by Greg Bear
Angry red, Prufrax follows his barely sensed form, watching him behind barricades of ice, approaching the moment of a most satisfying Zap. She gives her gloves their way
and finds a shape behind her, wearing gloves that are not gloves, not like her own, but capable of grasping her in tensed fields, blocking the Zap, dragging them together. The fragment separates, heat pours in from the protostar cloud. They are swirled in their vortex of power, twin locked comets—one red, one sullen gray.
“Who are you?” Prufrax screams as they close in on each other in the fields. Their environments meld. They grapple. In the confusion, the darkening, they are drawn out of the cloud with the fragment, and she sees the other’s face.
Her own.
The seedship self-destructs. The fragment is propelled from the protostar, above the plane of what will become planets in their orbits, away from the crippled and dying Mellangee.
Desperate, Prufrax uses all her strength to drill into the fragment. Helium blows past them, and bits of dead branch inds.
Aryz catches the pair immediately in the shapes chamber, rearranging the fragment’s structure to enclose them with the mutant shape and mandate. For the moment he has time enough to concentrate on them. They are dangerous. They are almost equal to each other, but his shape is weakening faster than the true glover. They float, bouncing from wall to wall in the chamber, forcing the mutant to crawl into a corner and howl with fear.
There may be value in saving the one and capturing the other. Involved as they are, the two can be carefully dissected from their fields and induced into a crude kind of sleep before the glover has a chance to free her weapons. He can dispose of the gloves—fake and real—and hook them both to the Mam, reattach the mutant shape as well. Perhaps something can be learned from the failure of the experiment.
The dissection and capture occur faster than the planning. His movement slows under the spreading flux bind. His last action, after attaching the humans to the Mam, is to make sure the brood mind’s flux bind is properly nested within that of the ship.
The fragment drops into simpler geometries.
It is as if they never existed.
The battle was over. There were no victors. Aryz became aware of the passage of time, shook away the sluggishness, and crawled through painfully dry corridors to set the environmental equipment going again. Throughout the fragment, machines struggled back to activity.
How many generations? The constellations were unrecognizable. He made star traces and found familiar spectra and types, but advanced in age. There had been a malfunction in the overall flux bind. He couldn’t find the nebula where the battle had occurred. In its place were comfortably middle-aged stars surrounded by young planets.
Aryz came down from the makeshift observatory. He slid through the fragment, established the limits of his new home, and found the solid mirror surface of the brood mind’s cocoon. It was still locked in flux bind, and he knew of no way to free it. In time the bind would probably wear off—but that might require life spans. The seedship was gone. They had lost the brood chamber, and with it the stock.
He was the last branch ind of his team. Not that it mattered now; there was nothing he could initiate without a brood mind. If the flux bind was permanent—as sometimes happened during malfunction—then he might as well be dead.
He closed his thoughts around him and was almost completely submerged when he sensed an alarm from the shapes chamber. The interface with the mandate had turned itself off; the new version of the Mam was malfunctioning. He tried to repair the equipment, but without the engineer’s wall he was almost helpless. The best he could do was rig a temporary nutrition supply through the old human-form Mam.
When he was done, he looked at the captive and the two shapes, then at the legless, armless Mam that served as their link to the interface and life itself.
She had spent her whole life in a room barely eight by ten meters, and not much taller than her own height. With her had been Grayd and the silent round creature whose name—if it had any—they had never learned. For a time there had been Mam, then another kind of Mam not nearly as satisfactory. She was hardly aware that her entire existence had been miserable, cramped, in one way or another incomplete.
Separated from them by a transparent partition, another round shape had periodically made itself known by voice or gesture.
Grayd had kept her sane. They had engaged in conspiracy. Removing themselves from the interface—what she called “eyes-shut”—they had held on to each other, tried to make sense out of what they knew instinctively, what was fed them through the interface, and what the being beyond the partition told them.
First they knew their names, and they knew that they were glovers. They knew that glovers were fighters. When Aryz passed instruction through the interface on how to fight, they had accepted it eagerly but uneasily. It didn’t seem to jibe with instructions locked deep within their instincts.
Five years under such conditions had made her introspective. She expected nothing, sought little beyond experience in the eyes-shut. Eyes-open with Grayd seemed scarcely more than a dream. They usually managed to ignore the peculiar bloated creature in the chamber with them; it spent nearly all its time hooked to the mandate and the Mam.
Of one thing only was she completely sure. Her name was Prufrax. She said it in eyes-open and eyes-shut, her only certainty.
Not long before the battle, she had been in a condition resembling dreamless sleep, like a robot being given instructions. The part of Prufrax that had taken on personality during eyes-shut and eyes-open for five years had been superseded by the fight instructions Aryz had programmed. She had flown as glovers must fly (though the gloves didn’t seem quite right). She had fought, grappling (she thought) with herself, but who could be certain of anything? She had long since decided that reality was not to be sought too avidly.
