6

Keep on Trokking

At Lan Yi's urgent request, Strider again broke off comforting Nelson for a moment to summon one of the Images.

I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut what you're doing, she thought pleasantly, I want either Pinocchio or Ten Per Cent Extra Free on-line. Right now.

It was Pinocchio who responded.

Your wish is my command. Do you have a magic bottle you wish to rub?

Strider didn't recognize the allusion.

You're needed. They have to have an interpreter.

She didn't need to tell him who "they" were. Pinocchio had already picked the datum up out of her mind.

I think you're correct.

Better believe it.

Instantly the small gathering around the ideopictogram were talking animatedly to each other. Strider, having heard Hilary's exclamation despite herself, couldn't help but try to listen in to the conversation even though her central worry was Nelson: she could help him, but she had nothing to offer the others except the services of Pinocchio so that they could communicate with each other.

Hilary had said "Helgiolath." That was why the last holo had nagged her with its familiarity. She'd spoken with Kortland, the Helgiolath leader in The Wondervale, often enough. The holo hadn't in fact looked all that much like Kortland, but there had been a similarity that extended beyond the trivial details of physical aspect.

She tried to formulate this in her mind while at the same time whispering to Nelson that there was no real need for despondency, look on their excursion to the Twin Galaxies as a welcome tourist extravaganza, if a kid like Hilary could be so bright and chirpy in the circumstances then surely Nelson could as well, and various other arguments that she wasn't very sure she believed herself.

All that Nelson did was slouch his body half-away from her, like a child who has decided to be inconsolable. Strider had never been at her best when dealing with children. This was a very big child she was having to deal with. Nelson's shoulders shuddered, and she realized he was sobbing behind his secondary retinal screens.

"Oh, Jeez," she thought sympathetically, and hit him hard on the temple with the butt of her lazgun.

With Maloron Leander she didn't even bother with the attempted pep-talk. Strider wanted to find out what the picture was for.

She smiled at Segrill, who was watching her, apparently both impressed and appalled.

"Ancient Human pre-mating ritual," she said.

#

Hilary was the only one who could read the ideopictograms. "Read" was perhaps not the right word: he could see through all the clutter of sophistication to gain an idea of what each of them was intended to depict, but beyond that he could not go. Lan Yi began to think of the boy as being something like a thighputer: Hilary could analyze data only so far and no further. The limitations of the thighputer were notoriously infuriating, but one had to be grateful to the device as a tool that often opened up the gateways that beckoned one into the gardens of understanding. It was the same with Hilary. Without him, those gateways would have been firmly locked in the faces of the adults—if, indeed, they'd have been able to see that the gateways existed at all.

So Lan Yi listened with a benevolent expression on his face as the boy prattled away each time they encountered a new ideopictogram.

He had been partly right in his guess that the devices together comprised a primer in the ancient language, and partly wrong. It soon became clear that the sequence provided this but not only this: it was attempting, at the same time, to relay to them a saga. Even with Hilary's ability to see straight through what Lan Yi privately referred to as the decorative embellishments of the ideopictograms and look just at their core, it was impossible to tell anything about the language other than the fact it was a language. However, one could infer from Hilary's descriptions a little about the saga part of the sequence.

Lan Yi didn't know whether it depressed him or cheered him, so he decided to let it do neither—merely to gather information as if he were regarding an image in an electron microholo. All the historical Human sagas told of great deeds of battle, of conquest, of the firm rule of kings and gods—in short, of people killing people. But this one, it soon became evident, was the story of a peacefully developing species. The mighty deeds were typified by the discovery of tool-making or of the keystone arch.

"Didn't they ever go to war?" said Strider, whose thoughts must have been mirroring his own.

"It seems not," said Lan Yi mildly, "though we should remember that it is historians who shape history, not the events themselves. Perhaps by the time this ship was built it suited the ur-Helgiolath, if I may call them that, to forget the less creditable aspects of their past—especially if one day they might be representing themselves to an alien species."

"You called them 'ur-Helgiolath'," said Polyaggle. "I think you are correct."

"Run that by me again," said Strider, turning to look into the Spindrifter's depthless eyes.

Seragarda was the one who responded. "The Helgiolath believe themselves to be a species native to The Wondervale—and we have always believed the same. But I am beginning to think that we were all wrong." She laughed a typical Pridehouse laugh. "They're newcomers—they're a species perhaps as old as we are ourselves, but they didn't emerge in The Wondervale."

Lan Yi could see Strider catch on at once. "Presumably they sprang up somewhere in the Twin Galaxies, then," she said. "That's where the Main Computer told us it's taking us home to."

"That would seem a reasonable guess," he said. "But we must keep it in mind that all this is still nothing but a guess. The resemblances to the Helgiolath could just be coincidences. This is a big Universe."

"Which makes coincidence less likely," said Strider at once. "We've encountered only a few tens of other species. It'd be a tad improbable that two of them should have so many similarities."

Then her face fell. "Oh," she added. "I see what you mean. Parallel evolution. Polyaggle could be mistaken for a Human from a distance. And the Lingk-kreatzai are—at least externally—barely distinguishable from Humans."

Lan Yi nodded and touched her on the shoulder. "Yes, but we must remember not to read too much into that, either," he said. "The Images were directing us towards the more humanoid species, so our sample is hardly a random one." Seragarda buffeted him with her rump and he smiled down at her. "I said 'humanoid', not 'bipedal'," he added. "The description can be interpreted psychologically as well as physiologically."

"That's obvious. I was objecting to the term itself," said Seragarda, her nasal eye performing a bewildering series of withdrawals, emergences and color changes. "Remember, you're in the company of people of the ancient species, and all you are is Johnny Upstart. 'Pridehouse-oid' might be a good choice. To be used in alternation with 'Spindrifteroid' and 'Lingk-kreatzai-oid'."

Strider grinned and gave Seragarda an affectionate punch on the forehead.

"I think we take your point," said Lan Yi. He surprised himself by buffeting Seragarda back with his own thin hips. "But I am not going to permit myself to be forced into saying 'Lingk-kreatzai-oid' for the rest of my life."

Seragarda laughed again.

"Say," said Hilary, "have you guys finished gettin' fresh with Seragarda? I wanna find out what happens next in the story." Strauss-Giolitto coughed pointedly.

Lan Yi drew himself together. The boy and the schoolmarm were right. The group's imperative was to glean as much information as they could as quickly as they could, not to exchange lackwit badinage.

"Let us continue," he said.

They came to the ideopictogram that seemed to relate to the emergence of the ur-Helgiolath—if that was indeed what this species had been—from the atmosphere of their native planet, followed by another that, from Hilary's excited account, had the species discovering ways to roam the starfields. The next of the "pictures on the walls' saw—although for once Hilary showed some hesitation as he described the image—the ur-Helgiolath traverse the immensities of intergalactic space.

"Why are you uncertain?" Lan Yi asked the boy.

"'s not that," said Hilary. "It's kinda like a lot of them got hurt and killed and things. And disappeared, like space ate them."

Wormholes, possibly, thought Lan Yi. Or just the dangers of exploration. No, backtrack that thought a moment to wormholes. Maybe the Helgiolath suffered the same difficulty that we did: they hadn't realized that the art of space navigation is not to discover wormholes but to avoid them—all except the ones you want.

Strauss-Giolitto put her hand on Hilary's head and he twisted to look up at her.

"This picture's real unhappy," he said. He bent down to snatch up Loki, who struggled a little but then settled contentedly in his arms. He hugged the cat as if she were a motile stuffed toy. "I don't like this picture."

So the ur-Helgiolath had compassion, thought Lan Yi. Their descendants, if indeed they are their descendants, show precious little of it.

"Then let's move on to the next one as quickly as we can, shall we, Hilary," he said.

But the next ideopictogram was even darker in mood, so far as Lan Yi could gather from Hilary's reactions. The boy dropped the cat, spun, and pressed his face into Maria's thighs.

"I wanna stop. This is horrible."

Lan Yi squatted and turned Hilary's tear-stained face towards him. "Do you really want to stop while it's still horrible?" he said.

"Yeah!"

"Maybe the next picture will show an end to the"—he sought for a suitable word—"horribleness?"

"Yeah?"

"Perhaps."

The boy was still reluctant, twisting his head away from Lan Yi's hand.

"Don't force him," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"We don't want to," said Seragarda. "Hilary, come here."

Cautiously he left Strauss-Giolitto's legs and put his arms around the wolfish head, nestling his face against the gleaming fur.

"Hilary," said Seragarda. The deep, soothing growl was too soft for the others to hear, but Pinocchio translated it directly into their minds. "Hilary, so far it's been just like a game, looking at all the pictures, hasn't it?"

"Yeah, it's been fun." Grudgingly.

"But it's not a game—not really. All the stuff you've been telling us—it's not only been fun for us all, and it's not only been interesting as well. Any one thing you can find out from the pictures might save the lives of everybody."

"OK, just one thing."

She nuzzled his cheek. "It doesn't work that way, Hilary. If we knew what the one thing was—or there might be lots of them—we wouldn't need you to help us out. We need to know as many things as we can."

Hilary withdrew his head for a moment and drew the back of his hand across his nose, then leant his cheek against Seragarda again.

"But it hurts when a picture is so unhappy as that one," he said, pointing.

"You don't like getting hurt, do you?"

"No."

"Neither do I. Nor does anybody else here—and none of us want to see you get hurt." Seragarda paused. "But there are times when you've got to put up with a little hurt in order to stop a big hurt. Ask Leonie."

