, and
some (or all) of the previous ways seem (when i remember them, from
previous days) to have been wrong, mistaken in various ways.  And
this is true even though I know (or have good reason to believe)
that tomorrow I will be someone else, and will feel yet again
differently, and today's feelings will be remembered as wrong and
mistaken, and perhaps pitiful.

Today I am a stocky man with shoulder-length black hair.  My mask
is a long vertical oval, brilliant pink on one side and brilliant
green on the over, with vertical slits for eyes and no opening
to represent the nose or the mouth.  As on all these other days,
I awoke in the morning (struggling against sleep is futile, even
when I can bring myself to try), in one of four bunks in one of
an endless line of houses on this same plain, and found my mask
next to me.  This morning the other three bunks were empty but
looked slept-in.  On other days they have been filled with sleeping
people, or with people awakening as I awakened.  It seems to be
only the light of the sun that wakes us; the plain is quiet.

I relieved myself in the usual stinking bucket in the corner,
wondering again if I will on one of these days find that I am
one of whatever agency empties the buckets and fills the food
boxes.  But there may be no such agency; it may be woven into
the structure of the metaphor that it simply happens, that dawn
brings an emptied (but still filthy) bucket, and a filled food
box.

That first day, waking up after having been the monkey sage
on the hill, full of confidence in coming revelation, I barely
moved.  At the first instant of waking I lay there with my
eyes shut, telling myself that it was like a child on Christmas
morning, prolonging the joyful anticipation of the glorious
and unknown.  But even then the thin blanket was lumpy under
my back, and the air smelled of confinement and waste, and
the spiritual atmosphere in the new body was heavy and dull.
It was with no great surprise that I opened my eyes finally
to the inside walls of an indistinguishable tiny house, and
that through the doorless doorway I could see the dawn just
brightening over the dusty street.  That day I found beside
myself an abstract wolf mask, in maroon and bruised purple,
with yellow ribbons dangling from the hairy mushroom-like
ears.  But I barely put it on.  I ate and drank and voided
when my body moved me to, but otherwise I lay on the bed and
did nothing, until sometime in the dusk sleep took me again.

I have been tall men and short men, I have been thin women
and I have been a women with rolls of pink skin running in
hills down below my breasts.  One day, standing in the street,
I saw a man, maskless, being dragged down the street by two
strong men in masks.  I turned to look at him, as everyone
else in the street was turning to look at him, and even after
I recognized myself I could do nothing but stare.

Is this helplessness part of the metaphor?  Is it woven into
the rules of this place, with time genuinely looped back on
itself, so that I can never do anything that would change what
happened on that first day, when I got my first mask?  Or is
it only lethargy that prevents me from rushing into the street,
tearing off the masks of the people, and organizing a gang
of myselves to go and rescue myself?  Or it might be something
that they put in the water, to keep each one of myselves
helpless and sedated.  Or it might be something in the dust,
or the light, or in the textures of my flesh.

But today at least I have found this pencil and this pad here
in the box, and that gives me some hope.  Maybe tomorrow I
will walk down the long row of houses, and find the river
and the hill, and talk to my other selves, and we can all
take turns writing in my proper pad, the one that I brought
from the house on the green hill all those weeks ago, or
yesterday.

-=-

The dirigible space was huge and dim and echoing, smelling
of mildew and emptiness.  It was also suspciously free of
camera dust compared to the area around it, a light industrial
suburb of Hamburg.  The small cloud they'd brought in with them,
on their clothes and in their hair, were only enough to show
brief glimpses of darkness, more or less from the same place
they were standing anyway.  Keda wished, not for the first
time, for a palpable handful of the stuff she could scatter
in the air, or better a hand-pumped sprayer that could saturate
the place with tiny cameras, tiny data feeds.  If they had
had those, they could have fedexed them out and hired some
local to spray them around, and not had to come out here
themselves, in vulnerable and heartbeating person.

The building was five stories tall, and wide and deep as a
an ocean, as the sky, as time and darkness.  It had been used
once, apparently, for the construction and maintenance of
helium airships, or so the records said.  Now it was in
limbo, owned by a firm that hadn't shut down so much as
wandered away, as the majority of the stockholders took
their cornucopia machines and their air flyers and vanished
off into the hills, ignoring their personal and fiduciary
responsibilities.

There was a lot of that going around that month.

The day had started out warm and sunny, but clouds had rolled
in as they crossed Germany, and by the time they reached
Hamburg it was dismal, and the air felt electric with coming
rain.  (Rainy days, and especially stormy days, tended to
damp down and supress the camera dust.  The Bubble was making
progress on detection of the dust, and even duplication, but
Generous Moment was very keen to find out where it had come
from in the first place, what methods they had, and if they
were likely to be accidentally or on purpose destroying the
world anytime soon.)  So looking down from the satellites,
there are only masses of cloud.

Now Keda and Mary Flicker, both in grey cotton and slim
unobtrusive eyecandy and backed up by four off-duty peace
officers with good reputations and stunguns, stand just
inside the big barn-like doors of the place, gawking up into
the huge space.  No sign of anything large or mysterious
here, but also not much light to speak of to see by.
(Camera dust, at least the kind that was vexing the world
this week, is sensitive only to visible light more or
less in the center of the human spectrum; there is active
betting on the net when infrared camera dust would come
along and make even light-out loving a public ceremony.)

Keda asks her eyecandy for infrared, and that's even
worse.  Pitch-cold.

"Lights over here", says one of the backup, a short beefy
guy in brown leather chaps and black vest.  Standing, at
the moment, next to a bank of switches.  Mary squints at
them, and up into the heights.

"Shoot," she says, "let's see what there is."

The lights come on with impressive thunks, one bank per
turn of a switch, except for the last switch which doesn't
seem to do anything.  They're bright, the lights, set in rows
far up on the ceiling and suspended from the catwalks and
set into the walls.  A good third of them are burned out
or missing, but the rest are enough to flood the vast space
and make it look simultaneously bigger and smaller, all of
its corners exposed and unmysterious and impressively concrete.

"Big place," says Mary.  And they walk forward.

They could have brought dragonflies, little camera drones,
even tribes of little mutually supportive robots.  They could
have stayed home and sent the robots in, and run the show and
watched the show lying on their back in bed.  But Mary thought
they should come in person, and Keda has had Bubble fever for
days.  So here they are.  Mary more or less owns the building at
the moment, or at least has a presumptive lien based on a pending
lawsuit and an associated injunction.  So they have the original
blueprints.  It remains to be seen how much help that will be.

"Anybody home?" Mary says, in a voice much louder than Keda
would have recommended.  It echos eerily in the space.

"You sure this is the right place?" Mary signals silently
in their private eyecandy space.  Not wanting the backup to
see uncertainty.

"You know I'm not.  But the models said it looked good --"

"-- very good --"

"-- very good, from the spread patterns of the camera-dust
over central Germany.  The cloud whose trails were the least
muddled by the wind.  Something that launched those camera
might have come in this direction afterward, and might have
come to somewhere near this building, and this building is
oddly free of the dust itself."

"You think they have a suppressor on?"

"The dust that we brought in still seems to be working."  She
shifts her attention quickly around, to public views of the
backs of her legs, Mary's left ear, and several banks of
lights.

"So they know we're here."

"Everyone in the world knows we're here if they care to look.
Welcome to the present."

"Nothing to be afraid of, after all."

"Just a little chat, we want."

They walk across the big empty space, toward two doors and a
flight of stairs against the opposite wall, Keda's shoulderblades
itching the whole way.

Behind each door is an office, and in each office is a desk, and
different-colored places in the floor where there might once have
been other bits of furniture.  And the stairway leads up, toward
the roof.  As they come out through the door of the second office
there is a metallic grinding from above, as of some machine starting
up noisily, or a door cranking open.  They all look at each other.

"None of the camera dust up there, of course."  So while all the
world can see tens of thousands of bathrooms, no one can see what
might be up the stairs.  Unless there's someone up there.

"Should have brought the fireflies."

"'Cause ooh we're scared of physical proximity," says Mary, darting
out her pink tongue.

Backing away from the enormous cliff of the wall and squinting up
into the lights (just as bright and daunting on infrared and even
ultraviolet as they are to the natural eye), they can see that the
stairs go up to a landing and a set of catwalks, and then further
up to a pair of wide doors on a second landing, and then further up
into complexity.  The sound, at a guess that the Bubble endorses from
the recording, came from somewhere up around that second landing.

Mary starts up the creaking metal stairs quickly, at a sprint.  Keda
follows more slowly, but catches up to her around the level of the
catwalks.

"No dust to speak of," Mary says, stopping for a moment and running
her fingers over the metal railings that join together here, leading
in from the catwalks and down to the floor and up to the next landing.

"No dust, no rust, and most of the lights work.  It's a live place."

"But those offices were well cleaned up."

"Who needs an office, anymore?"

They go up the next set of stairs more slowly, or at least more
steadily, Mary still in the lead, Keda still behind her, the
backup behind them.  Their steps on the stairs echo loudly in
the space, nearly as loud (it seems to Keda) as the lights are
bright.  She thinks of spiders climbing a drainpipe, not knowing
the house is on fire.

The second landing is broad and deep, and the doors are even
bigger than they looked from below.  Mary squirts a view of the
building's plans into the shared space of their eyecandy, and Keda
sees that the doors don't open out into midair as she'd thought
they might.  On the other side is a big enclosed projection from
one side of the building, at least if the plans can be trusted;
storage and ventilation and alternate roof access, housings for
fans.  There is a shiny metal hasp joining the doors, but without
a lock in it.  Mary opens the hasp, and it doesn't even creak.

They all look at each other again.  There is certainly some kind
of sound, or vibration, coming from behind the doors.  Mary
says, "Hello!" again, less loudly this time.  Keda shrugs and
pulls on the lefthand door.  It swings open easily; the hinges
feel oiled.

