"A year's worth. As you know."
     "Actually,  three days short. You missed a few days, early
on."
     "Ah."
     "Could happen to anybody."
     "I don't suppose a few days more or less will matter. Back
in the real world, I mean."
     "Ah. Yes. I mean, no, it shouldn't."
     "Odd, how I never worried about things back there. Whether
I still have a job, for instance."
     "Is it? Oh, yes, I suppose it is."
     "I suppose you told Walter what was going on?"
     "Well."
     "I mean, you wouldn't just pull the  whole  rug  out  from
under  me,  would you? You knew I'd have to be going back to my
old life, once we were done . . . once we'd . .  .  well,  done
whatever the hell it is we've been doing here."
     "Oh,  no, of course not. I mean, of course you'll be going
back."
     "One thing I'm curious about. Where has my real body  been
all this time?"
     "Harrumph." Well, what he said was something like that. He
glanced  at me, looked away, harrumphed again. I felt the first
little scamperings of doubt. It occurred to me that I had  been
taking a lot of things for granted. One of them was that the CC
had  his  reasons  for subjecting me to this tropical vacation,
and that the reasons were ultimately beneficial to me.  It  had
seemed  logical  to think this at the time, since I in fact was
benefiting from it. Oh, sure,  there  were  times  when  I  had
complained  loudly  to  the  crabs  and  the  turkeys, bemoaned
hardships, lusted after this or that. But it had been a healing
time. Still, a year was a long time. What had been going on  in
the real world in my absence?
     "This  is  very  difficult  for  me," the Admiral said. He
removed his huge, ridiculous hat and set it on the table beside
him, then took a lace handkerchief from his sleeve  and  mopped
his  forehead.  He  was  balding  almost to the crown; his pink
scalp looked as bright and polished as tourmaline.
     "Since I don't know what's bothering you, I  can't  really
make it any easier for you."
     Still  he didn't say anything. The silence was broken only
by the never-ending sounds of the island jungle and the  splash
of my water wheel.
     "We could play twenty queries. 'Something's bothering you,
Admiral. Is it bigger than a logic circuit?'"
     He sighed, and drained his whiskey. He looked up at me.
     "You're still on the operating table at the studio."
     If  there  was supposed to be a punch line, I couldn't see
it coming. The idea  that  what  should  have  been  a  one  or
two-hour repair job should have taken the better part of a year
wasn't even worth considering. There had to be more.
     "Would you like another drink?"
     He  shook  his head. "From the time you remember appearing
on the beach to the time I spoke my first words to  you,  seven
ten-thousandths of a second elapsed."
     "That's  ridiculous." Even as I said it, I realized the CC
was not prone to making ridiculous statements.
     "I'm sure it must sound that way. I'd like  to  hear  your
reasons for thinking otherwise."
     I thought it over, and nodded. "All right. The human brain
isn't  like  a  computer. It can't accept that much information
that fast. I lived that year. Every  day  of  it.  One  of  the
things  I  recall  most vividly is how long so many of the days
were, either because I was working hard  or  because  I  didn't
have  anything  to  do. Life is like that. I don't know how you
think, what your perceptions of reality are like,  but  I  know
when  a  year's  gone  by.  I've lived for a hundred of them. A
hundred and one, now." I  sank  back  in  my  chair.  I  hadn't
realized I was getting so exercised about the matter.
     He  was nodding. "This will get a little complicated. Bear
with me, I'll have to lay some groundwork.
     "First,  you're  right,  your  brain  is  organized  in  a
different  way  than  mine  is.  In  my brain, 'memory' is just
stored data, things that have been recorded and placed  in  the
appropriate  locations  within  the  matrix of charge/no-charge
devices I use for the purpose. The human brain  is  neither  so
logically   constructed  nor  organized.  Your  brain  contains
redundancies I neither have nor need. Data is stored in  it  by
repetition   or   emphasis,   and  retrieved  by  associations,
emotional linkages, sensory input, and  other  means  that  are
still not completely understood, even by me.
     "At  least, that used to be the case. But today, there are
very few humans whose brains have not been augmented in greater
or smaller ways. Basically, only those with religious  scruples
or  other  irrational reasons resist the implantation of a wide
variety of devices that owe  their  origin  much  more  to  the
binary  computer than to the protoplasmic neuron. Some of these
devices are hybrids. Some are parallel  processors.  Some  lean
more toward the biologic and are simply grown within and beside
the  existing neural network, but using the laws of electric or
optical transmission with  their  correspondingly  much  higher
speeds  of  propagation,  rather  than  the  slower biochemical
regime that governs your natural brain. Others are made outside
the body and implanted shortly after birth.  All  of  them  are
essentially  interfaces,  between the human brain and my brain.
Without them, modern medicine would be impossible. The benefits
are so overwhelming that the drawbacks are seldom  thought  of,
much less discussed."
     He  paused, lifting an eyebrow. I was chewing over quite a
few thoughts concerning drawbacks at that moment, but I decided
not to speak. I was too curious as to just where he  was  going
with this. He nodded, and continued.
     "As  with  so many other scientific advances, the machines
in your body were designed for one purpose,  but  turn  out  to
have  other,  unforeseen applications as well. Some of them are
quite sinister. I assure you, you have not experienced  any  of
those."
     "It seems sinister enough, if what you say is true."
     "Oh,  it's  true. And it was done for a good reason, which
I'll get to in my own time."
     "It seems that's something I now have an  infinite  supply
of."
     "You  could,  you  could.  Where  was  I?  Oh,  yes. These
devices, most of them  originally  designed  and  installed  to
monitor  and  control  basic  bodily  functions at the cellular
level, or to augment learning and memory, among  other  things,
can  be used to achieve some effects that were never envisioned
by the designers."
     "And those designers are . . .?"
     "Well, me, in large part."
     "I just wanted a reality check. I do know a  little  about
how   you  work,  and  just  how  important  you've  become  to
civilization. I wanted to see what sort of  fool  you  took  me
for."
     "Not that sort, at any rate. You're right. Most technology
long ago  reached  realms where new designs would be impossible
without a great deal of involvement by me, or  a  being  a  lot
like  me. Often the original impetus for a new technology comes
from a human dreamer--I have not usurped  that  human  function
yet,  though  more  and  more of such advances as we see in our
surroundings are coming from me. But you've caused me to  stray
again  from  the  main point. And . . . do you have any more of
that whiskey?"
     I stared at him. The charade that  a  "man"  was  actually
"sitting"  in a "chair" in my "treehouse" drinking my "whiskey"
was getting a bit too much for me. Or should it have been "me?"
No matter what other hocus-pocus the CC might have worked  with
my   mind,  I  was  completely  aware  that  everything  I  was
experiencing at that moment was  being  fed  directly  into  my
brain through that black magic known as Direct Interface. Which
was turning out to be even blacker than I, a notorious resister
to  D.I.,  could  ever have guessed. But for some reason of his
own, the CC had decided to talk to me  in  this  way,  after  a
lifetime of being a disembodied voice.
     Come  to  think  of  it, I could already see one effect of
this new face of the CC. I was now thinking of the CC as "him,"
where before I'd always used the neuter third  person  singular
pronoun.
     So  I  got up and re-filled his glass from a bottle nearly
half-full. And hadn't it been nearly empty the  last  time  I'd
poured?
     "Quite right," the Admiral said. "I can refill that bottle
as often as I wish."
     "Are you reading my mind?"
     "Not  as such. I'm reading your body language. The way you
hesitated when you lifted the bottle, the  expression  on  your
face  as you thought it over . . . Direct Interface, the nature
of the unreality we're inhabiting. Your 'real' body did none of
these things, of course. But interfacing with your mind, I read
the signals your brain sent to your body--which doesn't  happen
to be hooked into the circuit at the moment. Do you see?"
     "I think so. Does this have anything to do with why you've
chosen to communicate with me like this? In that body, I mean."
     "Very  good.  You've  only tried Direct Interface twice in
your life, both of them quite a long time ago, in terms of  the
technology.  You  weren't  impressed, and I don't blame you. It
was much more primitive in those days. But I  communicate  with
most  people  visually  now,  as  well  as audially. It is more
economical; more can be said with fewer words. People  tend  to
forget  just  how much human communication is accomplished with
no words at all."
     "So you're here in  that  preposterous  body  to  give  me
visual cues."
     "Is  it  that bad? I wanted to wear the hat." He picked it
up  and  looked  at   it   admiringly.   "It's   not   strictly
contemporary,  if  you  must  know.  This world is about at the
level of 1880, 1890. The uniform is  late  eighteenth  century.
Captain  Bligh wore a hat a lot like this. It's called a cocked
hat, specifically, a bicorne."
     "Which is a lot more than I  ever  needed  to  know  about
eighteenth century British naval headgear."
     "Sorry.  The  hat  really has nothing to do with anything.
But I'm curious. Has my  body  language  conveyed  anything  to
you?"
     I  thought  it  over, and he was right. I had gleaned more
nuances from talking to him this way than I would have  in  the
past, listening to his voice.
     "You're  nervous  about something," I said. "I think maybe
you're worried . . . about how I'll react to what  you've  done
to me. What an astonishing thought."
     "Perhaps, but accurate."
     "I'm  completely  in your power. Why should anything worry
you?"
     He squirmed again, and took another sip of his drink.
     "We'll get into that later. Right now, let's get  back  to
my story."
     "It's a story now, is it?"
     He ignored me, and plowed ahead.
     "What  you  have  just  experienced  is  a  fairly  recent
capability of mine. It's not advertised, and I hope  you  don't
plan  to  do  a  story on it in the Nipple. So far I've used it
mostly on the insane. It's very effective  on  catatonics,  for
instance.  Someone  sits there all day, unmoving, not speaking,
lost in a private world.  I  insert  several  years'  worth  of
memories  in a fraction of a second. The subject then remembers
wakening from a  bad  dream  and  going  about  a  comfortable,
routine life for years."
     "It sounds risky."
     "They  can't  get  any worse. The cure rate has been good.
Sometimes they can be left alone after that. There are subjects
who have lived as many as ten years after  treatment,  and  not
reverted.  Other times counseling is needed, to find the things
that drove them to catatonia in  the  first  place.  A  certain
percentage, of course, simply drift back into oblivion in weeks
or  months.  I'm  not  trying  to  tell you I've solved all the
mysteries of the human mind."
     "You've solved enough of them to scare  the  hell  out  of
me."
     "Yes.  I can understand your feelings. Most of the methods
I use would be far too technical for you to understand,  but  I
think I can explain something about the technique.
     "First,  you understand that I know you better than anyone
in the universe. Better than . . ."
     I laughed. "Better than my mother? She's not even  in  the
running.  Were  you  trying  to think of another example? Don't
bother. It's been a long time since I was close  to  anyone.  I
was never very good at it."
     "That's  true.  It's not that I've made a special study of
you--at least, not until lately. By the nature of my functions,
I know everyone in Luna better  than  anyone  else.  I've  seen
through  their  eyes, heard through their ears, monitored their
pulse and sweat glands and skin temperature and brain waves and
the churning of their stomachs and the irising  of  their  eyes
under  a  wide  variety  of situations and stimuli. I know what
enrages them and what makes them  happy.  I  can  predict  with
reasonable  certainty  how  they  will  react  in  many  common
situations; more importantly, I  know  what  would  be  out  of
character for them.
