Along The Lay Of Space

ALONG THE LAY OF SPACE

By H. C. Turk

Book I

Victory

Chapter 1

Prime Time In Her Bath

        The suicide planet resembled Earth except for its killing machines. In this fine, flat landscape of handsome forests, the semi-organic chambers only seemed out of place because of their function. The six humans preparing to remain seemed out of place because they would be the only living people on the planet.

        The Prime Minister of the surveying staff felt no remorse for abandoning certain of her fellows on this world of death.

        "Dears, I'll understand if anyone wants to change its mind," Prime in her sweet voice told her colleagues. "You won't have to feel bad, because everyone in the boat volunteered regardless. President Hervieux didn't order you to stay, after all, only suggested it. I don't think it's such a bad idea."

        "I find it a tremendous suggestion," Science Intensive added. "Even though our resources will be limited, surely we will learn a great deal about these sentients while waiting for your return. We will learn much about the Victorians' knowledge."

        No person changed his, her, or its mind. Not the survey boat's science executive, the administrator---Prime's second---the spare empath, the paired nongens, nor the documenter. Only Security had qualms, and he was leaving. Secure had qualms because he was leaving his lover behind. Empath would not begin her good-byes with him.

        The nine Canadians stood on sandy soil between the suicide chamber and the boat's lift. The latter resembled a rectangular metal mushroom, the riders being suspended about the stem. The former seemed the reconstituted stump of a huge tree. A residue on the chambers' exhaust described a humanlike organism whose members had turned to soot. Ritual suicide was the strong implication. Due to their victory in discovering a sentient race, the surveyors called these aliens "Victorians".

        "The only sentients we've ever found, and they had to kill themselves," Con moaned.

        Being the boat's integrating empath, Controller's emotional involvement was understandable. A greater emotion was his connection to his friend and protege.

        "You know I feel bad about leaving you here," he told Empath quietly.

        "Yes, I know," she smiled in return, and clasped Controller's hand, "but you're needed to guide the boat home. I love it here already," she smiled brilliantly, then moved closer, turning so that only her superior could hear. "I love the responsibility, Con. On the boat, I'm only a spare."

        "The key to ultimate empathy is having a family as wonderful as mine," Control smiled to his friend. "It's a little more important to me because I had no family as a youth, but I have one now. So will you one day," Con told her with an especially warm expression as he looked to Secure. "Then you'll have enough Manifestic empathy to guide your own surveying boat."

        The lift chirped. Turning, Prime listened to a message that only she could hear. Raising her eyebrows was a virtually extravagant expression for this reserved professional.

        "Time to go, dears," she told the staff of sentience surveyors. "The sooner we leave, the sooner we can return with Sec's dad and a research population."

        "I don't know if Analyst will leave Earth for a mere, immortal discovery," droll Security returned, and Intensive proudly stated:

        "I am so looking forward to working with our analytic head, one of the hemisphere's finest theoretical---"

        "Why hemisphere?" Secure interrupted. "You don't think he's good enough to rank in the whole world?"

        Science Intensive only opened and closed his mouth before Secure concluded.

        "Quit running for office, Intensive," he grumbled with no anger, "Canada already has a president."

        Tall Secure then looked down to find two bodies against him.

        "Good-bye our colleague and"

        "Most excellent friend," Non began and Gen concluded.

        "Hey, we're talking a few weeks," Secure told them as he squeezed a shoulder with each hand, then firmly smacked their backs.

        The twin people, middle-aged but appearing as bright youths, stepped away with pleased expressions and bid good-bye to Con and Prime with equal embraces. Though melancholy at the separation, nongens were never passionate.

        Brief handshakes were exchanged by Prime, Sec, and Con, who were leaving, and Administer, Intensive, and Register---the documenter---who would remain. To his surprise, Secure received a quick embrace from Register. This older artist was usually so moderate in his emotion. Secure did not know that when Empath bid adieu to her friends, then turned to take her fiance's hand, Register felt cheated. Sec did not know that only Register could not look when the lovers kissed.

        She smelled magnificent. No applied scents, but Empath's individual fragrance displayed her personality to Secure, as though a delicate, unique mark in the air. They held one another, Sec looking down to green eyes that with his poor color vision seemed brown. He loved her breathing, that pulsed inhalation whenever she was near; for whenever she stepped to him, her lips parted and her respiration changed, improved, Em now scanning Security but seeing even less than he, for she was the empath, and felt more than she saw. With Secure, she felt a love no less satisfying for being conventional, the duration implied a lifetime, not an affair. As the two prepared to separate, their emotional expertise seemed exchanged, for Secure was the one who felt dread at leaving his fiancee behind. He feared not danger, but loneliness. Empath forced herself to be ensconced by her duty, and felt as sure of her time ahead as a working empath did when guiding an ether boat across the stars via impure instantaneity.

        He would not remember her kiss, the application of lips and proximate tongues. In Security's recollection, this embrace would exist as a sense of singularity with Em, a continuity of character ended by their improperly being separated into a pair of individuals. Security left his love behind. Feeling fine about the separation because of its brevity, Empath set her lover aside for the future.

        "I love you, Matilda."

        "I love you, Ernie."

        Apart from restrained sorrow, the two commingling groups felt the pride of their accomplishment: having discovered another sentient race. But the surveyors' pride was akin to their parting, tinged with melancholy, for the sentient people they found were dead.

        Administer had the final say. "Don't worry, folks. It's a safe place unless you want to commit suicide. We have too much to live for." Then he waved good-bye.

        The departing surveyors attached themselves to the orbit lift via hip grips, appearing to stand against the stem attached only by thin belts. In moments, the lift had absorbed enough gravity to return the force to the planet in the form of rejection, the lift and its cargo pressed with increasing rapidity out of sight.

        As the atmosphere thinned, the orbit's lift wrapped the occupants in sealed air. After docking with the ether boat---which resembled a small, flat-roofed building---Prime moved quickly to the control office to begin the process of interstellar translation. Con was the key here, for he guided the Manifestic exchange of vacuum volumes via a bias current of emotion, that most subtle of human controls. He prepared himself by greeting his wife and daughter. Con then connected his lymphatic and nervous systems to the boat.

        A two-week voyage would return the sentience surveyors forty parsecs to Earth. During that time, Earth's sole surveying boat would sort through the ether. In denouement, a segment of the galaxy would bypass the boat at zero interval, several days as humans fly along the lay of the space.

        The surveyors were embarrassed at the president's flashing skin. In the Maple Office, Madeleine Hervieux sat on an antique 21st-century complas chair with her legs crossed. She wore a dress. At the garment's hem, the president's left knee was visible. Again, the surveyors felt some remorse that Canada's president, though their leader in all major decisions, was not among them in being a New Prudist. At least she didn't wear tight pants.

        Security's father, Analyst, thought she had nice legs.

        "I have not had such a satisfying news conference in years," Hervieux told her guests. "Not the first question did I suffer regarding Quebec's being sold to France. Not a single accusation did I bear about the funds from that transaction being wasted on space surveillance. You and your fellows, Miss Prime, have vindicated me and my career. You and your staff, Mr. Analyst, will refute the foolish notion that Quebec was abandoned in order to fund screwing around in space. I actually heard that. 'Screwing around in space.'"

        Becoming in pleated linen, Hervieux sat with an erect, elegant pose, small hands folded on her lap, facing a sofa full of sentience surveyors. Despite the president's leggy revelation, her mien was formal. Few people in Canada shared the surveyors' religious beliefs, the majority not offended by one sleek, mature knee. Most of the populace would find Hervieux sufficiently demure. Secure's father found her figure pleasant. He liked her terminology in describing the possibility of speciousness in extrasolar expeditions. He liked her small hands, her sleek lap.

        Sec wondered who cleaned this impeccable, expensive room. Perhaps those peripheral men. Just within sight, in every corner, stood a suited, dour man who seemed to be looking nowhere. Secure knew they were looking everywhere. Security recognized his own kind.

        "We are so very pleased, dear president, that our results are satisfying to you and our fellow Canadians," Prime returned after sipping her vegjuice.

        The president only smiled, so Analyst decided to speak.

        "Are we on?" he asked Hervieux

        He had filled a developing silence by nodding to the walls and speaking to the President of United Canada for the first time since their initial greetings that afternoon.

        The walls. Cursed with nothing so simple as a camera crew, the president had photon receptors in her walls, for she was a television show. For three hours every weekday, the president at work and play was displayed across the nation. It was said that she held the secret meetings required of a great executive in her bath.

        "No, Mr. Analyst, this is Gorbachev Day. Know The President is not shown on holidays."

        "Do you really hold secret meetings in the sandbox?" Analyst asked Hervieux. His son, not the president, quickly answered.

        "Thanks, Dad, for the tact."

        They had the same slump. Apart from lax shoulders, Analyst and son visually differed. Analyst was thick, average height; Secure tall, with bones just beneath the skin. But Analyst was not fat and Secure not skinny, both having a physical presence sourced from the sure moves of their every muscle. Prime was demure except for eyes that would fit a despot's face. The President could have been a queen. She continued speaking after Analyst shrugged.

        "So, you, sir, will head the research staff on the planet."

        Analyst looked to Secure at his left, at Prime on his right. His son shook his head, as though annoyed.

        "Yes," Analyst replied to the president.

        "And your specialty is...everything."

        Analyst looked to Secure at his left, at Prime on his right---and she answered for him.

        "Analyst will head the research population on Victory, Miss President, because of his career in generalist applications."

        "Are you one of those nongens, Mr. Analyst?" Hervieux wondered. "They as well are generalists, are they not?"

        "Gosh, I don't look sexless, do I?" Analyst asked as though innocent.

        Secure wanted to slap him. He wasn't speaking with a peer, but The President.

        "Many people," the president continued, "fail to understand how a person can be both sexless and human, the former being an intrinsic part of the latter. They believe these people should be in a monastery, not an ether boat."

        "Their lack of lust makes them marvelously versatile," Prime answered pleasantly. "Analyst is not short of lust."

        "I take it that nongens don't look up one's dress," Hervieux returned with a false smile, and Analyst looked away from the president's knee.

        All but one of the New Prudists blushed.

        "And 'empaths'," the president continued. "Miss Prime, you are certainly aware that some people still fail to believe that such a profession is genuine."

        "Whenever a species approaches sentience," Prime explained, "emotion becomes a burden. Empaths are wonderfully expert in emotion."

        "Don't hard scientists consider them nebulous?" Hervieux returned. "What of yourself, Mr. Analyst? Will there be a conflict of theoretics on the only planet besides Earth with a sentient race?"

        "Em is going to be my daughter," Analyst replied to Hervieux. "Forget the in-law part. That girl is family already. Con is my buddy, way deeper than theory."

        They were not called mister and miss and missus. Sentience surveyors were known only by their appellation of task. Analyst refrained from mentioning this to Hervieux. The president then became political.

        "I have invited you here today because you three will be included in the permanent research expedition on Victory. I must begin by stating the magnificence of your accomplishment. As long as mankind has understood the stars to be versions of our own sun, we have longed to find other mentalities to help us share the universe. You have found those friends, that people. The unparalleled outpouring of joy from virtually every person on Earth is the best explanation of your great success. Now I will explain your failure."

        "We didn't find dead people on purpose," Secure suddenly declared.

        "I can see whose son you are," Hervieux replied with a glare that cut to the back of Security's skull. "My reference is to our mutual safety. Residing on a planet whose temporary populace killed themselves seems risky, to say the least. If something goes wrong for you, it goes wrong for me. I do not want to be removed from office. If I am, the next president will not be allowed to sell a disruptive province in order to fund your project. No one loved Quebec more than I did, and still do---I was born there. What I'm saying is that if you go down, I go down, and I have never accepted defeat easily. So, let's not be delicate about this---if you ruin my career, I will ruin your asses."

        The surveyors left with salutations much less touching than those of Victory. They were removed from the presidential palace not by a sparse gravity lift, but a luxurious limo floater flanked by air superiority autos of Hervieux's personal guard. As the surveyors rose from the Mount Royal Palace grounds, exterior mikes supplied them with the sound of the city's celebration, as though the entire populace had gathered in the streets to shout their joy to the skies, to space.

        The surveyors' own joy was not dampened by a sound unheard, that of the president facing the photon walls after her guests left to shout, "Vive le QuŽbec libre!" then schedule a secret meeting with the opposition party during prime time in her bath.

Chapter 2

Pain Described Their Future

        "Any volunteers?" Administer quipped as he stood near the death device and looked to Empath.

        They all looked to her, all but Science Intensive. He did not have to look. The remaining sentience surveyors knew that Intensive wanted the useless empath to enter the alien chamber and exit as vapor.

        "This race had to be sophisticated---why would they want to kill themselves?" Ad quickly pronounced, attempting to draw his group away from an uncomfortable area, one of his own, inadvertent creation.

        Intensive cooperated. Since the administrator had stated Science's tacit idea, why blatantly demean the inferior staff member himself?

        "Of course, they did not all kill themselves," Intensive mildly replied, "only those who journeyed to this planet."

        "The ones on vacation," the first nongen volunteered.

        "Or sabbatical, or leave," the second added.

        "We may have achieved victory as surveyors by finding them,"

        "But we never expected this."

        Intensive looked to the nongens with disappointment. Empath understood their sin to be speaking while Science still had breath in his body. She, at least, was saying nothing, being uncomfortable in Intensive's presence. But Em did not feel the guilt that Science desired from her, the inferiority from her specialty's being insufficiently objective for the chief scientist. After Intensive's next speaking, however, Empath found that she had to reply.

        "Having verified via Register that the aliens' deaths were self-applied, I will soon determine the reason for their suicide, if I continue to receive the proper assistance. Now, let's have no more foolish talk about my wanting to throw the empath in because she's useless. Feely could be helpful if only she worked harder."

        She hated that word. Though accepting one's profession as a name was honorable in the society of sentience surveyors, in calling her "Feely", Intensive was not attempting warmth, but unkindness.

        "I work hard enough, Science," Em insisted. "You have everyone slaving along like livestock, as though there's some rush. As though you'll learn all about the aliens before the vacuum boat returns."

        "Oh, I am learning," Intensive announced, his smile as kind and warm as a curse, a smile that to Empath defined his personality.

        Science then began a pep talk, noting their accomplishments in the brief time since the boat had departed. Em ignored him. This was no flatball team---they were cultural surveyors, preliminary surveyors. Empath only wanted to do her reasonable best, and attempting to match the vast resources even then being assembled in Canada was not reasonable. Neither was Science Intensive.

        Em tried to ignore him, but failed. She was hurt. As expected, the empath was feeling, perhaps too much in this instance. She did not want to be considered useless, but could sense Intensive's disapproval as though an odor from overstressed pores. Somehow worse, she could sense the remaining surveyors understanding Intensive's view. Empath wanted to be accepted as their equal, not a subordinate. She also wanted to be accepted personally, as though all the surveying staff were a family. In the Victory family, Administer was the kindly uncle, alternately assuring and reasonable. Science Intensive seemed the prominent grandfather, a warrior-politician known to emphasize his relatives' imperfections. Empath was the lovely daughter, more the budding adult than the hardened professional, the group's emotional center. The two nongens were the beloved pets, having the best qualities of people, but lacking certain average traits. Not present was Register, the artist, an admired but somewhat distant cousin. But this family had no parents, had too much business and not enough love. This surveying staff, Em understood, was no family.

        She missed the boat. She missed that larger society whose insulation would have precluded Intensive's abrasions. She missed her family of friends: Prime and Controller and her true family, her upcoming family, but Empath could not, would not, think of Ernie.

        Em returned to her particular work as Intensive continued describing all his accomplishments of knowledge, his list of technical specifications. Empath did not want to hear. She did not want to hear of the aliens' electre sources and energy accumulators. She wanted to hear of the aliens as people, but Intensive could say nothing on that subject. Overburdened with her own people, Empath stepped to the suicide device; and, yes, it drew her. That was her feeling. Around her was a healthy world of mild weather and foliage whose richness implied all of nature, all of life; but before her was a chamber of artificial death, and Empath felt fear.

        As though actively murmuring its own cryptic interest, the impassive death device had gained her attention. The structure was just the size for one person to enter and never return. Attempting to be more objective, Em considered the chamber's physicality. What an economical shape, she thought---cylindrical with a flowing base---what an odd, pale and pulpy material used for construction, a material made from the soil below. Em then experienced a deeper feeling. She felt a rush of alienness that was the chamber's purposeful killing. So she stepped nearer to gain understanding, a comprehension that would purge her of the foreign emotion that made her feel empty and ignorant, yet filled with too much knowledge, knowledge of death.

        As Intensive spoke, Empath placed her hand on the structure, her touch more greeting than examination. Then she reached to the form's top, stretching in a uniform that fit too well for lonely men of a modest profession to view. Em knew they wanted to see her torso; she could feel this. And she could feel the device, sensing it more than ever before. Nothing new was on the warm surface to discover, but Em found something different within, something within herself.

        She lost the staff. The nongens, the most removed friends a person could have, completely left her mind. Firm and friendly Ad no longer existed in the world of her feelings. Forceful Science was absent from Em's universe as she gained an understanding from the chamber that caused her mouth and eyes to go wide, as though she had become an unknowing dunce. But Empath was learning. As she touched the chamber's surface, an impression from its interior or essence came to her, Empath believing that Intensive's technol discoveries had inspired her to learn in her own special manner. She had to speak, had to inform her associates; for just as they, the empath had a job to do.

        With one hand touching the chamber, Em spoke with a tone reminiscent of a child relaying a frightening discovery. Not facing her people but speaking to them all, she changed their surveying with a most alien phrase.

        "This is not for killing," she blurted.

        Administer's face showed concern, but Science became angered."What kind of empathic nonsense is that?" he snapped, the small man walking closer to Empath, his hard, athletic demeanor turned grossly authoritative. "I have proven that the Victorians vanished from the planet by vaporizing themselves with these chambers. What is this inanity about their not being for killing?"

        Always the moderator when Intensive became anxious, Administer spoke.

        "It does seem, Em," he submitted, "that the aliens came to this planet for meditative studies, culminating their religion by deciding that suicide was best for them."

        "Perhaps the...sensibilities allowing this decision," Gen began,

        "Are simply too sophisticated for our understanding," Non suggested.

        "Or our feelings," Science concluded. But how could he make so fine a word sound malicious?

        Em had heard too much of Intensive's aggression, too much of his need to Learn The Alien Truth, too much of her own lack of "productivity". Mild before, Em had changed with her latest feeling, her first alien emotion. Stepping away from the chamber, looking briefly at her hand as though enlightened words were written on her palm, Em remained as surprised at her discovery as she was assured of its verity. Aware that this alien knowledge was a human weapon suitable for establishing her place on the surveying staff, Empath turned directly to Science, surprising her fellows with the harshness of her confrontation.

        "I know what I'm talking about just as well as you," she declared. "If you don't believe that, then there's something wrong with your thinking, not my feeling."

        She stunned them with that assertion, the nongens alone able to respond. Arms flailing, Empath stalked side to side as the thick pair spoke. Consistently unkempt, they appeared coarse, but behaved so smoothly.

        "She must know what she's saying. After"

        "All, she is the empath."