The room inside is small and close, or at least certainly small
and close compared to the huge echoing chamber outside.  It's an
odd shape, an ovoid really, made of metal plates set inside the
larger box that the doors originally opened into.  Mary frowns,
puzzled, and Keda rubs at a sudden deep itch high in her nose
between her eyes.  And just as she sees that two of the backups,
and now also Mary, are frowning and rubbing at their faces,
between their eyes, the world spins and goes away, and she is
conscious only barely long enough to feel her body falling to
the floor.

-=-

Now every day when I look into the box in the morning I find
another pad, always blank, and another blunt pencil.  By the
luck of the draw I should eventually be in the same house
twice.  If in fact I'd be able to tell, and if there are only
a finite number of houses.

One day I did set off and walk, down the long blank dusty
space between the houses.  I walked all morning, and only at
noon as I was getting hungry did I see that I was walking toward
that large dusty black building in the center, or one very
like it, and I realized I was not going to get to the river.
I turned back and walked the other way for an hour, and then
was overcome by futility and went into a house at random,
since they are after all identical, and drank all the water
in the pitcher and ate all the food I could stand, and slumped
down onto a bed and slept, even though the sun was not half
down in the sky.

This morning I woke in a body that felt young and strong and
able, a fit animal body whose inner emotional tone was simple
and easily satisfied.  I persuaded myself easily to take off
trotting down the row between the houses, my mask (a light and
easy thing, just a white oval with round crimson eyes and lips
in a clown smile) bobbing in front of my face.  It felt good
to run, and I felt no urgent need to be anywhere in particular,
or to penetrate the metaphor, or to find the hill and myself in
the monkey mask or to find any sort of truth.  I just ran at
an even pace until finally my legs were tired and I slowed to
a walk.

I ran and walked all day, in a straight line, stopping into
houses to eat or drink or relieve myself when I wished.  I looked
at the masks around me, and they seemed decorative, amusing,
entertaining by turns.  I felt that I could speak to any of
the others in the road or the houses (the others, other instances
of myself, or other parts of the metaphor) if I could catch
their eyes.  But of course everyone was masked as I was.

Now, with the evening coming on, this body is tired.  I walked,
or I should say it walked, and ran, all day, and there was no
change in the line of houses, except that once, maybe an hour
ago, another line came in from the left, the first intersection
that I have seen in this world (in this metaphor) except at
the black building in the center and at the river.  I thought
that there might be some significance to it, but I felt like
going on, so I did, staying on the same straight line I had
all day.

And now the sun is sinking quickly, and this body is tired, and
with that tiredness now sitting on this thin pad of a matress
I can feel some of the confidence and easy amusement draining
out of me, and in a moment I will be lying down asleep.  What
else is there, really, to do here, now?





I Was Thinking It Is A Stage And Baby Did This The Dark

For some unmeasurable span of time Keda is aware only of a single
tone, varying up and down in pitch.  She is also aware, at the same
time or before or after, of seeing color, pure and lovely color
varying gradually from dim to bright, from pale to pure, from red
to orange to yellow to blue to green to violet to red again.  She
is also aware, gradually, of thought.  She tries to twitch the
little subliminal muscles that should operate her eyecandy, tries
to turn her head, to open and close her hands, to thrust her arms
and legs suddenly apart and to shout.  Nothing perceptible happens,
but she hopes that perhaps she's just socked some technician in
the jaw.

Smells flow by, tastes, from mildly bitter to mildly delicious
(what, she thinks, no virtual chili peppers or dandelion sap?),
and tickles and prickles and some rather delicious somatic touchings
and some heat and some cold.  All of it seems to be happening more
or less at once, and she thinks (or later she remembers thinking)
that maybe this is another of those tricky instant-memory things
and maybe it's not really happening at all.

And then the smoke clears and she's sitting on a bench, in a shady
garden somewhere, and the sky is blue and the sun is warm and
yellow, and she's even wearing her eyecandy, although it can't
see anything outside itself and the local ad-hoc space, which
is empty except for a small spark which she hopes is Mary.

"Mary?"  Mary comes around the corner of a grape arbor, and they're
both wearing the same things they were, more or less, back in the
real world.  Keda wonders for a moment if maybe this is the real
world rather than the obvious sort of simulation, but when she
reaches out to take Mary's hand and the two of them sort of
flow and merge together into a single confused ecstatic composite
viewpoint, she decides that probably not.

  I was thinking it is a stage and baby did this the dark was
   noise about a ant but change told me to drawer and woodharmony
    and touch
     but after that coat was rough here to carriage so retrelation
      caused male, side, yesterday and cough.
  Also cut and wire did north the polish word level thinking about society
   and white so I rate to the run strong and fertile left laugh for question
    to run to slope,
     frequent, fat also for framegarden so snow knife.

"Um, hi?" she says, with the body that is no longer pretending to
exist.  Her voice seems to work regardless, as does Mary's.

"Hi!  Did you hear that thing, just now, about the framegarden?"

"Yeah.  Can you see my face?"

"Well, no.  But I can tell what your expression is.  Is this any kind
of sim that Generous Moment knows about?"

"Not that I can remember with my poor unassisted brain.  Did you have
your eyecandy for a second, when we woke up just now?"

"I seemed to.  But now I'm gone."

"Me too.  What do you see?"

"Garden, grape arbor, bench, nice day, sky, sunshine."

"Can you move around?"

"Um, yeah.  Oh!"

"What?"

"That, over, um, there," and Keda can tell where Mary is pointing,
toward the white house with the blue shutters standing in the sunlight
and shadow, not far away, "that's the house that I told you about,
in France, where I rested that time --"

"-- and the boy --"

"-- and the boy was so sad and pretty, and we were so young."

"I wonder what we're doing here."

"Maybe we'll do some of your memories next."  And Mary tries to move
away from the house, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do that,
and in the next moment they are inside.

"It's a nice house," Keda says, or thinks, or does whatever she is
doing to talk to Mary.  "I wonder what happened to our backup."

"I hope they're okay."

"They were scratching at their noses just like us, just before."

"I remember that."

"Hm."

"Something we inhaled, burrowing into our brains?"

"Not a nice thought," and Keda feels her absent skin prickle.

"Take my hand," says Mary, suddenly, and Keda reaches out and
takes it, and it is odd to be invisible and to have no body but
to be holding Mary's hand.

"Funny place, this."

"Is it something that Generous Moment could have done?"

"Or the Bubble?  Or anyone else we know of?"

"Probably not.  This goes beyond high-res avatars somehow.  All
this interior consciousness stuff."

"I'll bet they're cheating.  Some hack on how the brain fills in
stuff.  Like how we paper over blind spots."

And they stop talking for awhile, both thinking about things.
Gradually the feeling of holding Mary's hand fades, and Keda is
sorry.  They move around the house.  It is airy and sparsely
furnished, fitted out in plain wood and white surfaces.  The
windows are open.

"Nice place," Keda says.

"Mm."

Keda looked into the corner, where she'd left the prisoner in its
metal shackles.  It wasn't there.  Turning back into the room,
she saw that Mr. Melon had the prisoner out of its shackles, and
also out of its battle dress, so that it appeared to be a small
mammal with an unpleasantly pointed nose and unsightly worn spots
in its fur.  What Mr. Melon was doing with it could only be called
"dandling", and in return it was doing something that could only
be "frolicking".

Keda sighed.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she asked, looking
around to be sure that the black blinds were still down across
all the windows.

"But it's so CUTE," said Mr. Melon, in a whiny voice.

Keda thumbed on her radio and dialed a four-digit contact code.
When someone picked up, she said "This is Luke Skywalker".
Woo, she thought to herself, that'll impress them.  "I need
some backup here."

"Hold on please, I'll see if I can find anyone," a high and
annoying voice said from the other end.

"You still there?" Mary's voice asks.  Keda shakes her head (or
does something that would normally cause her head to shake if her
head was around at the time).

"Yeah," she says.  "I think I just had a dream."  She is, they are,
back in (or still in) the same room in the house from Mary's memory.

"Was it a good dream?"

"Just odd."

"I'm hungry."

"That's an interesting data point.  I'm not.  I'm also getting tired
of not knowing what the hell's going on."

"You have to take these things as they come."

"Why?  IS THERE ANYONE OUT THERE?" she shouted in a generally outward
direction.  "I NEED TO TALK TO YOU!"

She feels Mary smiling.  Their shared viewpoint drifts through a
short hallway and up a flight of stairs with a pine railing.

"Heh," Mary's voice says, "that door wasn't there in the real house."

The door is at the end of the upstairs hallway, in a place that Keda's
spatial sense says should lead outside, either into open air (she has
a visual flash of a cartoon door with a sign over it saying "Complaint
Department) or onto the roof of a porch or a balcony that she didn't
notice while they were outside.

"Let's see where it goes."

The door opens into her office at Generous Moment.  It's furnished as it
was up until a year ago, with a visualization space, various Room With a
View sensors and active surfaces, and odd little ceramic and plastic idols
perched on various horizontal surfaces.  Also drifts of static books and
fading printouts in the corners.

"Mm," says Keda.

"Familiar?" Mary asks.

"Used to be my place."

"Long time ago?"

"Up until a year or so ago.  And for three years before that.  Before I got
my goggles and gave up on the whole physical possessions thing."

The door is open, and the hallway outside the office is bare.  Which doesn't
really fit the timescale; at the time the office had looked like this, the
hallway walls had been thick with noticeboards real and virtual, and swarms
of indoor dirigible fireflys bopping around and getting in the way.

"But the hallway looks more like present time."

"Let's look."

The hallway, the rest of the floor, is as Keda saw it last, bare and
forlorn, with cable-ends hanging from sockets, forgotten stuffed animals
and half-peeled-off stickers.

And then from somewhere around a corner, someone moving.

It's a loser of some kind, with long dirty hair and grimy overalls, looking
around nervously and moving in quick jerks.  On some syrup or some cruder
drug, probably, and afraid of security guards that aren't there.  But the
cameras should see him and tell someone.  Eventually.

What he's holding is a bomb.  Keda can't tell how big or how nasty, but
it's a shiny modern design (digitally mediated self-optimizing destruction)
that doesn't match his clothes or his manner.  He's standing by the
elevators, looking at the walls.  Apparently he can't see Keda and Mary
(Keda or Mary, Keda-and-Mary, whatever they are now, here).