After the battle she fell back into the mandate—into eyes-shut—all too willingly. And what matter? If eyes-open was even less comprehensible than eyes-shut, why did she have the nagging feeling eyes-open was so compelling, so necessary?
She tried to forget.
But a change had come to eyes-shut, too. Before the battle, the information had been selected. Now she could wander through the mandate at will. She seemed to smell the new information, completely unfamiliar, like a whiff of ocean.
She hardly knew where to begin.
She stumbled across:
—that all vessels will carry one, no matter what their size or class, just as every individual carries the map of a species. The mandate shall contain all the information of our kind, including accurate and uncensored history, for if we have learned anything, it is that censored and untrue accounts distort the eyes of the leaders. Leaders must have access to the truth. It is their responsibility. Whatever is told those who work under the leaders, for whatever reason, must not be believed by the leaders. Unders are told lies. Leaders must seek and be provided with accounts as accurate as possible, or we will be weakened and fall—
What wonderful dreams the leaders must have had. And they possessed some intrinsic gift called truth, through the use of the man-date. Prufrax could hardly believe that. As she made her tentative explorations through the new fields of eyes-shut, she began to link the word mandate with what she experienced.
That was where she was. And she alone. Once, she had explored with Grayd. Now there was no sign of Grayd.
She learned quickly. Soon she walked along a beach on Earth, then a beach on a world called Myriadne, and other beaches, fading in and out. By running through the entries rapidly, she came up with a blurred eidos and so learned what a beach was in the abstract. It was a boundary between one kind of eyes-shut and another, between water and land, neither of which had any corollary in eyes-open.
Some beaches had sand. Some had clouds—the eidos of clouds was quite
attractive. And one—
had herself running scared, screaming.
She called out, but the figure vanished. Prufrax stood on a beach under a greenish-yellow star, on a world called Kyrene, feeling lonelier than ever.
She explored farther, hoping to find Grayd, if not the figure that looked like herself. Grayd wouldn’t flee from her. Grayd would. The bloated thing confronted her, its helpless limbs twitching. It seemed to be human, but put together all wrong.
Now it was her turn to run, terrified. Never before had she met the mutated creature in eyes-shut. It was mobile; it had a purpose. Over land, clouds, trees, rocks, wind, air, equations, and an edge of physics she fled. The farther she went, the more distant from the strange one with twisted hands and small head, the less afraid she was.
She never found Grayd.
The memory of the battle was fresh and painful. Her environment had collapsed and been replaced by something indistinct. She remembered the ache of her hands, clumsily removed from the gloves.
Prufrax had fallen into a deep slumber and had dreamed. The dreams were totally unfamiliar to her. If there was a left-turning in her arc of sleep, she dreamed of philosophies and languages and other things she couldn’t relate to. A right-turning led to histories and sciences so incomprehensible as to be nightmares.
It was a most unpleasant sleep, and she was not at all sorry to find she wasn’t really asleep.
The crucial moment came when she discovered how to slow her turnings and the changes of dream subject. She entered a pleasant place of which she had no knowledge but which did not seem threatening. There was a vast expanse of water, but it didn’t terrify her. She couldn’t even identify it as water until she scooped up a handful. Beyond the water was a floor of shifting particles. Above both was an open expanse, not black but obviously space, drawing her eyes into intense pale blue-green.
And there was that figure she had encountered in the seedship. Herself. The figure pursued.
She fled.
Right over the boundary into Senexi information. She knew then that what she was seeing couldn’t possibly come from within herself. She was receiving data from another source. Perhaps she had been taken captive. It was possible she was now being forcibly debriefed. The tellman had discussed such possibilities, but none of the glovers had been taught how to defend themselves in specific situations. Instead it had been stated, in terms that brooked no second thought, that self-destruction was the only answer.
So she tried to kill herself. She sat in the freezing cold of a red-and-white room, her feet meeting but not touching a fluid covering on the floor. The information didn’t fit her senses—it seemed blurred, inappropriate. Unlike the other data, this didn’t allow participation or motion. Everything was locked solid.
She couldn’t find an effective means of killing herself. She resolved to close her eyes and simply will herself into dissolution. But closing her eyes only moved her into a deeper or shallower level of deception—other categories, subjects, visions.
She couldn’t sleep, wasn’t tired, couldn’t die. Like a leaf on a stream, she drifted. Her thoughts untangled, and she imagined herself floating on the water called ocean. She kept her eyes open. It was quite by accident that she encountered:
Instruction. Welcome to the introductory use of the mandate. As a noncombat processor, your duties are to maintain the mandate, provide essential information for your overs, and, if necessary, protect or destroy the mandate. The mandate is your immediate over. If it requires maintenance, you will oblige. Once linked with the mandate, as you are now, you may explore any aspect of the information by requesting delivery. To request delivery, indicate the core of your subject—
Prufrax! she shouted silently. What is Prufrax?
A voice with different tone immediately took over.