        "The secondary empath," Science corrected them with no apparent rancor. "The primary integrating empath is with the vacuum boat. The staff could not have returned without Controller's integrating the concepts of the Manifestic poser. Supposedly, Feely can also control stellar positioning, but only with the boat, on the boat. Here she just wastes her time feeling. Don't forget, even her future father-in-law has no great regard for empaths."

        "Now, Science," Administer pronounced soothingly, Em hoping that she was not hearing condescension, "let's not quote Analyst when he's not present. Besides, an empath's ability to sense impressions of an idea system has been proven valid. Surely, as a scientist you admit that."

        "Regarding the established principles of the Actal Manifestic drive, yes," Science Intensive replied. "Regarding unfamiliar alien technols, of course not. An empath needs a concept base whose essences she might contemplate. But Feely knows nothing about the death devices---unless she's been reading the Victorians' dead minds. There's a difference between scientific concept and the semi-mysticism that Feely is always ready to preach."

        "Emotions," Non said,

        "Are as real as ideas," Gen concluded.

        The scientist disagreed."If an empath's abilities are so qualitatively verifiable, then Feely should be able to specify more concretely than just, 'It's not for killing.' Well, Feely, can you tell us something real? If this is not a suicide device, what is it?"

        Em's reply, though factual, was all feeling.

        "I don't like being called 'Feely,' and you know it, Science. You call me that again and I start calling you Fishshit."

        Then she walked away. With a sly, humorless smile, Intensive requested that Administer discipline her, but the group leader let that idea---that feeling---fade. He was not alone in being astonished by Empath, not just her illegal obscenity, but by an anger never displayed before, a condition that, considering its moderate source, seemed equal to fury. The empath walked away, and her startled fellows stared.

        She was best to leave, for Em could not answer Intensive's question. She knew the devices were not for killing, they were for.... Empath had no end to that idea. She knew, however, that with further inspiration she would gain a feeling to reveal the chambers' purpose, their value beyond death.

        The little rodents did not like the empath. The pale green animals scurried to the surveyors to urinate on their feet, but one smell of Empath and they scurried away. She did not appreciate being so special, regardless of cleanliness. No other organisms on the planet were bothersome, not even the large felines constantly smacking their flat tails against tree trunks in a mating call. The humans' superior medicine neutralized all suspicious microorganisms. Walking down a long, grassy incline to the surveyors' settlement, Empath at the forest's edge found herself short of breath, and knew she should imbibe more oxygen lining. This, along with synaptic re-biasing to help their muscles compensate for the gravity disrepancy, was the only modification the surveyors required to be comfortable on this world, one ostensibly similar to Earth, although it felt so different, so...alien to the empath.

        Recalling the facts gleaned by the surveying staff, Empath felt a satisfying surge of pride. An advanced alien race had journeyed to this planet, then vanished. Their home world was unknown, their purpose here yet to be determined; but their end seemed clear: the chambers. The aliens had left little personal evidence behind, though body wastes revealed that the aliens had been present scant days before the humans arrived. Genetic examination of fecal cells described their essential physique: a foot-and-hands, head-and-face type of humanoid. No personal goods had been found, no attire or utensils. Only dozens of their death devices and a hundred larger buildings remained, scattered across an area of the planet presumably temperate to the aliens as well as humans. Unlike the surveyors' ad hoc shelters made of hardened plas gas, the alien edifices seemed friends; for everything the aliens experienced had been told to their buildings, and they recalled.

        Em was going to see Register, who was working within one of these buildings. Empath respected Intensive, but liked all the other surveyors present. Register, however, was her favorite in a most personal manner. Due to his poetic bent, Register had an emotional similarity to Empath. Although his specialty was collecting and collating data in all forms, Register via Intensive had found a new field of expertise on this planet. Of all the surveyors present, Register alone was adept at interfacing with the alien buildings, part-organic structures that stored data like a brain. The factor allowing Register's unique ability was unknown, but Empath guessed it to be aligned with his aesthetic sensibilities. Science, however, rejected her notion as insufficiently objective. If he couldn't count it, he did not believe it. But Empath believed.

        It seemed to be growing from the ground. The building suggested a smooth tree trunk made of ungrained stone, ten paces in diameter, with a curving, graceful roof. Less refined visually, the death chambers were impoverished kin in comparison. Unlike those smaller structures, the buildings had no discrete, moving entry mechanism, but a subtle slot that seemed too narrow to pass even an infant. Again, Empath was surprised to step against the slot and find herself entering a baffle, a half turn, and into the building. Inside to another oddity, for the dull-colored buildings passed light within, though the contiguous walls were opaque from outside.

        She had often entered these buildings, but this latest passage was decisive. As she entered via the baffle, which not even Intensive could explain, Empath gained the striking impression that this building was not of her world, her life, her understanding. Though the latter was changing with each new alien sensation to strike her, Em was not certain how well she would handle the knowledge when it finally came not as feeling, but as experience. She knew it was coming. She felt it.

        Once inside the building, Empath felt calmer, though scarcely more comfortable. The non-segmented interior surfaces were all the same, like thick, no-sheen glass rife with flowing cracks, these striations part of the physical mechanism for energy storage and data retention. Em considered these buildings the highest evolution of architecture, a homogeneous structure of a single part, the construction and function inseparable. The interior held no loose objects, no furnishings, markings, or perceptual displays. The aliens gained data access to their buildings without crass physical connection, without sensory intrusion. They did not look and listen, instead using the electre activity of thought to connect with the striated material's compatible energy. Science Intensive, through his brilliance, had discovered these facts, had learned how to modify human psychological conjunctors to allow a person access to the buildings' data contents. Only one human had the knack, had the proper cognon capabilities: Register, who sat inside amidst discrete, human devices, and tried to read the building's mind.

        "This trash instrument gives me gibberish," he moaned upon seeing Empath, and jerked away his brainhood, dropping it roughly against the wave/ray ascender.

        He was no youth. Register was no beauty. But Empath would rather be with, look at, and share effort with Register than any other surveyor, except one not present. One she could not contemplate and retain her professional mien.

        "I tried, and couldn't receive the first clear image," Empath mentioned.

        Stepping to Register, Em felt greater comfort, felt that by being near a person, she was farther from the building, which distressed her most not from being alien, but being misunderstood.

        "Yeah, lucky me," the poet replied, "I'm the one with the weird cognons."

        "What's it like, Reg?" Empath asked. "What's it like reading the building?"

        Smiling broadly, he answered in a falsely mysterious voice."Like entering a dream, Empath, someone else's dream. That's why I say I'm entering the building when I gain stored informations. I don't get distinct facts or anything like that. It's like, oh, poor memories, recalling something but not clearly. You have to keep thinking about it and thinking about it to understand."

        "But it can be dangerous, entering too deeply," Empath remarked.

        "That's because the building senses your trying to get more facts, and helps by making the process active instead of passive. Then instead of reading, I'm receiving. The problem is that humans haven't trained enough, or evolved enough, to accept psychological energy pumped into their heads. You see, energy held in the buildings is thermodynamic, but it's immediately available as electromagnetic. When the building senses your trying to enter deeply, it very cooperatively supplies data in the form of an odd electre wave that directly excites the brain cells' cognon functions. This is really great in itself, because it's a type of mind projection, but we don't have enough control over it. Of course, we can only receive, not send. Who knows what other great technols the aliens have that we can learn? Yeah, this one can hit back at you. Go too deep and you get a jolt like...well, it's almost like terror or rapture or something---I don't know. It's not fun. Still, it's not torture, though Intensive tells me that it can cause permanent change. He guesses what'll happen is that data will be injected so strongly into the mind that the thoughts will be experienced constantly."

        "How often have you gone too deeply, Reg?" Empath asked, then had a flash of concern. "You had better be careful," she pouted.

        "Only once really too deep. It was like nothing else," he said, and made a gesture with both hands as though packing his head full. "In one moment, I got a whole bag of...recollection. That was really clear, and just like remembering my own experience."

        "That's when you learned about...."

        "Yeah, I...recalled...people going into those little round boxes and dying. What's good is that Science verified it by checking the chambers' function. He's sure now that each Victorian entered and operated the thing by himself, or itself."

        With this surveyor, Em was not afraid to describe her empathic impressions, her alien emotions.

        "Register, I had a feeling a while ago. We were standing around one of the little chambers and I got the impression that they weren't made for killing."

        Register looked at her carefully, as though she were an artifact to examine, a recollection to contemplate. He found nothing unserious or unimportant there.

        "Empath, I know the aliens went in those things and were vaporized." Register spoke as though asking a question, as though seeking an explanation. Empath nearly had one.

        "I'm sure you're right, Reg, but I think there's no conflict. I don't know how, but I'm certain your facts and my feelings go together."

        "It's hard, Em, to choose an area of the buildings' data to study; but when I come across the death devices again, I'm keeping your impressions in mind. Please tell me anything new you feel; it can only help us. I always want to know what you think and feel, Empath."

        Then he changed. Register's friendly speaking became more personal with that last sentence. Looking down to seated Register, Empath saw his gaze become more ardent. Perhaps ardor was the word.

        "Empath, nothing, nothing is more important to me than your feelings. I had thought of you and me---us.... I could consider you.... Empath, Em, I wish Secure would find another fiancee, and you would find me."

        She immediately became embarrassed, her face hot. Register's response scarcely differed. He appeared frightened and awkward, like a subadult facing sex for the first time. Perhaps, in a way, he was.

        "Register, Secure and I are not parting," Empath blurted. "I appreciate you thoroughly, but if Security found someone else, I would never recover."

        Silent Register looked down, and Empath sensed dread. Never during their years of service or their time on the planet had she seen Register react with fear: with strength and concern, but not fear. She looked at him, and felt her own rejection. Register was disappointed and hurt, but Empath would not feel remorse for insisting upon the truth. She felt remorse for hurting her friend.

        "Please tell me the story," she requested quietly, and turned away, glimpsing the alien interior, but seeing nothing.

        Register calmed, in his expression, his breathing, going from too personal, past professional, and to his poetry. Reg was relieved to return to a subject that accepted his love. Anyone could feel that.

        "Despondent and dull/Mapleland steals enough money to spend on space/get the globe's attention/Seeking better techs than our common wonders/Like to find like minds/or better notions/any improvements or profundities accepted/Years to make these boats work/a new, no-duration process that seems like ages/all those needed for a voyage adding up to some time/Surveyors sent to likely stars, as chosen by no poet/We search for an ever to find fantastic algae/bugs beyond us/but nothing like people, not a thought/Dissatisfied Canada still with interest/Then we find them/Not Earth, but us, our boat, just the one, the most famous, placed in history/We find them, but they're gone/Traces of a race better than ours/gone for no good reason/volatile in the air, a dissipated vapor with remnant/The greatest mystery you could want/and we're lucky enough to be left/to study/to start/our humans versus theirs/The boat will return with resources, we six alone to get going/discovering more than could be presumed/via Ad's good guidance tending/to temper Intensive's science/via active nongens/and a poet's vision/While some dismiss the empath/others wait on her essence/expecting a feeling to reveal."

        Register then returned to work, ignoring Empath as he donned the brainhood and adjusted his equipment. Now Empath was startled, for the poet's last three lines were new. Em had never guessed the expectation Register expressed. She had not been left on the planet for revelations, only to provide emotional impressions if any should come. With Intensive in charge of the survey's scientific aspects, however, Em's chief duties were carrying gear and cooking. Never had she expected to be denigrated by Science, to feel useless to herself, to seem promising to Register, or find herself beloved by him. History's most incredible discovery and her part was disruption. She turned from the poet, turned from his shockproof boxes and bright panels, crude equipment considering their surrounds. She followed his guide, ignoring Register's activity as she left. But she could not ignore his cry.

        As though struck in the head, he gasped loudly and jerked the brainhood away, falling to his knees. Holding his forehead with both hands as though holding it on, Register looked down, breathing roughly. With no pause, Empath ran to his side, bending to look closely at his face, asking if he were hurt, but not touching him, not being so improperly intimate.

        He rose as though only to move away from Empath. He said he was not harmed. And he returned to his stool and his colorful gear, donning the brainhood again.

        Empath stepped back and looked, seeing strain on Register's face, seeing him continue work as though unaffected. He said nothing else, and suffered no more shocks. The only other change was Em's latest bout of empathy, her impression of the alien building and the human recorder, her feeling that Register's pain described their future.

Chapter 3

A Story From Another

        At least Science was not smug about Register's new intensity. The poet passed most of each day inside an alien building, connected to its memories. Constantly he recited impressions of recalled scenes into registering gear. Empath knew this, for she was the one to guide the staff's aircarts across the almost familiar landscape to buildings that seemed even more alien than before. She complained to Administer, who was properly concerned lest some alien scene become lodged in Register's head, one relived again and again, never to be removed. Why did it seem that Intensive had the final say?

        "Science, we've spoken of this before, about our goals here," Ad maintained. "We're just the preliminary staff---we can't learn everything about the Victorians in a few weeks, and I don't want to neuroze our personnel trying. Your work so far is exceptional, but don't let your admirable zeal overcome your good sense. Let's not turn the register into a burned-out sensing device."

        Unusually calm Intensive then corrected his superior.

        "Administer, Register's behavioral changes are not due to my zeal, but to Empath's rejection. Hard work is the best way he has of recovering from such a blow by an empath."

        "Science, if Register needs emotional recuperation from Empath's honest dismissal, working him to neuroze won't do it. As Science Intensive, you know that better than I."

        "The register is working hard, not dangerously," Science described. "No one under my jurisdiction will be allowed to endanger himself. Beyond that, how could anyone argue with our results? We are learning, Administer. We are learning of the aliens and their purposes here. By the time the boat returns from Canada, we will know the Victorians. We may know their home planet. Then, literally, the universe will be ours."

        Empath had to gasp at that overblown claim. But Science had a reply for her blatant scoffing. With his neck transceiver, he called for Register to join them. Resting on a carrychair in a nearby glade, the poet glided to his associates on the compact comforter and conveyance, followed by the nongens. Yes, Reg appeared harried. But what a story he had to tell.

        "Please, Register, recite the second part of your poem," Intensive requested, "that portion describing what we've most recently learned of the aliens."

        Weary Register then turned mechanically lethargic, reciting his latest composition, his latest alien memories.

        "Aliens beyond us in every sense/get sickened of complex living/their world all tech and no flesh/killing itself methodically/Some in a group vacate/to find a simple planet for living/not to study or learn/but to relax/not concerned about returning/Take enough tech for survival/Bored or brilliant, they find a new need/to become closer to life/and farther from their dying society/They abandon their buildings/to sleep in the brush/dispose of their clothes and nude it/leaving food makers static/and eat from the ground/Eat feces for a lark/use the all-in-all buildings to heal themselves/then back to chewing grass/Come to sense some real pure living/and like it/then want a closer feel/Build the little buildings to help purify their thinking/to make it narrow and deep/less thought and more comprehension/little chambers changing their minds to make it real/This is known/but the rest is a guess:/They lose too much thinking/perhaps/and change the chambers again/for certain/to melt their bodies/No explanation here/Bet our empath doesn't know."

        Unable to edit Register, Science could not prevent that final reference to Em, someone he did not want mentioned. Nevertheless, the remainder of the poem's latest section was virtually a paean to Intensive's accomplishment in making the aliens' recordings available to humans. Once again, dejected Empath had nothing to say.

        "Register has received excellent sensings of those events," Science told only Ad. "Only the nature of the doubly mentioned suicide initiatives remains speculative. Register is certain that the aliens' 'methodical' suicide by their home planet is meant literally, though I believe the small group of aliens who traveled to Victory were a religious cult that considered society in itself destructive. We do not know why this cult fled what they considered a suicidal society only to kill themselves here. Perhaps we will never be able to learn this from the alien buildings. After all, the insane cannot analyze themselves. Still, the reason for their self-extermination is one of the prime areas we are researching now. Ostensibly, they either became so primitive they went neuroze, or became so vastly sophisticated that the essence of life was revealed to them, and they gained immortality by eliminating their bodies."

        Intensive's smirk proved that he believed more in the aliens' insanity than their sanctity. Empath, however, found no humor here, and no hyperbole. She was chilled, thinking that perhaps, perhaps the aliens had discovered something of the kind. After all, Empath was certain that the alien chambers were not for killing, but for survival.

        The emotion struck her. Empath startled herself with this new impression. The chambers, one paces away, she had known they were not for killing. Now she felt their true purpose, and again was filled with a sense of alienness, of greater understanding that approached yet seemed impossible. Empath was filled with knowledge and filled with ignorance, feeling ill from confusion, from an overbearing sensation that was nearly tactile. As though to purge herself of stressful emotion, Empath shared her feelings.

        They knew. They all knew by Empath's changed expression, her features energized with fear. All of her colleagues knew that Em had gained some new empathic insight, and turned to her as she spoke.

        "The little buildings, Ad, the little buildings were made for survival. I can feel it."

        No one asked for proof. Those with confidence in empaths expected no concrete evidence for their impressions: empaths dealt in essence. Those without confidence included Science, but his reply to Em was wordless, for now it was Intensive's turn to scoff.

        After snarling toward Empath, Intensive spoke firmly to Ad, only Ad.

        "I have work to do, scientific research to undertake. You and the secondary empath can do the feeling. Register and I will be learning, if that's of any interest to you."

        Standing on the footstep of Reg's carrychair, he and the poet floated away. Like a cloud, Em thought, bad weather passing. This storm would return.

        "They're doing something significant, Empath,"

        "And are trying to hide it."

        "Science wants to surprise Ad,"

        "As though he could make himself more important than he already is,"

        "With only six of us on the planet,"

        "But not enough great discoveries for all."

        The nongens had approached Empath with a concerned tale. Before being found by Intensive tattling on him, they rushed back to work distinguishing artificial chems from those native to the environ. Administer prepared documents of this latest week on the planet. Empath had her own duties, but instead of recharging the food hatchers, she rushed to the building by the numbered ridge that the nongens had mentioned. Since Empath was dodging her responsibilities, she ran the distance, feeling that taking an aircart would be disreputable. Wasn't her plan of lying directly to Science dishonesty enough?

        He was surprised to see her enter the building. Empath felt the light sift in about her, felt uncomfortable, especially so to see Register ensconced in his alien memories. His eyes were rolled back, the poet not seeing Empath, not seeing anything, for his common perceptions were not in use. Connected between Intensive's devices and the alien structure, Register seemed in a limbo as though lost to both worlds.

        "What are you doing here?" Science confronted her. "You have work to do, the same as the rest of us. Can't you help this survey instead of hindering us?"

        "My work isn't like yours," Empath returned, "because I don't hide mine. The reason I'm here is because Administer wanted me to check on you."

        With his typical confidence, Intensive looked to Empath as though she were a misbehaving child."Why doesn't he just issue a call if he wants me?" Science pronounced. "Why send you? I think you're lying. And I think you don't lie well."

        "Then why not contact Ad yourself, Science?" Empath countered. "Then you can tell him what you're doing way out here. Everyone knows the buildings all have the same informational content, so why work in one so far away from our settlement? Maybe it's because you have Register's consciousness so deep in the alien data that you don't want anyone to know."

        Intensive smiled. No fury or hatred from him---and no defeat. Science always allows new opportunities to learn.