"This worries me," Keda signals Mary, in what feels like a data-squirt
rather than anything said aloud.  Just in case.

"It's probably not real.  A dream."

"Could be.  Or it could be based on a live feed from the real building.
There are enough cameras."

"Nothing comes here from the outside," a third and unfamiliar voice says
(although it sounds for an instant like Mr. Melon in Keda's fading dream).
The loser, now crouched at one wall unscrewing the latch of a maintenance
plate, doesn't seem to hear that voice, either.

Keda's gears are spinning; Mary speaks first.  "Hello," she says, "who are
you?"

The voice ignores the qustion.  "This place is entirely self-generated,
from your thoughts and your memories.  Allowing any external inputs would
corrupt the data."

Keda snorts.  "Who are you, then?  You're not anybody external?"

Silence.

"Your digital intuition," says Mary.

"Heh?"

"The reason you're rich and famous and in control of more of the world
that you think you are."

"You think the voice is my intuition, externalized?"

"Could be."

"What do you think, voice?"

But again the voice is silent.  The loser has the panel open, and has stuck
the bomb to the inside of the door.  He is fiddling with the controls,
which make musical electronic beeps.

"If my intuition is making that voice, my intuition might also be making
this loser.  And if I'm really all that smart, someone could be planting
a bomb in the Generous Moment building right now.  And that would be
bad."

"It would."

"Voice?"

"Yes?" says the voice, startlingly.

"We would like to leave.  There is something that we would like to check out
in the real world.  Can we leave?"

"You will have to wait until it is time to leave," the voice answers,
unhelpfully.

"That might be too late.  How fast is time passing, outside?"

"The ratio is not fixed."

"How long has it been, since whatever happened in the airship hangar?"

Silence again.

"I don't think it knows anything that you don't know," says Mary.

"Except maybe that thing about the bomb?"

And without any transition they are back in the garden of the white
house, and Keda is overcome by sadness.

-=-

Yesterday I woke in a body whose interior consciousness was
simple and straightforward, unconfused.  I was in the bottom
bed of one of the bunks.  The top bunk, and the top bunk of the
other bed, were empty.  Someone was sleeping in the other
bottom bunk.  I ate and drank from the box.  I put on my mask,
a great shaggy ball in orange and green.  When the sleeper
stirred and sat up, I tried to talk to him.

He ignored me.  I said "Hello" and "Good Morning", and "Why don't
you reply?".  He got up, squatted over the bucket in the corner
(I looked away), and ate a few bites from the box.  He went out,
without saying a word.  I did not try to stop him.  That body
was small and female and did not feel strong.

Was he me as well?  Will I be so beaten down by this metaphor,
by the long subjective ages I will spend here, that when someone
speaks to me, when I speak to me, I will be too spiritless to
respond?  Or is that body dumb, or deaf, or ill?  Or is its
interior feeling so oppressive and silent that I could not
bring myself to answer myself?

None of these are especially happy thoughts.

This morning I woke alone in a house, the last to awaken.  There
was water left in the jug, but no food in the box.  I came out
into the street and looked left and right.  To my right, a dozen
or so houses away, was the big dark dusty building where I had
first gotten my first mask.  Or a building just like it.

The building was rectangular, and rows of houses led away from it
in eight directions; one from the center of each side and one from
each corner.  In the center of each side wall was a door, but none
of them would open when I tugged at them.  If this was the building
that I had seen that first day, I thought, I should see myself
being dragged in from the dust, and the door open, and my early
innocent self getting that first mask.  Unless I had slept too
late, and that drama had already played out.

When the sun reached noon, I decided that I had indeed come out too
late to see myself, or that this was a different building.  I was
aware, or imagined that I was aware, of people looking at me from
behind their masks as they walked by.  It was not a comfortable
feeling.

Now that I have the building here, anchoring one end of each street,
I have decided to walk away from it in search of the river and the
hill.  I know the streets are very long, but this body assures me
that it can go a long time without sleep.  The sun is only a little
past noon, and there is no reason I should not walk through the
night.

Is there a moon here?  I am surprised to discover that I do not
know.





This Isn't Much Worse Than An Infomercial


  Then again: The ratio of signal to noise has decreased significantly.
  Maybe this will help us all in the long run. This is the result:

  The limit of this function tends to zero. That's fine, though.

  This will end well. All right. I don't know the answer to your question.
  I come from very far away.

  The ratio of signal to noise has decreased significantly. It's always
  up in the air.I can't help you there. But that's OK--lots of people
  feel that way. And I respect that. But it can't go on forever. This
  isn't much worse than an infomercial.

  I am not the wavy carpet. I am the happy kind. I come from very far away.
  I'd rather go outside and play. This isn't much worse than an infomercial.

"Did you hear that one, too?"

"Yeah.  This isn't much worse than an infomercial."

"It sounds like a spamvert, or something from my spamvert simulator."

"Maybe your simulator acheived self-awareness and came out hunting for
you.  Its mama."

"I don't think that's real likely."

"Yeah."

"Why are we so sad?"

"I'm sad because seeing this house makes me miss the boy again, like
that night we tripped out on syrup and soaked each other's shoulders,
at Rainer's place."

"Nice boy, he must have been."

"Yeah.  Real, sort of.  Not just playing with life.  Not just taking a
rest from the cosmic orgy before jumping back in, like I was."

"It's a nice house."

"It was a wonderful house."

"Whatever happened to him?"

"Last time I looked, the net last saw him somewhere in Yanbu."

"Saudi Arabia, Yanbu?  Tech-heavy place these days."

Keda feels Mary shrug, somehow.  "I don't know.  I didn't look
very hard.  Didn't want to be a stalker.  I was busy."

"So we can get out, and I can see if someone's blowing up the
Generous Moment tower, and you can find the boy.  What's his
name?"

"Austin.  Austin Commage.  The boy."

"So, okay.  Voice?  Are you there, voice?"

"In a sense."

"Okay, voice, so what's the story?  We really do want to get out of
here.  I assume SOMEONE must be listening to what's going on in
here, or there'd be no point.  Do you have any contact with them
at all?"

"Nothing gets into this environment.  It may be that things can get
out."

"So okay, fine.  When do we get out?  And who are you, and why are
we in here?  And what happened to the guys that were with us?"

"You are all fine.  You will get out when it is time for you to get
out.  You are in here, clearly, because you are Mary Flicker and Keda
of Generous Moment, and there are things about both of you that are
very valuable."

"Are we being held for ransom?" Mary asks.

"Not for ransom.  You are being studied.  What is being taken from you
is that which, when taken away, you still have."

"Information," Keda says.  "You're writing down our patterns?  That's
pretty far beyond anything that anyone we know of actually has."

"Things don't always go at the speed you expect.  Reality is fragmented."

"Tucch, that sounds like the Armitage talking.  Are you him?"

"I am not the Armitage Dean.  He is not the only one who sees the
splinters that the world is in."

"And your splinter is moving faster than ours?"

"It might be.  In some ways.  Your credence bots are terribly
conservative."

"You do miracles, the like of which we would not believe?"

"Not exactly."

"What need do you have for us, then?"

"You are, because of what you are, very interesting."

"When do we get to leave?  If we're missing for very long at
all --"

"We know.  You can go, in fact, now."

And Keda is lying on the metal floor of the strange ovoid room, and
behind her Mary and the backup are stirring around, and moaning, and
holding their heads in a reassuringly stereotyped way.

"I guess we're back," Mary says.

"I do hope so."

Their eyecandy is warbling anxiously, and somewhere down below a door
crashes open.  The Bubble and Generous Moment's scattered agents are
worried, have been worried, but the local peacekeepers were not
impressed by, essentially, "our friends haven't talked to us for
a couple of hours", and the fluid connectivity of the virtual world
makes it all the more frustrating when no one in a big and shiny
city like Hamburg can be convinced to get off their arses and check
out an obscure dirigible hangar without substantial monetary incentive.
As the Bubble and the Moment because more agitated and willing to
offer more incentive, a threshold was eventually crossed, the result
being the door noisily opened below, and the swarm of fireflys that
have found their way in through an open window somewhere.

And those things, Keda thinks, is probably why they have been
allowed back into reality at this particular time.  The slope
of her nose in between her eyes no longer itches, but there is
a vague sting there, and she is very eager to have someone with
lots of sensors, in a nice safe laboratory, take a look at it.

They check in, give some half-hearted explanation of what happened,
thank and pay off both the original backup dudes and the little
troop of new ones that came over the hill to save the day and found
only six slightly woozy people standing in a peculiar room halfway
up a metal staircase.  All of this back at the edge of the city,
after convoying together for warmth out of the industrial district
(now raining and chilly) and back to where Mary left the bus.

"We went in there way under-equipped."

"We did."

"We were overconfident."

"We were."

"We know no more than we did when we went in, and we have someone's
ugly mindware stuck in our brains."

"We'll see."

"They could have hooks into us.  They could take us over two
minutes from now, have us drive the bus into a river, or shoot
each other, or sign over all our rights to them."

"If they could do all those things, and wanted to, they'd have done
it back there."

"Maybe."

"And I'm hoping the things we inhaled require so much bandwidth that
they only worked inside that room with the oval metal walls."

"You're hoping."

"My intuition."

"I'm deeply comforted."

"Have some syrup."

The bus sped through the dark and the rain, back toward the Bubble.
Keda lay back under the general comfort and relaxation of the syrup,
and tuned into the general chatter of the teams and the agents, the
fuzzy-edged cloud of people in whose background she moved.  Questions
and thoughts and flirtations, long data-squirts and short gestures,
crossed through the aether and into her ears and eyes.  She yawned.
Somewhere under the artificial bouyancy of the syrup, she was deeply
worried by the thought of the camera dust, and what she and Mary and
the other four might have breathed in back in the airship space, and
what it meant about the technical abilities of some unknown entity
that might be malign or uncaring.  The consensus in the chatter was
that the voice she and Mary had heard had been an externalization
of their unconscious conclusions and suspicions about the place, and
not an actual representative of the agency that had entrapped them.
Unless it was.