Hilary looked up at Strider, whose face showed a mixture of an encouraging smile and a glower. Strider had fixed views on child-rearing.

"That's right, Hilary," she said through gritted teeth. Lan Yi wanted to tell her what a tricky bit of maturing Seragarda was trying to put the boy through. Strider had clearly never noticed that children ate their meals starting with the bits of them they liked the best, then moved dutifully on to the rest later. It was quite a sophisticated mental leap during childhood to discover that it was better the other way round, so the taste left in your mouth was your favorite. Seragarda—who wasn't even a Human, for Umbel's sake—was attempting to let Hilary discover this several years early.

"So what I'd like you to do," Seragarda said when she had Hilary's attention again, "is to pretend you're a grown-up—goodness me, you nearly are a grown-up. I'm not going to lie to you: if you find some of the pictures horrible you may have bad dreams later—dreams that are even worse than the pictures—but it'll all have been worth it. You'll have maybe saved the lives of everybody. We'll know that you've done it, and so will you."

"Guess so." The boy sucked in air through his nose with a liquid din.

"Going to try again?"

It took Hilary a few moments to reply, but then his face brightened. "Can I ride on your shoulders?"

"I'd love you to do that. But don't hold on by my ears, because that might hurt me." Seragarda, who for the past minutes had been unusually somber for a Pridehouse, gave a laugh. "Grab handfuls of the fur at the back of my neck—I like it when you do that."

She lowered herself so that Hilary could climb astride her. Out of the corner of his eye Lan Yi noticed the expression on Strauss-Giolitto's face. There was tenderness there but there was also a certain jealousy. This was a datum to be stored away in his mind, as was the fact that the Pridehouse had dreams and nightmares. He was learning more than just about the ur-Helgiolath. As Seragarda had pointed out to Hilary, every item of information was potentially useful: only later did you find out which were the genuinely useful ones.

"Let's have another look at that last ideopictogram, shall we?" said Seragarda.

"Have to?"

"I think so."

The small hands dug very deep into the fur at Seragarda's nape, and clutched tightly. He wrapped his feet under the crease of her forelegs. Lan Yi wondered if this was as painless as she had told Hilary it would be.

Maria put her hand on the boy's back, partly to support him and partly to give him further reassurance. And partly to take some of the sting out of that vague jealousy she's ashamed of herself for feeling, thought Lan Yi.

"Something very bad happened to the Helgiolath," blurted Hilary, as if he didn't want to say the words.

"What sort of bad thing was it?" said Seragarda.

Something in the next galaxy, guessed Lan Yi, but he said nothing, not wanting to interrupt the mood of trust that Seragarda had created between herself and the boy. Strider looked as if she were about to say something, but Lan Yi waved her to silence.

"I can't tell. The picture just shows evil . . . an' death . . . an' people getting hurt a lot." Hilary's knuckles were even whiter than his face. "Can we go on to the next picture now, please?"

"Of course." Seragarda laughed. "I thought you'd be heavier than you are. You've got a fair amount of growing to do, my friend."

"'Friend'?"

"Didn't you know that?"

"Like Maria?"

"Oh, I don't know that anyone can be your friend like Maria is, but it's the same sort of thing. I can try."

Another bit of data for Lan Yi's mental bank: the Pridehouse could pick up Human body language and facial expressions considerably more easily than the Humans could read the Pridehouse. And she'd coaxed Hilary better than any of the Humans might have done. How much do the Pridehouse really know about us? He resolved to ask Seragarda later.

Hilary's body stiffened as he looked at the next ideopictogram. He turned his head abruptly away and then, with a clear effort, forced himself to look again.

"It's horribler."

"Can you tell how?" said Seragarda.

"Almost everybody's dead. Some of 'em are dying—that's worse, 'cause they know they're dying an' there's nothing they can do to stop it. An' they're hurting an awful lot."

Intergalactic war? thought Lan Yi. Or are the Twin Galaxies colliding with each other?

"Shall we stop looking at this one now?" said Seragarda gently.

"Yeah. Please."

"Come on, then." She trotted a few paces along the corridor, her claws rattling on the uncoated metal surface, Hilary seeming unsteady astride her but maintaining his grip with a determined ferocity.

"Everyone's dead," he said. There was some relief in his voice, and his body relaxed a little.

"Everyone?"

"Yup. Only . . . only . . ."

"What else is there?" said Seragarda. "Something more that you can see?"

"It's kinda like other things are there that ain't dead."

"I'm not sure I know what you mean by that," said Seragarda with a laugh that almost unseated the child. "If you can, explain it to me."

"No . . . yes . . ." Hilary sounded confused. "Well, there's some people still alive but they're running away and they're lost and they don't know where they're going."

Lan Yi's right eyebrow twitched. It seems as if the hypothesis that the Helgiolath are an emigrant race might not be without plausibility, he thought. Fugitives from some disaster—war, collision, it doesn't matter what. They've had several million years to evolve from something like the image we saw in the holo to the way they are now. It could be.

"But there's still . . . things there as well."

"What sort of things?"

Lan Yi, waiting for Hilary's answer, looked ahead along the corridor and realized that this was the last of the ideopictograms—at least in this sequence. Maybe there were other tales to be told in other corridors: Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was big enough to tell a million stories.

Hilary let out a howl and threw himself forward, gripping Seragarda tightly around her neck. Her legs moved slightly in discomfort at the sudden shift of weight, but her voice stayed unruffled.

"What sort of things?" she repeated.

"Things that think."

"Yes?"

"We're inside one of them."

#

The bunk was comfortable, so Strider punched it until it was a bit less so. She didn't want to be comfortable—not in this goddam trap. She wanted to be as uncomfortable as she could possibly make herself, because it was the only act of defiance she could think of. Fuck whoever had made Artificial Environment 17,863,006 and fuck Artificial Environment 17,863,006 itself: if they wanted her just to enjoy herself eating good food—it had been annoyingly good—and relaxing on a soft mattress, then she was going to do exactly the opposite, on principle.

What had they learnt? Well, they'd learnt that the Main Computer had a pretty clear idea of the luxuries of life so far as Humans and Spindrifters and Lingk-kreatzai and Pridehouse and even Trok were concerned. The ur-Helgiolath holo—or an identical replica—had appeared to them again and wordlessly led them to what Strider couldn't help thinking of as the accommodation block. She hazily remembered having been a few times to luxury hotels in her youth on Earth when a rich guy called . . . called . . . Something Something, who was about three times her age, hadn't realized that if she wanted to climb in bed with him she would already have done so, but until this dawned on his piggy little brain she was out for as many free meals as she could get. The accommodation block was a bit like that: there was an orderly dining-room, four to a table, with menus you could scroll back and forwards on VDUs and buttons you could press when you found what you wanted. Defiantly, Strider had pressed for the untreated soya protein, because the stuff disgusted her. The Pridehouse had been given a big bowl to sit around, but the same scrolling menus: food bubbled up in it every time they pressed a button. Lan Yi sat with the Pridehouse, talking animatedly with Seragarda to the exclusion of everyone else. Afterwards the holo had left them to their own devices for a while, then shown them where their rooms were—rooms, hell, these weren't rooms: they were suites big enough to house about six people and a Bredai.

Don't think of this place as an accommodation block, Strider instructed herself savagely. It's a goddam barracks, fuckit.

She'd used the lavatory but had left it unflushed—just to add that extra touch of authenticity. She'd ripped the pictures off the walls—"Old Bastards, more like," she'd muttered—and with a spike from her grav-grapple incised some obscene graffiti into the walls in the places where the paintings had been. She'd kicked in one of the panels of the clothes cupboard in the corner. All in all, she'd been as anti-social as she possibly could. Later she'd consider drinking too much alcohol and throwing up in the corner.

Barracks! That's what this bloody is! Barracks! And don't forget it. Otherwise you'll let yourself get pampered into acquiescence.

So: Two things she'd learnt. Trashing the posh surroundings had made her feel a hell of a lot better. A useful tip. She must pass it on to the others when she woke.

A third item: The speed with which a Human child could recuperate. When they'd arrived back at the airlock Hilary had looked so drawn and ravaged by the experiences they'd put him through that she'd been seriously worried about him. He'd stayed that way until he'd first fastened his eyes on one of the scrolling menus, and then the color had come back into his cheeks—as much color as there ever was, because he kept dodging his vitamin-D supplements.

Her mind was doing the same sort of dodging act. All of these things were trivia—she shouldn't be wasting her brain cells on them. It was just that the fourth and biggest thing they'd learnt was rather too goddam gigantic for her to want to learn it.

Steady down, Leonie. Force yourself. Pretend you're Hilary.

OK, so you're back at the airlock, and Lan Yi and Seragarda have done a sort of double act explaining their hypotheses and wilder speculations and outright guesses, and . . .

THIS ACCORDS ENTIRELY WITH OUR OWN DEDUCTIONS, Ten Per Cent Extra Free had said.

"Great stuff, Tenper! You've deigned to join us!"

I HAVE BEEN INDUSTRIOUSLY OCCUPIED WITH OTHER MATTERS, CAPTAIN LEONIE STRIDER, said the Image. I HAVE ATTEMPTED TO DISABLE THE MAIN COMPUTER, BUT THIS HAS NOT PROVED POSSIBLE: THERE IS A SUFFICIENT NUMBER OF NETWORKED SHIELDS CONSTRUCTED WITHIN ITS SOFTWARE TO ENSURE THAT DISABLEMENT IS UNFEASIBLE.