Ah, now that’s quite a story. I was her biographer, the organizer of her life tapes (ref. GEORGE MACKNAX), and knew her well in the last years of her life. She was born in the Ferment 26468. Here are selected life tapes. Choose emphasis. Analyses follow.
—Hey! Who are you? There’s someone here with me … .
—Shh! Listen. Look at her. Who is she?
They looked, listened to the information.
—Why, she’s me … sort of.
—She’s us.
She stood two and a half meters tall. Her hair was black and thick, though cut short; her limbs well-muscled though drawn out by the training and hormonal treatments. She was seventeen years old, one of the few birds born in the solar system, and for the time being she had a chip on her shoulder. Everywhere she went, the birds asked about her mother, Jayax. “You better than her?”
Of course not! Who could be? But she was good; the instructors said so. She was just about through training, and whether she graduated to hawk or remained bird she would do her job well. Asking Prufrax about her mother was likely to make her set her mouth tight and glare.
On Mercior, the Grounds took up four thousand hectares and had its own port. The Grounds was divided into Land, Space, and Thought, and training in each area was mandatory for fledges, those birds embarking on hawk training. Prufrax was fledge three. She had passed Land—though she loathed downbound fighting—and was two years into Space. The tough part, everyone said, was not passing Space, but lasting through four years of Thought after the action in nearorbit and planetary.
Prufrax was not the introspective type. She could be studious when it suited her. She was a quick study at weapon maths, physics came easy when it had a direct application, but theory of service and polinstruc—which she had sampled only in prebird courses—bored her.
Since she had been a little girl, no more than five—
—Five! Five what?
and had seen her mother’s ships and fightsuits and fibs, she had known she would never be happy until she had ventured far out and put a seedship in her sights, had convinced a Senexi of the overness of end—
—The Zap! She’s talking the Zap!
—What’s that?
—You’re me, you should know.
—I’m not you, and we’re not her.
The Zap, said the mandate, and the data shifted.
“Tomorrow you receive your first implants. These will allow you to coordinate with the zero-angle phase engines and find your targets much more rapidly than you ever could with simple biologic. The implants, of course, will be delivered through your noses—minor irritation and sinus trouble, no more—into your limbic system. Later in your training, hookups and digital adapts will be installed as well. Are there any questions?”
“Yes, sir.” Prufrax stood at the top of the spherical classroom, causing the hawk instructor to swivel his platform. “I’m having problems with the zero-angle phase maths. Reduction of the momenta of the real.”
Other fledge threes piped up that they, too, had had trouble with those maths. The hawk instructor sighed. “We don’t want to install cheaters in all of you. It’s bad enough needing implants to supplement biologic. Individual learning is much more desirable. Do you request cheaters?” That was a challenge. They all responded negatively, but Prufrax had a secret smile. She knew the subject. She just took delight in having the maths explained again. She could reinforce an already thorough understanding. Others not so well versed would benefit. She wasn’t wasting time. She was in the pleasure of her weapon—the weapon she would be using against the Senexi.
“Zero-angle phase is the temporary reduction of the momenta of the real.” Equations and plexes appeared before each student as the instructor went on. “Nested unreals can conflict if a barrier is placed between the participator princip and the assumption of the real. The effectiveness of the participator can be determined by a convenience model we call the angle of phase. Zero-angle phase is achieved by an opaque probability field according to modified Fourier of the separat
ion of real waves. This can also be caused by the reflection of the beam—an effective counter to zero-angle phase, since the beam is always compoundable and the compound is always time-reversed. Here are the true gedanks—”
—Zero-angle phase. She’s learning the Zap.
—She hates them a lot, doesn’t she?
—The Senexi? They’re Senexi.
—I think … eyes-open is the world of the Senexi. What does that mean?
—That we’re prisoners. You were caught before me.
—Oh.
The news came as she was in recovery from the implant. Seedships had violated human space again, dropping cuckoos on thirty-five worlds. The worlds had been young colonies, and the cuckoos had wiped out all life, then tried to reseed with Senexi forms. The overs had reacted by sterilizing the planet’s surfaces. No victory, loss to both sides. It was as if the Senexi were so malevolent they didn’t care about success, only about destruction.
She hated them. She could imagine nothing worse.
Prufrax was twenty-three. In a year she would be qualified to hawk on a cruiser/raider. She would demonstrate her hatred.
Aryz felt himself slipping into endthought, the mind set that always preceded a branch ind’s self-destruction. What was there for him to do? The fragment had survived, but at what cost, to what purpose? Nothing had been accomplished. The nebula had been lost, or he supposed it had. He would likely never know the actual outcome.
He felt a vague irritation at the lack of a spectrum of responses. Without a purpose, a branch ind was nothing more than excess plasm.
He looked in on the captive and the shapes, all hooked to the mandate, and wondered what he would do with them. How would humans react to the situation he was in? More vigorously, probably. They would fight on. They always had. Even without leaders, with no discernible purpose, even in defeat. What gave them such stamina? Were they superior, more deserving? If they were better, then was it right for the Senexi to oppose their triumph?