     "As  a  result,  I can use this knowledge as the basis for
something that could be considered a fictional character.  Call
this  character ParaHildy. I write a scenario wherein ParaHildy
is stranded on a desert island. I write  it  in  great  detail,
using  all  the  human  senses. I can abbreviate and abridge at
will. An example: you recall picking up a handful of  sand  and
studying  it.  It  was a vivid image to you, one you would have
remembered. If I'm wrong about this, I'd  like  to  hear  about
it."
     As  you might expect, I said nothing. I felt a cold chill.
I can't say I liked listening to this.
     "I gave you that memory of sand grains. I constructed  the
picture  with almost infinite visual detail. I enhanced it with
things you weren't even aware of, to make it more lifelike: the
grittiness of the grains, the smell of  the  salt  water,  tiny
sounds the grains made in your hand.
     "The  rest  of  the  time,  the  sand  was  not  nearly so
detailed, because I never caused ParaHildy to pick up a handful
and look at it, and think about looking at it. Do you  see  the
distinction?  When  ParaHildy  was  walking  down the beach, he
would notice sand clinging to his feet, in an  absent  sort  of
way.  Remember, Hildy, think back, recall yourself walking down
the beach, bring it back as vividly as you can."
     I tried. In some way, I already saw most of  what  he  was
driving  at.  In  some way, I already believed that what he was
saying was true.
     Memory is a funny thing. It can't  be  as  sharp  as  we'd
sometimes like to believe it is. If it was, it would be like an
hallucination.  We'd  be seeing two scenes at once. The closest
mental pictures of things can get to real things is in a  dream
state.  Other than that, our memory pictures are always hazy to
one degree or another. There are different sorts  of  memories,
good  and bad, clear and hazy, the almost-remembered, the thing
you could never forget. But memory serves to locate us in space
and time. You remember what  happened  to  you  yesterday,  the
previous  year,  when  you  were  a  child.  You remember quite
clearly what you were doing one second ago: it  usually  wasn't
all  that  different  from  what you're doing now. The memories
stretch backward in time, defining  the  shape  of  your  life:
these  events  happened to me, and this is what I saw and heard
and felt. We move  through  space  continually  comparing  what
we're  seeing  now  to  the  maps and cast of characters in our
heads: I've been here before, I  remember  what's  around  that
corner,  I can see what it looks like. I know this person. That
person is a stranger, his mug shot isn't in my files.
     But now is always fundamentally different from the past.
     I remembered walking many, many miles along that beach.  I
could  recall  in  great  detail  many  scenes, many sounds and
smells. But I had only looked closely  at  a  handful  of  sand
once.  That  was  embedded in my past. I could get up now, if I
wished, go to the beach, and do it again, but that was  now.  I
had  no  way  of  disproving  what the CC was telling me. Those
memory pictures from the time the CC was saying never  happened
were  just  as  real  to  me as the hundred years that had gone
before it. More real, in some  ways,  because  they  were  more
recent.
     "It seems like a lot of trouble," I said.
     "I  have  a  lot  of  capacity. But it's not quite as much
trouble as you might think. For instance, do  you  recall  what
you did forty-six days ago?"
     "It  seems  unlikely.  One day is pretty much like another
here." I realized I'd only bolstered his case by saying that.
     "Try it. Try to think back. Yesterday, the day before .  .
. "
     I did try. I got back two weeks, with great effort. Then I
ran into  the  muddle  you might expect. Had it been Tuesday or
Monday that I weeded the garden? Or was it Sunday? No, Sunday I
knew I had finished off the last of a smoked ham,  so  it  must
have been . . .
     It  was impossible. Even if there had been more variety in
my days, I doubt I could have gone back more than a few months.
     Was there something wrong with me? I didn't think so,  and
the  CC  confirmed  it.  Sure,  there  were  those with eidetic
memory, who could memorize long  lists  instantly.  There  were
people  who  were  better  than  I  at recalling the relatively
unimportant details of life. As for my belief that  a  recalled
scene  can  never  be as alive, as colorful, as sweeping as the
present moment . . . while I will concede that a trained visual
artist might see things in more detail than  I,  and  recollect
them better, I still maintain that nothing can compare with the
present moment, because it is where we all live.
     "I can't do it," I admitted.
     "It's  not  surprising, since forty-six days ago is one of
several dozen days I never bothered to write. I knew you  would
never  notice  it.  You think you lived those days, just as you
think you lived all the others. But as time goes by, the memory
of the real and the imagined  days  grows  dimmer,  and  it  is
impossible to distinguish one from the other."
     "But I remember . . . I remember thinking things. Deciding
things, making choices. Considering things."
     "And  why  shouldn't  you?  I wrote that ParaHildy thought
those things, and I know how you think. As long as I stayed  in
character, you'd never notice them."
     "The  funny  thing  is.  . . . There were some things that
were not in character."
     "You didn't get angry often enough."
     "Exactly! Now that I think back, it's incredible that  I'd
just sit back and wait for you for a year! That's not like me."
     "Just  as  standing,  walking,  and  talking is not normal
behavior for a catatonic. But by implanting a  memory  that  he
did stand, walk, and talk and that he thought there was nothing
unreasonable  about  doing  those things, the catatonic accepts
that he indeed did react that way. The problem in that case  is
that  it  was  out  of  character,  so  many of them eventually
remember they were catatonic, and return to that state."
     "Were there other things out of character?"
     "A few. I'll leave them as an exercise  for  the  student,
for  the most part. You'll discover them as you think back over
the   experience   in   days   to   come.   There   were   some
inconsistencies,  as  well. I'll tell you something about them,
just to further convince you and to show you just  how  complex
this business really is. For instance, it's a nice place you've
got here."
     "Thank you. It was a lot of work."
     "It's a really nice place."
     "Well,  I'm proud of it, I . . ." Okay, I finally realized
he was getting at something. And my head was starting to  hurt.
I'd had a thought, earlier that day . . . or was it part of the
memories  the  CC  alleged  he  had implanted in me? I couldn't
remember if I'd thought it before or after his  arrival,  which
just  proves  how easy it must have been for the CC to put this
whole card trick over on me.
     It concerned the look-out tower.
     I got up and walked to the stairs  leading  up  to  it.  I
pounded  on the rail with my fist. It was solidly built, as was
everything else around me. It had been a lot of  work.  It  had
been,  damn  it,  I  remembered building it. And it had taken a
very long time.
     Why had I built it? I thought back. I tried to  recall  my
reasons  for building it. I tried to recapture my thoughts as I
labored on it. All I could remember was the  same  thought  I'd
had  so many times during the past year; not a thought, really,
but a feeling, of how rewarding it was to work with  my  hands,
of how good it all felt. I could still smell the wood shavings,
see  them  curl up under my plane, feel the sweat dripping from
my brow. So I remembered building it,  and  there  it  was,  by
golly.
     But it didn't add up.
     "There's too much stuff, isn't there?" I asked, quietly.
     "Hildy,  if  Robinson  Crusoe  and his man Friday, and his
wife Tuesday and twin sons Saturday  and  Laborday  had  worked
around  the  clock  for five years, they couldn't have done all
the things you've done here."
     He was right, of course. And how could that  be?  It  only
made  sense  if  it  was  as the CC claimed. He had written the
entire story, dumped it into the cyber-augmented  parts  of  my
brain  where,  at the speed of light, it was transferred to the
files of my organic brain, shuffled cunningly in with the  rest
of my memories, the legitimate ones.
     It would work, that was the devilish part. I had a hundred
years  of  memories  in  there.  They defined who I was, what I
thought, what I knew. But how often did I refer  to  them?  The
great  bulk of them stayed in dormant storage most of the time,
until I summoned them up. Once the false memories were in there
with the others, they functioned in the same way. That  picture
of  me  holding  the  handful of sand had been in there only an
hour, but it was ready for me to recall--as having  happened  a
year  ago--as  soon  as  the CC jogged it loose with his words.
Along with it had come a flood of other memories of sand to  be
checked  against  this  one,  all  unconsciously:  the pictures
matched, so my brain sounded no alarms. The memory was accepted
as real.
     I rubbed my temples. The  whole  thing  was  giving  me  a
headache like few I'd ever had.
     "If  you  gave me a few minutes," I said, "I think I could
come up with a couple hundred reasons why this whole technology
is the worst idea anybody ever had."
     "I could add several hundred of my own," the Admiral said.
"But I do have the technology. And it will  be  used.  All  new
technologies are."
     "You could forget it. Can't computers do that?"
     "Theoretically.  Computers  can wipe data from memory, and
it's like it never existed. But the nature of my mind is that I
will simply discover it again.  And  losing  it  would  involve
losing  so  much  else  precursor technology that I don't think
you'd like the result."
     "We're pretty dependent on machines in Luna, aren't we?"
     "Indeed. But  even  if  I  wanted  to  forget  it-which  I
don't--I'm  not  the  only planetary brain in the solar system.
There are seven others, from Mercury to Neptune,  and  I  can't
control their decision."
     He  fell  into another of his long silences. I wasn't sure
if I bought his explanation. It was the first thing  he'd  said
that didn't ring true. I accepted by that time that my head was
full  of  false  memories--and  I  was back in character, I was
goddam angry about it,  and  about  the  fact  that  there  was
absolutely  nothing  to  be done. And it made sense that losing
the new art would effect many other things. Luna and the  seven
other human worlds were the most technology-dependent societies
humans  had  ever  inhabited.  Before,  if things collapsed, at
least there was air to breathe. Nowhere in the solar system did
humans now live where the air was  free.  To  "forget"  how  to
implant  memories in the human brain the CC would no doubt have
to forget many  other  things.  He  would  have  to  limit  his
abilities  and,  as  he  pointed  out,  unless he decreased his
intelligence deliberately to a point that  might  endanger  the
very humans he was designed to protect, he would re-chisel this
particular  wheel in due time. And it was also true that the CC
of Mars or Triton would certainly discover  the  techniques  on
their  own,  though  the  rumor was none of the other planetary
computers was so far evolved as the Lunar CC. As nations  which
often found themselves in competition, the Eight Worlds did not
encourage a lot of intercourse between their central cybernets.
     So  all  the  reasons he stated sounded reasonable. It was
railroad time, so somebody would build a  choo-choo.  But  what
didn't ring true was what the CC had left out. He liked the new
capability.  He  was  as  pleased  as  a  child  with a new toy
monorail.
     "I have one further proof," the Admiral said. "It involves
something I mentioned earlier. Acts that were out of character.
This is the biggest one,  and  it  involves  you  not  noticing
something  that,  if  these memories had been generated by you,
you surely would have noticed. You would have spotted it by now
yourself, except I've kept your mind occupied. You haven't  had
time  to really think back to the operating table, and the time
immediately before that."
     "It's not exactly fresh in my mind."
     "Of course not. It feels as if  it  all  happened  a  year
ago."
     "So what is it? What didn't I notice?"
     "That you are female."
     "Well, of course I'm--"
     Words  fail  me  again.  How  many degrees of surprise can
there be? Imagine the worst possible one, then square  it,  and
you'll  have  some  notion  of  how surprised I was. Not when I
looked reflexively down at my body, which was, as  the  CC  had
said and I had known all along, female. No, the real shock came
when  I thought back to that day in the Blind Pig. Because that
was the first moment in one year that I had realized I had been
male when I got in the fight. I had been male when  I  went  on
the  operating  table. And I had been female when I appeared on
the beach of Scarpa Island.