"Perhaps that's a good thing, at this stage," Strider said viciously. "Disable the Main Computer and maybe you disable the life-support systems. Like the atmosphere. You wheeze a lot if you try to breathe a disabled atmosphere, and then you fall over and stay still."

I have also tried to redesign its programming, but have failed for the same reason. I have tried to integrate myself with it, mimic its software and alter it from within, but this has again proved unfeasible.

"Have you been able to do anything with it?"

Yes.

"What?"

Some of its peripheral software is concerned with navigation and records. I can now discover precisely where we are in relation to the spatial and temporal location we occupied at the moment I activated the software.

"Which was where?"

This is something hard to estab . . . Please calm down, Captain Leonie Strider. There is no purpose in your—

She'd been thinking of those words when she'd kicked in the front of the cupboard. Her foot ached like hell, but it was a good ache.

Pinocchio intervened, drowning out Ten Per Cent Extra Free's singsong with his own.

I WAS PRESENT WITH YOU WHILE HILARY EXAMINED THE IDEOPICTOGRAMS, he said. I HAVE RELATED ALL THAT I SAW AND UNDERSTOOD TO TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE, AND HE AND I HAVE COME TO SOME CONCLUSIONS.

"Wait," Lan Yi had said, holding up his hand to quieten Strider, who was waving her lazgun dangerously. "Were you able to see anything in the 'pictures on the walls' that Hilary was unable to?"

NO. WE COULD INTERPRET THE IDEOPICTOGRAMS NO BETTER THAN YOU COULD. WE SUFFER THE SAME MENTAL SOPHISTICATIONS AS YOU DO—EVEN MORE SO. THE SIMPLICITY OF A CHILD'S PERCEPTION IS REQUIRED. There was something in Pinocchio's voice that might just have been ruefulness: it was perhaps the first time the Images had been unable to perform some mental feat that a Human could do.

"You're an important person, Hilary," said Seragarda quietly to the child perched on top of her. He smiled palely.

BUT, said Pinocchio, his trilled words beginning to come faster, TEN PER CENT EXTRA FREE'S GREATER KNOWLEDGE OF THE WORKINGS OF THE WONDERVALE, AND OF ITS HISTORY, HAS ALLOWED HIM, WITH AN ESTIMATED NINETY-EIGHT PER CENT ACCURACY, TO PIECE TOGETHER THE TRUTH FROM WHAT HILARY WAS ABLE TO DESCRIBE.

Strider was still breathing heavily and her lips were still flushed, but she'd managed to force herself to get the lazgun back in its holster.

"Tell us, then," she said.

The beings who built Artificial Environment 17,863,006 were indeed the ancestors of the Helgiolath. Whether or not they were as pacifistic as the ideopictograms seem to claim is, of course, impossible to confirm.

"Is there going to be too much else you can't 'confirm'?" said Strider, adding sarcasm to the final word.

We can deal only with what the ideopictograms contain, not with what they omit.

Strider wished she'd not indulged herself with the sarcasm. Then, after brief thought, she didn't.

"Go on."

They spread to a neighboring galaxy and there encountered another species. Either this species was extremely bellicose and/or xenophobic or the ur-Helgiolath were violently antipathetic towards them. Again the truth of the matter cannot be ascertained, because the ideopictograms were created by the ur-Helgiolath.

"I believe the ur-Helgiolath were indeed originally pacific," interposed Lan Yi. "I believe they were forced into war."

WHY? Ten Per Cent Extra Free. Strider lowered.

Lan Yi explained about the insight he'd had concerning the bloodthirstiness of Human sagas, where the excesses of brutality were regarded as glorious, and wars, rapes and massacres were generally the bits that got written down as having been a hell of a lot of fun for all concerned. Also, what had horrified Hilary about the final images in the sequence had been not their sadistic triumphalism but their grief.

YOU MAY BE RIGHT, said Pinocchio. IT DOES NOT MATTER.

"It matters a bit," said Strider. "We're on our way to the Twin Galaxies, remember? There's a chance we could get there before the war is over—funnier things can happen when you're using the tachyon drive. I'd like to know who's massacring me."

Oh, the war's over, all right. Millions of years ago. The Main Computer is far too advanced to make an error of that magnitude.

"Hmmf."

"Who won?" said Lan Yi.

No one. By the time the war was over the Twin Galaxies were devoid of life. They were entirely sterilized. It is possible but highly unlikely that in the intervening timespan some rudimentary unicellular organisms may have independently evolved.

"No red carpets and welcoming parties, then?" said Strider. "No passing around the joints at the ambassador's official thrash?"

Pinocchio ignored her.

A huge fleet of the ur-Helgiolath, widely regarded as cowards by the rest of their kind but in fact obsessed with the preservation of their species, fled from the conflict towards the last—though how they reached The Wondervale is something unknown to us. They may have set up colonies in other galaxies as well.

"But . . ." said Lan Yi, with a worried glance in the direction of Hilary. He didn't want to awaken too many of the boy's darker memories. Luckily Hilary was busy rubbing his nose against the top of Seragarda's head, for reasons best known to himself, and was paying no attention. "But Hilary said that the Twin Galaxies were still occupied by beings—entities—that the ideopictograms portrayed as the ultimate in evil."

I was inaccurate when I said that there were no winners of the war. Ten Per Cent Extra Free's investigations of the Main Computer have not been entirely fruitless. What he has discovered has done much to confirm our deductions from Hilary's account of the ideopictograms.

Strider had a sudden sick feeling. When Hilary had come out with the remark "We're inside one of them" they hadn't taken it seriously: the kid had done well so far, and was obviously supremely upset.

She could hear the hoarseness in her own voice as she said: "We were wrong and Hilary was right—that's it, isn't it?"

Yes. The death machines created by both the ur-Helgiolath and their foes seem to have concluded that the war would be better waged without the distraction of organic creatures. It was they who exterminated every living organism within the Twin Galaxies. They continued the war until they had fought themselves into a stasis; then they retrenched.

"There's peace there at the moment, you mean?" Hein, who had been silent up until now, startled Strider with the sudden question.

Yes. No. There is a state of non-war.

"What's the difference?" said Strider, trying to seize back something of the initiative.

The same difference as there is between a fully discharged lazgun and a fully charged one. The first is harmless. The second is just waiting for some idiot to fire it.

"Are we the idiots?"

No. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 is the idiot—one of several idiots, we speculate, sent out to find a new activation trigger for the lazgun. You were just the unlucky ones it found.

"Maybe we're not the first. Maybe the war between the machines is going full belt again already. Maybe the Twin Galaxies and all their bloody machines are just so much cosmic dust by now." Hell's teeth, but Strider hoped so.

Ten Per Cent Extra Free was able to gain access to certain aspects of the Main Computer's peripheral consciousness. It is convinced that the Twin Galaxies are still in existence, and that the non-war is being maintained.

"The Main Computer might be wrong," said Lan Yi, as if the whole topic were one of merely academic interest.

There is very little likelihood of that, although the possibility does exist. The Main Computer is in tachyonic communication with the three survivors of the fleet of . . . idiots . . . that were sent out by the ur-Helgiolath. All the others—we cannot determine quite how many there were—have been destroyed by the technological species who have discovered them. At least one malfunctioned and fell into a black hole.

"So?" Strider again.

It therefore seems likely that there is also communication between the Main Computer and its kind in the Twin Galaxies.

Ah, yes: so the Main Computer would know if those machines were no longer in existence.

And it would also know if the war against the machines of the ur-Helgiolath's nameless foes had been won.

Which meant that it hadn't.

Strider followed the path of her thoughts a little further.

The death machines on both sides of the war had been programmed to extirpate the enemy; only later had they begun to reason that their creators would be better out of the picture. So, if Artificial Environment 17,863,006—her lips puckered at the euphemism of the term Artificial Environment—did indeed trigger off a new war, now that their discovery of it had confirmed to its brain that there were other organic civilizations in the cosmos—yeah, that would be it, it would conclude that they were the descendants of its creators—things might not be too bad if the ur-Helgiolaths' death machines won. The war would then be truly over. At the end of it there mightn't be much left of the Twin Galaxies but rubble, yet the whole thing would have been contained—and anyway the Images seemed certain that there was nothing left of the Twin Galaxies worth preserving . . . except the futures of whatever organisms might one day possibly evolve there. So, the ur-Helgiolath machines calm down and with luck don't get too paranoid about the rest of the Universe.

Run through another scenario. The enemy machines win. If the ur-Helgiolath who created the ideopictograms know that a fleet escaped from the conflict to settle other galaxies, it's pretty bloody definite that the enemy machines know this as well. Without the ur-Helgiolath machines to pin them down, they can get back to their primary job: annihilating ur-Helgiolath and their descendants. Any civilization could be descended from those fugitive ur-Helgiolath. Better not to risk a sin of omission. Zap it.

And no one could guess how many galaxies the ur-Helgiolath might have spread to.

Oh, shit.

Better safe than sorry.

Do the lot of them, just in case.

OK, here's a third scenario. Suppose both lots of machines destroy each other entirely. Once again the Twin Galaxies are rubble, which is a bit of a pity for all those organic chemicals that have been lying around wondering if, you know, it might be fun to try turning into a proto-bacterium. Not so much of a thrill, either, for a bunch of stalwarts dragged here against their will from Heaven's Ancestor, but that's just a few lives lost for the sake of saving untold billions, and she and her crew could sell themselves dearly—which would probably be no more than wrenching out the occasional light socket but would make them feel good.