        "Empath, I am neither asking nor allowing Register to place his mind too deeply into this building. You should understand that even if I were as selfish as you'd like me to be, ruining my prime contact with the aliens would ruin my studies as well. Believe it or not with your mediocre feeling, I have respect for my associate here and would not have him damaged. Now, if you are going to remain, feel some respect yourself for the man you've harmed with your lust for another, and allow him to continue with his chosen work."

        Empath's next revelation was not profound, but an observation available even to the nonscientific, the non-empathic: Science had a special ability to depress her. Again she was in that state, but like Intensive, she would not be defeated. Empath remained in the building as Science turned from her. And she whispered an alien curse to him that Em had developed on her own: May you get what you deserve....

        Intensive went to work by attaching psycholyzer contacts to his skull base. Then he was in a superefficient, direct neural link with the poet. Science closed his eyes, but remained composed, showing no strain as did Register. With no verbalities involved, Em could not understand the occurrence. Not until the building began to fade.

        The alien structure was dissolving around her, because Em could see through the wall, see the land outside. Before she could do more than observe, Empath saw that the static men were also disappearing---and so was she. Astonished, Em looked down through her hands, through the alien floor, to see compressed soil beneath. The building was shrinking or collapsing, as though a reversed growth, a tree receding into the soil. The occupants were going along, becoming smaller and translucent until they would be invisible and without size, pulled into the ground, inhaled by the planet.

        Empath looked everywhere: through herself, through Science, Register, the wall, up and down, trying to find some answer. Em said nothing, because the men could not hear. She considered fleeing, but imagined herself out in the open tiny and transparent, imagined that somehow they were vaporizing as had the aliens, and wondered of Intensive's mortal mistake that had caused this. Physically, she felt no different---had the aliens perfected a painless, utterly calm suicide? Em was not calm. She considered running or screaming or grabbing Science, who was killing them all. But Em was not dying, and no longer were the humans dissolving. As the people and building became normal again, Em viewed an altered landscape. As Science disconnected his gear, Empath ran.

        She breathed as though choking, the woman only trying to calm as she stared with wide-open eyes at a different land. Later in the day, cooler, a coarse, flattened mountain range in the distance, sparse foliage about her, another alien building, another survival chamber nearby. Objectively, Empath understood that they were on a different part of the planet, but she could not feel this. Her emotions were obliterated by that experience, the nonconsuming dissolution and following rebirth. Empath only tried to breathe normally as Science stepped near.

        She did not know what to sense in him. Compared to that alien experience, Science seemed comfortably human, but he had caused Em's current distress. No, no, regardless of how discomforting, this man had no alienness within him.

        "We knew the buildings were situated over much of the planet," he began calmly, sharing Em's view of the landscape, then looking closely at her terrified face. "We knew that the aliens moved about, but found no reference to transportation per se. This is their mode. You noticed that the buildings seem to grow from the planet's surface. In a way, they do. The aliens conveyed themselves by entering a building and having it degrow at the same time that it regrew at the desired site. Only recently did we learn of this capacity, and now prove our ability to instruct a building to so move. Nevertheless, we've yet to learn the exact mechanics of these simultaneous 'growings'."

        "I don't know what you'll learn," improving Empath said, still looking toward the horizon, still seeing nothing of the land beyond, "but I hope you will learn enough."

        The poet stepped behind them. No magic transportation here: looking too old and too vacant, Register plodded out of the alien building holding something. Something new. He looked down to a pale item in his hand, explaining as he approached his colleagues.

        "I found this against a...wall," he told Science wearily.

        Intensive and Empath looked down to a piece of fabric or paper, regular edges, smooth but with dark smears on both sides. Science had a guess as to its purpose, but the empath knew.

        "Apparently, a cloth for wiping the hands or mechanical equipment," Intensive declared as he accepted the flexible sheet.

        "Science, these aliens didn't use gears and grease," Em contended. "That's a communique---I can feel it."

        Intensive would never like that word, never take "feeling" as seriously as science. He turned from Em at once, striding back to the building. The poet plodded along.

        "It's obviously a rag," Intensive said over his shoulder, "and will be valuable in revealing the Victorians' mechanical materials and chemical compositions."

        "Science, that is a communique---I'm sure of it," Em insisted. "You have to try to read it."

        His voice firm but still unagitated, Intensive turned to reply:

        "Empath, even you should understand that I am becoming an expert in alien characteristics. The Victorians did not use smears on paper for communication---they used their buildings. This is a rag and will be extremely valuable as such. Unique, in fact. After all, the register's alien recollections are all communiques, but we have only this single fabric."

        "Science," Empath declared, "I'm telling you it's a---"

        "Empath, I am telling you that we are leaving now. Would you care to be quiet and join us, or would you prefer to walk back half a continent?"

        Quietly she joined the men. Science retained the fabric, for he would have it examined in his own, inobjective manner. Register, lately more of a neutral link than an interested associate, did not seem to care. Had Empath caused his numbness by stating her true love for Security? The possibility of her being responsible terrified Em as she waited in the alien building, waited for a degrowth and dissolution that offered no tactile feeling, but whose concept filled her like an illness. She imagined herself the poet, imagined that her response to the transportation concept was the same as Register's to her rejection. Empath then became completely confused, for how could such different ideas elicit similar reactions? Although the aliens were being resolved, but how could anyone decipher humans?

        Administer was waiting. Em did not ask whether the nongens had informed him of the experiment, whether Science Intensive had contacted his superior. Ad, however, was not disappointed, and not displeased. Intensive's success was clear and fulfilling. Only the smeared sheet was a puzzle: rag or notation? Administer found no conflict, for he decided the fabric was both. He would give it to Non for study of physical composition, then Gen---the linguist---would try to read it. So simple for the administrator, but why was Science upset? Regardless, Intensive would cooperate, for even the nongens might prove Empath wrong.

        They did not. Non discovered the fabric to be a largely unremarkable artificial weave, but the dark smears were a resin/pigment mix made from local plants. This material had been applied with alien hands. Unlike the alien structures that retained not a molecule in their self-cleanliness, this fabric was covered with oils and skin cells of the aliens themselves, and well preserved. Examination should reveal more of the Victorians' bodies than the digested, decomposing feces previously studied.

        Intensive thus expressed vast satisfaction. Too much, perhaps, as though to diminish the nongens' second discovery, that, yes, the smears denoted a literal handwriting. Via the alien buildings, a translation might be possible. But Gen, the linguist, could not enter the buildings' stored information. Only one person was expert here, and lately he listened only to Science.

        "Of course, Register and I will work on this language at first opportunity," Intensive promised Ad, not mentioning all the research scheduled ahead of the fabric.

        Though recently subservient to Intensive, Register made his own schedule for this communique, the lethargic poet finding extra energy for the chore. While Science with the nongens moved an alien building two oceans away, Register on his own determined to read the fabric. After all, this communique most interested Empath.

        He intended to find the experience of the aliens' physically writing on the fabric. He should then be able to sense its purpose, its content. But to specify his search so narrowly, to gain such control, Register would require an unprecedented depth of entry into an alien building.

        Selecting one of the structures, Reg considered moving it across mountains where he would not be easily found and disturbed. But if something went wrong, Register wanted to be found. He began in a nearby building with a promising tactic. Emphasizing a specific sense in order to concentrate more acutely, Register tried to overcome the unclarity of his average recollection. He began with seeing, for this was the most important alien as well as human sense; and, of course, he wanted to literally read the fabric.

        Alone in the building, Reg perceived memories left by the lost Victorians. First he sensed aliens newly on the planet. After this typical beginning, experienced Register quickly moved elsewhere: in another data "direction". Successfully concentrating on vision, Register then "saw" aliens eating. "Looking" to one side, Register "remembered" aliens who had lived on this world for years. Still emphasizing seeing and not just abstract recalling, Register "looked down", but found no data. The Victorians had vanished by this time. He "looked backward" and sensed the aliens soon before their disappearance. The poet began a day-long task that occupied him completely, emphasizing in turn each perceptive sense: first "looking," then listening, touching, tasting. Though the building cooperated, projecting memories to him, Register had learned to fend off excess power with extreme concentration, so he remained unharmed.

        And he failed. Regardless of emphasizing his senses or simply remembering as he had before, Register found no data of the aliens' writing on any cloth; thus, he found no reference to its content. The writing, or drawing, would have to be deciphered as ink on fabric. Reg would have to learn how to think like an alien. The danger was clear. Register could lose his mind---why take such a risk? Then he thought of Empath. Though a handsome woman, she was magnificently lovely in some nonphysical sense to Register. He thought of her feelings, which she had refused him. Then Register felt nearly desperate to become another type of human, one perhaps not so burdened with idea and emotion and failure.

        He began by forgetting that he sat in an alien building; Register needed to convince himself that he belonged in this realm. His success began with this conviction. Soon he was not perceiving selected facts of the Victorian building, but shared all the memories of his environ. Just as the memories became as natural as his own experience, so did the building's active projections become acceptable as a force of his life. Like human emotion, the force was as dangerous as lust. Passionate Register continued.

        The effort expended was incomparable for even this dedicated man---this dedicated alien, for the distinction vanished. Register's mind became the same as the buildings' constructors'. Through his own insistence and will, the poet first achieved, then retained, this state. He learned enough, long enough, to read the fabric, though perhaps not one more glyph would he understand. The achievement required so much of Register that he had nothing left for his own world but a story from another.

Chapter 4

Insane Fictions

        The building would not let him fall. They found Register canted nearly flat, supported by some alien field that prevented his collapse. After Non returned him to consciousness, Register began reciting. By then, Science had been summoned from a regrown building a half world but one moment away. Empath came running from across the glade. All six surveyors were then present, five normal, one lost, an automatic poet.

        "A foreign race has detected us/determined us/and crudely broadcast descriptions/their goal to make themselves accurately known/to preclude surprise when they arrive/Such is their nature to make us aware/and fear in advance/our being tortured beyond pain/and destroyed past death/So heinous are their claims/that on our own accord/we seek corroboration/our greater means more sophisticated than theirs/The aliens cannot affect our checking/maybe don't mind/Though away from home and those limitless resources/still we can verify/and find the aliens accurate/corroborate the race as Heinous/They are real/they are coming/No hiding/no help/A decent creature can't imagine any race made/for torture/their aesthetics called pain/living to enjoy the destruction of those sentient/the suffering of others their greatest joy/And no people seems more honest than this/more shameless/who've studied us in advance/at their distance/and can learn/will learn/exactly how to rack our bodies/and torment our brains/So honest as to describe it all in advance/so that we will be suffering when they arrive/and defy our preparation/for away from our world, we are the lesser/At home, we could avoid or repel them/but here we cannot even ask for help/cannot hide/cannot return/or run/can only be tormented by the approaching mass/We must find our own salvation/No hiding/no help/We must form some preservation/with means beyond the killers who come/As though repelling the past/we now formulate/duplicate/a solution we left home to avoid/but here we can't touch our transcenders/which we must reach/must join/Through the development of desperation/we modify our means/changing our consciousness enhancers/into separators of spirit/so that each of our personalities/will remain unique/though not discrete/not part of our bodies/but beyond mortality/and mere experience/And to all of everything living and extant/our death be nulled like obviated pain/Adieu, we are with you."

        Though having read nothing more on the alien cloth, Register had no end. Without pause, the poet began again. And again. Intensive via mental tracking determined that this story was now the prime function of Register's mind. As the nongens traced Reg's mental activity, Science entered the alien building's data. Due to his increasing familiarity with the Victorians' cognizance, Science lately had been able to mentally read their recordings to a limited but useful degree. In this manner, he learned of Register's actions, for this alien as well had left behind notice of his experience. Intensive then reported to his colleagues.

        "He managed to read the fabric," Science told them coldly. "To do so, Register went too deep with his consciousness. That story is lodged in his mentality, and we haven't the resources to remove it. In Canada, perhaps, but as long as we're here, that poem is all we will get from Register."

        Administer then seemed suddenly old, and as suddenly became the inquisitor.

        "You knew nothing of this in advance, Science Intensive?" Ad demanded.

        "My original position holds to this moment," Intensive professed. "I have always maintained that the writing on the fabric is secondary, and that Register under no circumstance should endanger himself by entering his mind too deeply into the buildings. Had I known of his intentions, I would have refused him permission and asked you all to help me bodily restrain him if necessary. But his actions were not predictable, because Register was not working. He was under an emotional influence that we are all aware of---we all know how important Empath felt the cloth to be. Register's problem, you see, was not science, but feeling." And Science turned to Empath with an intense, unreadable stare.

        "I didn't want him to do this," she whispered, looking only to the poet, feeling ill, only wanting Register to feel better. "I know that he will heal on Earth, and know we have to care for him here and keep him calm. And I don't care what you think---I only care what Register feels."

        Empath seemed ill herself, about to collapse or cry. Not even Science would doubt her claims. He doubted Register's.

        "What a waste," he scowled, looking down at the poet now rendered quiet by Non. "All that effort for a story. All that damage just to learn that the aliens like poetry, too."

        Empath looked sharply to Science and retorted:

        "What do you mean, a 'story'? The poetry is Register's, but the memories are alien. He made a poem about the aliens' experience just as he was making a poem about ours. Register described reality."

        "Don't be ridiculous," Science snapped. "If that story about a second alien race were true, why, it would be everywhere in the buildings' data. Obviously, such a torture situation would be more important than any other event, and would be mentioned throughout the buildings, not on one little rag. But the story is not true. It's only a rag because it's only a story."

        "Then why did the Victorians kill themselves?" the administrator asked.

        "That's obvious," Intensive asserted. "They killed themselves because they lost their minds, just as Register did. The Victorians tampered with their capacity to gain empathy with living, and since that endeavor is mystical idiocy, they lost their sanity. Can't you understand that?" he barked to Ad and the nongens. "The same thing happened to Register. This foolishness about 'feeling' caused him to overtax his brain and damage his mentality. All because of Empath's delusions."

        The scene was disconnected. Science, rarely, was physically agitated as he gestured toward Empath. Ad remained calm, objective, as the nongens aided recumbent, unknowing Register. The new focus of the scene, Empath, ignored all those persons active, for she was staring at the poet, oblivious to Intensive, hoping that on Earth Reg would be healed, just keep him quiet, eventually he'll be better, and never, never would she harm him again.

        "Let's not allow personal condemnations to corrupt us," Administer urged. "Empaths have been proven genuine in their abilities---even our empath. Em was correct in feeling that the death devices weren't for killing, because that was not their original purpose. She was right about the cloth's being some sort of communique, not just a rag. Certainly, she never meant Register harm. Our problem now is to help Reg however we can. Equally important, we must determine whether his story is poetry or warning."

        Intensive was then overcome with an expression of astonishment as though Ad himself had lost his mind, lost his senses right before them. Science did not have to say a word to eloquently convey his thoughts. The administrator would allow no words regardless.

        "Science Intensive," he instructed, "you are going to do everything you can to objectively determine whether that story was real or not. The official position of this administration is that your first priority is to verify Register's final work. Now, when the nongens aren't helping Register, they will help you. So will I, and of course, so will Empath."

        She would not. Em would be busy from then on. Already she was removing her clothes. Her fingers on fabric moved down, along her uniform, her torso, exposing the woman beneath. As soon as Em revealed skin below the neck, the remaining surveyors went rigid and silent as though paralyzed. Still staring at Register, Empath removed her uniform and underwear. Then she was nude but not erotic, for no one was thinking of sex. The men all recalled Register's description of the aliens' stripping down to skin and abandoning their buildings. Stripping down to skin and entering the forest. Empath's exact actions. Eyes wide, but not excited, she disrobed and turned from everything technol. And she walked away.

        They could not react until paces later. Then the administrator ordered his staff.

        "Science, stop her---she's having a breakdown."

        "No, Ad," he replied impassively. "Intentionally or not, she's never done us any good. Let her go; it's for the best."

        After the slightest pause for disbelief, Administer turned to the nongens, speaking firmly."Non and Gen---go over there and bring her back."

        "Please, no, Administer,"

        "We are too afraid"

        "Of her."

        So Ad went. He ran behind Empath, trying not to stare at her figure, her flesh. He ran beside the empath and told her to return. He tried to convince her, to order her, shouting then pleading as he stumbled through the undergrowth, running sideways, looking at Empath's face, not her body, as she gracefully proceeded without response. Then, against the surveyors' society, Ad grabbed Empath's shoulders to turn her around, to drag her back. With a limp move, she fell away, then ran off rapidly, Ad too slow to follow. Ad defeated. So he studied every part of her form as though to gain some satisfaction from his failure. But Ad saw only a loss.

        Three of the surveyors were now abnormal: first Register, then Empath, last Intensive, the latter lost in his deficiency; for he had been unable to refute Register, to make Empath the fool.

        "I cannot disprove the assertion that the aliens considered this fabric's story factual," he told Administer.

        "Then why"

        "Was it not in the buildings?" the nongens asked.

        "Perhaps the lack stems from the aliens' mystical rejection of technol sophistication," Intensive replied. "Perhaps they lost some of their ability to link with the buildings due to having their consciousness 'enhanced' by the chambers," he spat. "Perhaps they had no opportunity to regain their ability to record data before they...." But he did not know how to conclude: before they died, or killed themselves, or separated their spirits, or saved themselves, or....

        "What of the chambers?" Administer asked. "Did they function as claimed? Did the aliens save themselves as Register told us?"

        "I have no scientific basis---human or alien---to believe they could have done so," Science responded. "As for the aliens' beliefs.... Since essentially the Victorians all went together, no observers were left to measure the outcome. If some unattended, objective capacity to measure 'spirit separation' ever existed, I can't find it. I can't go deeply enough into the buildings' data. With care and study, perhaps Register could. Of course, Register can't do anything now."

        He lay near them in the main shelter. Still awake, always awake, that story running, running through his head, though not his mouth, Register perspiring in the cool interior.

        "What are the 'transcenders' mentioned in the poem?" Administer wondered.

        "As best as I can determine," Intensive answered, "they are power sources and/or conveyance apparatus somehow aligned with the 'spirit separators'."

        "What of the second aliens?" Administer continued. "If they were real, did these 'Heinous' simply come, then leave because no aliens were present to torture?"

        "I have never found any evidence of a second race's having been on the planet or in local space," Science insisted. "No second aliens exist. That's why I still maintain that even though the Victorians believed the torture story, their basis for that belief was insanity."

        "But maybe"

        "Maybe the second aliens"

        "Have yet to arrive."

        "If that is true," Ad mused, "and the Heinous have yet to come here, then they will find us, not the great aliens. And we will be their...victims."

        "We already are victims," Science declared, "of something---or someone. Two of us are already mindless---what could be worse?"

        "Torture," Non began.

        "Boundless suffering and"

        "Unlimited pain."

        The meeting concluded with Intensive's derision.

        "At least Register doesn't have to worry about asinine fears," he snarled. And the four surveyors returned to work.