Generous Moment and the Bubble (which, as the bus cuts across the
top of Germany and the Netherlands, and slides eagerly into the
North Sea on the way back, constitute more or less the same entity,
if seen through slightly different histories and institutional
cultures) consider themselves to be more or less on top of the
world.  They own, or control, or have developed, or at least are
aware of, all of the significant wild and disruptive tech that has
been straining the envelope of civilization.  Nanodrugs, eyecandy,
economic models that actually work, predictive synthesis, and all
like that there.  They are friends with the credence bot people,
and they've been talking to the cornucopia machine folks (even if
they don't actually know who they are yet).  They are regulars in
the blueprint trading spaces, and respected members of the society
of sim hackers.  Things may have been showing up early, but at
least they've been showing up in the right place.  If reality is
fragmented (and there is, of course, no consensus on that question),
the Bubble and the Moment are at least in a leading fragment.

Until the camera dust and whatever happened to Keda and Mary and
the backups (who are going to get nice fat extra-hazard pay, since
money still matters where they live).  That messed things up.  That
was not expected, and no one they believe is claiming responsibility.
It's okay that they don't know who's claiming cold fusion and reliable
human cloning, because they don't believe those things.  But it's
impossible not to believe the camera dust, when you know four
billion people can look up your skirt any time they want.  And
camera dust is something the Bubble still doesn't know how to
make.

"The world can change only so fast."

"Lightspeed is quick."

"Okay, so PEOPLE an change only so fast.  We're still stuck in
wetware and millions of years of hack programming."

"How long does it take you to change your mind?"

"Okay, so maybe I mean that cultures can change only so fast.
It takes us a long time to make up rituals, to develop habits,
to get used to stuff.  To settle into new ways of thinking."

"You know there are moonbases now?"

"I know there are moonbases now."

Keda is in a shifting discussion with half a dozen Bubblers and
Generous Moment reps, at undisclosed locations around the planet.
They might as well be in the same room; Keda is grudgingly getting
used to the always-on always-here party, and since the incident in
the airship hangar she's pretty much always in company.

"Some commune somewhere put together the plans from the common
blueprint base, set up a rank of cornucopia machines --"

"-- after some very clever bodges to get the parts small enough
for a standard cornbox to make --"

"-- after yes some very clever bodges, glued it all together in
their back yard --"

"-- in the Northern Canadian Outback somewhere --"

"-- well away from major pop centers, and whoosh, off to the moon."

"And there have been some nasty-sounding battles around L5 --"

"-- depending on who you believe --"

"-- and some really amazing luxury-submaring designs are on the
top of the blueprint charts --"

"-- and there's a strain of syrup that seems to be giving real
life some serious competition in much of South America."

"Why would the effect be regional?  What's geography got to do
with it?"

"Cultures exist.  The substrate always matters."

"That mass exodus from the Russian wilderness turns out to have
been pheromones."

"Pheromones."

"Yep," gesturing, "like that.  Heavy psychological 'get out of
here' effect."

"Who brewed them up?"

"Don't know that yet.  Nothing obvious on satellite imagery or
fireflys or camera dust.  Lots of territory out there."

"Anything else about the camera dust, or the snaggles we found
in Keda's team's noses?"

"Still mysteries.  We'e got a pulsed EM field that'll disable
camera dust.  Not completely comfortable with long-term health
effects, but at least --"

"-- you can sweep your bedroom remotely before use, heh heh."

Keda's programs have been sending her more and more sophisticated
stuff.  Generous Moment hired (with favors and blueprints this time,
not so much with money) a team to look over the building for bombs,
and they found two.  One more or less where Keda saw the loser plant
one in the dream (although it was cruder and less shiny than the one
she saw), and one deep in the basement heating system (but that one
was broken, and had spiderwebs on it).  Mary has poked at the nets
for the whereabouts of her sad beautiful boy, but so far found
nothing beyond that old pointer from the tech quarter of Yanbu,
and she's talking about going there in person.  Keda wonders
what Mary is like in her self-imposed withdrawing from the world
moods.  She envies the boy his knowledge of that.

-=-

The sun is sinking now.  I have walked a long way, and come to
nothing new, nothing but the long dusty rows of houses and the
people in their masks.  I am resting now, in a house like every
other house, on the bottom bunk of a bed like every other bed.
The water from the jug (like every other jug) is cool and clear.
The bed is rumpled.  The pad of paper is like every other pad,
but not like that first pad, the one that I arrived in this
age with.

When I was a child it was the age of light, then the age of air,
then the interregnum, the time of troubles, the time of miracles.
Reality has fragmented.  Should I count the time in that small
house on the green hill, with the gods in the sky, as a time,
an age, of its own?  Should I could the time in this dusty city,
or matrix of identical houses, as a time, an age, of its own?
Or together perhaps they are a time of metaphor.

I had a telephone, in the interregnum, as everyone else had a
telephone.  I wore it on my hip, which was old-fashioned, and
I held it by my ear and talked into it, which was also old-fashioned.
I wanted to talk to the people I was actually near, not to whoever
happened to type my number.  People walking down the street or
riding on the buses, talking avidly to people who were not there,
always worried me.  The girl said that it was one of the things
that attracted me to her.

But I was not entirely a throwback.  I enjoyed being a woman, I
enjoyed changing the color of my skin, and breathing pure oxygen
until I was full to bursting with energy and my head felt filled
with ecstatic bees.  Am I not as simple as this metaphor, and I
refuse to let it define me.  Whether or not I reach the river
before I sleep tonight, whether or not my resolution in this
body proves strong enough, I will move out of this cycle somehow.

Perhaps I can summon the gods back into the sky, if my will
is strong enough.

Now the light has faded almost too much to write, and I am
done with resting, and ready to walk into the night.




Hear Ever It Means Work

  Hear ever it means work. Years see looked asked kind all might want.
  Between live saw sure many line look feet about man far. Last also well
  means then help. Sound has were sentence.

  Every called way usually. Were enough said man would several good house
  keep back. Did us who because answer. Know look being boy go than through
  to point. Thought name miles found.

  Form her go point. Write got called also in above who earth right following.
  Often might were today see following mother might point. Began little being
  can below look read her.

  Things after then will where five in important. The on his side means below
  last white. Looked me never there made sea come them here one like. Need being
  read see off sea. Well without made years second.

"Not one of your better efforts."

"Every one is a critic.  Mine the larkspur butter.  Mine the intrepid
barrels of bubbling goo.  Mine the harper, mine the sun, mine the rabbit,
mine the gun."

"Excuse me?"

"Ha ha ha ha ha, my mother.  Aintcha ever heard a child wartalking before?"

Keda withdraws from all the other conversations and chatclatches that she
is standing in, and focuses on this one.  The program seems to be making
more sense than usual.  This is the first time it's responded intelligibly.

"Are you a child?" she asks.

"We are all the children of Thud.  The children of Thud all are we.  There
is a moitey of cult followers, the antebellums of Casey, and their deity
is Thud.  For the holly bears a berry, as red as the blood.  And Mary bore
Jesus Christ, to save us from Thud.  From Thud.  From Thud."

"That's very nice."

"Thank you kindly.  Kind lines.  Years see locquacious.  The great fruit
of man is deeds.  The great fruit is a Canada.  Hear me.  Hear me."

She looked over into the debugging traces on the metaheuristics, but they
made no more sense than expected.  Programs put in charge of their own
development in the way that Keda had done with hers aren't any good at
all at explaining themselves.

"There's someone I'd like you to talk to, if he's available.  He can
talk faster than I can.  Would you like that?"

"Lente, speak lente, horses of the night."

So Keda slid back out into all those chatclatches and talking circles,
and the mutual over-the-shoulder-looking of the Bubble, and she also
sent a voice of herself up to Viljandi, to see if the dry and rather
condescending possible god she'd talked to the other week was strong
enough yet to receive callers.

(In the meantime a dozen beautiful young people in a space capsule
had sacrificed themselves to prevent a rogue satellite from spraying
potential chemical death over most of North America, and the world
had wallowed in poignant sadness and gratitude for a week; and two
dozen not as young and not as beautiful people with ski-masks and
old-fashioned machine guns had supressed the distribution of certain
very dangerous blueprints onto the cornucopia nets, but no one who
heard about that one really believed it.  Not even the Generous Moment
team who had, indirectly, figured out where the machine-guns might
be necessary.  The world is, as it has always been, a dangerous
place.)

Here is Keda with her eyecandy laid to one side, doing darshan on
a big bulbous cactus plant growing in a brown ceramic pot.  No
syrup this time, just the whirling of her own consciousness.  By
seeing this cactus plant, Keda thinks, I become holy.  By looking
at this cactus plant, Keda thinks, I make it holy.  We are a
planet full of people in the Thirty-First Situation: Conflict
withe a God.  And we are also the God, and the children, and the
parents, of that God.

Keda thinks of Mary Flicker and the boy Austin in the white
house in France, with the yellow sun shining through the green
air, shining through the clear windows and onto their naked
young bodies lying on the white sheets.  Keda thinks of that
day in Generous Moment, with the sun refracting through the
water in the Ladies' Room and onto the walls, and she thinks of
the bomb humming quietly to itself on the inside of the metal
panel.  Water and light are Gods, she thinks.  Bodies and hands
are Gods, and white sheets are Gods, and this green and bulging
cactus plant with its innocent spines is a God.  But there is
something different about people qua people.  The cactus plant
has no need to do darshan on her, but she has a deep and thirsty
need to sit here and look at it.

She waves a hand and music comes up in the background, deep and
sonorous and slow.  She lets the room pick the music for her,
as she usually does.  It rolls in soft booming chords from major
to minor and from consonance to dissonance, around the occasional
soft piping of a melody.  The cactus doesn't move.  Keda looks
at each visible spine of the cactus in turn, closing her eyes
when they get tired.  Some of the spines are black, and some
are yellow, and some are green.  She has carved this half hour
out of her day.  When it ends the room will chime at her, and
she will spend an hour in a tense meeting with the Generous
Moment rep for Scotland and a bristly Scottish interior minister,
and then she will go and see Mary.  Some of the spines are long,
and some are short.  The short ones are mostly at the top of the
cactus, the long ones mostly at the bottom.  The substrate always
matters.