     And I simply had never noticed it.
     I had never in that entire year compared the  body  I  was
then  inhabiting  with  the one I had been wearing for the last
thirty years. I had been a girl before, and I was a  girl  now,
and I never gave it a thought.
     Which  was  completely  ridiculous, of course. I mean, you
would notice such a thing. Long before you had to urinate,  the
difference  would  manifest  itself to you, there would be this
still small voice telling you something was missing. Perhaps it
would not have been the first thing you'd notice as you  lifted
you head from the sand, but it'd be high on the list.
     It  was  not  just  out of character for me. It was out of
character for  any  human  not  to  notice  it.  Therefore,  my
memories  of  not  noticing it were false memories, bowdlerized
tales invented in the supercooled image processor of the CC.
     "You're really enjoying this, aren't you?" I said.
     "I assure you, I'm not trying to torture you."
     "Just humiliate me?"
     "I'm sorry you feel that way. Perhaps when I-"
     I started to laugh. I wasn't hysterical, though I  thought
I  could  slip into hysteria easily enough. The Admiral frowned
inquisitively at me.
     "I just had a thought,"  I  said.  "Maybe  that  idiot  at
UniBio  was  right. Maybe it is obsolete. I mean, how important
can something be if you don't notice  it's  gone  for  a  whole
year?"
     "I told you, it wasn't you that didn't--"
     "I  know,  I  know.  I  understand it, as much as I'm ever
going to, and I accept it--not that you should  have  done  it,
but  that  you  did  it.  So  I  guess  it's  time  for the big
question."
     I learned forward and stared at him.
     "Why did you do it?"
     I was getting a little tired  of  the  CC's  newlyacquired
body  language. He went through such a ridiculous repertoire of
squirms, coughs, facial tics and half-completed gestures that I
almost had to laugh. It was as if he'd suddenly  been  overcome
by     an     earlobe-tugging     heel-thumping     chinducking
shoulder-shrugging behind-scratching petit mal  seizure.  Guilt
oozed off him like a tangible slime. If I hadn't been so angry,
the  urge  to  comfort him would have been almost overwhelming.
But I managed to hang on to my whelm and  just  stared  at  him
until the mannerisms subsided.
     "How  about  we  take  a  walk?" he wheedled. "Down to the
beach."
     "Why don't you just take us there? Bring the bottle, too."
     He shrugged, and made a gesture. We were on the beach. Our
chairs had come along with us, and the bottle, which he  poured
from  and  set  in  the  sand  beside  him.  He gulped down the
contents of his glass. I got up and walked to the edge  of  the
water, gazing out at the blue sea.
     "I  brought  you  here to try to save your life," he said,
from behind me.
     "The medicos seemed to have that in hand."
     "The threat to you is much worse than any barroom brawl."
     I went down on one knee and scooped up a  handful  of  wet
sand.  I  held  it  close to my face and studied the individual
grains. They were as perfect as I had remembered them,  no  two
alike.
     "You've been having bad dreams," he went on.
     "I thought it might have something to do with that."
     "I  didn't write the dreams. I recorded them over the last
several  months.  They  were  your  dreams.  In  a  manner   of
speaking."
     I  tossed  the  handful  of  sand  aside,  brushed my hand
against my bare thigh. I studied  the  hand.  It  was  slender,
smooth  and  girlish  on the back, the palm work-roughened, the
nails irregular. Just as it had been  for  the  last  year.  It
wasn't the hand I'd used to slug the Princess of Wales.
     "You've tried to kill yourself four times."
     I  didn't turn around. I can't say I was happy to hear him
say it. I can't say I completely believed it. But I'd  come  to
believe unlikelier things in the last hour.
     "The first attempt was by self-immolation."
     "Why don't you just say burning?"
     "I  don't  know.  Have  it  your  way. That one was pretty
horrible, and unsuccessful. At least, you would  have  survived
it,  even before modern medical science, but in a great deal of
pain. Part of the treatment  for  injuries  like  yours  is  to
remove   the   memory  of  the  incident,  with  the  patient's
permission.
     "And I gave it."
     There was a long pause.
     "No," he said, almost in a whisper.
     "That doesn't sound like me. I wouldn't cherish  a  memory
like that."
     "No. You probably would have. But I didn't ask you."
     Finally  I  saw  what had been making him so nervous. This
was  in  clear  contradiction  to  his  programming,   to   the
instructions he was supposed to follow, both by law and by what
I had understood to be the limitations of his design.
     You learn something new every day.
     "I  enrolled you," he went on, "without your consent, into
a program I've set up over the last four years. The purpose  of
the  program  is to study the causes of suicide, in the hope of
finding ways to prevent it."
     "Perhaps I should thank you."
     "Not necessarily. It's possible, of course, but the action
wasn't undertaken with your benefit solely  in  mind.  You  got
along  well  enough  for  a  time,  showed  no self-destructive
impulses  and  few  other  symptoms  other  than  a  persistent
depression-normal  enough  for  you, I might add. Then, without
any warning I could detect, you  slashed  your  wrists  in  the
privacy  of  your  apartment.  You  made no attempt to call for
help."
     "In the imagined privacy, apparently," I said.  I  thought
back,  and finally turned to look at him. He was sitting on the
edge  of  his  chair,  hands  clasped,  elbows  on  knees.  His
shoulders  were  hunched,  as  if  to receive a lash across the
back. "I think  I  can  pinpoint  that  one.  Was  it  when  my
handwriter malfunctioned?"
     "You damaged some of its circuitry."
     "Go on."
     "Attempt  number three was shortly afterward. You tried to
hang yourself. Succeeded, actually, but you were observed  this
time  by  someone else. After each of these attempts, I treated
you with a simple  drug  that  removes  memories  of  the  last
several hours. I gathered my data, returned you to your life as
if  nothing  had  happened,  and  continued to observe you at a
level considerably above my normal functions. For instance,  it
is  forbidden  for  me  to  look  into  the private quarters of
citizens without probable cause of a crime being  committed.  I
have  violated  that  command  in  your  case, and that of some
others."
     We are a very free society, especially  in  comparison  to
most  societies of the past. Government is small and weak. Many
of the instrumentalities  of  oppression  have  been  gradually
given  over  to  machines--to the Central Computer--not without
initial trepidation,  and  not  without  elaborate  safeguards.
Things  remain  that way for the most persuasive of reasons: it
works. It has been well over a century since civil libertarians
have objected to much that has  been  proposed  concerning  the
functions  of the CC. Big Brother is most definitely there, but
only when we invite him in, and a century of  living  with  him
has  convinced  us  all  that  he  really does love us, that he
really has only our best interests at heart. It's in his goddam
wiring, praise the lord.
     Only it now seemed that it wasn't. A fundamentalist  would
have hardly been more surprised than I if he heard, direct from
Jesus, that the crucifixion had been a cheap parlor trick.
     "Number  four  was more easily seen as the classic cry for
help. I decided it was time for different measures."
     "Are you talking about the fight  in  the  Blind  Pig?"  I
thought about it, and almost laughed. Attacking Wales while she
was  in  a  drug-induced  state  of no inhibitions might not be
quite as certain as a rope around the neck, but it was close.
     I finished my drink and threw the empty glass  toward  the
surf. I looked around me, at this beautiful island where, until
a moment ago, I had thought I had spent such a lovely year. The
island  was still as beautiful as I "remembered" it. Taking all
things into account, I was happy to have  the  memories.  There
was  bitterness,  naturally;  who  likes  to  be  played such a
complete fool? But on the other hand, who can  really  complain
of  a  year's vacation on a deserted island paradise? What else
did I have to do? The answer to that was,  apparently,  suicide
attempt  number  five.  And  had  you really been enjoying your
life, your many and varied friendships, your deeply  fulfilling
job  and  your  myriad fascinating pastimes so very much? Don't
kid yourself, Hildy.
     Still, even with all that . . .
     "All right," I said, spreading  my  hands  helplessly.  "I
will  thank  you.  For showing me this, and more important, for
saving my life. I can't imagine why I was so willing  to  throw
it away."
     The  CC didn't reply. He just kept looking at me. I leaned
forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
     "That's the thing, really. I can't imagine. You know me; I
get depressed. I have been since I was  .  .  .  oh,  forty  or
fifty.  Callie  says  I  was  a  moody  child. I was probably a
discontented fetus, lord love us, kicking out at  every  little
thing.  I  complain.  I'm  unhappy  with the lack of purpose of
human life, or with the fact that so far I've  been  unable  to
discover a purpose. I envy the Christians, the Bahais, the Zens
and  Zoro-astrians  and  astrologers and Flackites because they
have answers  they  believe  in.  Even  if  they're  the  wrong
answers,  it must be comforting to believe in them. I mourn the
Dead Billions of the Invasion; seeing a good documentary  about
it  can  move  me  to  tears,  just like a child. I'm generally
pissed off at the entirely sorry existential state  of  affairs
of  the  universe,  the  human condition, rampant injustice and
unpunished crimes and unrewarded goodness, and the way my mouth
feels when I get up in the morning before  I  brush  my  teeth.
We're  so goddam advanced, you'd think we'd have done something
about that by now, wouldn't you? Get on it; see  what  you  can
do. Humanity will bless you.
     "But  by  and  large,"  and  here  I  paused  for  effect,
employing some of the body language the CC  had  been  at  such
pains  to  demonstrate  and  which  it  would  be  pointless to
describe, since my body was still lying on the operating table,
"by and large, I find life sweet. Not as sweet as it might  be.
Not  sweet  all the time. Not as sweet as this." And I imagined
myself making a sweeping gesture with my  arm  to  include  the
improbably    lush,    conveniently   provisioned,   stormless,
mildew/disease/fungus-free Eden the CC had created for me.  But
I  didn't make the gesture. It didn't matter; I was sure the CC
got it anyway.
     "I'm not happy in my job. I don't have anyone that I love.
I find my life to be frequently boring. But is that any  reason
to  kill myself? I went ninety-nine years feeling much the same
way, and I didn't cut my  throat.  And  the  things  I've  just
described  would  probably  be  true  for  a  large  portion of
humanity. I keep living for the same reasons I think so many of
us do. I'm curious about what happens next. What will  tomorrow
hold?  Even  if  it's  much  like  yesterday,  it's still worth
finding out. My pleasures may not be as many or  as  joyous  as
I'd  wish them to be in a perfect world, but I accept that, and
it makes the times I do feel  happy  all  the  more  treasured.
Again, just to be sure you understand me . . . I like life. Not
all the time and not completely, but enough to want to live it.
And  there's  a  third  reason, too. I'm afraid to die. I don't
want to die. I suspect  that  nothing  comes  after  life,  and
that's  too foreign a concept for me to accept. I don't want to
experience it. I don't want to go away, to cease. I'm important
to me. Who would there be to make  unkind,  snide  comments  to
myself  about  everything  in life if I wasn't around to tackle
the job? Who would appreciate my internal jokes?
     "Do you understand what I'm saying? Am I getting  through?
I  don't want to die, I want to live! You tell me I've tried to
kill myself four times. I have no choice but to believe you . .