        At Administer's insistence, Science continued his attempts to verify the Heinous story. Science would enter the alien buildings, assisted by Non and Gen. Less of a choice was available now, for one local building was closed to them---by Empath. She had slept one night outdoors on the doubly alien world, and felt spirits. First came her master, for Em felt Controller as a continuing aid. Her empathic superior, Con could be so anxious while precisely gleaning impressions of an idea system, whether machine, techorg, or human. How would he respond to the aliens? Empath wondered, but knew that Con would succeed, and felt pride in her friend's phantasmic achievement. A phantasm of an achievement because Con had never been given opportunity to sense alien emotions. Now he would help Em by having provided her education, by remaining within her feelings as a basis of expertise, efficiency, and ideal.

        The next spirit to approach was her lover, but he was forced to remain removed. Em felt Security with a special closeness unparalleled in their time together, because it was sourced by their time apart. Em did not feel Secure immediately beside her, but felt him barely separated, his ideas and feelings and body detained from her by an alien force, alien because it interfered with love, Ernie and Matilda unjustly separated by the social torture of professional duty.

        Em could no longer sense that fine time ahead when she and Secure would be reunited. Unable to feel her own future, Em sought the cause of this loss, which was the Victorians' past. In searching for this era, Empath found their present, their presence, gaining a thin sense of their spirits as though stretched in the air. What caused this impression? Did Em feel mere empathy for the aliens' abandoned physicality, or did she sense their personalities released across the world?

        Regardless, Empath for the first instance truly sensed the great aliens as she felt her lover. With insects about her and dew collecting and clouds forming overhead, Empath felt them honest, and felt them sane. She believed the cloth, and believed that the Heinous were coming.

        Em did not know what to do. But the inspiration of Register's damage told her that despite their science and their studies, the surveyors had no answers---the aliens did, so she would become a Victorian. The next morning, Em moved past the humans and entered a grown building. In all ways nearer to the aliens now due to the previous night's impressions, Empath knew enough to have the baffle close behind her, and no one could enter. She remained the day and night, seeking essences without the aid of human devices, assisted only by desperation. While sleeping in the building, supported by the building, Empath felt the aliens about her, and felt them at peace. She hoped their peace was not common death nor any special suicide. By morning, she had not decided, had not learned enough.

        She had learned of Register. Empath knew to enter the shelter where Reg lay alone and take him, dragging him onto an aircart, moving the poet to her building. Then she moved this building as easily as the aliens intended, the only requirement decision, regrowing it near an unmodified spirit chamber unknown to the staff. Empath knew that Science was monitoring her. Perhaps he knew of Empath's pulling Register into the chamber. Every surveyor knew that when the poet returned, he walked on his own.

        "You tell me, Science, how Empath has achieved a control over the alien technols that you and Register and all of us together have yet to gain."

        "I don't know what she's doing," Intensive snapped to Administer. "Ask her."

        "But Register"

        "Is better than two months"

        "Of Earth therapy"

        "Would have"

        "Accomplished."

        "He's not speaking, is he?" Science demanded of them all. "He's not exactly cured."

        "Science," Ad declared, "you know that Register's brain is re-set, and he can learn to be normal again."

        Angry Intensive then lost all of his cooperation.

        "I am leaving," he announced. "I am sick of these discussions, sick of hearing about the traitor Empath and her fantasies. I am sick of digging through buildings trying to learn of the aliens' stories instead of their magnificent technols. I want to learn of their home world, not their problems on this planet. I want to study the average aliens, not the maniacs who came here. Why did they come? To get away from a life too complex for them---too good for them. But that greatness is exactly what we surveyors have been seeking all along. Now that we're so close, we have to concern ourselves with this insane tale of the Heinous. Well, I don't believe in the Heinous, Administer, and no longer will I look for them."

        "The only way you cannot look for them, Science Intensive," Ad asserted, "is to directly disobey my orders."

        "So be it," Intensive proclaimed decisively. "Already we have two traitors who have gone without castigation: one who nearly burned his brain out through a zeal that you always accused me of, and the other a lunatic probably ready to kill herself like the crazed aliens. The difference, Administer, is that when I mutiny, I do it not for my own benefit, but for my duty. That duty is to bring home the Victorians' magnificent technols, not their insane fictions."

        He left. No longer would Science search for the truth of the second aliens. None of the surveyors had to, for the next day, the Heinous arrived.

Chapter 5

Untouchable Essence

        Empath knew. She gained knowledge from the building, and felt her friends' distress as they connected with their instruments and learned of the Heinous. In variable orbit, a staff multi-reader relayed data. Just over the horizon, numerous human-sized organisms and sophisticated technol gear gained the planet's surface.

        The nongens learned first. Receiving a notation from the orbiter, they returned to the compound to examine these new informations. Then they learned of a people nearby who could only be the Heinous. And they panicked. Non and Gen came screaming from the shelter, seeking their colleagues. They stumbled and cried as they clambered onto an aircart and flew to Administer in an alien building. They were whimpering when they found their superior, but were not ashamed, for fear was the only emotion available to them.

        Though aware of the commotion, Register was too weak and vacant to respond. Science Intensive, who was working with no other surveyor, noted the clamor and followed the nongens, joining Ad as though a desertion had never occurred. After hearing the nongens' initial, jumbled descriptions, Intensive replied.

        "You have to calm so that we can understand what has occurred. Now, are you sure these organisms aren't the great aliens from their home world here to learn what happened to their people?"

        "No, no, the technol"

        "Power sources don't"

        "Match what we know of"

        "The Victorians."

        Because the nongens were still jabbering and shaken, Administer and Science determined to remain especially calm, typically thoughtful.

        "The discrepancy of energy source is not conclusive considering the Victorians' sophistication," Intensive offered. "Perhaps these visitors are the original aliens, because certainly they're not our people. Perhaps another race such as ours, exploring for sentience."

        "The Heinous,"

        "The Heinous," Non and Gen insisted. "Who else could"

        "They be but"

        "The Heinous?"

        "What we'll do is learn who they are instead of panicking," Administer declared. Science then suggested:

        "I think it best we chem these two back to normal so they can help us. Certainly, we need to approach this establishment in order to determine its nature and identity. The nongens can't go while so upset."

        The twins nearly exploded.

        "We are not going to"

        "The Heinous"

        "Whatever our"

        "Condition!"

        Ad and Intensive agreed. Anything the pair wanted until their nerves could be subdued. As for the remaining staff, Science still did not believe in the Heinous, and Administer was anxious to learn. Empath was certain. She could feel them through the air. And she was doubly saddened, feeling the advancing fear of her own people and the previous terror of the aliens she knew. But her empathy with the Victorians did not provide Em with answers. She only knew that the cloth described the Heinous accurately, that they were such a horror as to cause the great aliens to reject their bodies to avoid them.

        Even in his recuperative state, Register felt that he knew the proper response. While Ad and Science learned that the strangers were studying Victorian constructions, Register in a weakened state brought some human gear into a building and moved it.

        He was nearly mechanical, the vestiges of his sense of duty reacting with Intensive's idea: approach to determine identity. Register responded, but was not thoughtful enough to be cautious. He regrew his building too near the strangers. Though experienced enough to set his equipment even in a daze, Register was too thoughtless to concentrate on anything but these procedures. When people with elaborate attire and strange faces neared him, Register did not quite notice. Then he was taken and cured so that he could understand nothing but suffering. For he was taken by the Heinous.

        Their dimensional display suggested an inverted version of the surveyors' own hollowvids. Though the staff knew that Register had been captured, they had no hope of rescuing him, no plan. Their wait for a development was short; for the next morning, the surveyors found an alien notice. A pedestal situated paces from the main shelter supported a small, bright sphere. As soon as the four surveyors approached, the sphere became active, projecting an area of multidimensional sight-and-sound, remarkably realistic except for size, the man being tortured within much smaller than the real poet.

        They saw him screaming as blood squirted from his ears. Though Reg furiously slapped his head to kill the source of his pain, this flagellation had no effect. Most remarkable was the intensity of his screeching, his slapping, the quaking of his head from the blows.

        After too many long seconds, the view broadened to reveal another surprise, the horrified surveyors next looking at an alien. A perfectly clear display of the only alien humans had ever seen. He stood slightly stooped on this foreign planet, broad-shouldered and thin-limbed, his attire multiple puffs of an iridescent fabric with thin straps, pyramidal footgear, pinkish skin, clasped hands with too many knuckles. The abruptly angled head seemed male, the chin a nub, eyes sunken. Coarse hair sprouted around a tiny nose and a convincingly human mouth. A mouth that spoke. The surveyors were not so dumbfounded that they failed to notice a discrepancy between the facial movements seen and the sound heard: some translation was involved. The alien was easily heard, though Register had not decreased his activity. Rigid beneath the shoulders, Register seemed cemented in the air as he pounded his head and silently screamed. But the alien allowed only himself volume, his false voice too human, too damned human, for it was identical to the poet's.

        "Pain is only a signal, a notation of damage. Even with your comrade, when no irrevocable injury is endured, the tiny signal upsets you all so. This is neither birth nor death nor utter damage, yet you are magnificently moved. We agree, for the magnificence is also in our enjoyment."

        With so much immediate to see, the surveyors scarcely noticed the background: huge slabs of equipment---vehicles or shelter---and numerous aliens sliding about. The staff could not study the scene because Register continued beating and bleeding, and the alien continued to speak.

        "We have learned so much from your person we have. We learn you are not what we expected, but you are good enough for us, our highest compliment, because we learn you are wonderful producers of this item called pain. Your upset at viewing this real pain is also an art for us, which we thank you. In advance we promise the suffering will not be permanent, not even a year before we are filled with you, and that we are experts in repairing all psycho and physical damages, so you'll be left the same as now, and rewarded by having any previous imperfections fixed by what we can. Though you know it'll not last, still you'll suffer greatly from the tiny crustaceans we send to eat your ears, and the flesh dissolving from your bones from substances, and prods demolishing each orifice, cancers where you can feel them most. Oh, and the old ways are the best, no manipulation to your brain, but direct action with the body making genuine subtleties of neural response which we can ponder and feel ourselves."

        Undone at having to see and hear this, Administer shouted toward the image:

        "Why are you doing this? It's inhuman!"

        Surprisingly, the image replied.

        "Sir, if we did not consider you as human as ourselves, we would not be making art with you." And the image vanished.

        The nongens collapsed. Ad and Science left them on the ground.

        "This is ridiculous," Administer wheezed. "It's like a joke, with those pompous pronouncements, and the voice not matching the mouth. Could this all be a dramatic presentation, some type of pornographic display?"

        "Yes," Science quietly replied, looking down, looking away from the sphere, which remained. "But we have to respond as though it were real. Pornography can be ignored, but if Register's suffering is genuine...."

Struck with unusual insight, Administer looked closely to Intensive.

        "They can't hurt us," Ad declared. "Even though we're not spine-linked to the boat's data integrator, we can still null our pain centers with chems. If we could get to Register, we could null him, too, and he would feel nothing, regardless of damage. If we do this and the Heinous capture us, we can survive. In Canada, most any physical injury can be repaired. We can null our consciousness and experience no trauma until we're rescued."

        His voice firm again, Science looked up sharply to provide a superior analysis."You presume that these aliens will be so cooperative as to 'make art' awhile then cease upon failing. More likely, they'll destroy us if we don't respond with the torment they desire. Since we're unable to communicate across light years, we can't call for help. Yes, even massive physical injuries can be remedied on Earth, but not death."

        Administer nearly shouted in reply."What choice do we have? We can't leave the planet; we have no weapons."

        "Perhaps we can regrow the buildings so rapidly and unpredictably that we can't be found," Intensive offered. "Perhaps we can barricade ourselves inside as did the empath. I have no idea what energy it would take to force one open."

        The spherical display became active again, now physically active, for it spit at the nearest Victorian structure. Without sound, a shot of dark fluid struck the building, leaving a fist-sized hole.

        Administer became so weak that he nearly collapsed. This was no display, no view of another's experience---this event was real, the puncture as genuine as though in his own body. Staring at the hole, Ad and Science gained enlightenment, but felt no pride in their mutual discovery.

        "The aliens," Intensive declared, "the Victorians knew the Heinous would overcome them, so how can we succeed?"

        "How can we survive?"

        Empath, through her building, shared her friends' distress. And the building subdued her, for without its influence, Empath would have been catatonic from feeling Register's pain, his torture. Tormented emotions filled her like blood, pervasive and pumping, but in check. Empath had to remain calm to be useful, to herself and Register and their friends. Though her whole person pressed toward panic, the empath demanded control, and succeeded.

        She knew of the surveyors' conversation. That final question had been asked before by a superior race. The only uncertainty remaining was the nature of the Victorians' solution: success or suicide? Not even Em was alien enough to know. But she had to know---and soon, for Empath felt an irrepressible conviction of no time. The surveyors had no time to contemplate and experiment. No time for waiting on new developments, fortuitous happenstance, or forthcoming expeditions. The surveyors would have to act soon, or die. But Empath could not decide, lacking enlightenment. Too human and alien at once, she seemed both regarding emotion, and neither in respect to understanding. Empath knew she had to remain calm and compete with the Heinous, but Em was missing some essence, and had to find it.

        Ad and Science were seeking as well, but acting directly. Deciding that the nongens would be useless, they chemmed the pair as Non and Gen were coming to, rendering them semi-conscious, but mobile and without terror.

        The four entered an alien building, and Science prepared to regrow it. Only he had the knowledge, the ability.

        "How quickly can we make regrowths, one after another?" Administrator asked.

        "Not rapidly," Science replied, busy with his psychological gear. "We're not Empath."

        "How far across the planet can we regrow? What are the limits?"

        "We are about to discover this."

        "What if the Heinous can detect our new position?"

        "Perhaps we can move the building into a mountain range or cave where locating us would be difficult," Intensive suggested. "Perhaps the building can be made impervious to water, and we can hide beneath an ocean."

        "Do you know this?"

        "We are about to learn."

        So many moves to try. Intensive began by regrowing the building on the opposite side of the planet, as far away from the Heinous as possible. No other alien structures were situated near this location. When the building reappeared, the men viewed a landscape that seemed welcome, and an object they never wanted to see again.

        Stepping outside, Ad and Science glimpsed about before finding a bright sphere on a pedestal. Retreating as though confronted by a creature, they entered the building and regrew it. Deep in a mountain range, they found a sphere. They moved the building again. A pedestal waited in the cave they entered. Intensive soon learned that the building could make itself waterproof, even beneath the deepest sea. With this regrowth, the men found no Heinous sphere outside---it appeared within their building.

        Horrified, the surveyors returned their building to the compound. The pedestal inside disappeared. None waited outside. Register came the next moment.

        A building regrew beside theirs. Within was the documenter, alone, but clearly the Heinous had sent him, for the poet could not produce such an effort. Register was busy being consumed. Something within him pressed outward against his skin like bugs trapped in a flexible bag. Blood dripped from his eyes and nose, but not enough to obscure his expression. Supported at a steep angle by the alien building, Register trembled unnaturally, blathering slobber and syllables from a face displaying a torment no moral person could comprehend.

        The alien understood. The great alien who slipped between the surveyors to take her brethren---but, no, this was Empath. Still nude and not visibly changed, Em seemed foreign even to her fellows. But she was unquestionably a young woman upon removing Register from the building. Wrapping both arms around his torso, wordless Empath pulled him backward with difficulty, trying to prevent his toppling over. Ad and Science did not know to help or how to help, and were intimidated by the pulsing lumps on Register's body, the blood slopped on Empath's limbs.

        The surveyors did not follow as Em dragged Register into her building. The chambers affected consciousness, but physical healing required the larger structures. Within the building that seemed a friend, Empath placed the friend who wished to be her lover. The alien technols understood, at once providing their medicinal services. Fields and forces reached out to modify Register's chemistry, reached out to patch him, to change his cells, to disrupt the invaders within him. Concerned Empath did not view; she felt the process working.

        She felt him dying. Mentally part of the building, Empath found the limits of the Victorians' medical technols, found the limits of the Heinous' honesty. The creatures within Register were for torture first, then for killing. Their effects could not be reversed. Register would die, and so would his friends.

        Empath was stricken with loss, personal loss, not of her friend, but her life. Her own life. Not the loss of the current instant or the following breath, but the era of her life that would never come. She felt the loss of never having a family, of never fulfilling her career, of never enjoying an ancient age, of never loving Ernie enough, long enough, well enough. She felt this special distress in light of both cultures she knew, and finally felt them identical; for both were as human as reasoned life, as fearful death.

        Along with this sense of loss, Empath gained her missing portion. Now she felt the needed essence, not of her life but of no life; not of love and pain and fear and the need for desperate solutions, but of having none of these, no experience, no life. Register was dying. After much more torture, he would be gone. The empath understood completely. She felt completely. Felt death. Understood death. She comprehended the lack: of experience, of thought, feeling, that lack of essence and empathy. And she understood the great aliens' solution, understood how to retain her essence, retain her empathy.

        Just as Ad and Intensive, Empath would have rather risked the Heinous than kill herself. This idea had been the surveyors' limit. Now Empath knew the risk to be infinite, the outcome certain. Empath moved for release, for separation. Within her was no religion or conviction, no decision or desperation. Empath felt only propriety, a comprehension of ultimate correctness. Empath felt death, and loved it.

        She reached for Register and saw her hands. Empath looked at her hands and wondered of this strange sight. Though perfectly normal, Em's fingers now seemed foreign, for she could not explain them. Why did hands develop with five fingers instead of six? she wondered, she had to wonder. Why not more knuckles or less? The notion suddenly became momentous to her, because such ignorance of her own basic life was foreign---or was it? Was not a comprehensive understanding of her spiritual essence the best fact she could have of existence, now that she was losing her life? Empath smiled, though her face did not change. The only thing wrong with her hands was that she was not holding Ernie's.

        She carried the man too large for her, and stress was no object. Past the buildings and to the nearest separator, Em was followed by her friends, associates who saw in her an original alien, a true human, a genuine spirit still incarnate. They followed because their life's goal was to seek utter sentience. They found it in Empath. In empathy. After Em released Register, Ad and Science entered the chamber. The men agreed with Empath, for never could they resist the great aliens. The nongens also. Then they were gone, then they were together. And Empath was alone on the planet. Yet Em was alone in not being with the planet. To join, Empath had to fulfill two final events in her life. One was her death, but the first was her emotion. Separated exactly by nothing, Matilda along the lay of space bid her love good-bye.

        Here came the Heinous, the same people as she, but an antithetical connotation: sentience surveyors and empaths themselves, poets come for their art before it vanished. They arrived in time for nothing, the exact meaning of the gasses released, the genuine significance unavailable to them, the humans now alien to those with bodies and breath, as tactile as empathy, as measurable as emotion. She died, and became simultaneous with her congruent friends, integral with salvation, Em and her friends an untouchable essence none alive could describe, no one living could feel.

Book II

War

Chapter 6

The Murder Of His Emotion

        After an exhaustive week of sorting through the ether lanes in a semi-conscious state, the sentience surveyors found that their forty-parsec translation had been successful, but their settlement was a failure.

        Upon recoalescing into Victory's local space in the vacuum volume containing their boat, the surveyors learned that they were not alone in orbiting the planet. As the boat's technol sensers construed the situation, autonomic protocols translated the informations into a visual hollowvid projected spherically in the ship's control office. Resting in her lounge chair, the prime minister was surprised that their gleaners had found it necessary to throw out a vid, for this immediacy meant danger. A moment before, Prime had been looking across the cubical room to her colleagues as they prepared to contact the Victory ground staff. Then a ten-foot Victory popped into view, the staff's attention taken by a blinking form that reverted to a steady view as soon as the staff noticed. Notated to the staff via a combination of depicted visual and direct brain injection was an orbiting object. The sentience surveyors received informations of distance, speed, appearance, mass, construction, and energy expenditures.