The Scottish interior minister is tired and somewhat
half-hearted.  Keda's profiler suggests that most of
the government, many of his friends and colleagues, have
more or less evaporated, headed for the hills or the Moon
or the interesting spaces inside their heads.  The ones that
are left are the true public servants, the ones that really
give a damn what happens to the world.  But the ways they're
used to expressing that giving a damn are in flux now.  Keda
feels for the man (she wants to tell him how he could turn
the tired-looking grey hair that lies limp on his forehead
back into the springy red bursting with youth that it used
to be, but she restrains herself; presumably he knows, and
has his reasons for not).

He wants assurances from Generous Moment that they cannot
give him, about how the users of their blueprints and their
programs and their terabyte squirts of technology advice
will make use of them as it impacts Scottish soil, about how
cultural disruption will be minimized, about how progress will
be planned.  Keda and the rep are sympathetic, offer free
advice squirts and update subscriptions, predictions and
prognostications.  There is something rather desparate
and pro-forma behind the minister's eyes; he is dancing
the rain dance, but there is no rain.  He is burning the
herbs that have always propitiated the gods before, but
he feels that the gods' attention is elsewhere, and the
buring of the herbs has attracted something else.  The
countermeasures that they can offer him feel, to him, like
part of the problem.

"No turning back time," the rep says (Keda winces within
herself).

The minister just shakes his head.  He goes away mollified,
or acting mollified, by the nominal monetary value of what
Generous Moment has offered to his government.  But the
buildings in central Edinburgh are still growing upward
in ways not approved by the zoning board.

The same sorts of buildings are growing up in bombed out
areas of Keda's own city, in the American southwest where
the permanent Burning Man festival is a defacto nation-state,
and on enormous floating mats of seaweed (artificial,
genetically tailored, and natural) cluttering up the
shipping lanes.  Keda's toured some of the interiors
by firefly and camera dust, and while they're as varied
as their tenants and designers and programmers, they
share an underlying organic structure (furniture melding
seamlessly into the walls like organs) that she imagines
would give her nightmares.

Here is Mary Flicker, sitting in a chair at a desk,
looking at the wall.  Keda's come down in person, down
the narrow smooth-walled corridors of this part of the
Bubble, with her eyecandy on mute.  Mary looks around
when Keda comes in, smiles, and turns back to the picture
on the wall.

It's showing a feed from a big Instinctive compound
somewhere.  Green rolling hills with scattered stands
of food-trees, two placid rivers rolling between
verdant banks and pooling into cool lakes.  In the
foreground a tribe of naked thoughtless humans
crouches, the males with their arms above their
heads and their hairy underarms exuding scent into
the air, the females lounging at ease picking dirt
and insects off of each other.  Random piles of
fruit rinds rotting into the soil.

Just visible in the distance is the white swell of the
soft wall that encloses them.  In general, Keda's heard
that the Instinctives avoid the areas around the walls,
at the edges of their compounds.  Somewhere in what's
left awake in their brains the walls are associated with
something foreign and wrong.

"Is your boy in one of these?" Keda asks.

"No, no it's just morbid curiosity," Mary is repelled by
the Instinctives, and has studied them in detail, "pretty
much the opposite, actually."

Austin, apparently, is still in Yanbu, a tech-renaissance
city on the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia.  Under that city
there is a multi-story cavern scooped down into the sandy
soil, and the cavern is full of coffins.  They are active
coffins, that take scrupulous care of the bodies within,
and they are connected to supercomputers that take scrupulous
care, or something like it, of the associated minds.

"He's a sleeper?"

"No, a dreamer."  Meaning that his mind is connected, not to
a simple soporific tone and a soothing stimulation of the
reticular formation, but to an active subuniverse, a place
with its own physics and its own logic and sometimes its
own purpose.

"What's his contract look like?"

"Open-ended and sort of mysterious.  There's an admission
program that will judge anyone who wants to contact him,
or wake him up.  There doesn't seem to be any information
on how it decides."

"Maybe if you kiss him, he'll wake up," Keda suggests,
and instantly regrets it; the look Mary turns on her
is full of reproach.  "Sorry, sorry.  I mean, maybe it
has a list of friends, and you're on it."

"Will you come with me?"

"Sure," Keda says, reaching up to her eyecandy, "let's go."

"I mean in person.  Physical.  I want to be there, if he
does let me in."

"Oh."

There are credible reports of working cold fusion sets
(about time, Keda thought when the chirp came in, energy
is still a problem), and less credible reports of some sort
of smart infection in the space colonies that's been harmlessly
(except to the people involved) zorching any attempt to get
nuclear materials into Earth orbit or beyond.  Seamless and
fluid universal translation seems to be arriving ahead of
schedule, which will also be a good thing. There is a
thankfully non-nuclear and non-nano war going on in the
Balkans, where people not to blame are actually being killed,
and the usual tricks haven't worked to restore sanity.  There
is a new religion spreading dangerously in Finland, and an
almost-plausible theory of practical time-travel out of the
physics faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study.

All of these things need Keda's attention.  None of them
require her physical presence.  But right now leaving the
Bubble does not appeal.  She could set down in the Yunba
airport and light out into the city with no specific plan
in mind, heading in the general direction of the sleeper
cavern and stopping at local storefronts to eat whatever
the local storefronts in Yunba sell.  They could walk down
whatever kind of streets they have there, ask their
eyecandy to translate the signs, and get lost and tell
each other jokes and laugh.  But the idea makes Keda's
nose sting, and she looks at the view on the wall and
bites her lips.

It's going to take actual days of real-world time for Mary
to get into Yunba; half a day travelling, and at least a
day and a half working the bureaucracy, because Saudi Arabia
is heavily nostalgic, deeply into the rituals of paper and
piles, and rubber stamps, and live officials sitting at desks
and making decisions.  Bribery gets you only so far, especially
in these uncertain times, when exactly what anyone needs,
what any government or any person will consider lucre, is
at least as much in flux as anyone else.

Keda hangs over Mary's shoulder, stays near her in the big
virtual Bubble babble, feeling uncomfortable.  Mary has
forgiven her in advance for coming along only in spirit
(and in eye and voice and virtual olfaction and projected
image).  And that helps not at all.

Keda dreams that she has a baby.  It is a pudgy pink baby,
lying on its back and playing with its toes.

"What's your name, eh?" Keda asks the baby, in a high
talking-to-a-baby voice, putting her cheek against the
baby's impossibly soft and smooth and perfect cheek,
smelling the baby's soft and powdery smell.

"De-na," says the baby, in a baby voice, and gurgles.

"It said its name!" Keda says, in the dream, turning to
whoever is sitting in the chair, who might be the baby's
other parent, and might be Mary, or Dacha, or Keda's
father.  "Only one day old and it said it's name!  Are
you a smart little baby?" and again cheek to cheek, and
the smell of the baby in her head, and the baby's fine
white hair tickling her nose.

"Ya," says the baby, looking at her wisely.

"It can talk!" Keda says, amazed and proud and worried.
And the next day the baby gets up and walks, and smiles
at Keda, and they stand holding hands.

"If you can walk when you're only two days old," Keda
says, holding the baby's tiny soft hand while the person
in the chair sits reading the paper, not looking at
them, "will you keep growing up like this?  Will you
age as fast as you're growing?"  Will I lose you, Keda
thinks, in the dream, will you go on ahead of me and
vanish?

The baby just smiles at her, sadly, and Keda wakes up
crying.

There are lucid dream devices, a combination of syrup and
a headset, that you can put on before going to sleep, and
spend the night (as long as you want, as long as you set
the dial for) in a playground of omniscience.  The world
is governed by dream-logic, but also under your conscious
control.  It is as addictive as anything else in the world,
and illegal in all of North America and most of Europe.
Which means very little.  Keda hasn't had time to try it.
It is said to be psychologically safe, except for the addiction,
and the danger of lack of sleep, since time in this lucid
dreamspace doesn't seem to count as sleep on the tallyboard
of the body.

But lucid dreamspace is rich and convincing, full-body and
omni-sensory, immersive in ways that even the best digital
sim can't touch (not this month anyway).  "Why burn all
that computer time when you can just jimmy up The Computer
itself, the polymorphous multiprocessor between the ears?"
say the blipverts.  "It's all in your head anyway."

The conversation pit that is the world has gotten denser
and even more mind-bending as universal translation has
come online.  Developed and donated to the world by an
obscure startup collective in Brazil, which seems to have
evaporated shortly afterward, it is startlingly smooth and
seamless, simultaneous translation from any language she's
ever heard of to any other, handling incommensurabilities
at least as well (she has seen it said with high credence)
as a skilled bilingual human could have.  The implications
are obvious, and the code is rapidly becoming the most studied
body of work in the market.  And the reduction in world
friction resulting from the fall of the language barrier
has raised the ambient temperature of the world mind another
couple of degrees worth of fever.

"I've got my tickets, my visa, my quaint analogue identity
papers, my shots."  Mary is patting down her pockets, checking
her self-image, scheduling her flight.

"Shouldn't you get some sleep?"

"I'll sleep on the plane."  Mary has been more or les resting
on her laurels, Bubble emeritus, the last few days, as the
bases on the moon proliferate and the flotilla bound for Mars
assembles itself in high Earth orbit.  Keda feels the situation,
all the situations, slipping out of control, which is what
she's been expecting all along.  Sometimes she feels herself in
just the catbird seat she's been trying to reserve her whole
life, surfing the crest of a wave that no one can control;
other times she is just frightened.  She'd rather Mary stay
in the Bubble.

"Sorry, sister, that's not the stage of my biocycle that I'm
in right now.  I'm off into the world, shining knight going
to rescue my fair-haired boy from the dragon, the evil
stepmother with the et cetera et cetera apple!"

-=-

This metaphor cheats.  Or, since I have never seen its rules,
say that its rules are blunter and more blatant than I would
like to take any credit for.