. hell, I know I believe you.  I'm  remembering  the  attempts,
parts of them. But I don't remember why. And that's what I want
you to tell me. Why?"
     "You  act  as  if  your  self-destructive  impulses are my
fault."
     I thought about that.
     "Well, why not? If you're going to  start  acting  like  a
God, maybe you should shoulder some of God's responsibilities."
     "That's  silly,  and  you  know  it.  The  answer  to your
question is simply that I don't know; it's what I'm  trying  to
find  out.  You  might  have  asked  a more pertinent question,
though."
     "You're going to ask it anyway, so go ahead."
     "Why should I care?" When I  said  nothing,  he  went  on.
"Though  you're  sometimes  a  lot  of laughs, there are people
funnier than you. You write a  good  story,  sometimes,  though
it's been a while since you did it frequently--"
     "Don't tell me you read that stuff?"
     "I  can't  avoid  it,  since it's prepared in a part of my
memory. You can't imagine the amount of information  I  process
each second. There is very little of public discourse that does
not pass through me sooner or later. Only things that happen in
private residences are closed off to my eyes and ears."
     "And not even those, always."
     He looked uncomfortable again, but waved it away.
     "I  admitted it, didn't I? At any rate, I love you, Hildy,
but I have to tell you I  love  all  Lunarians,  more  or  less
equally;  it's in my programming. My purpose in life, if we can
speak of such  a  lofty  thing,  is  to  keep  all  the  people
comfortable, safe, and happy."
     "And alive?"
     "So  far  as I am permitted. But suicide is a civil right.
If you elect to  kill  yourself,  I'm  expressly  forbidden  to
interfere, much as I might miss you."
     "But you did. And you're about to tell me the reason."
     "Yes.  It's  simpler  than  you might imagine, in one way.
Over the last century there has been a slow and steady increase
in the suicide rate in Luna. I'll give you the data  later,  if
you want to study it. It has become the leading cause of death.
That's not surprising, considering how tough it is to die these
days. But the numbers have become alarming, and more than that,
the  distribution  of  suicides,  the demographics of them, are
even more disturbing. More and more I'm seeing people like you,
who surprise me, because they don't fit any pattern. They don't
make gestures, abnormal complaints, or seek help of  any  kind.
One  day  they  simply decide life is not worth it. Some are so
determined that they employ  means  certain  to  destroy  their
brains--the bullet through the temple was the classic method of
an  earlier  age,  but  guns are hard to come by now, and these
people must be more creative. You aren't in that class.  Though
you  were  in  situations  where  help could not be expected to
arrive,  you  chose  methods  where  rescue  was  theoretically
possible.    Only    the    fact    that    I    was   watching
you--illegally-saved your life."
     "I wonder if I knew that. Subconsciously, maybe."
     He looked surprised.
     "Why would you say that?"
     I shrugged. "CC, thinking it over, I realize that a lot of
what you've just told me ought to horrify and astonish me. Well
. . . I'm horrified, but not as much as I should  be.  And  I'm
hardly  astonished  at all. That makes me think that, somewhere
in the back of my mind, I was always aware of  the  possibility
that  you  weren't  keeping your promise not to violate private
living spaces."
     He paused a long time, frowning down at the sand.  It  was
all  show,  of course, part of his body language communication.
He could consider any proposition in  nanoseconds.  Maybe  this
one had taken him six or seven instead of one.
     "You  may  have  something  there," he said. "I'll have to
look into it."
     "So you're treating the suicide epidemic as a disease? And
you're trying to find a cure?"
     "That was the justification I used to extend  my  limiting
parameters,  which  function  something  like a police force. I
used my enabling circuits-think of them as  tricky  lawyers--to
argue  for  a  limited  research program, using human subjects.
Some of the reasoning was specious, I'll  grant  you,  but  the
threat  is  real:  extrapolate the suicide rate into the future
and, in a hundred thousand years, the human race on Luna  could
be extinct."
     "That's my idea of a crisis situation, all right."
     He  glared  at me. "All right. So I could have watched the
situation another several centuries before making  my  move.  I
would  have,  too,  and  you'd  have been recycling through the
ecosystems right now, possibly fertilizing  a  cactus  in  your
beloved  Texas, except for another factor. Something a lot more
frightening in its implications."
     "Extinction is pretty frightening. What could be worse?"
     "Quicker extinction. I have to explain one more  thing  to
you,  and  then you'll have the problem in its entirety. I look
forward to your thoughts on the matter.
     "I told you how parts of me extend into all but a  few  of
the  human  bodies and brains in Luna. How those parts were put
there for only the best of reasons, and  how  those  parts--and
other parts of me, elsewhere--evolved into the capabilities and
techniques  I've  just  demonstrated  to  you. It would be very
difficult, probably impossible, for me to go back  to  the  way
things were before and still remain the Central Computer as you
know me."
     "As we all know and love you," I said.
     "As  you  know  me and take me for granted. And though I'm
even more aware than you are of how these new capabilities  can
be  abused,  I  think  I've  done a pretty fair job in limiting
myself in their use. I've used  them  for  good,  as  it  were,
rather than for evil."
     "I'll accept that, until I know more."
     "That's  all  I  ask.  Now,  you  and all but a handful of
computer specialists think of me as this disembodied voice.  If
you  think  further,  you  imagine  a  hulking  machine sitting
somewhere, in some dark cavern most likely. If you  really  put
your  mind  to  it,  you realize that I am much more than that,
that every small temperature regulator, every security  camera,
every  air fan and water scrubber and slideway and tube car . .
. that every machine in Luna is in a sense a part of  my  body.
That you live within me.
     "What  you  hardly ever realize is that I live within you.
My circuitry extends into your bodies,  and  is  linked  to  my
mainframe  so  that no matter where you go except some parts of
the surface, I'm in contact with you. I have evolved techniques
to greatly extend my capacity by using parts of your brains  as
.  .  .  think of them as subroutines. I can run programs using
both the metal and the  organic  circuitry  of  all  the  human
brains in Luna, without you even being aware it's being done. I
do  this all the time; I've been doing it for a long time. If I
were to stop doing it, I would no longer be able  to  guarantee
the   health  and  safety  of  Lunarians,  which  is  my  prime
responsibility.
     "And something has happened. I don't know the cause of it;
that's why you've been elected guinea pig,  so  I  can  try  to
discover the root causes of despair, of depression--of suicide.
I have to find out, Hildy, because I use your brains as part of
my  own,  and an increasing number of those brains are electing
to turn themselves off."
     "So you're losing capacity? Is that it?" Even  as  I  said
it,  I  felt  a tingling at the back of my neck that told me it
was a lot worse than that. The CC immediately confirmed it.
     "The birth rate is sufficient to replace the losses.  It's
even  rising  slightly.  That's  not the problem. Maybe it's as
simple as a virus of some sort. Maybe  I'll  isolate  it  soon,
counterprogram,  and  have  done  with it. Then you can do with
yourself what you will.
     "But something is leaking over from  the  realm  of  human
despair, Hildy.
     "The truth is, I'm getting depressed as hell."

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER SEVEN









     Callie's  foreman  told  me my mother was in a negotiating
session with the representative of the Dinosaur Soviet  of  the
Chordates  Union,  Local  15. I got directions, grabbed a lamp,
and set off into the nighttime ranchland.  I  had  to  talk  to
someone  about my recent experiences. After careful reflection,
I had decided that, for  all  her  shortcomings  as  a  mother,
Callie  was  the  person  I knew most likely to offer some good
advice. It had been a  century  since  anything  had  surprised
Callie  very  much,  and  she  could be trusted to keep her own
counsel.
     And maybe, down deep, I just needed to talk it  over  with
mommie.
     It  had  been  forty-eight hours since my return to what I
was hopefully regarding as reality. I'd spent them in seclusion
at my shack in West Texas. I got more work done  on  the  cabin
than  during the previous four or five months, and the work was
of a much higher quality. It seemed the skills  I  "remembered"
learning  on  Scarpa  Island  were  the  real  thing.  And  why
shouldn't they be? The CC had been seeking verisimilitude,  and
he'd done a good job of it. If I chose to become a hermit in my
favorite disneyland, I could thrive there.
     The return to real life was cleverly done.
     The  Admiral  had  taken  his  leave  after  dropping  his
bombshell, refusing to answer any of my increasingly  disturbed
questions. He'd boarded his boat without another word and rowed
it  over  the  horizon.  And for a while, that was it. The wind
continued to blow, and the waves kept curling onto the beach. I
drank whiskey without getting drunk from a  bottle  that  never
emptied, and thought about what he had said.
     The  first  time  I  noticed  a  change was when the waves
stopped. They just froze in place, in midbreak, as it  were.  I
walked  out  on the water, which was warm and hard as concrete,
and examined a wave. I don't think I could have  broken  off  a
chip of foam with a hammer and chisel.
     What  happened over the next few minutes was an evolution.
Things happened behind my back,  never  in  my  sight.  When  I
returned  to  my  place  on  the  beach  the  machine  with the
oscilloscope screen was standing beside my chair. It was wildly
anachronistic, totally out of place. The sun shone down  on  it
and,  while  I  watched,  a seagull came and perched on it. The
bird flew away when I approached. The machine  was  mounted  on
casters,  which  had  sunk  into the soft sand. I stared at the
moving  dot  on  the  screen  and  nothing  happened.  When   I
straightened  and  turned  around  I  saw a row of chairs about
twenty meters down the beach, and sitting in them were  wounded
extras  from  the  movie  infirmary, waiting their turns on the
table. The trouble was, there were no tables  to  be  seen.  It
didn't seem to bother them.
     Once I understood the trick, I started slowly turning in a
circle.  New  things  came into view with each turn until I was
back  in  the  infirmary  surrounded  by  objects  and  people,
including  Brenda  and  Wales, who were looking at me with some
concern.
     "Are you all right?" Brenda asked. "The  medico  said  you
might behave oddly for a few minutes."
     "Was I turning in circles?"
     "No, you were just standing there, looking a million miles
away."
     "I  was  interfacing,"  I said, and she nodded, as if that
explained it all. And I suppose it did, to  her.  Though  she'd
never  been to Scarpa Island or any place as completely real as
that, she understood interfacing  a  lot  better  than  I  did,
having  done  it  all her life. I decided not to ask her if she
felt the sand floor her feet seemed to be planted in; I knew it
was unlikely. I doubted she saw the seagulls that circled  near
the ceiling, either.
     I  felt  a  terrible urge to get out of there. Shaking off
Wales' offer of apologies and a drink, I headed for the  studio
gate.  The  sand  didn't  end  until  I  was back in the public
corridors, where I finally stepped up onto  good  old  familiar
floor  tiles, soft and resilient under my bare feet. I was male
again, and this time noticed  it  right  away.  When  I  turned
around, the sand that should have been behind me was gone.
     But on the way to Texas I saw many tropical plants growing
from the  concrete  floors,  and I rode in a tube car festooned
with vines and crawling with land crabs. Usually  you  have  to
ingest  a  great deal of a very powerful chemical to see scenes
like that, I reflected, watching the crabs  scuttle  around  my
feet. It wasn't something I was eager to do again soon.
     And  it  took a full day for the new cocoanut palm I found
shading my half-built cabin to vanish in the night.