        Prime and Secure felt their spinal transceivers tingle, relaying data directly to their brains. Other staff members had time to think, "Oh, this is serious," but Prime and Secure had no time. The Prime Minister controlled the vessel, and Security's job was to protect it.

        Analyst was allowed to join in the information feed by mentally activating his spinal transceiver connected to the boat's data integrator (factingrate) via electre transmission.

        "It's a ship," he determined, sitting upright in the maggrav office.

        "You mean for the seas?" the information ombudsman called out as though astonished to the point of foolishness.

        "It's a massive item, dear, that's all we know," Prime remarked to her niece, Omb.

        "We're presuming it's a ship, and a warship," Security stated rapidly, then turned to speak formally to Prime.

        "Prime Minister, I am activating security protocols for mandating staff safety. Get us out of here."

        Security's priorities were now Prime's, and she did not argue.

        Controlling the ship via her spinal link, Prime had only to verbally think a coded order, which was transmitted to the boat's controls. So effective was experienced Prime that she could instruct the boat with the speech centers of her brain while alternately speaking aloud to Secure in acknowledgment.

        "We can't kick into an ether lane without days of preparation, dear. Besides, you wouldn't want me to abandon the surface staff, would you?"

        "I would not, but get us away from that object."

        "I am, dear, by sliding our boat on a gravity ridge so we'll orbit on the planet's far side."

        They appeared inactive. Several people, all in the same drab, unmarked uniform, sat around a lovely apparent globe that had the odd characteristic of being opaque to a person viewing its surface or orbital space, but transparent to a surveyor viewing a colleague on the hollowvid's far side. No one stood. No one pressed a button or threw a switch. But Prime Minister directed the vessel with utmost efficiency, and Security mandated her protocols.

        The information ombudsman verified that all boat priorities functioned as required. Simultaneously, Omb attempted to communicate with the surveyors on Victory. She failed. Neither could the three orbiting multi-readers contact the ground staff. In too great a hurry to speak, Ombuds allowed the boat's factingrate to relay the data to Prime and Secure at thought speed.

        Unnecessarily, but characteristically, Analyst spoke."That ship ain't attacking. The thing's erg condition hasn't changed. I can't believe we can't contact our people below. Now we're too far out of synchronicity to read them from orbit. They're on the other side of the planet. Let's get the boat down there, Son."

        "Let's shut up and let me work, Dad," Security snapped.

        Despite his anxiety, Analyst had no fiancee waiting on the planet. Security feared for his fellows, and for his future wife. Waiting on the planet, lost on the planet, attacked on the planet---Secure did not know.

        Sec noted Prime's control decisions in his head as he watched the hollowvid. He saw their cottage-shaped ether boat encircling the vid slip nearly sideways in a high-g move that the staff inside could not feel, the vessel sliding in a planetary curve away from that unknown object, represented on the vid as a dot of white light. With an encoded thought, Sec approved of Prime's performance, then spoke to his father more mildly.

        "We can't land, Analyst, because we'd have the planet's mass at our backs. We cannot allow our movement to be limited."

        "Yeah, well, slough off a boat compartment and shift it down to the surface," Analyst suggested. "Take my room, because I'm volunteering."

        "No, I'm going. It's not your fiancee down there."

        "Sorry, dear," smiling Prime responded. "The protocols of security forbid its manifester from abandoning its post."

        Sec looked over to Prime seated behind her individual desk, fotos of her kids propped beside the pencil holder. He looked her up and down, her petite form, boyish hair, her face ensconced in that endless middle age made available by modern medicine, her mien a combination of sweetness and certainty. Sec was sure that Prime retained her original organs.

        "Prime, I have to go," Secure insisted.

        "Don't mention it again, dear," Prime responded, "and continue with your duties."

        "I can do both," he declared, and stood. "You know I can handle security tasks even while in a separated compartment. Besides, our most important responsibility is to our staff below."

        "You might consider fielding our bubble, dear," Prime suggested firmly.

        Her arguments did not convince Secure. He would not wait for further discussion. Sec had to shift down to the surface, because Empath might be in danger. He turned from his superior.

        Prime had achieved her position by never arguing, only instructing. Despite Sec's responsibility, Prime was in charge of the entire survey; so she shot him.

        Analyst was shaking his head in pity before the jolt arrived. Not even Security could have been surprised when Prime through her brain link ordered the bias current in Security's spine to stab him in the consciousness. Two steps away from his chair, Secure grabbed both ears as he stopped in a jerk of his entire body. After staring ahead a moment as though seeing the deity come to deliver him, Secure sighed, and returned to his seat. He did not return to avoid being shot again, but to avoid abandoning his duty. Prime's electrics had incised his emotion, venting his passion not from force, but through conviction.

        The vacuum boat contained a score of surveyors and their gear, but only five had seats in the office. The fifth was Controller, who now joined his peers. Though Con had earlier disconnected his head from the Manifestic poser (positioner), only now did his mind function as a human product instead of an emotion machine. He had learned of their situation, the silent staff below, the unknown orbiter, passionate Sec.

        After glimpsing Con's entrance, Secure returned to his chair beside Prime, looked to the minister, to his father, to the hollowvid, then muttered, "Screw you." No one knew the subject of his rancor. They were more certain about Analyst's reference when he muttered, "Jerk off."

        Anxious Omb could not remain seated. So tall and thin she appeared gaunt, handsome Ombuds stalked beside her wooden desk, her voluminous hair bouncing against her shoulders. The other surveyors remained seated, viewing the hollowvid, glimpsing one another, listening to data with their brains.

        "The guys in the hold are querying me," Omb stated to her aunt. "They want to help."

        "They cannot help, dear," Prime replied. "Have them remain in their condos."

        Sec fielded the soap bubble, establishing an erg detractor around the boat. This electrelogical shell would cause any accelerative entity with mass or energy or constituent electre wave/rays to slide past, like slipping on a bar of soap in the bath. Originally developed to allow the ether boat to approach stellar surfaces, the erg detractor implied defensive capabilities whose usage the staff had practiced. The surveyors had never expected to field the bubble to protect them from another sentient force.

        Secure allowed the bubble only min discharge from the boat's main electre brick, reserving their energy for emergency ship shifting, the boat unable to gravitate away with the bubble fielded. With the foreign orbiter a half world away, the boat's autonomic protocols would have sufficient warning to increase the detractor to full bubble density if necessary. Secure did not bother to tell the staff of his activity. Let them read it for themselves.

        Sec then accepted the latest data of the intruder, which Omb had received in those seconds when Security had been busy emoting, as though an empath. As though a lover. Secure now stared at the hollowvid, with the subtle value of human vision noting the style of the foreign item. The size of a great ocean vessel, the object comprised integrated shapes as though a strange city whose acute roofs had been compressed into a single form. Evidently possessing top and bottom, valuable only in space vessels with stored or artificial gravity, the orbiter implied the orientation of a church, here reaching for the deity of space. With its aggressive shapes thrusting away from a hard base, the object suggested an alien warship.

        "What's its purpose?" Secure asked his father.

        "I don't know, but I'm not impressed," Analyst replied. "You know, even we couldn't figure the purpose of our own boat if we just ran across it. That thing doesn't radiate no electre web in local space, it don't generate no Actal Manifestic wave/rays, or emanate tangible radiation. You could only figure our system when its active. Our electre bricks don't stink, but that queer out there has hard nucleonics strong enough to smell."

        "It has to know we're here," Ombuds told her colleagues, "but our readers notate no response from it."

        "They have to know we're here," Prime corrected. "The object reads contained organics, does it not, dear? Reasonably, a controlling entity is within."

        "Maybe it's carrying cattle," Analyst scoffed.

        "Maybe it's carrying our surface staff," Secure snarled. "Where are they?" he demanded of Ombuds.

        The staff's prime minister replied."Dear, I slid a multi-reader right above them, and dropped it parallel to gravity from an elevator orbit."

        "It doesn't see them," Omb concluded, and Prime with an electrical order from her brain switched the hollowvid to reveal the multi-reader's vantage.

        More rapidly and accurately than any person could move, the small instrument approached and entered each settlement building in turn, finding empty cots, full food hatchers, one terrified rodent that slammed against the hard walls attempting to flee the intruder, but no human.

        "No damage, no disruption," Omb noted. "They just seem to have gone to work and not returned."

        "Have it check the alien stuff," Analyst suggested needlessly, for Prime had ordered the multi-reader to approach the Victorian constructions. Suddenly it changed course, in a dizzying display twirling to one side and shooting off into the forest.

        "It smelled something dead," Omb quietly stated.

        Seconds later, they viewed the body. One quick glimpse, no more, of an aged feline. The reader then twirled and flew to the alien buildings, trees shooting past in a soundless blur. It entered each building. Two contained staff equipment, but no surveyor was present. Only the small chambers remained to examine. The orbiter searched each by physically entering. The surveyors, however, were found outside.

        "There's a vaporous residue like we found before," Omb noted. "But this one matches the components of human bodies, not alien.Ó

        Omb could not believe those words. Abruptly she turned to each surveyor present, disbelieving the sound of her own voice, disbelieving her own, objective information.

        Only Prime was not stunned. As the remaining surveyors stared at the hollowvid, seeing the alien death chamber, the minister instructed the multi-reader to take physical samples into its corpus and study them instead of reading the material through interfering air. But the atmosphere did not interfere. The initial readings proved accurate. The multi-reader relayed information to the boat, data of discovery, and death.

        Omb's responsibility was to collate and verify received informations. Since all data proved correct, duty required Ombuds to state that apparently the planet's staff had entered the death chambers exactly as the Victorians before, thereby causing their own vaporization. Omb could only speak three words, in a whisper.

        "They killed themselves."

        With a strained, ugly expression, Security shouted:         "You don't know that they all died. Can't you judge your own informations? You can't say how many died---maybe some ran away."

        "Maybe they did," Omb replied excitedly, receiving new data directly into her brain. "I think I found them!"

        Analyst shook his head."No you didn't. All that gear isn't ours---it came from that thing in orbit. And those mobile organisms: there are too many to be our staff."

        "Our people might still be there," Security returned. "Maybe they've been imprisoned."

        "Even if some or all of the staff are dead, that doesn't mean they killed themselves," Analyst submitted, his eyes moving side to side as though his vision could not keep pace with his thinking. "Maybe we've found more of the aliens who made the chambers. Maybe they used the chambers to execute the ones here, by brainwashing, and did the same to our staff."

"Analyst, dear, don't you think your speculation is incredible?"

        "That's my damn job!" he shouted to Prime.

        Having been staring at his friends as startling data came to him through his spine link, Controller now felt strong enough to join the staff's activity.

        "Where do we go first, to the settlement or the aliens?" he loudly asked Prime with some of Analyst's anxiety.

        "Neither, dear," she replied. "I've sent the second multi-reader to our compound. The readers can find our people better than we can, if they're present. The third is heading toward the strangers on Victory's dark side. We don't need to go anywhere in person yet. Secure?"

        Prime sought his acknowledgment, his judgment as head of Security for the boat. She implied that he must continue with his task, his chore, although his fiancee was evidently a patch of smoke now settled on the soil.

        "Agreed," Secure stated firmly. "We're looking for danger. Something has gone damn bad, and we're not letting more of it happen. It's not going to happen to us. We're presuming the organisms on the surface are sentient and dangerous, as is the massive orbiter. We also have to be careful what we do in case our people are trapped in either the alien settlement or their vessel."

        "The reader is approaching the strangers, dears," Prime noted, and her staff began receiving informations.

        Via the hollowvid, they saw the forest rushing below. In their minds, they heard injected data of the alien forms beyond, from energy accumulations to organic ambience. Ahead were several pieces of stationary metallic and composite objects, active with thermals and nucleonics. Ahead were scores of mobile, human-sized organisms whose respiratory exhausts described them as humanlike. In enhanced moonlight, the surveyors then saw aliens. Their shoulders were so wide they seemed to have sticks across their backs, shiny fabrics hanging along their torsos. They had limbs as thin as sticks, knobby joints, feet enclosed in triangular coverings, their hands bare, fingers too long. All seemed to be males, males with facial hair. Their skulls were narrow and at an odd angle to the neck, but the faces seemed humanly expressive.

        As the staff viewed, most of the aliens walking with a sliding movement stopped. They turned as one, and their faces changed. Just before the vid faded from the multi-reader's being commandeered, the aliens smiled.

        The office seemed so empty. Secure breathed deeply and looked to the ceiling. He just wanted to look away from the hollowvid, from the facts it threw at him. He looked at the complas ceiling, saw how boring it was, and wondered why he was in this box, packaged like an appliance. He wondered why he wasn't walking along a riverbank somewhere with Empath. He wondered why they weren't holding hands and gazing across a pleasant forest. Below were pleasant forests. But no Matilda.

        "They didn't wreck our reader," Ombuds noted quietly. "They're doing something to it."

        Sec looked at his colleagues. Without the central hollowvid, the staff members seemed so hard and large, obtrusive. Prime retained a smile, which proved the acuity of her condition. Sec thought that Omb might hyperventilate, but he could tell in his head that she functioned properly. Erect in his chair, Analyst rubbed his chest---a terrible habit from his own father, who used to rub it himself, then lower. Analyst was about to leap up and attack the problem with a wrench, but Dad the mechanic would not succeed here, though Dad the brilliant analyst might be invaluable. Con seemed ill because he had nothing to do, for he could not aid with his emoting.

        "Security, do you advise that we prepare to blow into the ether lanes?" Prime wondered.

        "I don't envision a prolonged confrontation here," Security replied. "Not if all our staff are captured or, or dead. Preparing the Manifestics will take days. Our resources are best spent elsewhere."

        Ombuds reestablished a doubled hollowvid of the two multi-readers at the settlement searching for staff, one examining beneath the soil by circuitous boring, the second helically circling the compound, searching for data, for people. Sec appreciated the complexity of the paired display; Analyst was dissatisfied because it told him nothing, exactly nothing.

        "Aren't you sending another of those to that alien place?" he asked Prime.

        "Please tell me, dear, what occurred with the first. You are the analyst and can discern its condition better than Omb and I."

        Yes, of course, he could do his job instead of complaining. Concentrating on the informations entering his mind, Analyst soon responded to the prime minister.

        "Yeah, it's still active. The bias current is still present, but either they've arranged for nothing whatsoever to be read---which is almost impossible---or they're stopped it from transmitting."

        Analyst's speaking then became more active.

        "I bet they're taking it apart, trying to get at us through the reader, just as they did with the chambers. That's how they got our people. They connived them or forced them into killing themselves, and now they're after us and the boat through the multi-reader. Blow it to hell, Security!"

        "What if our staff is nearby?" Sec snarled to his father.

        "Wait, dears," Prime Minister ordered with her pleasant firmness. "I've had a multi-reader connect with the surface staff's recorders. Omb will allow us to listen to Ad's last entries."

        They heard Administer's perfectly recorded voice, and Secure could only think, I do not want to hear Em, I cannot bear to hear Em's voice. Not if she is dead. They heard Ad describe the Heinous' arrival, the alien sphere sent to the staff, the threats.

        Suddenly, Omb collapsed onto her chair. Her eyes rolled, showing all white, and she slumped back, head lolling.

        Controller quickly moved to her side. He looked at her face, whispered, and she began reviving. Before Omb could breathe normally again and sit erect, Analyst turned to Prime.

        "Why did she faint?" he demanded.

        "Oh, you poor dear," Prime said, staring at Omb as she accepted the data that Omb had rejected. "Oh, all the poor dears. This is what Omb found. Someone has to look. When things started going strange, Administer began visually recording everything that happened in the compound. Omb found the end. She previewed the final recording."

        Prime fed Administer's last documentation to the hollowvid. It showed Register's return, his torment. Empath then appeared, and Security's heart hit him, a blow in his chest from himself, his emotion, his love. Secure watched nude Empath grasp Register's pulsing body with her fine hands and drag him into an alien suicide chamber. The remaining ground staff stared after her, waited, then became casual. They looked at one another, at the horizon where the Heinous neared, at the air wherein Register now lay. As Empath turned from the chamber, approaching her friends, they looked to her as though seeing something they had sought for their entire lives. Then they followed their colleague's gas. First Ad, then Intensive, then Non, then Gen entered, leaving as hot air. Equally casual, Em was last, stepping to the chamber. Then she paused. Em looked behind, looked about, as though at some ambient force she desired to sense for a final occasion. She looked at her hands as though missing something she should have been holding. Then she breathed deeply with an odd smile, spoke, and entered the chamber not casually, but pleased.

        The observers heard the breeze, heard scurrying rodents in the distant, heard Empath's feet as she stepped into the chamber. She made no sound with her voice, but no linguistics expert was needed to decode her final speaking. Anyone could read her lips when she mouthed the word "Ernie".

        "Blow the damn reader to hell, son!" Analyst shouted.

        Secure did not collapse as had Omb. He did not weep or vomit or cry out to ancient gods, to local space. Split into disconnected parts, Sec was decimated in his emotions, but sound in his duty. The same as Em, he accepted responsibility for his friends. But he would not let his staff die. Security would kill the Heinous instead. Before his father's shout was concluded, Secure instructed the multi-reader in the alien camp to discharge it's electre brick. The explosion would be visible from orbit. But the surveyors sensed no damage on Victory. The only bomb was in their boat. Instead of demolishing the Heinous and their compound, Security energized the reader and found a bright sphere before his face, an alien device that had begun the murder of his emotion.

Chapter 7

Together With Their Brains

        As Sec ordered the orbiter to flash its ergs, the hollowvid changed, as though the wrong apparatus had accepted his instruction. No plasma expanded to eat the boat with heat, but the view inside became alien. The staff saw, on the center of the office floor, a spherical object on a pedestal recognized from their friends' recordings. The object did not seem to belong, for it was a static shape in the rapidly moving scene of a multi-reader still searching the forest. Examining her information sources through the boat's internal sensers libraried by the pervasive fact integrator, Omb understood.

        "It's not a corruption of the hollowvid," she informed the staff. "It's tangible---it is really in here!"

        Analyst leapt from his seat and screamed like a madman."How did it get inside!"

        "The erg detractor seems to have been set to minimum," Prime noted.

        Everyone stared at Secure, who understood that if he had used the brick's electrelogics instead of saving their ergs, the Heinous sphere would not likely have entered. Immediately he was furious at having failed. With all of his emotion and expertise and demand for duty, Sec had worried about his responsibility instead of implementing it properly. Though aware a further failure might kill them all, Secure did not deliberate this future, continuing with the present.

        He checked the photon stores. Since the boat had been in full starlight for minutes, Sec could apply all the received energy to the erg detractor without wasting the boat's electre brick. Both erg sources were now available, but perhaps too late. Secure sucked light out of local space and applied it to the bubble.

        The Heinous sphere began projecting its own, flatter view, a mere projection compared to the hollowvid's revelation, but astonishing due to the accompanying sound. The staff recognized the view of alien personage and gear from Ad's recording. Most distressing was that the alien speaking used Administer's voice.