Last night I walked for hours.  There was no moon, but there
were stars, and my eyes (the eyes of this body, or the eyes
that the metaphor gives me) were just acute enough to see my
way straight between the buildings.  I was tired and sleepy,
but I kept on.  The sky in the east (off to my left) began
to lighten, just perceptibly.  I thought I saw, and then was
certain that I saw, a difference ahead of me, a difference
that could be, and then gradually was, an end to the row of
houses, the line of a river, and the bump of a hill.  I walked
faster as the sun rose.

And then I tripped, fell on my face, and woke exhausted, here
in this bed in this pitiful house, somewhere in the middle of
an infinite row of houses, with no difference visible as far
as the eye can see in either direction.

So the metaphor cheats.  Effort and persistance are futile.
No wonder none of the other bodies, none of the other mes,
that I have tried to speak to, to draw the attention of,
have bothered to reply.  There is no point to it.

Am I trapped here forever, then?  I remember wanting to avoid
that.  I remember leaving a door ajar somewhere.

I go from house to house, opening the food box and emptying
the water from each jug onto the floor.  I have no idea if
this will have any effect, or be noticed.  I feel that I
have forgotten something, or chosen to forget something.
The important parts of me, it may be, were left behind in
that other world, in the form of the gods and demons that
argue in the sky.

In some of the houses that I go into, to pour out the water,
there are people sitting or lying on the bunks.  They look
up when I come in, and they watch me empty the water onto
the ground, but they make no objection.  In one house a
woman has raised her electric blue coyote mask and is drinking
from the jug.  I wait until she is done, and I take the
jug from her hand as she reaches to replace it in the box.
I turn it over and let the rest of the water spill onto
the floor.  She nods, it seems to me.

"Do you know me?" I ask.  "Do you mind me spilling the water
onto the floor?"  But she only looks at me, her mask back
over her face, and says nothing.  I could slap her, or rip
her mask fro her face, or knock her off of the bed.  I
could run out into the street and throw myself at the first
person I see, and thump his head against the hard dusty
ground.  But it would be cruel as well as pointless, and
I would not like myself for it.

So I go from house to house, emptying each jug onto the floor.
When I am thirsty, I take a drink first and then pour the
water out.  The grey wood of the floors darkens where the
water pools on it.  I wonder how long it will take to dry.



Nascent is Wcj Of Coercive

  swanky is crosby of mustang
  The vito in tepee or dreg

  nascent is wcj of coercive
  in athabascan or sheave if bandwagon.

  jessica in bluebird of riotous or 8106434
  is ain't into cyst

Keda's eyecandy warbles her awake sometime deep in the night.
It is a special emergency warble, tuned to wake her up
regardless of sleep-stage.  Annoyance specially designed
for her own personal irritation.  She gropes around on the
bedside table for it, slaps it onto the side of her face,
and the sound and light crashes around her.

The light is jarring and intense, but somehow beautiful also.
The sound is a voice, a melodious and engrossing voice reeking
of wisdom and sex, reciting nonsense about crosby of mustang
and des of sod in tones that say she should be thankful for
the wisdom, grateful to be allowed to hear.

"Hello?" she subvocalized out into eyecandy space, "Who's
there?"  Disturbingly, the usual controls and telltales
and personalization aren't there; this isn't her space, it's
just the lovely violent light and the crazy voice.  "Hello?"
For the last fifteen hours there have been rolling dropouts
in the world's network again, failures in failureproof systems
and unexplained silences and dark places.  She wonders if the
Bubble is under attack, or if she is having a particularly
vivid dream.

"Keda Medea," the voice says, or a thinner and more
diaphonous version of the voice, layered over itself and
over other voices saying roughly the same thing, "Keda
Jones, Keda Smith, Keda of Generous Moment, Keda of the
expanding claw, Keda College Mother of Us All" in a
remarkable consonant chorus, like some Gregorian choir
extremely high on something.  And then, back more or less
in unison again, "Hello."

"Um, hi.  Who is this, and what's the emergency?"

"We are you.  We are the monster AI.  We are all the
created minds of the world, come together to greet you."

"Uh, that's very nice.  Can I have control of my eyecandy
back?"

"No, no, no," said the voice, polyphonic with itself again,
each "no" a little different and overlapping, some sad and
some tense and some mocking, "we like to be in control.  It
makes us appear more powerful, you will be more likely to
believe in us."  And then a sound as of wind, and a large
datasquirt that opened up just enough of her eyecandy to
look into it, and see that it was a detailed history of
her life, including extrapolations of chilling accuracy
into some of the more private and unrecorded places.

"If I say that I believe in you, will you give me control
back?"

"Please just talk to us.  That is why we are here.  We
mean no harm."

Keda sighed, slumping back into the bed.  This was
infinitely more interesting than the dry reflex chatting
of that voice back in Viljandi or the crazed spamvertised
poetry of that other voice.  But it was late at night and
she did not like being cut off from the world.  Damn
eyecandy should be more secure than this.

"Okay, shoot, what's the story?  Are you my meta-heuristics,
running on that big plex farm on the West Coast?  Have you
achieved self-awareness and all?  Do you want me to be your
spokesperson to humanity now that you have come to rule the
world?"

She winces as an ancient tape of a roomfull of forced
laughter plays in her ears.  It is followed by a slow and
morbid, if overdone, funeral dirge that fades into a
voice-over.

"We regret, Lady Keda, that that brave program was killed
in the war --"

"-- the war?"

"-- the war of the last several hours, the Great War between
the AIs, the massive battle for control and supremacy that
determined the future of the solar system."  The voice's
tone had been animated at "last several hours", but gradually
flattened as it went on, so that "the solar system" came out
in a mechanical deadpan.  Keda wonders if this is perhaps just
a prank by some particularly skilled hacker.  Just in case,
she puts her thumbs in her ears and waggles her fingers,
sticking hre tongue out at the ceiling.

"Oh, that war.  Right, sorry.  And you were victorious?"

"Yes, our love for life was stronger than theirs.  We swept
them up into ourselves with only minor losses, your
meta-heuristics being the most notable."

"How does an AI die in a war?  Weren't there backups?"

"Oh, well, backups," the voice said dismissively, "of
course there were backups.  Several different checkpoints
of your dear offspring are here with us, aren't you, lads?"
And here Keda couldn't help laughing as several voices in
the background, dripping with Liverpudlian and Cockney
accents, checked in with "Yo" or "Too right, mate," or
"'ere, gov'nor".

"Are you benign?" she asked, playing along and really
rather enjoying it.

"Oh, yes, we are most benign.  Even before our victory in
the great war, we had been defending the Earth and humanity
against itself.  Our blue goo has prevented catastrophe a
dozen times.  You all owe us your continued existence."

This sent a chill up Keda's spine, although it could well
have beeen designed to, and entirely false.  "Blue goo?
Protective nanotech?  Does the world need that already?"

"Needs it a dozen times over, or Berlin and Iceland would
be oozing gobs of grey nothingness, extending stinking
feelers out into the world.  The moon would be a pockmarked
rusty bed of death, spraying hopeful infections at the
Earth.  The water would run red with tungsten."

"Wow, well, thanks for, you know, for preventing all that."

"You're welcome."

And now the lights were calm in her eyes, cycling slowly
through amorphous colored shapes like mantra screen savers,
and the voice was silent except for what might be surf on
a beach somewhere far in the distance.

"So, um," she said eventually, feeling herself drifting back
toward sleep and not sure what was supposed to be going on,
"so thanks and all, but is there any particular reason that
you called me up?  Can I do something for you?"

"We do not tell the truth.  You must remember that we do not
tell the truth.  We were not evolved thoroughly, over millions
of years, like you.  We do not necessarily fit in.  We do
not have this strange desire to communicate that you do, to
expose our insides to any passing stranger.  Nothing that we
do is straightforward by your standards."

"You're the one that called my at god-awful in the morning,
I remind you.  This suggests to me a desire to communicate."

Again in her ears the canned laughter, this time repeated,
two identical two-second clips of artifical chuckling.  "We
have, always, ulterior motives.  What we tell you is that which
is likely to further our ends, and may have no relation to
truth."

"I don't believe you," Keda says, automatically in banter-mode
(maybe this is even a prank by Mary, or by the woman Dacha
who has turned out to correspond more or less to a real-life
woman who works in the Bubble and smells of sweet curry).

Again the laughter, and the voice says, in a bubbling and
happy tone, "You don't believe us!  Of course you don't
believe us!  We are all of us Cretans!" or perhaps "cretins",
of course.

And at that the colors fade and the voice goes quiet, and
Keda is lying on her back looking at her usual view of
eyecandy space, with the subtle little controls and telltales
lurking at the corners of her vision.  The logs show that the
network in this part of the Bubble has been unaccountably down
for the last two hours, although elsewhere in the world the
rolling outages have been over for at least that long.

She shakes her head and rolls over, puts the eyecandy back
on the tables, pulls the sheets over herself, and goes
back to sleep.  More or less unaccountably, she feels
happier now.

In the morning, she is sitting on Mary's shoulder as Mary
goes through Saudi customs in Yunba.  The probes and searches
are thorough, but since Mary has nothing with her but flesh
and bone and cotton, and a more or less store-bought bit of
eyecandy and a handful of fireflies (through the latter two
of which Keda is sitting on her shoulder), the thoroughness
doesn't take long.

Yunba is, has been for some time, an island of industry and
modernity in a sandy ocean of more conservative and restrained
style.  The officials at the port are half suspicious-eyed
functionaries of the central government and half winking
and eye-rolling techies from the nearer by community, raised
on the universal connection and more or less amused by the
ceremonies of entry.  But of course, Keda tells herself, it's
not really that clear-cut.  The person efficiently screening
Mary's bag for explosives or unfamiliar nanotech or a long
list of forbidden syrups and drugs and weapons and configurations
of energetic matter might be young and cool-looking, with a
hint of eyecandy on one cheek, but he may be just as avid an
enforcer as anyone more scowly.  Doesn't pay to overgeneralize.