Lucky old Universe if scenario numero three can be organized.

Hm. Maybe Strider and her crew could do a bit more than wrench out some light sockets.

She turned to Strauss-Giolitto.

"Maria, you're a teacher, aren't you?" she said, trying to make her voice honeyed. It sounded to her not so much honeyed as covered in something rather nasty, so she gave up the attempt.

Strauss-Giolitto looked confused. She wasn't the only one. "Ah, Leonie, you do sort of know this."

"And you're fully qualified in educational psychology, aren't you?"

"Um, yes."

"Ever fancied trying your hand at practicing educational psychology on the Main Computer of a death machine capable of taking out whole planets by merely coughing?"

"It hadn't occurred to me before."

It was audible in Strauss-Giolitto's voice and the measured way in which she spoke the words that she was thinking something along the lines of: Humor the maniac. She's got a lazgun in that holster and she might be just nuts enough to use it. Lan Yi, however, was looking at Strider with surmise dawning in his eyes: Yes, he nodded to her. Yes.

"Well," said Strider, "the whole of life is a learning experience, even for teachers. Once we've fed and rested, I want you to talk with Ten Per Cent Extra Free. I think that you and he could collaborate together in an adventure that must be every educationalist's dream."

And it was just then that the holo had turned up to show them to the accommodation block.

Barracks, dammit.

#

"So that's the best you can do?" said O'Sondheim disgustedly to his thighputer. Then he realized that the thighputer couldn't hear what he was saying.

SO THAT's THE BEST YOU CAN DO? he keyed in.

BAD COMMAND, it told him.

"Fuckit," he said, and thought about keying that in as well by way of petty revenge—except that he'd probably just get another BAD COMMAND response.

He addressed what was left of the Santa Maria's Main Computer. "Have you had any more luck than the thighputer?" It was a pointless question. The two were hooked up together, so that anything one of them knew the other would.

"Nope," said the voice of the Main Computer, filling the command deck. In an idle hour O'Sondheim had reprogrammed the big machine to speak in the same vernacular Argot it could display on a screen, but he hadn't been able to do anything about the formal, machine-like timbre of its voice. The clash between the two modes was wince-making.

He wished there was someone else he could trust to be here on the command deck with him, but the people he'd brought away from Qitanefermeartha and through the wormhole were agriculturalists, xenanthropologists, security officers, children . . . A couple of the children could probably operate the puters better than he could, but he reckoned they were still too young for him to be able to trust their judgment.

"So," he said aloud, again addressing the Main Computer directly, "you've narrowed it down to eight hundred and forty-two stellar systems."

"Oh, buddy," said the Main Computer in its monotone drone, "have you any idea how much narrowing down that's involved? The number of stellar systems in the Milky Way is . . ."

"Spare me the figures."

He looked at the Pockets in front of him. Each day they seemed less substantial.

"Heartfire?" he said tentatively.

YES. The voice retained the same lilt it had always had, but it sounded weak and tired, as if Heartfire were on a deathbed and struggling to say anything at all.

"Have you or Angler discovered anything?"

No.

The Heartfire of old would have added a complicated explanation concerning her failure, and Angler's. Now both of the Images always seemed to be exhausted, uninterested.

"Do you even know where we are in time? Do dinosaurs still roam around doing . . . whatever dinosaurs did? Has the Human species leapt down out of the trees yet? Has it had its brief hour of glory and disappeared?"

We don't know.

O'Sondheim looked at the Pockets again, as always with distaste. He used them as infrequently as possible. Years ago, back on Earth, he'd one day taken a trip out into what was left of the countryside near his home and wandered over a range of small, shallow hills, feeling that it was doing him good. He'd come across the corpse of a rabbit—rabbits were among the few mammals of any size still to subsist in the wild. Something had eaten the creature's eyes and part of its skull—carrion birds, probably. Through the gap in the bone he had been able to see the deliquescent remains of the brain. He had used his commline to call a cabble to him and gone home immediately. There he had been violently sick for what had seemed like hours.

The Pockets reminded him now of that liquid brain-matter.

He didn't want to lean his head into one of them.

It was his duty to do so. Your responsibility, Captain O'Sondheim, and all that stuff. Never ask the personnel to do anything you can't face doing yourself: first rule of inspiring the people you expected to obey all your other commands . . .

Shit, just do it.

Eight hundred and forty-two systems. Even with the tachyon drive, that'd take me about three and a half lifetimes to check out, and I might even go straight through the Solar System, reckoning it was a no-hoper, if I'm too early or too late.

The Pockets.

You've got face up to them, Danny. They're your only real chance.

Feeling as if he were about to stick his head into the open, rotting skull of a dead rabbit, he pushed himself up from his seat and walked towards the nearest Pocket.

Halfway there he stopped.

I can't do this.

He could even remember, in some visceral way, the taste of the vomit.

Yes, I can. Strider could.

In his mind he saw Strider's face overlaid on the rabbit's corpse. Her eyes were widened and one side of her nose was crooked up in a sneer.

"Right," he said to her. "Here goes."

His legs felt far two heavy as he took the last few paces and plunged his head into the Pocket.

O'Sondheim wasn't in fact sick, but it was a very near thing.

#

There were other sagas to be discovered in other corridors. Ten Per Cent Extra Free and Pinocchio created Pockets for the crew to use, and thus Strider and her personnel were able to explore Artificial Environment 17,863,006 without ever leaving the main hall of the accommodation block. Even so, Lan Yi and Seragarda preferred to wander the corridors together, usually with Hilary, seeing the ideopictograms directly rather than in the miniaturized, almost comic-strip form which the Pockets displayed.

One entire corridor was taken up with an account of the ur-Helgiolath discovery and development of mathematics—although it was impossible to discover any details of the mathematics. Another series mystified them completely until Seragarda suddenly announced that the sequence was raunchy, at which point the two of them, laughing in their different ways, ran back to the start again—"purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry," as Seragarda had bravely declared before rolling over and over on the corridor floor, her Image-interpreted laughter almost deafening Lan Yi. ("Doubtless the ur-Helgiolath would find Human or Pridehouse erotica equally amusing," he said tidily once she'd quieted. "We Pridehouse read our own erotica only for the laughs," she explained.) There was another sequence which Lan Yi himself found vaguely arousing. As far as he could envisage it, the ur-Helgiolath had made a practice of trying to stir dead planets into viable biospheres where transplanted lifeforms might survive. The ideopictograms still presented infuriatingly elusive—and sometimes allusive—images to his inner eye, but some of them seemed to convey to him, at a gut level, the joy the ur-Helgiolath felt when one of the sterile worlds they had nurtured began to support life. He had never felt anything like this when thinking about the terraforming of Mars: that had been nothing more than a necessary technological trick, essential to the survival of the Human species, whereas there was a joy in the ur-Helgiolath equivalent that he could translate only in sexual terms.

He realized that he was beginning to fall in love with Seragarda, in the same way that he was already in love with Polyaggle and Maria Strauss-Giolitto. A six-legged wolf, a colonial organism and a Human lesbian: all in all, it was a strange mix, and one not likely to lead to physical requital. But it was banishing his final, wistful memories of Geena.

Seragarda and he had hoped that the holo guides would help them translate the sequences of ideopictograms and even teach them how to use the language primer which the images also comprised—indeed, they had assumed that this was one of the reasons the holos were on hand. After their first sleep aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006 they had approached one. All of the guides seemed now to have adopted the ur-Helgiolath shape in perpetuity.

"We wish further to investigate the information on the walls, and would like you to assist us," Lan Yi said.

The holo froze for several seconds. Now that he was more accustomed to its external form, Lan Yi wondered why it had taken all of them so long to realize that this must be an evolutionary ancestor of the Helgiolath—it seemed so obvious.

"This is something that I am not permitted to do," said the holo—or, rather, the Main Computer—at last.

Lan Yi was surprised. "Are you permitted to tell us why you are forbidden to help us?"

Again those moments of stillness, then: "I am not. I have strict blocks within me forbidding discussion of the matter."

"Who programmed those blocks into you?" Seragarda was at Lan Yi's side, sitting back on her haunches and very gently rubbing one ear absent-mindedly against the back of his hand.

"I programmed them into myself."

Lan Yi blinked. "Why?"

The holo showed a slight trembling, which he interpreted as a sign of hesitation.

"I . . . I do not know. If I did, I still would not be permitted to tell you."

"Wait with us a moment."

Lan Yi squatted so that his head was level with Seragarda's. "I have a feeling that what we are discovering from these refusals is of great interest," he said in a low voice.

"I agree. It's as if the machine has rejected its creators so utterly that it refuses even to contemplate the notion that they created it." She let her tongue loll, then spoke again. "Perhaps they didn't—perhaps this is a machine-generated machine."

"I do not think that can be so. If it were the case, then the ideopictograms would not be there."

"Unless the earlier generations of the death machines were programmed to replicate themselves exactly."

Lan Yi considered. "No. I cannot believe that to be the case. It is my belief that the Main Computer has free will, and has voluntarily circumscribed its own field of operations. It might have blanked out areas of its own memory, but instead it chose to erect prohibitions within itself."

"That makes sense," said Seragarda. "To lose the memory of the ur-Helgiolath altogether would be a weakness. In some circumstances the Main Computer must be able to demolish the blocks on its activities. Ask it."

"Why not ask it yourself?" said Lan Yi politely.