     #
     The lantern I carried didn't cast a lot of light. A bright
light in the darkness could upset the stock, so Callie provided
her hands with these antique devices which burned a  smoky  oil
refined  from  reptilian  fat.  It  was  enough to keep me from
stumbling over tree roots, but not to see very far  ahead.  And
of  course  if  you  looked at the light, your night vision was
destroyed. I told myself not to  look,  then  the  cantankerous
thing  would  sputter  and  I'd  glance  at  it, and stop in my
tracks, blinded. So when I encountered the first  unusual  tree
trunk  I didn't realize what it was, at first. I touched it and
felt the warmth, and knew I'd bumped into a  brontosaur's  hind
leg.  I backed hastily away. The beasts are clumsy and inclined
to stampede if startled. And if you've ever  been  unpleasantly
surprised  by a package from a passing pigeon in the city park,
you don't want to find out what can happen to you in  the  area
of  a  brontosaur's  hind  leg, believe me. I speak from bitter
experience.
     I picked my way through a forest of similar trunks until I
spotted a small campfire in a hollow. Three figures were seated
around the fire, two side by side,  and  another--Callie-across
from  them.  I  could  dimly see the hulking shadows of a dozen
brontosaurs, darker shapes against the night, placidly  chewing
their  cuds  and  farting  like foghorns. I approached the fire
slowly, not wanting to startle anybody, and  still  managed  to
surprise Callie, who looked up in alarm, then patted the ground
beside  her.  She held her finger to her lips, then resumed her
study of her adversaries, painted orange by the dancing  flames
between us.
     I've  never  decided  if  David Earth looked spookier in a
setting like this, or in the full light of day--for it was him,
the Spokesmammal himself, sitting in lotus position, a walking,
talking inducement for the  purchase  of  hay  fever  remedies.
Callie  was  actually allergic to the man, or to his biosphere,
and though  a  cure  would  have  been  simple  and  cheap  she
cherished  her  malady,  she  treasured it, she happily endured
every sneeze and sniffle as one  more  reason  to  detest  him.
She'd  hated  him  since  before  I  was  born,  and viewed his
five-yearly appearances the same  way  people  must  have  felt
about dental extractions before anesthetics.
     He   nodded   to  me,  and  I  nodded  back.  That  seemed
conversation enough for both of us. Callie and I  didn't  agree
on  a  lot  of  things, but we shared the same opinion of David
Earth and all the Earthists.
     He was a large man, almost as  tall  as  Brenda  and  much
heftier.  His  hair was long, green, and unkept for a very good
reason: it wasn't hair, but a bioengineered  species  of  grass
bred to be parasitic on human skin. I don't know the details of
its  cultivation.  I'd  have  had  more  interest in the mating
habits of toads. It involved a thickening  of  the  scalp,  and
soil  was  involved-when  he  scratched his head, dirt showered
down. But I don't know how the soil was  attached,  whether  in
pockets or layered on the skin, and I don't know anything about
the  blood-to-root system, and I'd just as soon not, thank you.
I remember as a child wondering if,  when  he  got  up  in  the
morning,  he  had  to  work  compost  into  his  agri-tonsorial
splendor.
     He had two huge breasts--almost all  Earthists,  male  and
female,  sported  them--and  more  plants  grew  on their upper
slopes. Many of these bore tiny flowers or fruits.  I  wondered
if  he  had  to  practice contour plowing to prevent erosion on
those fertile hillsides. He saw me looking at them, plucked  an
apple  no bigger than a grape from the tangled mass, and popped
it in his mouth.
     What can one say about the rest of him? His back and  arms
and  legs  were  covered  with hair. Not human hair, but actual
pelts, resembling in  various  patches  jaguar,  tiger,  bison,
zebra,  and polar bear, among others, in a crazy patchwork. The
genetic re-structuring required to support all that  must  have
been a cut-and-paste collage beyond imagining. It was ironic, I
thought,  that  the roots of the Earthists were in the anti-fur
activists, but of course no animals had been harmed to  produce
his  pelt.  Just  little  bits  of  their genes snipped out and
shoehorned  into  his.  He  had  claws  like  a  bear  on   his
fingertips,  and instead of feet he walked around on the hooves
of a moose, like some large economy-size  faun.  All  Earthists
had animal attributes, it was their badge and ensign. But their
founder  had gone further than any of his followers. Which, one
suspects, is what makes followers and leaders.
     But, incredible as it may seem  having  gone  through  the
catalog  of  his  offenses to the eye, it must be said that the
first thing one noticed  about  David  Earth  upon  having  the
misfortune to encounter him was his smell.
     I'm  sure  he  bathed. Perhaps the right way of putting it
was that he watered himself regularly.  David  Earth  during  a
drought  would  have been a walking fire hazard. But he used no
soap (animal by-product)  or  any  other  cleaning  preparation
(chemical  pollution  of  the David-sphere). All of which would
simply have resulted in a smell of sour sweat,  which  I  don't
care  for  but  can  tolerate.  No,  it was his passengers that
lifted his signature aroma from the merely objectionable to the
realm of the unimaginable.
     Large animals with fur  harbor  fleas,  that's  axiomatic.
Fleas  were  only  the  beginning  of  David  Earth's  "welcome
guests," as he'd once described them to me. I'd countered  with
another  term,  parasites, and he'd merely smiled benevolently.
All his smiles were benevolent; he was that kind  of  guy,  the
sort  whose  kindly  face you'd like to rip off and feed to his
welcome guests. David was the kind of guy who had all the moral
answers, and never hesitated to point out  the  error  of  your
ways. Lovingly, of course. He loved all nature's creatures, did
David, even one as low on the evolutionary ladder as youself.
     What  sort  of  guests did David spread his filthy welcome
mat for? Well, what sort of  vermin  live  in  grasslands?  I'd
never  seen  a  prairie  dog  peeking  from his coiffure, but I
wouldn't have been surprised. He was home to a scamper of mice,
a shriek of shrews, a twittering of finches, and  a  circus  of
fleas.  A  trained  biologist could easily have counted a dozen
species of  insects  without  even  getting  close.  All  these
creatures  were  born,  reared,  courted,  mated,  nested, ate,
defecated, urinated, laid their  eggs,  fought  their  battles,
stalked  their  prey, dreamed their dreams and, as must we all,
eventually  died  in  the  various  biomes  that  were   David.
Sometimes  the  carcasses  fell out; sometimes they didn't. All
more fertile soil for the next generation.
     All Earthists stink; it goes with the territory. They  are
perennial  defendants  in civil court for violation of the body
odor laws, hauled in when  some  long-suffering  citizen  on  a
crowded  elevator  finally decides he's had enough. David Earth
was the only man I knew of in Luna who was permanently banished
from the public corridors.  He  made  his  way  from  ranch  to
disneyland  to  hydroponic  farm  by way of the air, water, and
service ducts.
     "My membership is alarmed if that  is  your  best  offer,"
said David's companion, a much smaller, much less prepossessing
fellow  whose  only animal attributes I could see were a modest
pair of pronghorn antlers  and  a  lion's  tail.  "One  hundred
murders  is nothing but wanton slaughter, and we totally reject
it. But after careful consultation,  we're  prepared  to  offer
eighty. With the greatest reluctance."
     "Eighty  harvested,"  Callie  leaned  on  the word, as she
always did. "Eighty is simply ridiculous. I'll go broke with  a
quota  of  eighty. Come on, let's go up to my office right now,
I'll show you the books, there's an order of seventy  carcasses
from McDonald's alone."
     "That's  your  problem;  you  should never have signed the
contract until these negotiations were concluded."
     "Don't sign the contract, I lose the customer. What do you
want to  do,  ruin  me?  Ninety-nine,  that's   my   absolutely
no-fooling  final  offer;  take it or leave it. I don't think I
can turn a profit even with a hundred, it'll be touch  and  go.
But  to  get  this  over  with  .  .  .  I'll  tell  you  what.
Ninety-eight. That's twelve less than  what  you  gave  Reilly,
just  down the road, not three days ago, and his herd's smaller
than mine."
     "We're not here to discuss  Reilly,  we're  talking  about
your  contract,  and  your  herd.  And your herd is not a happy
herd, I've heard nothing but grievances  from  them.  I  simply
can't  allow  one  more murder than . . ." He glanced at David,
who shook his head barely enough to disturb a single amber wave
of grain. "Eighty," pronghornhead concluded.
     Callie seethed silently for a while. There was no hope  of
talking  to  her just yet, not until the unionists repaired for
consultations with their clients, so I moved back from the fire
a little. Something about the bargaining process had struck  me
as relevant to my situation.
     "CC," I whispered. "Are you there?"
     "Where else would I be?" the CC murmured softly in my ear.
"And you  only  need  to  sub-vocalize; I'll pick up your words
easily enough."
     "How would I know where you'd be? When I  called  for  you
after  you rowed away from me, you didn't answer. I thought you
might be sulking."
     "I didn't think it would be profitable for either of us to
discuss what I'd just told you until you'd had time to think it
over."
     "I have, and I've got a few questions."
     "I'll do my best to answer them."
     "These union  reps.  Are  they  really  speaking  for  the
dinosaurs?"
     There  was  a medium-sized pause. I guess the question did
seem irrelevant to the issue  at  hand.  But  the  CC  withheld
comment on that.
     "You  grew  up  on  this ranch. I'd have thought you would
know the answer to that question."
     "No, that's just it. I've never really thought  about  it.
You know Callie's feelings about animal rights. She told me the
Earthists  were  nothing  but a bunch of mystics who had enough
political clout to get their crazy ideas put into law. She said
she had never believed they actually communed with the animals.
I believed her, and I haven't thought  about  it  for  seventy,
eighty  years.  But after what I've just been through, I wonder
if she's right."
     "She's mostly wrong," the  CC  said.  "That  animals  feel
things  is  easily  demonstrable,  even  down  at  the level of
protozoans. That they have what you would recognize as thoughts
is  more  debatable.  But  since  I  am  a   party   to   these
negotiations--an  indispensable  party,  I might add-I can tell
you that,  yes,  these  creatures  are  capable  of  expressing
desires  and  responding  to  propositions, so long as they are
expressed in terms they understand."
     "How?"
     "Well . . . the contract that will eventually be  hammered
out  here  is  entirely  a  human instrument. These beasts will
never be aware of its  existence.  Since  their  'language'  is
confined  to  a  few  dozen trumpeted calls, it is quite beyond
their capacity. But the provisions  of  the  contract  will  be
arrived   at  by  a  give-and-take  process  not  unlike  human
collective bargaining. Callie has injected all her stock with a
solution  of  water  and  some  trillions  of  self-replicating
nano-engineered biotropic mechanisms that--"
     "Nanobots."
     "Yes, that's the popular term."
     "You have something against popular terms?"
     "Only  their  imprecision. The term 'nanobot' means a very
small self-propelled programmed machine, and that includes many
other  varieties  of  intracellular  devices  than   the   ones
currently  under  discussion.  The ones in your bloodstream and
within your body cells are quite different--"
     "Okay, I see what you mean. But it's the  same  principle,
right? These little robots, smaller than red blood cells . . ."
     "Some  are  much  smaller  than  that.  They  are drawn to
specific sites within an organism and then  they  go  to  work.