        "We most apologize for your being delicate," the voice began. "Your other peoples were so ungenerous that they fled their skeletons instead of having art with us."

        The speaking continued, but now the voice not matching the face was Science Intensive's.

        "Please rectify your selfishness with our forgiveness. Offer we do the finest selection of original, natural, wonderful pain types for your fine bodies."

        The speaking continued, but the voice was now Gen's. And the background changed, for behind the alien was a human violently slapping his own head. Register. The alien then spoke in Register's voice as the poet tried to drive demons from his skull.

        "It's phony," Analyst stated with a hard, low voice. This fact he had gained from Omb, but she could not speak, only look, as the alien continued. As Register continued. "It's not happening now to Reg, but it did."

        "Unlike your brethren, you are not alone with your force, but have more. It will not be against yourselves as with them, but against us. You will cause us pain. In retribution, you will have to kill us for it."

        Though prostrate now, Register did not lay still. Something sharp pressed out from within his torso, ruining Reg's interior. The alien continued speaking, and the voice became Non's.

        Secure knew whose sound would be last, final, ultimate, the end, and he could not bear it, could not bear to hear the sound of his lover, his dead lover.

        "We will torture you lovely, or have you to kill us horridly, horridly, to refuse it."

        The voice became Empath's.

        "We would never kill you. We would never kill us. You sick, you wicked."

        Security understood. Whether Empath were dead or alive, these creatures proved their honesty, for they were torturing the boat's staff. They wielded Empath's death to torture Secure beyond common suffering. Sec would not cooperate with the aliens' torment, but neither would he defeat them with suicide. Secure would not save his friends by convincing them to die. As had Matilda.

        Analyst concentrated on his own informations instead of seething at the Heinous' threats.

        "That ball has enough internal energy so that if it's released, we'll all die. But it won't wreck the boat. I don't want to die. Neither do you. Get it outside, now."

        "Everyone please leave the office," Prime ordered as she stood. "I've already instructed the research population to enter the boat's peripheral rooms. When they comply, we'll remove those compartments from the boat. Secure?"

        Only he and his father had remained seated. Sec looked up to the prime minister."What if the sphere enters one of the rooms we've culled? Then you'll be stuck in there with no gear. I want to kick it outside while it's in here."

        "Agreed, dear, but while you're doing it, the staff should be as far away as possible. Including you and your father. You can work remotely."

        "No, we can't all leave, Prime. If these 'Heinous' are seeking torture, then they're seeking people, not a vehicle. If we're all off in rooms somewhere, that will encourage the sphere to come and find us. You folks leave the office, but not me."

        "Very well," Prime replied, then turned to the remaining staff. "Everyone leave, please."

        "Prime, spread them all over the boat, including the researchers," Secure suggested. "In case we have an accident."

        "In case we have an explosion," his father added. "I like explosions."

        "We've never had to do this before," Ombuds said as she stood, her voice the surprised sound of an innocent confronted with reality.

        "Kill that damn hollowvid before you go," Analyst grumbled to Omb. "It's just in the way."

        Ombuds complied, then left the office.

        "Who do you need to assist you, Security?" Prime asked.

        "In here? Just Analyst. Have Omb connect us with everyone in the boat, but don't let them bother us with brilliant ideas until you preview them. Get out, Prime; we're wasting time."

        She left with the staff. Controller felt it best to proceed to the electre hold, where his wife, Janet, managed the main electre brick. Con did not function well without his family. A second family remained in the control office, Security and Analyst seated across the blank vid field from one another. An alien pedestal and Heinous sphere separated them.

        "We get this outside, then rig weapons to attack the alien compound, and their warship," Secure determined.

        "We got to learn what this is, Ernie," his father insisted. "They managed to get this thing inside the boat. Maybe they could blow it up now if they wanted to."

        "Not with the detractor fielded---don't give me that crap. You're being paranoid."

        "I'm being cautious, you little shit. What if they send more?"

        "They haven't sent more because they can't get through the full bubble."

        "Fishshit. I'm reading the field's acceptance, and nothing has approached it. We have to figure this ball so we can prevent more from coming in."

        "How tangible was its entry?"

        "I don't know. If I prod too much, it might puke ergs out and melt us. You get it outside, and I'll suss it remotely."

        "Look, Analyst, the sphere's been inactive for minutes. If they wanted to blow it up, they would have. I bet they've been trying, but can't send a control signal through the soap bubble when it's fully fielded. I bet the whole show, aliens and all, was recorded."

        Analyst and Sec recalled Ad's recording of himself and Intensive fleeing in a Victorian building, of a Heinous sphere following. But Science and Ad had not been in a vacuum boat.

        "We got to move now, Secure," Analyst urged. "Those perverts might have it set to go off any time. You know, a timer. Let's grab the sphere and toss it through a bloody window."

        "Yeah, that's really being cautious, Anal," Security sneered. "We have to get it outside of the detractor field, yes. If it goes off there, so what. But let's not kill ourselves doing it."

        The two men had not been bickering without working. Both constantly received informations fed from the boat's internal sensers passively examining the sphere. Analyst subvocalized for Omb to check for intrusion of the soap bubble while he concentrated on the ball inside. Omb acknowledged with a simple yes, another voice in his head, the woman fully stable now, not suffering terrors from her dead friends and family.

        "If we touch it, the thing blows, I'm guessing," Analyst assumed. "There's something organic in its guts I can't get a lock on, but it's just organic. I don't read nothing special in the rest of the ball. It's nukey, but no electres. Geez, what a bunch of half-assed perverts not to have electrelogics in this day and age. Half-assed assholes."

        "They got the damn thing inside, didn't they?" Sec shouted. "Could we do that to them?"

        Analyst then looked sharply to his son."Yes. That's what we need to do. We need to send it back where it came from and blow it up in their faces."

        "Dad, they can listen to us, you know---you saw Ad's recording. You just threatened their lives."

        "How could they hear us when no energy is getting through the fielded detractor?" Analyst called out loudly.

        "All right, let's go. We'll wrap the sphere up, then slide it out of the office. If it goes off, the force will be contained. Get me something and some people to do it."

        "Where are you going with it?" his father demanded.

        "To a vacuum lock, of course. If we can't just kick the sphere outside, we'll place it in an outer room, then slough off that room and send it to the bubble's edge."

        "The pedestal is on the floor," Analyst noted as though speaking to a fool. "We'll have to lift it to get a shield beneath. What if a physical displacement of its position sets it off?"

        "We'll do the top last, so its force will blow outside, not down to the electre hold. I'll have Prime evacuate the floor above us. Past that, it's just space."

        "What if it blows the minute we get near?"

        "Then we bloody well die, damn it!" Sec shouted.

        "All right, I'm in contact with my technol adjuncts," Analyst huffed. "I'm making sure they bring some stuff that keeps everything out as well as everything in. I don't want that ball listening to us, reading us. Even if it can't ship data to its masters, it might be self-responsive. I don't want it figuring out something nasty to do because of what it learns in here."

        "Great timing, now that you've told the thing you want to blow it up, and that you'd like to destroy the Heinous compound and their ship."

        "Thanks for reminding the ball of what I said, Mr. Genius," Analyst grumbled. "Maybe it's hard of hearing."

        Two of Analyst's subordinates entered the office, looking only toward that sphere. No information of the Heinous had been censored from the boat's population, but only now did these men view the hateful object.

        They pressed ahead of themselves a vertical roll of thick malmetal fabric half their height whose cart was supported by a hardened-air roller that seemed a cloud of dirt inches thick beneath its burden. The surveyors' strongest material, malmetal was used to repair nukey and electrelogical power areas where ergs might leak as fusion or wave/ray melds. Because this fabric version, though flexible, could only be cut with an electre brick discharge, the roll held several short pieces.

        The adjuncts stopped at the hollowvid area, then looked to the people who would order them near the deadly object.

        Prime entered the office with dark eyes of anxiety, but a slight smile of concentration. She had always seemed like a too-young mother to Sec, though she did not inspire Analyst to think of his former wife, wherever she was. The prime minister had been unable to remain away from this critical area of decision.

        "Please proceed, dears," Prime said to the hesitating adjuncts. "Analyst will tell you what he wants done."

        Analyst instructed them with a curt nod; he didn't need the prime minister telling his people what to do. As the pair pushed through the gap in the decorative railing encircling the hollowvid realm, Sec suddenly thought that nothing in the work areas of the boat should be decorative, everything functional. No fotos on the desks, no posters done by Con's daughter adorning the walls, none of that damn flowery wallpaper and wainscoting. But the posters were fun. The rail was of handsome, hand carved wood, a pleasure to view and touch when the surveyors were lounging about pursuing average business. Sec understood that the decoration seemed inappropriate not because they were working, but because they were desperate to avoid further death.

        As the adjuncts rolled the thick fabric to within one long pace of the sphere, Security gave a warning.

        "If this thing is smart, it will try to do something now, as we're applying the fab."

        Secure was proven correct by the sphere's speaking to him.

        "Of course, you are right, my love," it stated in Empath's voice.

        Sec responded by leaping to his feet, face stricken with anger. The sphere continued their dialogue in kind, responding not with words, but with activity. From the slick surface shot a bolt of dark fluid that smacked against Sec's forehead. Immediately the liquid congealed, growing into several thumb-sized plants that began eating his head.

        Sec reached to the demons at his hairline, but could not remove them. They remained, blood oozing from his scalp, bits of hair falling to the carpet. They remained, and began moving down his face.

        Analyst read them as plants in an instant. Leaping to his feet, Analyst with a brief, speech-center code demanded data of the living things on Security's face. A most sophisticated plant life, the boat's sensers gleaned. Analyst did not pause. As he gained the assessment, he shouted to his adjuncts to "Get away!" and commanded the cart to dispense the malmetal. In a partial second, the fab had unrolled, several lengths overlapping cylindrically around the sphere. Before another second passed, the fabric covered both top and bottom of the sphere and pedestal, sliding beneath the bottom first, but not before a huge fart burped forth, a grotesque imitation of human flatulence that ripped a hole in the office ceiling, through the room above, puncturing the boat's hull.

        The surveyors saw stars.

        Analyst allowed the bubble to pass this energy, then turned to his son as the boat patched itself, a few cubic feet of air lost, one ear now gone from Secure.

        Prime moved before Analyst. As Sec tore at the plant life eating his skin, forcefully closing his eyes and mouth as the organisms gained his face, Prime ran to Sec and viciously snatched at the alien forms crawling toward his eyes. One of the plants came away in her hand, along with the tip of Sec's nose. Then the plant began eating Prime's finger.

        Analyst thought of oak bark. The handrail was oak, and these plants resembled green pieces of individual bark from an oak tree. Analyst saw another color. While eating, the plants deposited a thick, brown fluid. He understood how complex the human mind can be to allow multiple thoughts of such clarity, his primary brainwork being applied to activity, for Analyst was going to skin his son.

        Immediately after securing the pedestal and sphere, Analyst ran to the remaining fab on the roll and grasped the separate hand controls, for he needed all subtlety to scrape the plants away from Sec with a malmetal fabric that could cut him dead if misapplied. Two paces away, Sec produced the most terrifying sounds Analyst had ever heard. His stressed breathing and grunting, the slaps and digs at his own face as his body twisted and jerked, signified horror, torture. Analyst knew how Ad and Em and Science had felt to view Register.

        Squeezing the controls, Analyst instructed the roll to move beside Sec. Stepping near, Analyst turned to face his son, his son with no face. The sight was no worse than the sound, for Sec was covered with three hands and those small, greenish items. All those hands on his face seemed to be applying blood, but, no, it was being drawn. There stood Prime, tearing at the attackers on Sec's face with one hand as an alien organism dissolved her finger.

        Though surveyors filled the corridor outside, Analyst locked the door with a subvocal code. Analyst did not think he could remove vicious plants from the entire staff. Of course, he understood that he would be next.

        The thick malmetal had no sharp edge, but its hardness and density were unparalleled. Squeezing spherical controls in either hand, Analyst had the fab unroll and extend toward Sec. Analyst would shave him, scraping the fab against Sec's skin, but not into it. First he got scalp. This sight was likely a joy to the Heinous, for there was Analyst, grimacing as he bent near his son to get the best view of the plants, Prime and Sec jerking and twisting and bleeding, Analyst squeezing both hands to send the fab against Sec's scalp and remove it down to bone.

        With this failure, this misapplication, Analyst's face expanded, mouth and eyes opening wide, then shutting down as he concentrated more carefully. Yes, he scraped away one plant, and was elated as he secured it by rolling tight strands from the fab's edge around it. But he could scrape away no more, for Sec was holding them.

        "You have to move your hands!" Analyst shouted, alternately sending a speech center communique. "Ernie, you got to move your hands, son!"

        With no clear thought, Sec could not believe the foolishness of the instruction. Then he understood. That last striking slash of pain against his head was the malmetal roll. Dad was scraping it along his head. Better no skin than no face. No eyes, no brain. With an effort that caused his entire body to go as rigid as death, Sec tore his own hands away. Prime followed, and they waited.

        Prime viewed a martyr. The religion of space had caused Security's torture, and he would accept it, his carriage erect as he refrained from crying out at the torment being inflicted not by some enemy, but by his beliefs, for a conviction in sentience had led him to this crucifixion.

        Analyst did not have time to consider the courage required for Secure to trust him, to remove his hands from the plants that could now eat his face unencumbered. Except for the malmetal. Moving the edge along Sec's face to a pair of plants on his cheek, Analyst closed his eyes as contact was made, scraping away the sick forms by feel, as though an empath, an emotion mechanic trusting his touch. Yes, yes, he got them both, Analyst carefully squeezing the controls over Sec's nose with just a bit of skin removed, two more gone, a third, three more away from his eye, his eaten eye, his consumed eye, down, down, away from the empty socket, Sec's arms tight as his side, torso still erect, closing his mouth and eyes as tightly as possible, not really breathing, hands squeezing only themselves now, as his father scraped away the remaining plants, rolled them in malmetal thread, and turned to Prime.

        She held out her hand. Colorless skin, expression bleached by anxiety, Prime was the ghost woman accompanying Security the martyr. Only one plant ate at Prime, now on another finger, Analyst knowing that by the time he gained an accurate touch for this new shape of her hand, another finger would be gone. So he cut if off himself. Snip, snip, and the fab edge folded against itself, all the plants now hidden, wrapped behind glossy, opaque thread that formed a lump containing torment and body parts and family blood.

        He sat, looking away a moment, as though crucified himself. Analyst sat as he allowed the door to open, the staff meds the first to rush in, as predicted. More of Con's family. Uncle Psybiology and brother-in-law Medical ran inside, moving respectively to Prime and Secure. Pulling a blood pack from his doc-kit, Psy slapped the sealer against Prime's stumps, where it self-adhered. Then he reached behind Prime's neck to her skin-covered spine link, finding it only by touch to insert a neurol injector that had been preset for pain. Instantly the electre current reverse dampened her brain's pain generation, and Prime felt nothing, nothing bad. Psy then reached to squeeze the injector's pod into a different shape, and Prime's shocky state dissolved. Removing the pain generation and the tendency toward shock also removed all of Prime's mental energy. She seemed exhausted and became unfeeling, though her consciousness remained.

        Having lost the need to be courageous, Sec again pressed against his face with both hands, not pulling demons away, but feeling the damage, concealing it. Medical pulled both hands away as best he could while applying the same injector, same settings, against Security's spine. Then Sec's hands dropped away, Medical looking up to the tall man's face, which had no normal color. Red drooled from his ragged nose, from the raw flesh of his cheeks, scalp showing white, contrasted against the dark hole where Sec's left eye had been. After looking a moment, Medic seemed relieved.

        He glanced toward Analyst while reaching for a blood patch, a clear fabric applied to Secure's entire face, the bleeding stopped by this sterile seal.

        "The eye is gone, but that's all," Med told Analyst, Sec in no condition to hear a diagnosis. "They got some nerve endings, but nothing of the brain. The other damage is minor. The only eyes we brought are inorganic, though. They won't connect until we have him regrow some nerves, so he'll have to wait till we get home to get him a new one. He'll be fine," Med concluded with satisfaction. "He'll be brand new."

        Sec and Prime left the office on their own, a helping hand on the elbow, Analyst staring after his son though he had to continue, had to continue thinking of the sphere, the attack, the ongoing danger. So did Omb. She approached Analyst, appearing remarkably strong. With Prime disabled, the information ombudsman was ostensibly in charge.

        "What's it doing?" she asked.

        Analyst spoke while stepping those few paces to his seat. He did not feel that he could bear his own weight another moment.

        "I've just now released a little of the fab to read through molecularly. It'll close faster than any major ergs can get through, but I've made a labyrinthine path anyway. Hold on."

        Analyst then was able to sense the malmetal container's energy contents. His spine link relayed an aural reading in his head, verbal, for Analyst heard speaking.

        "Thank you," the wrapped sphere said in Empath's voice, "thank you for the pain."

        "It's doing nothing," Analyst lied. "It's not expending any energy. Let's get it outside. We'll use the cart from the fab. The sphere ain't that massy."

        They found no difficulty in rolling the hardened-air cart beneath the ad hoc, malmetal cylinder, and moving the cart to the nearest exterior hull segment with an osmotic lock. Pressing the fab container against the segment delineated with neat signs of "Exit" and "Abandon Air All Ye Who Enter Here", Analyst and his technol adjuncts watched it move through as though into water, the wall flowing closed about it, and the smothered sphere entered space.

        "Repel it with maggrav away from the boat, Omb," Analyst suggested. "You're running the office."

        So she was. But the erg detractor was made to allow approaching energies to slip past, not penetrate through---in or out.

        "Analyst, matter is just hard, slow moving energy to the soap bubble, so I'll have to weave it through. How about if we use the same parameters of labyrinthine pathmaking you used to probe through the malmetal?"

        "Good thinking. Tell the bubble you want to slide out some matter along a seam without allowing anything in, and I'll feed the factingrate the protocols."

        Turning from Analyst, Omb concentrated on properly encoding her thoughts. In a moment, the analyst and information ombudsman were working together with their brains. Through a rectangular porthole covered with lacy drapes handsewn by a surveyor, the staff watched the ad hoc container move slowly from the boat. Two hundred paces later, the malmetal cylinder slid through the bubble.

        "Can't hurt us now, the son of a bitch," Analyst seethed to Omb, then turned to his adjuncts. "Let's take it apart. Guys, you rig every remote you can manage. Omb, you get me Controller."

        "What?" she returned.

        Analyst knew that Prime would never respond so crudely.

        "I've been reading at the sphere since it entered. I'll do better now because I can be active, but I want to see if an integrating empath can do more than truck us about. Really complex idea systems are supposed to be sort of emotional, aren't they? That's why empaths can 'feel' them. Maybe Con' can help."

        "That's a rather intangible science for you, isn't it, Analyst?"

        "That's a rather half-assed response for the current prime minister, isn't it, Omb?"

        "Yes, it is," she replied after a brief pause. "I'm contacting Controller now," Omb said, turning away as though she would speak with the integrating empath in person.

        "Omb," Analyst called out to her back. When she turned, he said, "Sorry," and she winked in reply. Still, Omb walked away. She had to visit family. Analyst understood. But he became nearly angry, for although he wanted to visit his healing son, he had to save his life again.