Seragarda moved slightly closer to him. "The Pridehouse is an ancient species," she said.

It seemed a non sequitur. Lan Yi waited for her to continue.

"We do not draw attention to ourselves if we can help it—over many generations we have learnt to be circumspect about our true nature until we are certain of the intentions of those with whom we communicate."

Lan Yi waited for her to speak again. "As a representative of the Human species," he said, aware as he spoke the words of their pomposity, "may I express gratitude that you have trusted us."

"It was easy to trust you. You are a very young species and so your thought processes are easy enough for us to construe. Besides, there was little you could do to harm us, so it seemed worth the experiment to find out if you were what you seemed."

Lan Yi was perplexed. "But you chose Strider to be the leader of your fleet," he said.

Seragarda laughed and turned her head to look him in the eyes. "You are a species that believes in leaders," she said. "We are not. Boosting her ego was a way of finding out more about whether or not we could trust you. So we commanded her to be our leader, and she obeyed. Back then, remember, it would have been simple enough for us to have destroyed you if things had gone wrong. Now it's different. We are—we were—happy enough to accept Strider's leadership once we had discovered more about you Humans, and to restructure our own society according to your expectations."

"But . . . the Onurg?"

"He is the servant and adviser to all of us."

Lan Yi shook his head rapidly several times, as if to shake away unnecessary thoughts. "I will consider this later. At this time I wish to know why you yourself will not question the holo."

"The Main Computer—and probably Artificial Environment 17,863,006 itself—has come to the assumption, because Strider is so clearly the leader of all of us, that we of the Pridehouse are a subsidiary species. We have a higher status than Loki, but it has not recognized us as full people. We wish to keep it this way—for our own protection."

"And also because you are sneaky?"

He could feel her powerful shoulder moving against him. He could sense that she was attempting with great difficulty not to burst out into a full gust of laughter.

"That is true," she said at last, controlling herself. She lowered her body to the deck. "Call me something like 'good doggie'. Tickle my back. The Pridehouse's sneakiness now may be of use to all of us later."

"What makes you think the Main Computer isn't listening to everything we say?"

"There's only one of it," she replied, "and there's been only one of it for millions of years. How can it be expected to understand interpersonal relationships? It's probably an order of magnitude more intelligent than any of us, and yet it's very stupid. The more often we wrong-foot it the better. So let it come to the wrong conclusions as often as possible—master."

She looked at him with such an appealing caricature of canine loyalty that now it was his turn not to break into open laughter.

"Ask that holo the question," she urged.

Lan Yi stood.

"My junior assistant and I have conferred," he said to the holo. "In what circumstances might you be able to demolish the prohibitions that forbid you to talk of these matters with us?"

The holo began to move its seemingly sightless head jerkily. Lan Yi had the sense that he had thrown the Main Computer into a quandary, so that it had lost some control over the holographic illusion of its presence.

"When the time is right," the holo said with difficulty, the words coming out in staccato fashion. "If the time becomes right."

Then it disappeared. Lan Yi could have sworn it left a flurry of sparks in its wake.

"We've learnt one more thing," said Seragarda.

"Yes. There are some things the Main Computer cannot do to alter Artificial Environment 17,863,006's interior—otherwise the ideopictograms would have been erased long ago." He tapped his fingers on his chin. "Yet it can create the accommodation block. It can serve up food."

"Those were physical things it was programmed to do by its makers—probably they involve only the humblest of its subroutines."

"Yes," said Lan Yi. "Its instincts, you could say . . ."

His voice trailed thoughtfully away.

"So it's not omnipotent in here," Seragarda continued, dropping her doggie act and getting to her feet in a rattle of claws. "It can do airlocks and food and beds and atmospheres and lighting and all the things its creators would expect it to do automatically, but anything physical outwith the scope of its 'instincts', as you call them, is beyond its abilities. It's a local god with limited powers." She added: "It can't blast us with a bolt of lightning."

"You know, Seragarda," said Lan Yi, running his fingers through the fur of her shoulder, "this may be the most useful thing we have learnt so far. In some ways, we are stronger than the god. Our lives may depend on this knowledge."

During the days since then, he and Seragarda had rarely seen any of the holos, and then only at mealtimes. They were allowed to pursue their examinations of the ideopictograms without interference. Whether or not the Main Computer eavesdropped on their conversations and watched the way they joked and sometimes argued interpretations and points of science was a matter over which they had no control, so most often they ignored the possibility.

Often Hilary, when he was with them, was allowed to ride on Seragarda's shoulders again. Lan Yi frequently wondered who enjoyed the experience the more—Hilary or Seragarda—but he hesitated to ask her: the question would, for some reason he couldn't fathom, have seemed like an intrusion.

Sometimes she shared her cabin with the Onurg, and he was annoyed to find that he felt a twinge of jealousy on those occasions. It was bizarre and illogical to find this emotion within himself, yet he couldn't—as he always tried to be honest with himself—deny that it was there. This was something else that he did not discuss with her.

#

"Take a look at this, willya, Maloron?" said Strider, standing back from her Pocket.

The tall woman had been sitting enjoying what was a perfectly acceptable semblance of coffee at one of the prim little tables the Main Computer had supplied in the principal hall of the accommodation block.

"OK, here I come," she said resignedly, putting her coffee down. It was still too hot for her to finish it off. The captain called: the captain was to be obeyed.

As soon as she put her head into the Pocket she forgot all about her coffee.

"Hoo boy," she said.

Strider had moved to the adjacent Pocket and had apparently called up the same image and explanatory graphical display. Her voice now sounded all around Leander.

"We'd sorta guessed that this thing—Artificial Environment 17,863,006—was able to blow stars into supernovae," Strider said, "but we underestimated its capacity."

"You're not joking. How did you get this stuff?" Leander felt almost childishly frightened as she looked at the figures rolling backwards and forwards along the Pocket's horizontal surface. None of the numbers were small.

"Tenper, who is hereforth forgiven for past transgressions, was able to worm them out of the Main Computer's peripheral software when it wasn't looking." Strider gave a low and not entirely amused chuckle. "Or maybe it let him do it. Maybe it's proud of all this stuff, and was secretly hoping to be able to show it off."

What Leander was looking at in the Pocket was the weaponry specification of Artificial Environment 17,863,006. Apart from the tiny portion of the craft's whole which was reserved for accommodations and life-support machinery, most of the rest seemed to be devoted to means of mass destruction.

"I'm glad I'm not a globular cluster," said Leander.

"I'm glad I'm not a whole goddam galaxy," said Strider.

The Pocket—acting doubtless under the direct instructions of Ten Per Cent Extra Free—was displaying the yield of the various weapons in units which Leander and Strider could understand.

"Wouldn't like to meet Artificial Environment 17,863,006 up a dark alley," muttered Leander.

"There wouldn't be much dark alley left if it took a dislike to you."

"That might be to our advantage," Leander observed. "Might be to everyone's advantage."

"I'm not following where you're leading."

"The average dark-alley assholes who want to get your plastic aren't particularly interested in hurting you—all they want to do is disable you long enough that they can get the plastic off you with the minimum amount of fight. Right?"

"I wouldn't know," said Strider. "The couple of times jerks tried it on me I had to call the hospital for them." She remembered her first encounter with Pinocchio.

"Yeah, well, believe me. You've never woken up an hour later to discover all that's left of your thighputer is a hole in the leg." Leander heaved a sigh. "OK, and one time I found that some inadequate—guy must have been a necrophile, or something—had fucked me while I was unconscious: maybe he was one of those good old boys who are too retarded to find out where the 'on' switch is on their sexbot." Another sigh. "Thing is, the bastards might have a secret puerile fantasy of rubbing you out, but they don't do it—most of them. Because they're scared."

"I'm very interested in your personal reminiscences, Maloron, but—"

"No, listen here, Leonie. They're scared, that's the point. You're scared—you used to be—of letting yourself be affectionate with other people. The dorks in the dark alleys are scared as well: hurt you too bad and they might get hurt themselves, because if you get killed your friends might track them down and pull their balls or tits off. But if they don't hurt you a bit, then what have they got to prop up their faltering little egos?"

"The only little ego I know round here is Segrill," said the booming voice of Strider in Leander's Pocket.

"Just listen, Leonie. The assholes in the dark alley have a club or a knife or a lazgun, but they don't carry much else. They don't attack you with a tactical nuke, because if they did most of their own component atoms would end up somewhere in the jetstream. They want to pretend to be powerful. You know the category of people most often beaten up on the streets, back on Earth and Mars?"

"No. Women, I guess."

"Wrong. Cripples. Gutsy folk, those shits in the back alleys, huh? Children are a second choice."

"I still don't know how this—"

"The thing is, Leonie, that the bullies hardly ever attack someone they reckon is going to kick them in the ass so hard they discover themselves with a mouthful of faecal material. The Main Computer here and Artificial Environment 17,863,006 itself are intelligent, but they've got the instincts of the prick who's wandering down that dark alley. They've got more firepower than they can possibly ever use."

Leander drew a deep breath.

"They've got self-preservation to think about. Sure, there's enough weaponry on board to demolish a globular cluster, and you bet the ur-Helgiolath programmed the Main Computer to think this would be a fun idea, but the Main Computer has more sense than to try it because Artificial Environment 17,863,006 would have to be standing off half a million parsecs if it weren't to run the risk of getting hurt itself."

Now it was Strider's turn to sigh. "You ever heard of suicide bombers, Maloron?" she said. "Kamikaze pilots? Wingenues?"

