TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOURSELF AND OTHERS




Take Good Care of Yourself and Others

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What about the children?", I asked.

"Ah, you ask the hard questions."

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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




Your Kind Heart Needs a Slim Figure More Lascivious

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

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

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

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

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

  Right.

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

  Okay.

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

  Us and the compute farms.

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

  Better than money?

  better then money

  When?

  hee hee!  nine months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Okay.

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

   So you have all these people out of a job?

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

   And that would be the law, or what?

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

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

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

   You tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sally is irrational.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which, of course, is the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




The Twenty-Eighth Situation: Obstacles to Love

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

-=-

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But you have not given in."

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

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

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

-=-

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

-=-

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

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

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



WARNING: Reading This Could Change Your Life

   Do you have any gods running?

   how do you mean, 'gods'?

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

   har.

   Is that a No?

   come up and see me sometime.

   Serious?

   [disconnected]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mari's touch, that was."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marilyn just looks wry.

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

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

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

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

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

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





New Houses In Your Area! Greenleaf Potempkin

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I missed her for a long time.

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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





BLESS YOU FRIEND


"Why haven't you told her?"

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

"What do you mean?"

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

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

"So you got me here to --"

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

"But anyway."

"Anyway."

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

"I know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The who?"

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

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

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

Marilyn smiles.  "Just a good memory."

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

"Immortal, though."

"You think?"

"I don't remember him dying."

"Fictional character."

"So?"

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

"Tchitra Yadjgna?"

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

"Excuse me!"

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

"What's the difference?"

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

"Impudent rivalry with a deity?  Why?"

"It just appeals."

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

"Do one?"

"Give me a dramatic situation."

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

"Eleven."

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

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

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

"And what about you?"

"How do you mean?"

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

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

"You wanna listen to some music?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"-- and all of them --"

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

"They're dead, Marilyn --"

"-- Mari --"

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

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

"Delayed gratification?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Who?"

"I don't know."

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

"What now?"

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

"You have satellites?"

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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



So Blinn?  Cottonseed Din

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

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

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

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

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

"Not an accident?"

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

"They, who?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Heh.  This whole night makes no sense."

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

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

"He's not dead."

"Hope not.  You tie a mean tourniquet."

"You're changing the subject."

"Duh."

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

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




XQQEDYM, Ask You: What

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I had not planned to be gone this long.



Itsformidable Companion? Is Carnage Chuckwalla

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

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

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

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

"Which army?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You know him?" Marilyn asks.

"I know everybody."

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

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

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

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

"-- to torment me."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But no one has credence on the Ocelot!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"-- I'd noticed --"

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

And he stands and walks out.

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

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

"Was it him who attacked you?"

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

"It's a complicated world."

"Genius."

"Was it true what else he said?"

"About?"

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

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

"There's no consensus?"  Marilyn impish.

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

"Then?"

"Well.  The world's changing fast."

"Hadn't noticed."

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

"The Singularity."

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

"Crazy craziness."

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

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

"Opportunities to control -- everything?"

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

"The crystalization of a new world?"

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

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

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

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

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




BXUM: Are You Blind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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





A Try Will Make You Understand Our Purpose Carbonaceous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"-- not bets --"

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

"So we'll be able to leave."

"I think so, eh Dean?"

"Yeah, yeah, you know."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-=-

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And no factories?  No laboratories?