Chapter 8

Compensate For Occurrence

        Not even his adjuncts were certain what Analyst had learned. His tendency was to collect informations within his mind until they exploded out as solution, as though a burst of passion. The technol adjuncts variously sat and reclined and paced in the office while viewing informations on the hollowvid. Surrounding the cylindrical fab containing the alien sphere were discrete instruments, physico and electre devices---from logolyzers to sodality purveyors---whose data were passed to the boat as incoherent light, that energy most readily slipped through the soap bubble. Analyst sat deeply in his chair, though he seemed about to leap upward. Omb sat on the edge of her seat, though she seemed sunken, shoulders drooping. She only became alert again when a favorite voice returned, not a sick imitation emanating from the Heinous sphere, but the true words of her aunt, her superior.

        "What are you trying to do, dear?" Prime asked Analyst as she entered the office with her mild smile of strength, gently grasping Omb's shoulder as she seated herself beside the ombudsman. Grasped her shoulder with her single hand. Her other arm was sealed so neatly that it seemed proper for her wrist to terminate in a rounded end, as though the heel of her foot.

        Analyst did not ask of Ernie's condition. Through his spine link, he had learned that his son was stable, out of danger. No, all the staff remained in danger, and Analyst had to heal them.

        "I want to send that ball back under my control," Analyst explained. "We know it didn't come from the planet's surface. That means it came from the space building over there."

        Prime knew the boat had received no response from that supposed vehicle. Nevertheless, the surveyors did not know about the sphere until it penetrated their vessel.

        "Why, dear? Perhaps we should abandon it and leave the area."

        "We should do what, run?" Analyst returned sharply. "You mean abandon Victory, not the bloody sphere. We're going to abandon our greatest discovery---our greatest victory? What about our staff below? We're just gonna run off and leave them without even walking where they last walked, seeing what they last saw?"

        Prime placed her half-hand in her lap. She had no argument with this analytic empath.

        "What do you propose to do in the way of returning the sphere to its source, dear?" she asked of Analyst. "How will you apply your influence once the sphere arrives?"

        Administer had called it a sphere, not a ball. Ad was family. Deceased now, but ever family.

        "I'll get the thing inside their ship and spy on those Heinous perverts, or I'll just blow them to bloody hell."

        "How far along are you in comprehending the sphere?" Prime continued. "My word, it seems to me that the most astonishing discovery we've made has nothing to do with Victory, but the technols these Heinous people manifested by transporting the sphere tangibly as though a radio program."

        "No, it ain't all that great, " Analyst scoffed. "The ball may not have been as tangible as it seemed."

        "Dear Analyst, are you saying it was illusory?" Prime returned, and moved her stump an inch.

        "Not its effects, hell no, but it used the contents of our boat. It came here as a form of broadcast electromagnetic, a program just as you said, one containing data of us---that the Heinous learned from our staff. The EM broadcast caused common bacteria from the air in here to grow, but genetically mutated. The sphere's shell, at first only appearance, was grown from the mineral content of dust, or akin to our hardening air. That's why it took so long for things to start happening---the sphere had to grow its tangible materials first. Those plants were common viral forms genetically modified and grown inside the sphere's shell. The supporting fluid was modified water vapor. Simple."

        Analyst's adjuncts, also Con, looked to Analyst as though he had lost his mind. None of them had found evidence to support such a reckless, imaginative theory.

        "What evidence have your people found to support that theory, Analyst?" Prime asked.

        "None, its all fishshit," he snarled. "That's the first idea I came up with, but it's all crap. I wanted it to be true, because if they can transport matter like a radio program, then we're in trouble. I didn't want those perverts to be better than we are, but maybe they're not anyway. Listen, Prime, these clowns use electre without inferring ether. That's telegraph compared to radio, black and white compared to color, a crayon drawing compared to a hollowvid, a---"

        "Please continue, dear," Prime interrupted, for Analyst was intellectually frothing, "by explaining why you believe the Heinous could not control the sphere's functions through our detractor. After all, Security and I were attacked after the bubble had been fielded."

        "Yeah, Sec had a bubble up I could have popped with my finger. Once the soap was up full thick, the perverts couldn't do nothing with their damn ball---it had its own priorities. It read Secure's emotional distress that came upon hearing Empath's voice, so it used that against him. That's what I was looking for with the made-from-dust bit: an explanation that would make them perverts look less like geniuses. Maybe they still ain't, with their half-assed application of electrelogics. But, hell, you don't have to know what an electron is to shock somebody---just stick their finger in a socket. I'm still thinking them perverts don't have much more than some kind of limited tangibility broadcasting. Con agrees. I think they shot their wad with that technol, or else they would have picked us apart by now. Con?"

        "I want to feel that this is the height and the end of their technols, Prime, but I can't be sure from in here. I'm too removed from the sphere."

        "We don't need to know the 'heights of their abilities', dear," Prime smiled to Analyst and the controller. "We only need to incite them to vacate the area. As far as I'm concerned, we can settle for annihilation as a method."

        "We got no bombs on board," Analyst returned. "That's why I want to send their ball back. It will tell us how to run them off, if I can get it to back-feed stuff to us the way it did before, with the perverts on the planet and our staff. I think I can override its controls. After all, I own electre," he stated with excitement, with anger. "Damn, we will own their ass because they just piss around with electre, but we own it. Their shitting quarks can't hide from the paramass electren wave/ray. Paramass, paramass, paramass," was his final chant, a singsong boast signaling his confidence, his anxiety.

        "Very well, send the sphere home if you're so powerful, dear," Prime suggested.

        "Not ready yet," Analyst replied. "I think I can get it home, but then it has to do something. So I'll charge it with an electre bug, one that won't interfere with the ball's own power usage. I'm talking viral electrelogics: an intelligent charge that'll reproduce off a host in its likeness. If the ball gets near what sent it, the bug will duplicate that activity of sending, and I'll know how its done. That's the start I need. I don't know how those perverts got this thing here, but if they know, I will know. Then I'll duplicate it, me and the bug. The charge should be able to replicate the energies applied by rehashing their effects, first as knowledge, then as manifestation."

        "Well, dear, what is the limit of this usage of electrelogistics? Could you bug a musket ball, cram it in the breech, and fire it again using the electre power?"

        "Damn straight, even though that's a chemical action, using just the outside of atoms. We're not talking atoms here, but universal, submaterial forces. Paramass, paramass, paramass."

        "Analyst," Prime wondered, "why do we still have that malmetal roll in our office?"

        Analyst looked to her as though she had asked why they all were breathing air instead of vacuum.

        "Because I might need it," he said.

        "My final question, then, is why are you not proceeding instead of conversing with me?" Prime and her semi-sweet smile added.

        "I have to get the force map finished so the bug in the ball won't be found by the Heinous perverts. Con's helping me sense the sphere's protocols as an idea system, but he says he's suffering from separation. So, we're waiting for him to go and lay hands on it."

        Prime was not the type to look at a person espousing even ridiculous ideas as though he were a total fool. She replied moderately, though with less of a smile.

        "Dear, what if the Heinous set it off?"

        "I'm sure it's deactivated," Analyst responded.

        "Then why not bring it back inside where Con would be within the soap bubble?"

        "I'm not that sure."

        "Very well," the prime minister continued, "what if the Heinous send another sphere, or a more significant erg mass, either of which they activate while Con is outside the detractor's fielding?"

        "The surface area of the fielding is in square miles. Our boat is between the sphere and the perverts' shack."

        "Nukes spread very rapidly, dear," Prime mentioned.

        Analyst shrugged."Tell him," he said, and pointed to Con.

        "I am telling you, dear Analyst, that Security would never allow you to proceed."

        "Yeah, but he's always been a bad kid," Analyst lied. "Besides, you're the boss. This is the best idea I got. If you can do better, go ahead."

        "Analyst, what about an alternate plan?" Prime wondered.

        "I don't have second-rate ideas," he harshly returned. "Call me reckless if you want, Prime, but don't call Con a fool. He ain't."

        "Who says?" Control asked of Analyst as though skeptical, then turned to Prime. "Perhaps I am a fool, Prime, but a foolish empath is a strong empath. What are we, sentience surveyors or politicos? I go out there, take my best precautions, and absorb the sphere's truth."

        Controller looked to his wife. Janet should have been in the electre hold, but he needed her presence to increase his empathic, emotional strength. If not for Janet and their daughter, Penny, Con would have no family. No parents, no kin as a youth, although he always wanted them. Always needed a family in order to feel correct, to emote properly.

        He looked to Analyst. Controller needed his confidence. Con almost envied him because he had a father. Almost. Analyst was rubbing his chest again, as his father used to, but Analyst stopped at the ribs, not continuing down to.... The analyst's complex brain was functioning on multiple levels again, thinking of Papa holding him on his lap and rubbing his chest, rubbing his chest and speaking with a deep voice. Analyst could still hear that sound, but not the words, not quite the content, something about son, but what about him? Analyst had never touched his son, damn it, never paddled, slapped, pushed him around, never embraced him so he'd misconstrue it as fondling. Only got his face tore off.

        Con had felt enough in preparation. He stood, and faced Analyst with a confident mien appropriate for a man who could feel his way through the ether.

        "I'm ready," he concluded.

        "You are correct, dear," seated Prime mused dreamily, "We are not politicos," and she thumbed a gesture to the nearest osmotic lock.

        Hard starlight glinting white on the fine weave, Con's ad hoc shield glared as though transparent, as though light could penetrate malmetal fabric. Contrast control on his vacuum sack prevented retinal damage from the light's intensity, but Con was not looking. He was feeling. The cylindrical shield beside him was for emergencies; the malmetal fab of his concern ensconced a foreign sphere of torture, one he now touched, literally, with one fingertip, the man's hand and the protective fabric wrapped in the contained air of his expanded sack. Connected to the boat's data integrator, Con verified Analyst's reading of the sphere's exposition of energy flow portrayed in metamathical terms the men exchanged. Analyst agreed with this path of mid-force expenditure, that priority of massive electren intimidation, and verified levels and layers of erg exchange.

        Beside him floated discrete instruments of complas with electre and techorg interiors. He and the gear were connected to the staff via tiny wires: one from Con's hand to and from the instruments, another from this removed lab to the boat, to Analyst and the data integrator. This physical connection supplied more and more subtle informations than their previous flashlighting, which was the easiest solution to avoid interference from the bubble. Con could almost see it. A hard refraction like air above a hot road.

        "Hey, I think I know what I'm doing now! I think I can make this son of a bitch dance" Analyst called out loudly in the office, and Con heard him in his head, as though Analyst stood nearby, in space, but Con was alone.

        Omb then notified the surveyors how this situation was changing.

        "The Heinous boat has relieved itself of matter," she yelped, "a dense object pulling stiff gees around a high orbit."

        Con, in space, said, "What?" under his breath as Prime and Analyst studied informations in the office, Ombuds verbalizing the base constituents.

        "That matter is goaling for our boat, I tell you. Estimated receipt in twenty minutes. Null that---gees increasing, make it eighteen. Further null; figure fifteen. Accelerative increase. Get him in. Get Con in. Analyst!" she shouted directly to the man across the hollowvid from her, for Omb had noted no response in him. "Analyst, why aren't you retrieving Con?"

        "Because there's no time," he stated quietly, eyes moving left and right, and Omb could hear him thinking. The vid showed an arc curving around Victory toward them, its pale streak a representation of travel, the multi-readers in orbit now displaying their gleanings: the size of an autocar, of similar mass, hard-edged and full of energy.

        "Pulling him through the fielding will take ten minutes. That rock will be here in twelve unless it keeps accelerating, so make it eleven. Nine, I see. If we drop the erg detractor, then the perverts own our ass. They want us to drop it. Then the boat will be full of those spheres."

        "Analyst, dear, what do you---?"

        "Be quiet," he said breathlessly, not looking at the staff, the vid, but to the floor, the hard floor that felt like sponge, the phony feel of maggrav. "I have to get him out, I have to get him away."

        It was dirty. Some brown stuff stained the floor where Prime and Sec had been standing. Analyst had noticed this material on Sec's face, but hadn't thought of it. Hadn't thought of the plant shit. Now he understood. The plants assimilated tissue as quickly as they could ingest it. That's one little thing could just keep eating Prime's fingers. Analyst wondered if the remaining staff had seen. Seen Sec's torment, his damage, his pain, his shit. Of course, everyone Analyst locked outside had been able to view with the boat's information supplies. The entire staff had seen Sec being attacked exactly as they all had witnessed the recording of Register's torture. The difference was that Secure had survived. So far.

        Prime knew that Analyst was accessing the boat's factingrate in a multiplicity of priorities. The prime minister left him alone with his work. She did not interfere even seconds later when Analyst issued his first instruction for saving Con.

        "Drop the sphere's malmetal."

        "Analyst!" Ombuds cried. "You have to get Con inside his own shield, or bring him inside the bubble."

        "Dear, the malmetal won't likely protect him from such an accelerative mass, especially considering its contained ergs," Prime told her. "You see that we have no time to slip him through the bubble. We will not drop the detractor and expose the ether boat, dear."

        Analyst then left the boat's staff. Intellectually, he was alone with Control in saving the integrating empath.

        "Con, grab hold of the ball," Analyst subvocalized.

        "Touch it?" he replied. "Analyst, I know what's going on. Do you want me to feel for more of the idea system?"

        "No, I'm telling you to grab hold with your arms and legs and stick your head right against it. When the sphere goes, I want to make sure you go with it."

        That pale streak still curved along the hollowvid.

        "Time of receipt, four minutes," Omb stated with a dull, dead voice.

        Con heard it. He heard the danger, the Heinous' aesthetic delivery.

        "Analyst, can you have the sphere transport itself into the boat?" Control wondered. "That's great."

        "No, Con, I can't. I can only send it back where it came from."

        "You're sending me into the Heinous' vessel?" Con asked with the voice of a child.

        Analyst shouted in reply."I'd come out and get you with my own hands if I could! I can't do that, Con, I cannot. But I sent you out there, and I am bringing you back."

        Prime changed the hollowvid. In the office's center, Con was seen between two malmetal cylinders, one empty, one unwrapping itself from a small, bright sphere on a dark pedestal. Wearing only a plain uniform, Con would have seemed unprotected were it not for the faint refraction caused by his vacuum sack. Controller then embraced the sphere and pedestal with every limb. Was he then a passenger set for rapid transport that might toss him off, or a suitor engaged in coitus with a synthetic, tortuous lover? On the hollowvid, a streak suggesting more than torment glided toward the intimate pair.

        "Receipt in three minutes. It won't hit on Con's side of the boat," Omb pronounced, a physically irrelevant fact she had to state.

        "Keep your wire feed connected," Analyst told Con. "I want us to hear each other. You got to help me, partner. I've got the electre bug set inside the ball, but I have to finish arranging it. It'll power the sphere back, and get you out of the way of whatever's coming. But do not let go of that sphere. Whatever happens, do not let go, or I can't get you back."

        "Receipt in one minute."

        "You'll see the metamathical settings I'm making in your head. Just feel them as you touch the sphere and glean its system. I'll pick up your emotional responses directly from your brain and the factingrate will integrate the two finesses with the decorum I've developed. Make it feel right for you, Con. Help me get you away, and I will bring you home. I promise I will bring you home."

        Con felt how Analyst had saved his son. With courage and confidence, and blood.

        In his head, as though his own thoughts, Con read a flow of metamathical symbols denoting the idea system of the sphere's transport proclivities, and Analyst's intents. Con did not feel how they jibed.

        "Don't tense up on me now, Controller," Analyst instructed loudly, speaking when only subvocalizing was required. "Relax and do your job."

        So he did. Con allowed his feelings to be generated without the force of consciousness, thinking only of being empathic and sympathetic with the ideas of the two systems that must meld for his survival.

        "Ten seconds."

        He thought of Em. He wondered how Empath had functioned in a similar situation; for, yes, he felt that she had suffered the same desperation of needing to save herself with feeling. Con wondered how she had succeeded, for no longer was he certain that Em had failed, as he made to save himself with emotion.

        "Mass received," Omb whispered, and Con disappeared from the hollowvid. In the next moment, the surveyors saw nothing but light, unlimited light.

        Omb changed the vid view. Now seen from the vantage of a removed orbiter, Victory was a bright background for an even brighter sphere of expanding light; and they could feel the heat.

        "A big nuke," Analyst said flatly. "It's a damn big nuke slipping over the bubble. He got away. I saw him get away. I felt it."

        "You don't know where he went!" Omb declared with a stricken, tearful face, and Analyst did not bother to argue.

        Omb's face then went blank as she carefully listened to data. Turning to the hollowvid, she pointed to a small glint near the boat. With that gesture, and Omb's accompanying words, her face turned stricken again.

        "It doesn't matter where he went---because his vacuum sack stayed behind!"

        Con died with the sphere. The feeling was spiritual, not one of leaving his body, but of his corpus' abandoning his mind, his soul, then reaching behind to painfully drag them along. Controller felt his most important aspects of physicality, spirituality, and mentality split, separate, and the feeling was ecstasy, Con thankful that Em had died magnificently in saving herself and the staff. Coming together again after a duration of death, Con felt his pieces slammed together as though they did not fit, and the pain was horrifying, for it seemed that the renewal of life was torture, Con sorrowful if Empath saved herself by suffering this torment, as though being tortured by the Heinous. This future would be Controller's due, for he felt that Analyst had saved him by sending him into the Heinous' ship.

        He found himself within a cramped and contrasty room with a low ceiling, harsh light emanating from the floor, and a multitude of unclean people sliding past machines and each other. Con smelled alien sweat and odd metallic compounds, saw a sphere paces away, three Heinous moving between, one finally noting him, and it stopped. He did, the alien man. The Heinous then turned to pound his ribs, face pointed elegantly upward, in a loud voice that seemed precise. Most of the aliens then turned to Con, but not even the nearest leapt away---were they totally devoid of both fear and surprise?

        Situated so near an alien, Controller found him more aesthetic than when seen on the hollowvid in the form of Ad's recordings. But his odor was thick, his apparel soiled and not so handsome in real life. Real death. Con could observe no more, gaining only a sense of cramped quarters, dirty aliens milling about each other and several spheres, aware that he had not been transported or translated properly, perhaps one lung left behind, for he could scarcely breathe. Then he understood that the atmosphere was problematic, for it contained insufficient oxygen for a man recently ripped through space.

        Con then found himself naked. He found that Analyst was merely a semi-genius. Yes, Analyst had managed to save Con from being fried by a nuclear blast. Controller had traveled with the alien sphere, but his vacuum sack remained behind.

        Controller then learned of soiled tailoring and alien odor. One Heinous approached Con with a heavy, open box that he dragged with back-bending effort. The second reached for Con and ripped off his eyelid.

        Con was not so fatigued that he did not feel the pain---as though they had ripped his entire face away---feel the terror of such a bizarre, cruel act, feel the danger of such violence near his eye. Con thought of Security, blind Security, tortured Security, and prayed the Heinous would not, would not....