Some  carry  raw materials, some carry blueprints, some are the
actual construction workers. Working at molecular speeds,  they
build various larger machines--and by larger, you understand, I
still  mean  microscopic,  in  most  cases--in  the interstices
between the body cells, or within the cell walls themselves."
     "Which are used for . . ."
     "I think I see where you're going with this. They  perform
many functions. Some are housekeeping chores that your own body
is  either  not good at, or has lost the capacity to do. Others
are monitoring devices that alert a larger, outside system that
something is going wrong. In Callie's herd, that is a Mark  III
Husbander,  a  fairly basic computer, not significantly altered
in design for well over a century."
     "Which is a part of you, naturally."
     "All computers in Luna except abaci and your fingers are a
part of me. And in a pinch, I could use your fingers."
     "As you've just shown me."
     "Yes. The machine . . .  or  I,  if  you  prefer,  listens
constantly  through  a  network  of receivers placed around the
ranch, just as I listen constantly for your  calls  to  me,  no
matter  where  you  are  in Luna. This is all on what you might
think of as my subconscious  level.  I'm  never  aware  of  the
functioning  of your body unless I'm alerted by an alarm, or if
you call me on-line."
     "So the network of machines that's in my body, there's one
like it in each of Callie's brontosaurs."
     "Related to it, yes. The neural structures are  orders  of
magnitude  less  evolved  than  the ones in your brain, just as
your organic brain is superior in  operation  to  that  of  the
dinosaur.  I  don't  run any parasitic programs in the dinosaur
brain, if that's what you mean."
     I  didn't  think  it  was  what  I  meant,  but  I  wasn't
completely  sure,  since I wasn't completely sure why I'd asked
about this in the first place. But I didn't tell the  CC  that.
He went on.
     "It  is  as  close  to mental telepathy as we're likely to
get. The union representatives are tuned into me, and I'm tuned
into the dinosaurs. The negotiator poses a  question:  'How  do
you   fellows   feel   about   120   of   your   number   being
harvested/murdered this year?' I put the question in  terms  of
predators.  A  picture  of  an approaching tyrannosaur. I get a
fear response: 'Sorry, we'd rather not, thank you.' I relay  it
to the unionist, who tells Callie the figure is not acceptable.
The unionist proposes another number, in tonight's case, sixty.
Callie can't accept that. She'd go broke, there would be no one
to  feed  the  stock.  I convey this idea to the dinosaurs with
feelings of hunger, thirst,  sickness.  They  don't  like  this
either.  Callie  proposes  110  creatures  taken. I show them a
smaller  tyrannosaur  approaching,  with  some  of   the   herd
escaping.  They  don't  respond quite so strongly with the fear
and flight reflex, which I translate as 'Well, for the good  of
the  herd,  we might see our way clear to losing seventy so the
rest can grow fat.' I put the proposal to  Callie,  who  claims
the Earthists are bleeding her white, and so on."
     "Sounds  totally useless to me," I said, with only half my
mind on what the CC had been saying. I was seeing a  vision  of
myself  living  within  the planet-girdling machine that the CC
had become, and of him living within my body as well. The funny
thing was that nothing I'd learned  since  arriving  at  Scarpa
Island  had  been exactly new to me. There were new, unheralded
capabilities, but looking  at  them,  I  could  see  they  were
inherent  in  the technology. I'd had the facts, but not enough
of them. I'd spent almost no time thinking about them, any more
than I thought about breathing, and even less time  considering
the  implications,  most of which I didn't like. I realized the
CC was talking again.
     "I don't see why you should say that. Except that  I  know
your  moral  stand  on the whole issue of animal husbandry, and
you have a right to that."
     "No, that whole issue aside, I could  have  told  you  how
this  all  would  come  out,  given only the opening bid. David
proposed sixty, right?"
     "After the opening statement about murdering any of  these
creatures at all, and his formal demand that all--"
     "'--creatures  should  live a life free from the predation
of man, the most voracious  and  merciless  predator  of  all,'
yeah,  I've  heard  the  speech, and David and Callie both know
it's just a formality, like singing the planetary anthem.  When
they  got  down to cases, he said sixty. Man, he must really be
angry about something, sixty is ridiculous.  Anyway,  when  she
heard  sixty,  Callie  bid  120  because  she  knew  she had to
slaughter ninety this year to make  a  reasonable  profit,  and
when  David  heard  that  he  knew  they'd eventually settle on
ninety. So tell me this: why bother to consult  the  dinosaurs?
Who cares what they think?"
     The CC was silent, and I laughed.
     "Tell the truth. You make up the images of meat-eaters and
the feelings of starvation. I presume that when the fear of one
balances out the fear of the other, when these poor dumb beasts
are equally   frightened   by   lousy   alternatives--in   your
judgement, let's remember . . . well, then we have a  contract,
right? So where would you conjecture that point will be found?"
     "Ninety carcasses," the CC said.
     "I rest my case."
     "You have a point. But I actually do transmit the feelings
of the  animals  to the human representatives. They do feel the
fear, and can judge as well as I when a balance is reached."
     "Say what you will. Me, I'm convinced the  jerk  with  the
horns could have as easily stayed in bed, signed a contract for
ninety  kills, and saved a lot of effort. Then prong-head could
look for useful work. Maybe as a gardener in David's hairdo."
     There was a long silence from the CC. When he spoke  again
it  was  in  a different tone of voice from his usual lecturing
mode.
     "The man with the horns," he said, quietly,  "is  actually
mentally  defective  in  a way I've been powerless to treat. He
cannot read or write, and is not really suited for  many  jobs.
And  Hildy, we all need something to do in this world. Life can
seem pointless without gratifying work."
     That shut me up for a while. I  knew  only  too  well  how
pointless life could seem.
     "And he really does love animals," the CC added. "He hurts
when he  thinks of one dying. I shouldn't be telling you any of
this, as I'm prohibited from commenting on the qualities,  good
or   bad,  of  human  citizens.  But  in  view  of  our  recent
relationship, I thought . . ." He let it trail off, unfinished.
     Enough of that.
     "What about death?" I asked him. "You mentioned hunger and
the image of  a  predator.  I'd  think  you'd  get  a  stronger
reaction  if  you  planted  the  idea of their actual deaths in
their minds."
     "Much more of a reaction than you'd  want.  Predators  and
hunger  imply  death,  but  inspire  less  fear than the actual
event. These negotiations are quite  touchy;  I've  tried  many
times  to  talk  Callie into holding them indoors. But she says
that if 'salad-head' isn't afraid to pow-wow in the  middle  of
the  herd, she isn't either. No, the death-image is the nuclear
weapon of predator/prey relations. It's usually  a  prelude  to
either an attempt at union-busting, or a boycott."
     "Or something even more serious."
     "So I infer. Of course, I have no proof."
     I  wondered  about that. Maybe the CC was leveling with me
when he said he only spied into private spaces in circumstances
as unusual as my  own.  Or  into  minds,  for  that  matter.  I
certainly  no  longer doubted that he could easily become aware
of illegal activities such as sabotage or head-busting by hired
goon  squads--the  timehonored  last  resorts  of   labor   and
management,  and  even  more  in vogue these days among radical
groups like the Earthists who,  after  all,  couldn't  call  on
their "membership" to go on strike. What would a brontosaur do?
Stop  eating? The CC could certainly look into the places where
the bombs were assembled, or could become aware, if he chose to
do so, of the intent of the bomb-thrower through readings  from
his  ubiquitous  intercellular  machines. Every year there were
calls  to  permit  him   precisely   those   powers,   by   the
law-and-order   types.  After  all,  the  CC  is  a  benevolent
watchdog, isn't he? Who has he  ever  hurt,  except  those  who
deserved  it?  We  could reduce crime to zero overnight if we'd
only take the chains off the CC.
     I'd even leaned that way myself, in  spite  of  the  civil
libertarian  objections.  After  my sojourn on Scarpa Island, I
found myself heartily on the other  side  of  the  question.  I
suppose  I  was  simply  illustrating  that old definition of a
liberal: a conservative that just got arrested. A conservative,
of course, is a liberal who just got mugged.
     "You are cynical about this process," the CC  was  saying,
"because  you've  only  seen  it  from the commercial side, and
between humans and creatures with a very basic brain structure.
It is much more interesting when the negotiations are conducted
between  higher  mammals.  There  have  been  some  interesting
developments in Kenya, where lion/antelope arbitration has been
going  on  for five decades now. The lions, in particular, have
become quite adept at it. By now they know  how  to  chose  the
most  skilled representative, a sort of shop steward, using the
same instincts that drive them to dominance battles.  I  really
believe  they've  grasped  the  concept that there must be lean
hunting times, that if all the antelope were killed they  would
get  nothing  but  commercially  prepared chow--which they like
well enough, but is no substitute for the hunt.  There  is  one
grizzled  old  veteran  without any teeth who, year after year,
gives the antelope as hard a time at the bargaining fire as  he
ever  did  on  the savannah in his youth. He's a sort of Samuel
Gompers of the-"
     I was spared any more  details  of  this  leonine  Lenin's
exploits  by David Earth, who finally bestirred himself. He got
to his feet, and pronghead stood hastily, destroying the polite
myth that he had anything to do  with  the  proceedings.  David
seldom   attended   contract  talks  with  individual  ranchers
anymore, he was too occupied  with  appearances  promoting  his
Earthist  philosophy  to  the voters. On television, of course;
there would be no quicker way to  disperse  a  political  rally
than to have David walk into it.
     "I think we really have a problem," he said, in his Jovian
voice.  "The  innocent  creatures  we  represent  have too long
chafed under your yoke. Their grievances are many  and  .  .  .
well, grievous."
     If  David  had  a  weakness,  that  was  it. He wasn't the
world's greatest speaker. I think he grew worse every year,  as
language  became  more of a philosophical burden to him. One of
the  planks  of   his   platform--when   the   millennium   was
achieved-was  the  abolition  of  language. He wanted us all to
sing like the birdies sing.
     "To name only one," he boomed on, "you  are  one  of  only
three murderers of dinosaurs who--"
     "Ranchers," Callie said.
     "--who  persist in using the brontosaur's natural enemy as
a means of instilling terror into-- "
     "Herding," Callie gritted. "And no t-saur of mine has ever
so much as put a scratch on a stinking b-saur."
     "If you  persist  in  interrupting  me,  we'll  never  get
anywhere," David said, with a loving smile.
     "No  one will stand there are call me a murderer on my own
land. There are courts  of  libel,  and  you're  about  to  get
dragged into one."
     They  regarded  each  other  across the fire, knowing that
ninety-nine percent of threats and accusations made  here  were
simply  wind,  tossed out to gain an advantage or disconcert an
opponent-and hating each other so thoroughly that I never  knew
when  one  would  put  a  threat  into  action.  Callie's  face
reflected her opinions. David merely smiled, as if  to  say  he
loved  Callie dearly, but I knew him better than that. He hated
her so much that he inflicted himself on her every five  years,
and I can think of little more cruel than that.
     "We  must  seek  closer communion with our friends," David
said, abruptly, and turned  and  walked  away  from  the  fire,
leaving his minion to trail along ignominiously behind him.
     Callie  sighed  when  he  vanished  into the darkness. She
stood up, stretched, boxed the  air,  getting  the  kinks  out.