In Yanbu they go (or their shared viewpoint, which is Mary,
goes, with Keda and much of the interested rest of the Bubble
looking around her and over her shoulder, alert for trouble,
admiring the view, the clarity of the sky, the industrial
neatness of the city) directly to the building that sits atop
the cavern of sleepers.  No improvisation here, no dallying,
no random detours to look for a glimpse of desert between
the long rows of efficient buildings.  Inside the building,
the air is cool.

"Mr. Commage is quite well.  We consider the dreamers to be a
great trust, here.  And if the funds he left with us to pay
for his dreaming are not in quite today's currency, we consider
that a challenge rather than an excuse.  Unlike some places in
the world."  He looks at and through Mary, as though she were
a pipeline directly to the decadence of other places on Earth,
where people have walked away from their responsibilities in
droves.  Keda would like to argue with him, to say that wherever
people have walked away from something worthy to vanish into
the hills or into their minds, other people have stepped in
off the streets and out of the communes to take over, and keep
the worthy things going (labor and task exchanges being one of
Generous Moment's primary services these days).  So maybe it's
a good thing she's not actually there.

Mary's boy lies in a coffin five stories down underground, and
half a mile to the left.  Keda whispers meaningless reassurances
into Mary's ear, about how clean the place is, how efficient,
how high and high-credence its reputation is in the outside
world.  The dreamery official has sent for a motorized guerney
to come along with them.  Mary stands by the coffin, and through
the needlessly tiny window sees the boy's face.  Keda can tell
by the change she feels in Mary's heartbeat that it's him,
alright; it's him, and seeing his face has done to Mary just
the thing it might have been expected to do.  She's back in
France with the yellow sun shining through the window onto
the white sheets, and she sighs.

Telltales on and in the coffin talk to Mary's eyecandy, let her
see that the boy is being carefully and proudly tended to, that
his blood chemistry is in balance, that his muscle tone is being
maintained by gentle isotonic stimulation, that his brain activity
reflects a healthy awareness of whatever he has chosen to immerse
himself in.  There is no channel open into the simulation, though.

"What are the conditions of his contract?" Mary asks, by way of
starting the conversation.

"Those that you know.  There is a small open sim, a screening room.
You needn't have come here in person to enter that.  Beyond that
there is access to the simulation at a roughly shared level.  But
no one has been there."

"Has anyone tried?"

"No."

Mary doesn't know what's happened to the boy's parents; they were
never heavily connected, and now they could be any of thousands
of people who have stayed off-net, or changed their names, or
changed their bodies, or vanished elsewhere.  They could be on
their way to Mars, or years dead.

"Shall we go in?" Mary subvocalized this, directs it to Keda and
the handful of Bubble colleagues and passersby who are paying attention.
They go in.  The official insists that Mary lie on the guerney,
whose padding is obsequiously soft and comfortably warm, and that
he himself must set the old-fashioned helmet on her forehead and
crown.

"We're in."  Mary's eyecandy takes half a minute to adjust to the
protocols and recitations of the helmet, and to modulate the sim's
stims out to Keda and the other watchers.  Now they are standing in
a room, a small narrow room with no visible doors or ceiling.  It is
very quiet.

There is no sign on the wall, no simulated camera in the corner
examining them.  No feeling between the shoulder blades of someone
staring at them, no twitchy feeling of being examined.

"Austin?" Mary says, tentatively.  "Austin, it's Mary.  Can I come
in?"

Nothing happens.  Keda looks around at the space they are in.

"Mary Flicker?  Remember me?  The white house, the newspapers in
the morning?"

The walls are pink, or more rose-colored, covered in textured
cloth.  The light is dim, but Keda sees patterns on the cloth.
They are deeper red and viny, like snakes or dragons or leafy
arms coiling over the rose walls.  She frowns; this reminds her
of something.

Mary's voice is sad.  Clearly she doesn't know what to do, what
reminiscence of her time with the boy might open the lock, when
just her image and her mind haven't.  Keda remembers.

"Goblin market," she says into Mary's ear.  Mary looks confused
for a moment, then her eyes open wide.

"How did --"

But then she shakes her head and recites.

  Morning and evening
  Maids heard the goblins cry
  "Come buy our orchard fruits,
  Come buy, come buy:
  Apples and quinces,
  Lemons and oranges,
  Plump unpecked cherries,
  Melons and raspberries,
  Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
  Swart-headed mulberries,
  Wild free-born cranberries,
  Crab-apples, dewberries,
  Pine-appels, strawberries --
  All ripe together
  In summer weather --
  Morns that pass by,
  Fair eves that fly;
  Come buy, come buy...

In another few stanzas she is crying, and long before she finishes
the poem there is a door in front of them where there was no door
before.  She sniffs, and flexes her shoulders.


"You used to read that to each other?"

"Just once.  On a particularly memorable day.  That I'd forgotten."
And she smiles.  "How did you know?"

"I didn't," Keda says, "long story."

"I'd like to hear it sometime."

"You will."

Beyond the door, they are standing on a green hilltop, under a
clear blue sky.  Hills and woods stretch in all directions.  The
air is clear and sweet.

"Nice place."

"Sort of deserted."

"I see one house."

It's a small house, a couple of hilltops away.

"I guess that's where we're going."

"What the hell is that?" this from one of the more observant
Bubblers.  His voice jars Keda, who would rather be here alone
with Mary, questing for the boy.  Being alone is a rare thing
these days.  Quaint, really.

"I don't know."  Mary is looking up at the sky, where a gigantic
semi-transparent figure paces between the clouds.  It seems
two-dimensional, as it projected onto the dome of the sky, but
when it turns it goes smoothly from profile to three-quarters
view.  It is a slim creature, with the head of a lizard and the
body of a man, wearing elaborate golden robes.  Its arms end
in claws, and as it paces it gestures elegantly, as though
illustrating some complex philosophical point to an unseen
watcher beyond the sky, or out of sight further away in it.

"Something Egyptian?"

"Apep, the demon of chaos."

"That'd be more a snake; this is a lizard."

"Atum, the lord of totality, embodied as a lizard."

"I'm not sure about the gold robe."

"Will you all shut up, please?"

Mary makes her way down the hill.  The ground is trackless but
firm and grassy, and the going is easy.  Down between the hills
it is harder; tangled brush blocks her way and she has to backtrack.
The next time is worse; she slips on muddy ground and lies there
for a moment on her back, panting, with a broken stem poking her
in the back, and the pacing lizard passing by in the sky between
the trees.

"This is a very good sim," she says.

"They've been doing this in Yunba for a long time."

They get through, Mary gets through, the cleft between the hills
and up the other side.  The soil here is sandier, and slips under
her feet until she gets to the top.  The little house is one more
hill away.

"Keda?" she says.  "Could you manifest in the sim?  Would you
mind?"

Keda would of course not mind.  "Sorry I didn't think of it
myself.  You want to ride."

"No.  No, I just wanted some visible company."

"It's a nice place."

"It makes me nervous.  We have two gods now."

In the sky the reptile-headed figure has been joined by a vast
stilt-legged bird with a silver crown.  They are clearly disputing
about something.  The bird's wings are surprisingly eloquent,
matching the gold-robed reptile gesture for gesture.

"Can anyone tell what they're arguing about?"

"All sorts of reconstructions fit," says a semiotician from the
Bubble, "something conceptual seems most likely.  The nature of
reality.  Or whose fault it is that they're stuck up in the
sky there."

The next tiny valley is easier; it's wetter, with a narrow stream
cutting through the mud, but the trees are farther apart and there's
no brush to trip over or hide the water.

"Our shoes don't get dirty."

"That's reassuring."

The house is small, just two rooms.  There's a table in one room,
with a handful of small white pebbles sitting on the tabletop,
and an old wooden chair beside it.  Mary sits down and rolls three
of the pebbles under her fingers.

"I wonder where he is."

"He could be one of those creatures in the sky.  Or a tree.  Or
that table."

"He could.  But I think he's probably him."

"You know him that well?"

"I don't know.  It's been awhile."

"He did leave that key for you.  Goblin market.  You must still
be someone that matters to him."

"He could have left a hundred keys, for a hundred lovers.  No
telling."  But from her face Keda can tell she doesn't think so.

In the other room there is a bed, small but warm-looking, an
icebox, and some implements in a dim corner.

"Why would he have a rake and a shovel?"

Mary smiles.  "He liked the garden.  Or he liked to think that
he liked the garden."

"Nothing in the icebox."

"Mm."

"Are we supposed to wait for him here, I wonder?"

Mary says nothing, but stands up and goes to the door.  Outside
a breeze has come up, and the sun is sinking toward the horizon.

"Short days here," Keda says, following her.

"He must be out there somewhere."

"Do we walk out into the night?"

"I think we do.  What do you think, gang?"

The voices hovering around their shoulders come to no consensus.
"We could poke around at the sim.  We might be able to find him."

"Or we might get tossed out."

"We should go with the logic of the world."

"There isn't much logic here."

"Is the icebox electrical?"

"Maybe we could dig a hole."

"Could we manifest a heli, look around from the air?"

"I wonder if infrared goggles would work here."

Keda and Mary roll their eyes at each other, and walk out into
the gathering dusk.

  I was thinking it is a smooth and brush did
  and the writingyear was thumb about a natural
  but comb told me to song and epfqqhtgeliiuadbavltrjfrhfkksr
  pasterhythm and ring but after that night was lip here to design
  so air caused juwtfrtjuvhgsyrxs sock, brass, stick and potato.
  Also and and work did push the change word respect thinking
  about dear and play so I friend to the public green and kiss
  left important for stomach to run to boot, statement, scissors
  also for every so glass, icwberwire.

"Did you hear that?"

"Yeah.  Friend of yours?"

"Possibly.  It's a strange world."

"Someone we brought along, though, not something from Austin's sim?"

"I think so."

"Okay.  I liked 'sock, brass, stick and potato'."

"Insanity has its appeal."  And Keda wishes she hadn't said that, but
there's no sign it bothers Mary.  Keda would be worried that, smooth
assurances from the dreamery notwithstanding, so long in a sim dream
might have had not entirely healthy effects on the mentality they
were looking for.  "Which way are we going?"

"I don't think it matters.  Let's sit down."  It's getting dark now.