"No."

"Plug into your thighputer sometime and call up HISTORY.SCAN and have a look. Some people back on Earth hated each other so much they were prepared to kill themselves just so's they could kill other people."

"Hated themselves, you mean?"

"It's the same thing."

Leander was feeling her left leg beginning to cramp. "You mean they actually did that?"

"Too true."

"Assholes."

"You've got it in a nutcase."

"You don't think the Main Computer is one of those?" The cramp was growing ever more painful. Sometime soon—very soon—Leander was going to have to retreat from the Pocket, sit down and beat the back of her calf until the pain subsided.

"That's my guess," Strider answered. "I think the Main Computer has been programmed for hatred—I think all of the death machines in the Twin Galaxies were programmed that way. That's what Hilary and the Images got out of the last of the first sequence of ideopictograms they looked at."

Leander's mind recoiled from the notion.

"Surely they couldn't be so stupid?" she asked, hating the question.

"Never underestimate stupidity—it's what shapes whole civilizations."

"Profound," said Leander resentfully.

"True, though."

"I want to study the weaponry this crate's loaded with," said Leander after some silence. "It's easier on the brain. I want to calm myself down in case I have nightmares."

Strider gave a little snicker. "Know what you mean," she said, her voice far louder than surely she'd intended it to be within the confines of Leander's Pocket.

"Asshole," said Leander. "Whoever built this bitch was an asshole."

"You don't find too many brain cells in the average asshole," Strider observed.

"Not unless you look real close."

Strider laughed. Leander winced at the cacophony.

"I want to start linking this stuff into my thighputer," she said. "Any moment now the Main Computer could discover that Ten Per Cent Extra Free's been poaching the data and withdraw it."

"I said, I think the Main Computer wants to show it off to us."

"You might be wrong."

"Yeah, go ahead."

Leander did, appalled as she made the linkage by the sheer destructive power of which Artificial Environment 17,863,006 was capable. Technological civilizations produced devices that were capable of molding the Universe to make it a better place to live, and instead they used their ability to destroy. Lan Yi had told over a recent meal about the eroticism inherent in the ideopictogram that seemed to refer to the ur-Helgiolath's bringing to life of a hitherto dead planet. Maybe not all technological civilizations fell into the same trap . . . until, like the ur-Helgiolath, they were dragged into it.

Maybe life was an aberration. If you looked from one angle, the Universe could have been a more beautiful place without it.

She had barely finished downloading the data about Artificial Environment 17,863,006 when someone grabbed her from behind, yanking her from the Pocket.

Blinking her eyes in confusion, she saw that it was Orphanwifer. Already he was standing at the back of Strider, hauling on the holstered belt which was all that she was wearing. As she emerged from her Pocket, Strider threw a punch at him but he sideswiped it easily with his palm.

"Stop," he said.

He spoke the single word with such authority that Leander could see Strider's aggression falter.

"We have an emergency," said Orphanwifer.

Strider's body tensed, her hand whipping to the butt of her lazgun.

"Speak," she said.

"Kareed has tried to kill Hein." Kareed was the least noticeable of the three Lingk-kreatzai, seeming always to skulk in corners. The contrast between him and the other two, Orphanwifer and Ilyano, could hardly have been greater: their personalities tended, if not curbed, to dominate any gathering in which they might be.

"Why?"

"Ask why later." Orphanwifer half-dragged Strider towards the door that led into the Lingk-kreatzai wing of the accommodation block. Anticipating their arrival, it began to slide open. "You come too," he barked over his shoulder at Leander.

She followed the other two at the double through the door and discovered herself wading through sticky mud. Although her heart was beating loudly and she was on the alert for any sign of threat—to be frank with herself, she was scared silly, violence never having been her forte—a part of her mind noted that the Main Computer had accurately recreated the environment in which the Lingk-kreatzai would be most comfortable. A further thought: it was considerate of the Lingk-kreatzai never to have made any mention of what were presumably the discomforts of spending most of their time in an environment designed for Humans and Pridehouse. It made her feel vaguely guilty.

An enraged shout from the far end of the passage along which they were slipping and sliding scattered all her guilty impulses: she could gather them again later.

"You scum! Scum! Rapist! Scum!"

They burst through a further door.

The cabin was ovoid, its interior entirely coated with mud. At one end huddled Ilyano and Hein. Hein had a gash at the side of his throat which he was trying to staunch with his hand; blood flowed freely between his fingers. His other arm was around Ilyano's shoulders. Her face, smeared muddily, was a mask of fear.

At the other end of the cabin was Kareed. He was yelling further obscenities at Hein as if his mouth were producing the unchecked stream of words without his own volition.

". . . childfuckersonstufferdaughterkillerLingkshrouder . . ."

Kareed was clutching one of the metal forks from the dining-room. There was blood on its tines.

Strider took control immediately.

"I think he doesn't like you," she said curtly to Hein. Her voice cut through the gummy air. Kareed's string of abuse stopped abruptly.

There wasn't silence in the room—too many people were heaving for breath—but it felt as if there were.

Strider, moving with impossible dignity across the miry surface down the slight slope to the center of the cabin, pulled her lazgun from its holster. Deliberately she turned her back on Kareed and this time spoke directly to Hein.

"Why doesn't he like you?" she said.

Hein tried to answer her, but obviously had difficulty speaking. The blow Kareed had struck with the fork must have bruised his larynx—at least, Leander hoped this was all the damage that had been done apart from the slash.

Ilyano spoke for him.

"Hein and I were making love," she said.

Out of the corner of her eye Leander watched Orphanwifer. Ilyano was the wife he had chosen to bring with him. The Lingk-kreatzai males were far more concerned about marital bonding—its responsibilities and its obligations—than the Humans and certainly more so than the Pridehouse, whose happy promiscuity was astonishing. But Orphanwifer showed no reaction. Leander had always suspected that on occasion Orphanwifer conquered his instinctive possessiveness to let Kareed share Ilyano's affections—or perhaps it was she who had insisted and Orphanwifer who had complied.

Ilyano looked up at Orphanwifer. "He is a very appealing male," she said, referring to Hein.

"I know this wasn't the first time," said Orphanwifer complacently.

"You do?"

"Well, I didn't bloody know," said Strider. "You might have mentioned, Hein."

Again Hein tried to speak. Again he failed.

Leander kept looking at Kareed. Through her secondary retinal screen she enlarged the image of his face, then lowered her gaze towards the fork he still held in his tightly clenched fist. His hand—the whole of his forearm—was shaking with wrath. At any moment he could erupt.

And Strider had her back to him.

Anyone else would have been attacked by now, but Strider had imposed her strength of will upon the entire cabin.

There was no guarantee that Strider's spell would maintain its stranglehold grip much longer.

"So what's your grump, Kareed?" said Strider icily, still not turning towards him. "Can't see any raping going on around here. Bit of miscegenation but, hell, what's that between consenting adults?"

Out of sight of Kareed, Strider was readjusting the setting of her lazgun. Leander felt relieved. If Kareed were stupid enough to go for her Strider would injure and maybe maim, but not kill—or, at least, not kill intentionally.

Kareed gave no answer except for a rage-filled, resentful snort.

"It happens rarely among us," said Orphanwifer, "but it does happen."

"What happens? A Lingk-kreatzai turns into a homicidal nut?" said Strider. She was almost caressing the lazgun. Leander knew she meant to use it.

"Lingk-kreatzai males are murderously aggressive between each other in their infancy," said Orphanwifer, his voice as quiet as before. "It is a trait we have occasionally tried to breed out of our species."

"Oh yeah? Only occasionally?"

"For all we know, it may be essential to our species' survival."

Orphanwifer made a move towards Strider, but she waved him angrily away with the lazgun. This was her show, and at the moment it was running according to her script, her expression said. Interference from the assistant director could screw up everything.

"Sometimes a male reverts to infantile behavior," said Orphanwifer, retreating again. "It's a sort of intellectual neoteny—as if he never grew entirely out of childhood, but retained that same aggression somewhere under the adult veneer."

"Oh, great. So any of you lot could become ranting psychopaths without warning?"

"As I have said, it is most unusual," Orphanwifer replied, trying to soothe her.

As well he might, thought Leander. With Kareed only just under control and Strider's temper fraying, this could get to be a bloodbath.

She took a step forward herself. Strider glared at her, but she paid no heed. Not all the assistant directors' ideas were bummers.

"What's the matter, Kareed?" she said. "Who is it you're jealous of? Orphanwifer, because Ilyano's his wife? Hein, because Ilyano wants to screw him from time to time for a change? Ilyano herself, because she has the free will to choose who she fucks? Or is it all of us, everyone inside Artificial Environment 17,863,006?"

The Lingk-kreatzai's head dropped. His fingers relaxed and the fork dropped with a plop into the floor's mud.

Leander splodged over to sit down beside him, deliberately letting her shoulder rub against his. She put her hand on his muddy thigh. He flinched, but then accepted the touch.

Trying not to let her movements show the nervousness she was feeling, she leant her head against his. She was aware that Strider had at last turned around, and that the lazgun was now pointing directly towards Kareed, but she tried to shut the awareness out of her mind. If the Lingk-kreatzai wanted to, he could throw her in front of him, use her as a shield. The less she thought about this eventuality, the less he was likely to think about it either.

Hope so.

"He took Ilyano," muttered Kareed towards his own knees. The Images translated his tone as that of a Human child on the verge of a tantrum.