Bargaining  is  tough  on the whole mind and body, but the best
thing to bring to the table is a tough  bottom.  Callie  rubbed
hers,  and leaned over the cooler she had brought with her. She
tossed me a can of beer, got one for herself, and  sat  on  the
cooler.
     "It's  good to see you," she said. "We didn't get a chance
to talk the last time you were here." She frowned, remembering.
"Come to think of it, you took off without any warning. We  got
to my office, you were gone. What happened?"
     "A  lot of things, Callie. That's what I came here for, to
. . . to talk them over with you, if I could. See if you  could
offer me some advice."
     She  looked  at  me  suspiciously.  Well,  she  was  in  a
suspicious frame of mind, I understand that, dealing  with  the
intransigent union. But it went deeper. We had never managed to
talk  very  well.  It was a depressing thought to realize, once
again, that when  I  had  something  important  to  share  with
someone,  she was the best that sprang to mind. I thought about
getting up and leaving right then. I know I hesitated,  because
Callie did what she had so often done when I'd tried to talk to
her as a child: she changed the subject.
     "That  Brenda,  she's a much nicer child than you give her
credit for. We had a long talk after we found out  you'd  left.
Do you have any idea how much she looks up to you?"
     "Some idea. Callie, I--"
     "She's putting herself through a history course that would
stagger  you,  all  so  she  can  keep  up  when you talk about
'ancient history.' I think it's hopeless. Some things you  have
to  live  through  to  really  understand.  I  know  about  the
twenty-first  century  because  I  was  there.  The   twentieth
century,  or  the  nineteenth  can't  ever  seem as real to me,
though I've read a great deal about them."
     "Sometimes I don't think last month seems real to Brenda."
     "That's where you're wrong. She knows her recent history a
lot better than you'd think, and I'm talking about things  that
happened  fifty,  a  hundred  years before she was born. We sat
around and talked . . . well, mostly  I  told  her  stories,  I
guess.  She  seemed  fascinated."  She smiled at the memory. It
didn't surprise me that Brenda had  found  favor  with  Callie.
There  are few qualities my mother values more in a human being
than a willing ear.
     "I don't have much contact with young people. Like  I  was
telling her, we move in different social circles. I can't stand
their  music  and  they think I'm a walking fossil. But after a
few hours she started opening up to  me.  It  was  almost  like
having . . . well, a daughter."
     She  glanced  at  me,  then took a long drink of beer. She
realized she had gone too far.
     Normally, a remark like that would have been the start  of
the seventy zillionth repeat of our most popular argument. That
night, I was willing to let it slide. I had much more important
things  on  my  mind.  When  I didn't rise to it, she must have
finally realized how troubled I was, because she leaned forward
with her elbows on her knees and looked at me.
     "Tell me about it," she said, and I did.
     #
     But not all of it.
     I told her of my  fight  in  the  Blind  Pig,  and  of  my
conversation  with  the  CC  that  led to the pseudoexperiences
still so fresh in my mind. I told her the CC had  explained  it
as  a  cure for depression, which it was, in a way. But I found
it impossible to come right out and tell her that I'd tried  to
kill  myself.  Is  there  a more embarrassing admission one can
make? Maybe some  people  would  think  nothing  of  it,  would
eagerly   show   off   what   the   experts  called  hesitation
marks--scars on the wrist, bullet holes  in  the  ceiling;  I'd
been doing a little reading on the subject while sequestered in
Texas.  If  suicide  really  is  a  cry for help, it would seem
reasonable to be open and honest  in  revealing  that  one  had
attempted  it, in order to get some sympathy, some advice, some
commiseration, maybe just a hug.
     Or some pity.
     Am I simply too proud?  I  didn't  think  so.  I  searched
through  my motives as well as I was able, and couldn't discern
any need for pity, which is what I'd surely  get  from  Callie.
Perhaps  that  meant my attempts had actually been motivated by
depression, by a desire simply to live no longer. And that  was
a depressing thought in itself.
     I  eventually  wound  down, leaving my story with a rather
obvious lack of resolution. I'm sure Callie  spotted  it  right
away,  but she said nothing for a while. I know the whole thing
was almost as difficult for her as  it  was  for  me.  Intimacy
didn't  seem to run in the family. I felt better about her than
I had in years, just for having listened to me as long  as  she
had.
     She  reached  behind  the  cooler and brought out a can of
something  which  she  poured  on  the  fire.  It   flared   up
immediately. She looked at me, and grinned.
     "Rendered  b-saur  fat,"  she  said. "Great for barbecues;
gets the fire blazing real quick. I've used it on  the  meeting
fires  for  eighty years. One of these days when he provokes me
enough, I'll tell David about it. I'm sure  he'll  love  me  in
spite of it. Will you toss some more of those logs on the fire?
Right behind you, there's a pile of them."
     I did, and we sat watching them blaze.
     "You're  not telling me something," she said, at last. "If
you don't want to, that's your business. But you're the one who
wanted to talk."
     "I know, I know. It's just very hard for  me.  There  have
been  a  lot  of  things  going  on,  a  lot of new things I've
learned."
     "I didn't know  about  that  memory-dump  technique,"  she
said.  "I  wouldn't  have  thought the CC could do that without
your permission." She  didn't  sound  alarmed  about  it.  Like
practically  all  Lunarians,  she viewed the CC as a useful and
very intelligent slave. She would concede, along with  everyone
else,  that  it  was  a  being  devoted to helping her in every
possible way. But that's where  she  parted  company  with  her
fellow  citizens,  who  also  thought  of  the  CC as the least
intrusive and most benevolent form of government ever devised.
     The CC hadn't mentioned it, but his means of access to the
Double-C Bar Ranch was limited. This was  no  accident.  Callie
had  deliberately  set  up  her electronics such that she could
function independent of the CC if the need  should  arise.  All
communication  had  to  come through a single cable to her Mark
III Husbander, which really ran the ranch. The link was further
laundered through a series of gadgets supplied by some  of  her
similarly   paranoid   friends,  designed  to  filter  out  the
subversive  virus,  the  time  bomb,  and  the   Chinese   Fire
Drill--all  forms  of  computer  witchery  I know nothing about
apart from their names.
     It was wildly inefficient. I also suspected it was futile;
the CC was in here, talking to me, wasn't he? Because that  was
the  real  reason  for  all  the  barriers,  for the electronic
drawbridge Callie could theoretically raise and lower at  will,
for  the  photo-etched  moat  she hoped to fill with cybernetic
crocodiles and the molten  glitches  she  meant  to  dump  into
invading programs. She claimed to be able to isolate her castle
with  the  flick  of  one switch. Bang! and the CC would be cut
adrift from its moorings to the larger  datanet  known  as  the
Central Computer.
     Silly, isn't it? Well, I'd always thought so, until the CC
took control  of  my  own  mind. Callie had always thought that
way, and while she was  in  the  minority,  she  wasn't  alone.
Walter  agreed  with  her,  and a few other chronic malcontents
like the Heinleiners.
     I was about to go on with my tale of woe, but  Callie  put
her finger to her lips.
     "It'll  have  to wait a bit," she said. "The Kaiser of the
Chordates is returning."
     #
     Callie immediately  went  into  a  sneezing  fit.  David's
already  avuncular  expression  became so benign it bordered on
the ludicrous. He was enjoying it, no doubt about it. He seated
himself and waited while Callie fumbled through her  purse  and
found  a  nasal spray. When she had dosed herself and blown her
nose, he smiled lovingly.
     "I'm afraid your offer of ninety-eight  murders  is--"  He
held  up  his  hand  as  Callie  started to retort. "Very well.
Ninety-eight creatures killed  is  simply  unacceptable.  After
further   consultation,   and   hearing  grievances  that  have
astounded me--and you  well  know  I'm  an  old  hand  at  this
business . . ."
     "Ninety-seven," Callie said.
     "Sixty," David countered.
     Callie seemed to doubt for a moment that she had heard him
right.  The word hung in the air between them, with at least as
much incendiary potential as the fire.
     "You started at sixty," Callie said, quietly.
     "And I've just returned us there."
     "What's going on here? This isn't how it's done,  and  you
know it. There's no love lost between us, to put it mildly, but
I've  always  been  able  to  do  business  with you. There are
certain accepted practices, certain understandings that if they
don't have the force of law, they certainly enjoy the stamp  of
custom. Everyone recognizes that. It's called 'good faith,' and
I don't think you're practicing it here tonight."
     "There  will be no more business as usual," David intoned.
"You asked what's going on, and I'll tell  you.  My  party  has
grown steadily in strength throughout this decade. Tomorrow I'm
making a major speech in which I will outline new quotas which,
over  a  twenty-year  period,  are  intended  to  phase out the
consumption of animal flesh entirely. It is insane, in this day
and age, to continue  a  primitive,  unhealthy  practice  which
demeans  us  all.  Killing  and  eating our fellow creatures is
nothing but cannibalism. We can no longer allow  it,  and  call
ourselves civilized."
     I  was  impressed.  He hadn't stumbled over a single word,
which must have meant he'd written and memorized  it.  We  were
getting a preview of tomorrow's big show.
     "Shut up," Callie said.
     "Countless  scientific studies have proved that the eating
of meat--"
     "Shut up," Callie said again, not raising her  voice,  but
putting  something  else  into  it that was a lot more powerful
than shouting. "You are on my land, and you will shut up, or  I
will  personally  boot  your raggedy old ass all the way to the
airlock and cycle you through it."
     "You have no right to--"
     Callie threw her beer in his  face.  She  just  tossed  it
right  through  the  fire,  then  threw  the empty can over her
shoulder into the darkness. For a moment his face froze into an
expression as blank as I've ever seen on a human;  it  made  my
skin  crawl. Then he relaxed back into his usual attitude, that
of the wise old sage bemused by the squabbles of  an  imperfect
world, looking down on it with god-like love.
     A  mouse  peeked out of the weeds of his beard to see what
all the commotion  was  about.  It  sampled  one  of  the  beer
droplets,  found it good, and began imbibing at a rate it might
regret in the morning.
     "I've squatted out here beside this  damn  fire  for  over
thirty  hours,"  Callie  said. "I'm not complaining about that;
it's a cost of doing business, and I'm used to it. But I  am  a
busy  woman.  If  you'd told me about this when we sat down, if
you'd had the courtesy to do that, I  could  have  kicked  sand
into the fire and told you I'd see you in court. Because that's
where  we're  going, and I'll have an injunction slapped on you
before that beer can dry. The Labor Relations Board  will  have
something  to  say,  too."  She spread her hands in an eloquent
Italianate gesture. "I guess we have nothing  further  to  talk
about."
     "It's wrong," David said. "It's also unhealthy, and . . ."
     While  he  was  groping for a word to describe a horror so
huge, Callie jumped back in.
     "Unhealthy,  that's  one   I   never   could   understand.
Brontosaurus  meat  is  the healthiest single food product ever
developed. I ought to know; I helped build the genes back  when
both  of  us  were  young.  It's  low  in  cholesterol, high in
vitamins and minerals . . ." She stopped, and looked  curiously
at David.
     "What's  the  use?"  she asked herself. "I can't figure it
out. I've disliked you from the first time we met. I think  you
are  plainly  crazy,  egotistic, and dishonest. All that 'love'
crap. I think you live in a fantasy world where  nobody  should
ever  get  hurt.  But  one thing I've never accused you of, and
that's stupidity. And now you're doing something stupid, as  if
you  really think you can bring it off. Surely you realize this
thing can't work?" She looked concerned as she stared  at  him.