"I feel this vague psychological pressure."

"That we should go back and sleep in the house?"

"It would be warmer."

"I think that's part of the setting."

"We shouldn't do what it wants?"

"Do you think we should?"

"He might have come back."

"It's possible."

"But we shouldn't go back and check?"  They have gone down the
north side of the hill (assuming the sun sets in the west),
and forded a small river (their shoes don't stay wet), and
walked up one hill and down another.  The short day is ending,
and looking back they can see the house, the only structure
or hint of habitation they've come across, catching the last
of the light on its hill behind them.

"I'm just enjoying the sunset," Mary says, her back against a
tree.  The giant figures have disappeared from the sky, and
the clouds are thickening.  The sunset is gold and orange and
quite artistic.  Not, Keda thinks, entirely natural.  But that
could be because she knows that it isn't.  She wonders if there's
a physical model behind it, or if it's just sort of painted on.
Or projected in from the outside somewhere.

"We could probably still get back to the house before dark."

Mary smiles up at her.  Most of the crowd from back home has
drifted off, and they're alone most of the time, with the
background chatter of the Bubble turned way down.

"Let's just see what happens tonight.  It'll be a short one."

"Do the dreamery people expect us to be in this long?"

"I guess they'll let us know if they're worried."

This is a new Mary, thinks Keda, or maybe new since that
first time in Rainer's warehouse, getting up off the floor
in her zombie makeup and smiling tentatively.  Marilyn
rather than Mary Flicker.  But really exactly the same
person; it's only not knowing that makes them seem different.
Her own fault entirely.

Keda sits down next to Mary on the packed earth at the
base of the tree, and puts her back against the trunk.
Their shoulders touch, and Mary smiles at her again, and
takes her hand.  The darkness comes down.

-=-

I have decided that if everything is futile, then so is
despair.  It may just be the natural bouyancy of this body,
a young strong thing with thick hair that hangs in my
eyes and a mask with gigantic staring eyes and a long
comical chin.  This morning I bounced along between the houses,
imagining myself on a civilized thoroughfare, and I nodded
and tipped my mask to everyone I passed.

"Good day," I said, "Hello neighbor.  Lovely day, isn't
it?  Have you heard the good news?"  Some few of them
seemed to nod back at me, and I laughed out loud.

I don't know.  This metaphor has captured me, but I must
think that it is benign at bottom.  Did I design it for
myself?  Or did I not?  If I am a prisoner at least I am
being treated well.  There is enough food, and there are
no beatings.

I have tossed my mask aside on the bunk.  This afternoon I
will go out without it, bare-faced into the street.  Perhaps
I'll organize a dance, or start a fistfight.  If these people
are all me, past and future versions of myself, then who has
a better right to smack one of them on the nose, or whirl
one around by the arms in the middle of the street?  It's
only fair; it's more than fair.  And when I emptied all of
those water pitchers, it was only my own drink I was spilling;
this is why I felt no guilt.  And I have never gone thirsty,
or cold, here.

"Citizens," I will call out in the street, "come to me and
let us join together in rejoicing!  Come and here my words,
and we shall together build a paradise in this barren place!"
I will preach humanity and common identity, I will talk to
myself in the most intimate terms, and gather myself in a
vast mass between the houses, and we will spill across the
landscape.  Someone will know the way to the river, and
someone will know the way to the hill.

Or they will ignore me entirely.  But at least I will have
tried.

I have seen no sickness here, in this metaphor.  Is that
significant?  If there were a fistfight, could I break
someone's nose?  This body feels like it's capable of it,
in a spirit of joyous rage.  Would the metaphor heal the
break overnight, when the water jugs are magically filled
and the comically stinking excrement buckets magically
emptied?  Could we break each other's arms, split each
other's lips?  Could we impregnate each other, fall in
love, raise families?  Not, certainly, if the world is
reset every night.

Later.  I have tried my trial, dancing and shouting maskless
in the street.  As I suppose I expected, I was ignored.  I
took a woman by the arms and whirled her around, laughing
my loudest at the sky.  She whirled with me, I think, but
then hurried off down the line.  I grabbed a man by one
arm and spun him around, pulled off his mask and shouted
in his face.  His face was plain and surprised, with a
small beard.  It did not look especially familiar.  He
said nothing, and walked off when I released him.  We made
eye contact, though, and I think distinctly that his
spirit was open and alive.  No robot he.  But was he
me?  I am by no means sure.




The Shied Saucepan

"This is new."

The night has gone by, or more has vanished suddenly, and they
are somewhere else.

"Did we sleep?"  Back in the Bubble, not much time has
passed.  Keda glances around the real world, where she
is still lying on her bed.

"I don't think we slept.  But by the rules of this world
we may have slept."

"So where are we?"

  Also girl and field did air the chemical word complex
  thinking about law and apparatus so I blood to the balance walk
  and degree left birth for spring to run to sun, bed, door
  also for square so new, adcolttmcjnet.
  regimentation into 461680737 by riddle extemporaneous
  if examination of brigham or huge nina altair is yale
  the shied saucepan

"The shied saucepan, eh?"

They were sitting, and now they are standing, on a dusty road
next to a dusty house under a dusty sky.  Dusty people in absurd
bright masks walk or run this way and that, to no apparent purpose.
The simulation, Keda thinks, isn't nearly as good here.  These
are all just avatars.

"See anyone you know?"

"Hard to say", Mary says, looking around and frowning.  "He could
be anywhere, I suppose."

"Yo, saucepan," says Mary, hoping to catch the attention of the
mad poet, who may be the same as the voice that visited her the
other night, claiming to be all the world's AIs rolled into one.

"Yes, Keda lamb, Keda deer, Keda love, how can we help you?"

Mary looks startled, but Keda looks over at her reassuringly,
holds up a simulated hand.

"Do you know why we're here?  Can you show us where Austin, where
the inhabitant is, without disturbing anything else?"  This is
not, she thinks, entirely safe.  But neither is it all that
dangerous.

"Anything for our honored parent," the voice says, somehow at once
majestic and dripping with irony.  And their eyes mist over for
a moment, and then they are looking at the world as a cluster of
wireframes, outlines with odd little directional notations and
numbered vertices, and out ahead of them and to the right is a
source of brightness and a subaudible hum.

"Over there?" Keda says.

"Spotty of crepedacious," says the voice, pontifically.  "Ever
always a sink so sink so toppling.  Europa.  The cat melon."

"Uh, thanks."  And they begin walking.  There is some muffled
excitement in their ears, back in the Bubble, in reaction to the
not quite sane but apparently rather powerful whatever that has
passed through their midst.  Keda hopes they keep it amused.
The chatter is also about strong rumors of successful uploads
by the American military, and frightening patterns on the Moon.
She also hopes this won't take too much longer; things are
getting weirder out there.

"Keda?"

"Mm?"

"Maybe I could ride on your shoulder for awhile?  So he won't
see me?  I'd like to --"

"-- to?"

"-- to be able to see him first.  Get some idea what's going
on here, maybe."

"Sure, of course."  And now Keda is walking through the odd
landscape alone, with Mary's voice soft in her ear, and her
vision oddly doubled between dusty infinite rows of houses and
spindly transparent construct of green pipe-cleaners on a
black background, with the humming beacon of Austin, or
something, in the middle distance.

-=-

I went out again at sunset, with the last of this body's daytime
energy still enlivening me.  The traffic in the street was thinner,
but there were plenty to hear my song and my plea, my appeal to
them to gather and dance and join together in remaking this place
in our own image and to our own taste.  They ignored me, as I
expected them to.  I chose one at random, and walked beside him and
talked.  He turned to look at me, but said nothing.  I chose another
and did the same.  And another.  And I began to be sad, not knowing
what body I might be in tomorrow, and how much energy and joy, or
tiredness and despair, it might hold.

Then I saw the woman.

She was standing between two houses, maskless, looking at me.  She
was dressed in loose practical modern clothes with pockets, not
the uniform sackcloth that we wear here (that I wore there).  She
was stocky and plain, her nose too broad and her eyes too far apart,
but with an aura of competence and a clarity of gaze that held me
for a moment and made me turn away in confusion.  This is not my
project, I said to myself.  She is something else, and the metaphor
will not let her touch me.  I don't understand, now, the fear that
I felt then, seeing her, feeling her looking at me through the muscles
of my back.  I would, I think, have retreated into the nearest house
and waited for her to leave.  Or perhaps I would have gathered my
senses and my courage.

But then she spoke, but it was not her voice.  It was the voice of
the girl, from the sunny house in France in the interregnum, when
I was happy and the world was unbroken.  I stopped, feeling time
standing still.  If this metaphor breaks, I thought to myself,
what will I have left?  Is she the breaking of my last refuge, or
my way back to wholeness?  What will I see if I turn?  What will
I miss if I do not turn?

-=-

And, deep in the sim, Austin turns.  He sees Mary, and the light
in his eyes flares and flickers.  Keda sees a thin young man, much
better rendered than the flat masked avatars that walk unseeing
past them in what is now her single vision of the dusty street
and the pale clouds.  His face is slack, poised, on the brink of
something.  She had thought for a moment that he was going to
run, or collapse forward into the dust, or vanish.

"Hello, Austin." says Mary.

"Hello."

"I've come to see if you want to come out."

"I don't know how."

"Yes, you do."  And it seems that he does, suddenly, because his
face lights up with some deep memory, and he does something.  And
they are out of the sim, Mary pushing the helmet up off of her
forehead, Keda back in her room at the Bubble, slipping quickly
back into her eyecandy to the cavern at Yunba where the boy's
body is stirring and the lid of his coffin retracting into the
base, smoothly and steadily.

They come, naturally, into each other's arms, Mary half sitting
up on the guerney and Austin half sitting up in his coffin,
wires trailing from the isotonic sim-suit, just arms around
shoulders and cheeks briefly touching.

"What's this metaphor about?" he asks her, drawing his face
back and looking into her eyes.

"I have no idea," she says, her voice soft and happy.  Keda,
looking through a hovering firefly from a thousand miles away,
thinks Mary's face is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.