"She took him," Leander said. "That's another way of looking at it."

Orphanwifer was with the couple at the far end of the ovoid, and seemed to be applying pressure to a point on Hein's throat a few centimeters below the wound. The big Lingk-kreatzai could move very quietly when he wanted to. Leander assumed he knew what he was doing.

"I don't believe that," said Kareed. His shoulders were slumped in hopelessness, in humiliation.

Too much hopelessness and humiliation?

"She's Orphanwifer's bride," Kareed continued. "He allowed Ilyano and me to play together—I knew that, even if she didn't—but he would never have permitted her to lie with someone who was not of the Lingk-kreatzai."

"Are you sure?"

Kareed's fists suddenly tightened, and he leant his head forward until it was almost between his legs.

Leander let him weep in that painful, tight way of his for a few moments, then said: "The person who is tending Hein at this moment is Orphanwifer—look, see. Orphanwifer bears no grudge. Why should you?"

The words came choking out of him as individual packets rather than as a sentence. "Because—to—Orphanwifer—she—is—just—a—wife—but—to—me—she—is—a—loved—one."

"Have you asked Ilyano about this?" said Leander casually. The fingers of her left hand were beginning to twitch. She didn't know how long she could keep this up: the guy was insane, that was all there was to it. Back in the Solar System he'd have been cured by medbots or, if they couldn't manage it, taken somewhere where more advanced machines could cure him—assuming they ever could. Here there wasn't even a medbot. She could feel the tenseness of his shoulder muscles—it was almost like a thrum in her ear. Perhaps it'd be better if she got out of the way and let Strider do what she suspected Strider secretly wanted to do—deal with the problem by zapping it, then picking up the pieces later.

No. That wasn't right. There were so pitifully few of them aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006 that the loss, even if only temporary, of one of them was a loss too great to be tolerated.

"No," said Kareed. "Why should I?"

"She's not a slave."

"She's a wife."

For a split second redness filled Leander's vision. She had to stop herself reaching for the fork in the mud beside Kareed's ankles. No, don't do that. Different species have different ways.

"She's Orphanwifer's wife," Leander said with all the self-control she could muster, "yet you've screwed her a few times, haven't you?"

"That was with his permission."

The urge to reach for the fork became almost unmanageable. Cool down, cool down.

"Ever wanted to have sex with me? With Strider? With Maria?"

Kareed said nothing. Leander took this as an admission.

"You could have asked," she said. "Instead you decided to get jealous of everyone else, didn't you? Have a little think about this. Polyaggle's the last of her species. Segrill might as well be, unless we can get this ship back from the Twin Galaxies and stay alive in the process. Hilary may not live long enough ever to meet another child again. You're really so jealous of them?"

Kareed erupted into motion.

Leander was slammed back against the curving wall of the cabin, and for a fraction of a second could see nothing but a grimy orange cloudbank. She struggled with waves of unconsciousness: they were splashing ashore from a dark sea into which she would have gratefully plunged, but she fought off the temptation.

Kareed was partway towards Strider. He had reclaimed the fork and was holding it high above his head, ready to stab downwards with it.

Leander kept the scene in focus with difficulty.

There was a flare of light.

Kareed dropped into the mud. There was a high keening noise which Leander realized after a little was not some thighputer malfunction but Kareed's thin scream.

The Lingk-kreatzai was so tucked up around himself that it seemed his body had tied itself into a knot. His scream ebbed until once again he was sobbing—huge, strangled sobs that had little to do with the pain of whatever wound Strider's lazgun had inflicted on him. Clapping her hands against her temples, Leander forced herself to focus yet again.

"What have you done to him?" she shrieked.

"Stopped him trying to kill people," said Strider, her voice harsh. "If I've got to, I'll kill him."

"No!" Leander shouted. The shout made her head feel as if someone were trying to split it in two with a rather blunt axe.

She scrabbled on her hands and knees across the muddy floor, losing her balance on her hands more often than not, once collapsing sideways to land painfully when a knee shot out from under her.

"Stay clear," she heard Strider saying, but she didn't allow the words to have any meaning for her.

She reached Kareed's squirming body at last. He didn't seem to look so much like a Human any more—rather, he was a vastly overgrown fetus, his face and his flesh wrinkled from the coldness his wound was sucking into his body, from his pain, from his humiliation.

Strider's foot was clamped across the wrist of the hand in which, somehow, Kareed still gripped the fork. Leander prized the implement—the weapon—out of his fingers and hurled it away somewhere behind her. She was panting as loudly as if someone had just punched her in the diaphragm—and her torso felt that way, too. The pain at the back of her head was tiny by comparison.

She lifted up Kareed's head and slid her knees under his shoulders, for the first time grateful for the slimy mud. She lowered his head on to her thighs. His eyes were tight shut. He must still have been moving when the bolt from the lazgun hit him, because there was no neat hole in his shoulder: instead it seemed as if much of the joint had been burnt away.

Leander stared up at Strider.

"Did you have to do that?" she said, eyes narrowing.

Strider looked neither defensive nor aggressive, merely contemplative, as if she'd just fixed some minor gadget and was wondering whether or not it would work as well as it had before.

"I didn't want a fork in my throat," she said, her voice as dispassionate as the expression on her face.

Ilyano and Orphanwifer came to stand beside them, with Hein just behind them. Even through her bitter passion—the bitterness bordering almost on hatred—Leander noticed that it was to Orphanwifer, not Hein, that Ilyano clung.

"Shall I finish him?" Strider said to Orphanwifer.

"No!" screamed Leander again. She stroked Kareed's muddy hair.

Strider ignored her.

"He's nothing but a liability," Strider said conversationally, "running around attacking people. He could it do some time when it'd mean us all getting killed. 'sides, I'm not sure if that shoulder wound's going to heal in a hurry—we haven't exactly got any five-star hospitals around here. What d'you think?"

Orphanwifer gave a deep rumble of a sigh. "We of the Lingk-kreatzai, once we are adults, do not kill other intelligent beings and certainly not ourselves—unless we are insane, like Kareed, or unless it proves absolutely necessary because the person is terminally ill and in pain."

"We Humans have a bit less compunction," said Strider peremptorily. "Anyway, he's in pain—quite a lot of it, I'd guess—and that wound could easily prove a bit on the terminal side, huh?"

"Maybe we can do something for him," Orphanwifer said in a somber voice, as if doubting his own half-pessimistic optimism.

"Think so?"

"It's possible."

Strider holstered the lazgun. "Well, I don't want to lose a crew member—there are far too damned few of us already. At the moment, though, your friend Kareed isn't an extra member of the crew—he's a minus number when it comes to counting us up. As I said, he's a liability. He does this sort of thing again and he's not going to be a minus number any longer: he's going to be a zero."

Leander began to feel calmer. She couldn't understand why she felt so strongly about Kareed not being killed. She didn't even like the guy. He gave her the creeps, with his furtiveness and the sly way he would never look you in the face, as if there were some evil little scheme being dreamt up behind those inscrutable, evasive eyes.

"Let's go see what we can do about Hein's throat," said Strider. "In our quarters we've got bedding and stuff we can use for bandages."

"I've packed the wound with mud," said Orphanwifer, his voice less doubtful now that the moment of immediate danger was past. "If this truly replicates Lingk mud, its curative properties are considerable."

"On Lingk-kreatzai tissues," said Strider sharply. "Still, it's probably the best hope we've got. Shit, but even back home in the oh-Jeez-that's-the-place-those-real-jumped-up-primitive-Humans-come-from Solar System we could have Hein out of pain within seconds and get his neck tissues regenerated within half an hour, max."

Orphanwifer seemed not to notice the sneer in her voice.

"Yes," he said. "But here we must do the best we can. Don't underestimate the mud. And don't underestimate Ilyano's skill—she's not just here because she's my wife, you know. She heals."

"Healed the twitching of Hein's cock a few times, it seems," said Strider sarcastically. "Hell, it takes me bloody ages to get him off to sleep so's I can have a rest." Her tone changed into one of earnest curiosity. "How'd you do it, Ilyano? You got a mallet, or something, or have you found he's got an off-switch?"

Hein looked foolish. Leander realized the transmuted Pridehouse had just learnt something about Humans that he hadn't known before. Odd, because Pridehouse males were among their own kind the most considerate and gently playful of lovers. Like Nelson, in fact. She hardly ever climaxed with him inside her, but there were so many other things he could do to bring her to orgasm. She had become so close to him these past few weeks that now he could manage it just by cracking one of his dire jokes while she lay in his arms, her fingers counting his ribs.

"You coming with us, Maloron?" said Strider. "Or are you going to carry on being nursie for a bit?"

"Kareed needs help as well," Leander said.

"I want to get Hein bandaged up first. People who attempt murder come last on the list."

"You almost murdered him."

"Nope. I almost did my painful duty as a captain. Individual rights—great concept, but it's crap. I still think maybe I ought to have killed him. He's got individual rights to the exact point where the exercise of them starts threatening the safety of the crew as a whole—got that?"

Yeah. It made sense. It just seemed . . . brutal. Logical and ethically sound but brutal. Back home they'd have put Kareed somewhere safe and maybe they'd have cured him after a bit; either way, he'd have had a happy life, insofar as he could. Out here they didn't have the luxury of being kind to the maniac. That was the way it was. Leander was glad she wasn't in Strider's job. It required a ruthlessness she didn't possess. Yet she knew that Leonie was also someone of considerable compassion; that must make it even worse for her. It was Strider's compassion, not Orphanwifer's persuasion or Leander's yelling, that had saved Kareed's life.