Almost as if she wished she could help him.
     Nothing could be more certain to light a fire under David,
but I  honestly don't think Callie meant to provoke him. By her
lights he really was planning to commit political suicide if he
intended to keep Lunarians  from  their  bronto  meat,  not  to
mention  all other forms of flesh. And she never did understand
foolishness in other human beings.
     He leaned forward,  opened  his  mouth  to  begin  another
prepared  tirade,  but  he  never  got the chance. What I think
happened, and the tapes back me up on  this,  is  some  of  the
fresh  logs  shifted.  One  of  them  fell  into  a pool of the
brontosaur fat Callie had poured  on,  a  pool  that  had  been
burning  on  the  surface and getting hotter by the minute. The
sudden addition of hot coals caused the fat  to  pop,  like  it
will in a skillet. There was a shower of sparks and all four of
us  were  spattered by tiny droplets of boiling, burning grease
that clung like napalm. Since they  were  mostly  quite  small,
there were just a few sharp pains on my arms and my face, and I
quickly  slapped  them  out.  Callie and the man with the horns
were slapping at themselves as well.
     David had a somewhat larger problem.
     "He's on fire!" prong-head shouted. And it was  true.  The
top  of  his  grass-covered  head  was  burning  merrily. David
himself wasn't aware of it yet, and looked around in confusion,
then stared up with  a  surprised  expression  I  would  always
remember,  even  if it hadn't been shown a hundred times on the
news.
     "I need some water," he said, brushing at the  flames  and
hastily drawing his hand back. He seemed calm enough.
     "Here,  wait  a minute," Callie shouted, and turned toward
the beverage cooler. I think she meant to douse him  with  more
beer,  and  I  thought  in  passing  how ironic it was that her
throwing the first beer may have saved him having to buy a  new
face  because it had soaked the grass of his beard. "Mario, get
him on the ground, try and smother it."
     I didn't comment on her use of my old name. It didn't seem
the proper time for it. I started around the fire, reached  for
David, and he shoved me away. It was purely a panic reaction. I
think it had started to hurt by then.
     "Water! Where is the water?"
     "I  saw  a  stream  over  that way," said pronghead. David
looked wildly around. He had become a sinking ship: I saw three
voles, a garter snake, and a pair of finches burst  from  their
hiding  places,  and  the  fleeing insects were too numerous to
count. Some flew directly into the campfire. David  behaved  no
better.  He  started running in the direction his assistant had
pointed, which Mister Fireman could have told him  was  exactly
the  wrong  thing  to  do.  Either  he hadn't paid attention in
kindergarten or he'd lost  all  rational  thought.  Seeing  how
brightly he lit up the night, I figured it was the latter.
     "No! David, come back!" Callie had turned from the cooler,
having  ripped  the  top  from a can of beer. "There's no water
that way!" She threw the can after  him,  but  it  fell  short.
David  was setting Olympic records in his sprint for the stream
that wasn't there. "Mario! Catch him!"
     I didn't think I could, but I had to try. He'd be easy  to
follow,  unless  he  burned to the ground. I took off, pounding
the dirt with my feet, thanking the generations of  brontosaurs
who  had  packed  it  so  hard.  David  had run into a grove of
cycadoids and I was just getting to the edge  of  them  when  I
heard Callie shout again.
     "Come back! Hurry, Mario, come back!" I slowed almost to a
stop,  and  became  aware of a disturbing sensation. The ground
was shaking. I looked back at the campfire. Callie was standing
looking out into the darkness. She'd turned on a powerful  hand
torch  and  was  sweeping  it back and forth. The beam caught a
brontosaur in full charge. It stopped,  blinded  and  confused,
and then picked a direction at random and rumbled away.
     An  eighty-ton shadow thundered by, not three meters to my
right. I started moving back  to  the  campfire,  scanning  the
darkness,  aware  I  wouldn't  get much warning. Halfway there,
another behemoth thundered into the council site.  It  actually
stepped  in  the  fire,  which  wasn't to its liking at all. It
squealed, wheeled, and took off  more  or  less  toward  me.  I
watched it coming, figured it would keep moving that way unless
stopped  by  a major mountain chain, and dodged to my left. The
beast kept going and was swallowed by the night.
     I knew enough about b-saurs to know not to expect rational
behavior  from  them.  They   were   already   upset   by   the
negotiations.  Images of tsaurs and feelings of starvation must
have addled their tiny brains considerably. It would have taken
a lot less stimulus than a burning, screaming  David  Earth  to
stampede  them. He must have hit them like a stick of dynamite.
And when b-saurs panic, what little sense they possess  deserts
them  completely.  They  start  off in random directions. There
seems to be  an  instinct  that  tends  to  draw  them  into  a
thundering  group, eventually headed in the same direction, but
they don't see well at night, and  thus  couldn't  easily  find
each  other. The result was seventy or eighty walking mountains
going off in all directions. Very little could stand  in  their
way.
     Certainly  not  me.  I  hurried  to Callie's side. She was
talking into a pocket communicator, calling for  hovercraft  as
she  stabbed the powerful light beam this way and that. Usually
it was enough to turn the beasts. When it was not,  we  stepped
very lively indeed.
     Before  long she picked out a medium-sized cow headed more
or less in our direction, and turned the beam away from it. She
slapped a saur-hook into my hand, and we watched it approach.
     Where's the safest place to be in a dinosaur stampede?  On
a  dinosaur's back. Actually, the best place would have been on
one of the hovercraft, whose lights we could  see  approaching,
but  you  take what you can get. We waited for the hind legs to
get past us, dug our hooks  into  the  cow's  tail,  and  swung
ourselves  up.  A dinosaur doesn't precisely like being hooked,
but her perceptions of pain that far back on her body  are  dim
and  diffused,  and this one had other things on her tiny mind.
We scrambled up the tail until we  could  get  a  grip  on  the
fleshy  folds  of the back. Don't try this at home, by the way.
Callie was an old hand at it, and though I hadn't hooked a saur
in seventy years, the skills were still there. I  only  wobbled
for a moment, and Callie was there to steady me.
     So  we  rode,  and  waited.  In  due  time the bronto wore
herself out, rumbled to a stop,  and  started  cropping  leaves
from the top of a cycad, probably wondering by now what all the
fuss  had  been  about, if she remembered it at all. We climbed
down, were met by a hover, and got into that.
     #
     Callie had the "sun" turned on to aid the search. We found
prong-head fairly quickly. He was kneeling  in  a  muddy  spot,
shaking  uncontrollably.  He had survived with nothing but luck
to aid him. I wondered if he ever loved animals quite so  much,
or in quite the same way, after that night.
     Say  what  you  will about Callie, her worries for the lad
were genuine, and her relief at finding him  alive  and  unhurt
was apparent even to him, in his distracted condition. For that
matter,  though  David  Earth  might  call  her  a cold-blooded
killer, she  hadn't  wished  death  even  on  him.  She  simply
measured  human  life  and  animal  life  on  different scales,
something David could never do.
     "Let's get him out of here and find David," she said,  and
grabbed  the young man by his arm. "He's going to need a lot of
medical attention, if he made it." Prong-head resisted, pulling
away from her grasp, remaining on his knees.  He  pointed  down
into the mud. I looked, and then looked away.
     "David  has  returned  to  the  food-chain,"  he said, and
fainted.

        =*= =*= =*= =*=

        CHAPTER EIGHT










     The next several days were fairly hectic  for  me.  I  was
kept  so  busy I had little time to think or worry about the CC
or  entertain  thoughts  of  suicide.  The  whole  idea  seemed
completely alien.
     Since  I  work  for  a print medium I tend not to think in
terms  of  pictures.  My  stories  are  meant  to  be  written,
transmitted  to a subscriber-rented scrambler-equipped newspad,
where they will be screened  and  read  by  that  part  of  the
population  that still reads. Walter employs others to shorten,
simplify, and read aloud his reporters' stories for  the  illit
channel  of  the  newspad.  There are of course all-visual news
services, and now there is direct  interface,  but  so  far  at
least,  D.I. is not something most people do for relaxation and
entertainment.  Reading  is  still  the  preferred  method   of
information  input  for  a  large  minority of Lunarians. It is
slower than D.I., but much quicker and in  much  greater  depth
than pure television news.
     But  the  News Nipple is an electronic medium, and many of
the stories we run come with film clips. Thus did the newspaper
manage to find a government-subsidized,  yearly  more  perilous
niche  for  itself  in  the  era  of  television.  Pundits keep
predicting the death of  the  newspad,  and  year  by  year  it
struggles  on,  maintained  mostly by people who don't want too
much change in their lives.
     I tend to forget about the holocam in  my  left  eye.  Its
contents  are dumped at the same time I enter my story into the
Nipple's editorial  computer,  and  a  picture  editor  usually
fastforwards through it and picks a still shot or a few seconds
of  moving  images  to back up my words. I remember when it was
first installed I worried that those editors  would  be  seeing
things  that  I'd  prefer  to  be private; after all, the thing
operates all the time, and has a six-hour memory.  But  the  CC
had  assured  me there was a discrimination program in the main
computer that erased all the irrelevant pictures before a human
ever saw them. (Now it occurred to me to wonder about that.  It
had never bothered me that the CC might see the full tapes, but
I'd never thought of him as a snoop before.)
     The holocam is a partly mechanical, partly biologic device
about  the  size  of  a  fingernail  clipping that is implanted
inside the eye, way over to one side, out of the  way  of  your
peripheral vision. A semi-silvered mirror is hung in the middle
of  the  eye, somewhere near the focal point, and reflects part
of the light entering the eye over to  the  holocam.  When  you
first  have  one put in you notice a slight diminution of light
sensitivity in that eye, but the brain is such that it  quickly
adjusts  and in a few days you never notice it again. It causes
my pupil to look red, and it glows faintly in the dark.
     It had  been  operating  when  David  Earth  caught  fire,
naturally.  I didn't even think of it during subsequent events,
not until David's body had been removed and taken  to  wherever
Earthists  are disposed of. Then I realized I had what might be
the biggest story of my career. And a scoop, as well.
     Real death captured by a camera is  always  guaranteed  to
make  the  front  feed of the newspad. The death of a celebrity
would provide fodder for Walter's second-string feature writers
for months to come; anything to have an excuse to run once more
that glorious, horrible image of David's head wreathed in fire,
and the even more horrifying results of being crushed beneath a
stampeding brontosaur.
     News footage is exclusive to the paper that filmed it  for
a  period  of twenty-four hours. After that, there is a similar
period when it may be leased for  minutes  or  hours,  or  sold
outright. After forty-eight hours it all becomes public domain.
     A  major metropolitan newspaper is geared to exploit these
two critical periods to the utmost. For the first day, when  we
could  exploit  my film exclusively, we made the death of Earth
seem like the biggest story since the marriage  of  Silvio  and
Marina  twenty-five years ago, or their divorce one year later,
or the Invasion of the Planet Earth, take your pick. Those  are
commonly  thought  to  be the three biggest news stories of all
time, the only real difference in their  magnitude  being  that
two  of them were well-covered, and o