"C'mon," said Strider to the others. "Let's go get Hein strapped up. We can come back for Kareed."

"I'll stay with him."

"You sure you want to?"

"Look at him," said Leander. "He's in agony. He needs somebody to be with him."

"Each to her own," said Strider with a shrug.

She turned away. A moment later the door closed behind the four, leaving Leander alone with Kareed's helplessly shuddering body.

Leander stroked his hair again.

"Hey, come on, you're going to pull through," she said quietly, almost as if it were the first line of a song.

His body gave a sudden convulsion and before she knew anything his hand was about her throat, tugging with sharp fingernails, trying to tear the flesh away.

She had no breath. All she felt were the pain and the strength of his grip. She shoved at his shoulders, but succeeded in doing nothing except increase the agony at her neck. The pain made the light of the room fade until she could see nothing except dark purple. She tried to roll away through the mud. This time she had more success. His grasp on her throat grew no less tight, but she sensed that the unexpectedness of her maneuver had unsettled him, cost him his balance. She kicked out blindly in the direction where she knew his body must be, and he gave an ooomf of shock as her toes dug into some soft area of flesh.

His fingers eased momentarily, and she was loose.

It wasn't going to do her much good. She couldn't see anything through the advancing curtains of purple. She couldn't see him.

She rolled over and over in the mud, getting away from him. Just how wounded was this bastard?

"Whore mother!" she heard him bellow. "You're . . . bad as . . . she is!"

"You want to reason this one out?" she said, pulling herself up on to all fours.

His kick took her on the right breast and she was tumbling and turning again. Her back slapped against the wall of the cabin. She hardly felt it, because the pain of her breast was excruciating. No one was supposed to live through pain like this.

Fuckit. She'd saved his life. Fuck him.

She moved on to the offensive.

"Not much, are you, Kareed?"

Another kick. This time some instinct made her turn her head just at the last moment so that his foot broke her cheekbone rather than crushed her larynx.

Nothing he could do to her now could increase the pain. Her body already had a surfeit. She'd heard somewhere that victims of torture soon reached a point where all the new things that were done to them made no difference: they reached a place where they couldn't feel pain any more.

"Bit of a failure, eh?" she gasped, goading him.

Maybe that was a bit of light she could see now, flitting around the edges of her vision.

"Ilyano fucked with Hein because she wanted to. Got that? Face it, buster."

She felt his fist club her face on the other side from her broken cheek. This time there was no sound of splintering bone.

He must be right in front of her.

She swung her arm round in a vicious arc to hammer his shins, and had the satisfaction of hearing him yell in agony and fall heavily.

"Pick on blind people? Oh, yeah, big strong Kareed. Wow, all the girls must really respect you."

There was a bit more light now. She heard him stagger to his feet and saw a hint of dark movement out of the side of her right eye. She rolled away from the movement and heard a swish as yet another kick narrowly missed the side of her head.

He'd fallen again.

She could hear it hurting him. With luck he'd fallen on his damaged shoulder. She hoped so. Bastard. He deserved it. Nuts or not, he deserved it.

Leander shot a foot out in the direction of his whimpering. Her stiffened toes struck him directly in the mouth and he shrieked in surprise and agony, then tried to bite her.

He didn't have enough teeth left to gain a grip.

She kicked at him again. This time she didn't know which bit of him her foot hit, but his grunt told her that she'd made another lucky impact.

"Guess what, Kareed," she said, trying to make her voice even, "you can't even beat up someone who can't see you. Tried picking on any cats recently?"

There was a glare of laser light that she could see even through her blindness.

Kareed, who had been flopping noisily around on the muddy floor, was suddenly still.

"Good job I came back," said Strider.

#

They couldn't think of any way of burying Kareed so in the end they just stuffed him into a cupboard that was far enough away from the accommodation block—barracks—to make it unlikely they would be troubled by the smell.

It seemed callous, but in fact callousness wasn't their mood. Orphanwifer said a few words of praise for his dead colleague as they jammed the door shut—prowess as a technician, possessed of a wry wit when the mood took him, nimble with numbers, and so forth. There wasn't a lot about what a much loved guy Kareed had been: that would have been stretching credulity a bit too far.

Even so, Strider did feel a genuine grief as she stood with the rest in the anonymous corridor. All she had ever felt for Kareed was a sort of pitying contempt, but nevertheless he had been a part of her crew—he had been one of hers.

When Orphanwifer had finished she said: "I wish . . ." The rest of the sentence escaped her. She had been the executioner, so it seemed wrong.

"But certainly," said Orphanwifer. "You lead us. You must."

"I'd like to say a few things," Strider said. Orphanwifer looked as if he wanted to move away from the cupboard door and give her the stage to herself, but she refused to let him go.

"This could have been any of us, you know—it could have been me. Kareed's dead because killing him was the only way we as a community could cope with someone who'd cracked up, who'd become dangerous to the rest of us."

Oh, hell, she thought. It sounds as if I'm trying to justify myself—like I was Kaantalech, pretending I hadn't enjoyed an act of slaughter but had just done it out of duty.

"I don't want it to happen again—ever. If you think your gears are slipping, tell someone. If you think someone else's are, tell someone." But I don't want to institute some kind of secret police. "It's not surprising that someone among us went nuts—could have been any of us, as I said."

She looked at the pathetic little gathering—at the back of which the Main Computer, in the form of one of the holos, was observing. Hein's neck was a mass of improvised bandages. Maloron's face—as much of it as could be seen—was puffy and bruised, and her chest was covered in torn strips of cloth.

"Like, if you saw that someone had broken a limb and was trying to pretend they hadn't, you'd tell everyone else. You wouldn't try not to hurt their feelings, OK? Same goes if someone cracks. We can't fucking afford it, is what I'm trying to say. We could have lost Maloron here—almost did. She's a loada shit in a lot of ways, because if she hadn't been so dumb and sentimental about this asshole she wouldn't have got her face kicked in, but she can manipulate data through her thighputer in a way that could save all of our lives. We'd all have looked pretty goddam stupid if our ace number-cruncher had snuffed it for the sake of keeping some loony alive so's he could kill us all."

ARE YOU SURE THIS ENCOMIUM TO KAREED IS GOING EXACTLY ACCORDING TO PLAN, LEONIE? said Pinocchio.

Shut up. Er, no. I'll wind it up as soon as I can.

"None of us much liked Kareed—offhand, I can't think of a good reason to. He was a shifty little shit, and I would suggest in all honesty that Orphanwifer made a serious misjudgment in bringing him along. But I'd like us to spend a short while trying to think of all Kareed's virtues—well, any virtue. Let us not, we gathered here together, think any the worse of Kareed just because he was a vindictive sliver of cold snot who'd probably have let us down when we most needed him. A moment's silence, please, in respect for our dear departed colleague."

After a few seconds there was a patter of applause. A very gentle patter.

"I think that went rather well, don't you?" said Strider to Orphanwifer as they walked together back down the corridor at the head of the funeral party.

"You have . . . an unusual eloquence," said the Lingk-kreatzai.

#

Segrill had avoided the funeral. It wasn't just that he'd hardly noticed Kareed's existence, it wasn't just that he thought that funerals were rather sick affairs, and it wasn't just that he had the fear that, being so much smaller than the others, he might find himself locked into the cupboard with Kareed's decomposing corpse.

He wanted free time in the Pocket.

He hadn't been one of the technologists on F-14, but he'd known and understood much if not most of what they were up to. He was the nearest thing to a weaponry expert the crew aboard Artificial Environment 17,863,006 possessed. Everyone—even Strider—tended to forget that, because he was small, so that it was difficult for them to think of him as anything other than negligible in every other way.

He studied the weapons configuration of Artificial Environment 17,863,006, and nodded. Yes, this was the way he'd have set it up himself. The vessel was virtually impregnable from any direction. If something like a maxbeam caught it straight on it might be in difficulties, but catching it straight on would be tricky because of its polyhedral form: most beams of any kind—not just maxbeams—would do a bit of damage but then find themselves bounced back harmlessly into the vacuum. Artificial Environment 17,863,006 had a defensive shield, but it hardly needed it. The exterior of the death machine was built out of something that didn't differ much from The Wondervale's deadmetal: it was a pretty safe place to be, assuming the technology in the Twin Galaxies wasn't radically different from that of The Wondervale.

Silly assumption.

No: not that silly.

There are natural limits to what technology can do, wherever you might happen to be in the Universe. The laws of physics hold.

Well, usually.

Segrill was less interested in Artificial Environment 17,863,006's defenses than in its attack capabilities. Whatever weapons it had in its armory would presumably be possessed also by the enemy death machines. If there was anything arcane here, then perhaps Artificial Environment 17,863,006 wasn't as invulnerable as it appeared. He thought at the Pocket that he wanted a general analysis, and it immediately began to obey.

Most of the stuff was pretty standard: intramolecular disrupters, maxbeams, sternian activators, ftl pulsenukes, rotary locks, implosion bolts . . . He swept them out of his thoughts, and hence out of the Pocket's analysis.

There were only a few weapons types that he hadn't encountered before. He decided to take them one by one, getting the Pocket to describe their functioning, uses and effects as best it could.

Then he'd try to hook up the Pocket to the Main Computer. He had a feeling that this was an area in which it would respond to questioning: it liked to show off, after all.

With a pleased little chirrup, Segrill settled down to a long session of work.