        Doctors could replace Secure's destroyed eye. They could regrow his ripped facial flesh. They could soothe the trauma in his mind. They could even adjust his memories. But they could not change time. They could not alter the fact that the injuries had occurred, the damage, the torment. They could compensate for occurrence, but not reverse reality. Security had been tortured, perversely attacked, fiendishly injured; and Con did not want it to happen to him. He could only think that the future did not matter, only the present. Despite the medicinal technols available, Con could not bear to suffer such damage, could not even contemplate it. He would not survive as a human if he were mutilated, despite future healing, which of course would not come to him. Although Secure resided in the safety of the boat, Con lay in the midst of the torturers, and they seemed hungry.

        The alien quickly pulled the hair from Con's removed eyelid, then ate the flesh. The Heinous with the box pointed the opening toward Con's face. Con knew it would be acid or a hideous, vicious animal, but the empath---due to fear---felt wrong. Hot air rose from the box, but air rich with oxygen. Con deeply inhaled the warm fluid, not releasing the sphere and pedestal, limbs locked like a terminal lover.

        The two eventful aliens then looked to each other's activity, the eye ripper kicking his colleague's air box away, and Con again was gasping. The two Heinous then turned from one another, speaking loudly, simultaneously, Con believing they were chanting; but, no, they were arguing. Without looking at one another, they began slapping at each other's groin with enough force to have debilitated an unpadded human. Then a third voice called out shrilly, emanating from a nearing alien. All eyes turned with his speaking, the two argumentative Heinous now back to back, he on the left stuffing his own tunic into his mouth and literally biting off a large portion with vicious gnashes, his alternate spreading his legs to the sound of a wet hissing coming from his body, the alien then stomping and sloshing in his waste liquid.

        Con only wanted to breathe, wanted to end the bleeding that dripped into his damaged eye, wanted to believe that the shock from the pain and from the very nature of the injury were unreal, but nothing could be more real than the torment grasping him. Then, with no desire to suss the Heinous psychology, Controller understood the argument. One alien wanted to torture him immediately. The other wanted to provide him with oxygen to keep him alive. The leader or official would do both. He replaced the box so that air flowed against Con's face, then ripped away his other eyelid. This he fed to the thoughtful creature who had brought the air supply. Hair and all.

        The Heinous then began eating the rest of him.

Chapter 9

A Future That Refused His Love

        "When are you bringing him back---if you can?!"

        Angered and upset, Omb could not vent her emotions with loud speaking. She stretched her neck so far toward Analyst that he feared a pinched nerve in her spine link.

        "I'm not bringing him back in the middle of a nuclear fire," Analyst returned calmly. "That bomb didn't have much matter of its own, mostly radioactive stuff. The bubble is dissipating it quickly, but we have to wait a moment."

        "Can't we move in the clear, Analyst---please!" loud Omb cried, and the words seemed painful.

        "Dear, we can only crawl with the bubble up. Even with it down, we dare not move," Prime responded decisively. "If Analyst can implement his ideas, not likely will he apply them broadly during the initial usage. To get Con back, we had better be in the exact site as before. Now, please calm yourself, and read stellar posing so we can compensate for red shift. We need your help, Ombuds. If necessary, feed a tranq up your spine, but stay with us."

        Prime turned to the staff analyst."Now, Analyst, how are you going to instruct the sphere to return?"

        "I'm using three decorums. First, I'm sending out electre wave/rays. I don't think those ignorant perverts can read my electres enough to block them. Second, the sphere is going to use its own connection to the perverts' ship to learn when the nuke is dissipated, so it'll order itself to return. I have a third protocol, but Omb is gonna get pissed if I tell you."

        "Go ahead, please," Prime instructed, nearly peeved herself.

        "Part of the bug can read Con's essential condition," Analyst averred. "If it senses his imminent death, it'll kick him and the sphere out of the ship, here if possible. But anywhere rather than staying inside."

        The hollowvid then blinked, the boat's staff now seeing Control, thanks to Omb. Assuming that Con's spine link continued to transmit, she had instructed the nearest multi-reader to smell for his signal. Sifting through the Heinous' EM, the orbiter filtered out Con's signal, relaying it to the boat with an electre pulse that pushed through the nuke's hard radiation, allowed by bubble priorities to slide through the detractor.

        Con's spine link functioned, but the empath had nothing to say. He was looking, however, and the staff saw his view. The vid displayed a dense pack of Heinous, all looking toward Controller. One rapidly reached toward Con, and the hollowvid went blank.

        "What happened, dear?" Prime demanded of Ombuds.

        "His paraconscious control of the link was lost due to, due to pain. He hurts too much," Omb stated with a voice so shallow she seemed to have stopped breathing.

        "We have to retrieve him now, dear," Prime demanded, looking only to Analyst.

        He turned to the vid. Again, the surveyor's saw Controller's view. They saw an alien eat his eyelash.

        "That's minor damage and you know it, Prime," Analyst snapped. "If we return him to our locale, he'll burn up. We'll have to wait."

        "Then he'll be dead!" Omb cried, literally cried. "He'll be dead, just like the others!"

        Analyst looked to Prime."To get him now, we'll have to drop the fielding. The hull will protect us for a few seconds, but Con wouldn't last a blink outside. Those perverts quit sending their spheres, or we'd read them smearing on the bubble. If we drop it a second, maybe we can sneak Con in."

        "We can't wait!" Omb returned loudly. "I can read his pain. He cannot bear it. And the fear! He'll die of---"

        "It's time to bring him back, dear," Prime repeated, examining Omb's informational feed, agreeing with Ombuds, acknowledging Con's pain, his torture.

        "Snuff the bubble," Analyst told the prime minister. "I'm kicking him away from the perverts. I hope he lands in your lap."

        The chief alien's hand pressed against Con's lap. Refusing to release the sphere, and knowing that his grasp was a type of infantile response, holding on to a parent, any child's initial savior, even those not knowing their parents, Con saw a hand reach around him that was not human. The skin was lovely, nearly translucent, and Con saw an extra knuckle in each digit, saw a longish thumb, saw the hand reach into his uniform and grab his scrotum to pull his genitals away to add to the feast. Then he died. Again.

        As though a suicidal coward, Con's body fled his soul, leaving his mind behind. No, his body inhaled these pieces back into an existential whole after a duration of death. Then Controller understood the Heinous, for the sensation was torture, but ecstatic. This absolute of feeling, both emotion and tactile sensation, was a thrill not duplicated in his living. Con hoped that Em had not saved herself by becoming one of the Heinous. Con was no Heinous, and hoped never to feel in any life or ongoing death that ecstasy, that torture, again.

        Con found himself alive enough to feel the more common torment of extreme pain, for he was being crushed by himself, crushed by his parts forced to meld again, crushed by his soul and mind and body forced to concoct a whole, to become human once more. This extra-human torment was appropriate, for the force to crush him whole was the expertise of a friend, for Con found himself again within the surveyor's boat.

        The analyst was surprised. He had expected Con to be returned to the exact site he left---outside the bubble---not where the sphere had originally been conveyed. But Control had been helping, and was desperate to return home. And Con did not want to breathe vacuum. Con had returned, but not alone. Expert Analyst had brought the Heinous along.

        The boss. The Heinous who had wrapped his hand around Con's genitals stood in the office. Noting his locale, the alien released Con, who allowed himself to fall away from the sphere and pedestal. The Heinous then resorted to his social instinct of torture. He attacked the nearest surveyors, who did not know how to react. Security did.

        Omb was nearest. The Heinous leapt toward her, Omb throwing herself to the office floor as the alien reached and grasped, pulling away much of her scalp hair with a forceful, evidently practiced, move. He then stepped toward Prime. As Omb's shriek of pain and panic filled the office, Sec entered.

        With his empty eye socket and facial wounds closed, Secure's greatest problem was emotional fatigue. Having been apprised of the surveyors' situation via his spine link, Security slid into the office on a padded body chair supported by a hardened-air roller, hoping to find Con returned. He did not expect company. Sec found a creature scurrying about with Omb's hair between its fingers.

        With his energy renewed by a stroke of terror, Security responded along with his father, but Secure was in charge. As Staff Security Initiator, he overrode all other spine link orders and sent the malmetal on its cart to the Heinous, its speed impossible to avoid since Sec had the boat's intrinsic maggrav aid with a peristaltic push of the floor's force. As the Heinous reached Prime to pluck at her face, the roll struck him, its end unfurling, the Heinous pressed against the bulkhead faster than even a creature made for torment could react.

        Dazed, the Heinous could not struggle as Sec wrapped him with a malmetal blanket, pinching the ends of this ad hoc bag closed.

        Sec would have slumped in the chair had it not insisted upon supporting him perfectly. He let his head fall back in relief, but the chair would only cooperate a few degrees.

        Sec had no further security instructions. Let Dad and Prime finish the Heinous. The fatigue from Sec's injuries had defeated him again, Secure unable even to speak. Communicating with a spine link required one to consciously form words with the brain's speech centers as though physically speaking. Sec could not even move his mind.

        Omb's brother, Med, arrived. Despite her painful violation, Ombuds would physically heal. Recovering from torture's emotion would be more difficult. The prime minister did not want to worry about her niece. Con's injury was minor according to his response, for he beamed joyously as he stood unaided, clasping Med with a grand smile, his eyes drooling as the medic led him away. Prime responded to the pair with only a brief smile. She was in a hurry.

        "Analyst, prepare to void the ship of that sphere and that fab container at once, please."

        "Just a minute," Analyst muttered.

        Prime "listened" to his efforts, but could not determine the plans Analyst and his electre works had for the sphere.

        "What are you waiting for, dear," she stated as sweetly as a demand could be.

        "I'm stripping the sphere of its informations, its identity. If I get it all, I might be able to duplicate its functions. Damn, that would be great."

        "Analyst, I want that device out of this boat immediately," Prime returned, but Sec answered.

        "I'm security here," he managed to reply orally.

        Turning to him Sec, Prime looked the man up and down before replying."What would you propose, Secure?"

        "Let him study it longer, but wrap it in the fab first. The bubble is fielded, and it'll stay up. And I say that if you're going to have your fun with it, Anal, you better find something to do with it that its masters won't like. You know what I mean. It was really in their boat, wasn't it?"

        "Damn straight it was, and it's going back a son of a bitch. Real shortly, Sec, real shortly. You can see I have a tangible feed from the boat's electre brick, and I'm pumping this ball full in every interstice. I'm not going to disguise anything with a bug. It'll be full of paramass, paramass, paramass hell. When I turn this loose in an electric environment, the perverts will be a bunch of nuclei with no electron shells."

        While speaking, Analyst had instructed more of the malmetal fab to cover the sphere. This cylinder was larger, because it contained discrete gear ends, terminals of inquiry feeding informations to the boat's factingrate. Sec had one more instruction for his father.

        "Don't send it back alone."

        After glimpsing his son, whose eyes were closed, Analyst ordered the second sealed cylinder to approach the larger.

        "Go and rest," Analyst told Secure. "Everyone else is going to keep a weather eye out for anything those perverts are doing. This might take an hour. I'm ready to send it back sooner if I have to, but I'm sucking its guts out if I can. After all, that's what they're trying to do to us."

        "After all," Sec replied wearily, "it's our job to study sentience, ain't it?"

        Prime stared at him as though an ether deity had delivered duration space's revelation.

        Sec was resting in his chamber when Analyst and adjuncts slid a malmetal cylinder from the office so fat it would barely fit through the nearest osmotic entry. Sec had not noticed the dozen nuclear explosions that slid over their bubble and dissipated in local space, a loud light that was all flash and no damage.

        Uncertain that he could send the sphere to the Heinous vessel directly from the boat, Analyst decided to return it from outside the bubble. He had retrieved the sphere directly into the boat by using the informational guidance of its home, whereas now it was departing from a strange environ. Besides, no Con was along to help.

        Analyst carefully wove the containers along a readymade seam in the fielded detractor and into the radiation at its edge, hot gasses still glowing as though the boat's personal aurora, a badge of experience that marked the staff as experts in avoiding death. Secure could only consider the deaths they had found when expecting joy.

        Analyst jammed an electre order along a skinny wire to the sphere and its owner, wondering of the man's fear, but trying not to care, an inverted empath.

        With the rush of events since their arrival, with the filling activity of nearly being killed, Secure had not been able to contemplate Empath's demise, feeling even as he ordered acts against the attacking sphere that she remained alive, surely, hidden somewhere on Victory, for she could not be dead, must not be dead, impossible, unacceptable, unreal.

        The fab unrolled, and there was a man grasping the sphere, his desperation an alien imitation of Controller's saving contact. Grabbing at the sphere as though to pull away its facial parts was an alien, but a desperate person clinging to the only solid world available as he drowned in space.

        Secure was now filled with the dread of the sentience surveyors' informational accuracy, for if their systems insisted that the ground staff were all dead, then Empath no longer lived.

        Clinging to the sphere like Con, so when Analyst ordered a contained electrelogical protocol to reverse the sphere's event stage as before, the pair vanished from the staff's space, but not from their knowledge.

        Secure knew that when he finally set foot on Victory's surface, he would find Em, part of Em, but not enough. Only information or memories or tangible remains, but these would not be living. Neither was Matilda.

        Not waiting for the Heinous to disable his paramass workings, Analyst had the sphere spit out its electre charge as soon as it entered the alien ship, immediately upon returning home.

        Though attempting to sense these workings through his link, Secure could only be amazed at his limited mentality, for he could not imagine never seeing Em again. He could not imagine sleeping through another night without her. He could not imagine calling for her and never hearing a reply. He could not imagine his present continuing without Matilda, but the present was only his life's beginning, and he would end alone.

        The orbiters relayed a tale of submaterial disruption. The Heinous ship did not change on the exterior, but inside, electrons fled atoms like eyes plucked from a man's face. Molecular bonds went as limp as hair snatched from a living woman's head. The integrity of the organisms' electric fields was swallowed by the electre charge just as a pervert might gulp a man's eyelid. And down, down, down they drowned in the paramass brew of a technol master.

        Something lived. Some protocol or a removed initiator survived enough to allow the Heinous to flee. The vessel seemed to explode, for a massive thermonuclear event engulfed the ship. Then an object whose informations corresponded to the Heinous vessel was found accelerating massively away from Victory. The alien ship disappeared from local space, influenced by internal machinations, or summoned home by superiors.

        Prime was relieved to think she might not have become a mass murderer. Analyst was astonished that the Heinous' technols had allowed their vessel---if not its organic contents---to survive his electre bomb. These perverts were tougher than he thought.

        "We'll have to follow, dears," Prime told her staff. "I don't see how we can allow them to find Earth."

        Omb did not disagree, but the past came first. After the hollowvid depicting the Heinous vanished, Ombuds stared at the vacated field, then dropped her head and began weeping, intensely, intently, looking up a long moment later with apparent surprise, with an ignorance she had to resolve.

        "Are Em and Register really dead?" she wept, but no one had an answer of relief.

        They would have to follow the Heinous. Security did not disagree, but the present came first, for the sentience surveyors had to bury their dead, one man weeping for a future that refused his love.

Chapter 10

Chasing After The Perverts

        "My fellow citizens, the era that we enter will not end as one of war. My pledge is that space is not a void filled only with battle, though it will be filled with the continuing presence of Canada. Despite the declaration of war that the United Provinces of Canada has, through its Parliament, declared against the people known as the Heinous, the magnificent profession of sentience surveyors assures us that space is so vast that surely the evil of the Heinous is the rarity, and that the virtue of Canadians and Victorians will be proven the norm. Next question."

        Madeleine Hervieux selected one of the writhing hands of journalists at the press conference.

        "Miss President, do you believe that your declaring war against these Heinous was the factor that got you reelected?"

        "War was declared by Parliament, not me. Significant in my reelection is that I have handled the threat of the Heinous and their attack against our people and those of Victory in a manner appreciated by the citizens of United Canada; who, although peace loving, will not accept a violation of their fellows without due response. You. No, he was first."

        "President Hervieux, you may have won the election due to declaring war against the Heinous folk, but you almost lost it because the surveyors were left on that planet in the first place with no weapons."

        "Is that a question?"

        "I'm asking why they were not armed. Several other million people would like to know that answer."

        "I suggest, sir, that you do not speak for the people of Canada, only for your magazine. The initial surveying team on Victory was unarmed because sentience surveyors are not a military force. Furthermore, in the previous nine years of sentience surveying and 476 planets examined, the only dangers found were appropriately confronted with vaccines, not howitzers. Next."

        "Miss President, a group of scientists in the United States has determined that the Heinous and the other aliens on Victory are the same race, and that it was all a trap for us."

        "Americans might better spend their scientific resources on ending their billion-dollar debt to us and curing their population of the plague of emotion-prod junkies infesting their professional services. The notion is an absurdity and certainly not based on a rational reading of the available data. You. Try to ask a question, please, instead of providing a speech when I haven't."

        After a response from the throng that was somewhere between laughter and sneering, the next question came.

        "President Hervieux, what if these Heinous attack, now that we've declared war against them?"

        "We declared war against them because they did attack, past tense, an irrevocable, irrefutable act against the citizens of United Canada."

        "No, I mean attack Earth, Canada."

        "A second crew of surveyors have vowed to find the Heinous' home planet to preclude such an assault."

        "You said they weren't a military force."

        "They weren't. They remain an exploratory enterprise whose vessels are now armed. They do not, in seeking the Heinous' home, intend to bring war there, but to make sure it does not come here."

        "Miss President, if we do find the home planet of the Heinous, what will our forces do there? Wipe them out, so to speak?"

        "We will offer terms of peace."

        "You're going to ask them to surrender first thing?"

        "We will offer them the possibility of avoiding a war in their own territory. Our bargaining position is based upon our superior technols: technological capabilities."

"Miss President, if we're so superior, how did their warship get away?

        "Our technols are proven superior by the fact that the attack of their warship was repelled despite their massive use of thermonuclear weapons against our peaceful, unarmed surveying vessel."

        "How long do the surveyors expect this to take?"

        "The search might well require years of effort, but we will not abandon the memories of our slaughtered brethren until their murderers are found and brought to justice. Next."

        "Why bother, President Hervieux? The expenditure will be so great, and since it's expected to take years, why don't the sentience surveyors go about their business and come up with some better discovery than war? If there are so many wonderful races in the galaxy, why not go looking for them instead of the Heinous?"

        "The sentience surveyors remain exactly that: explorers for intelligence. Yet their firmest recommendation to me remains that they be supported in their efforts to find these vicious aliens. The surveyors are convinced that if we don't find the Heinous, they will find us."

        After a survey of Victory, the staff returned to Canada. Leaving no living thing of theirs behind, they returned home for instructions, for recuperation. They made themselves celebrities with an astounding tale of a mysterious race that any Terran could call friend, and the tortuous fiends that had driven them to death. The only artifact they brought was a plea for their goal to be fulfilled: that of discovering the Heinous' home and preventing their further destruction of sentience in the galaxy. The surveyors left Earth with the support of their president and their country, and the interest of the remaining world. They sought the killers by beginning with their victims.

        Though by profession the surveyors would have preferred to seek the Victory aliens and their evolved culture, the Heinous were more important, for the Victorians posed no danger to Earth. Besides, no data of the great aliens' home could be found.

        Science Intensive had gleaned the secrets of the aliens' buildings, which continued in their original manner of recording the lives of their inhabitants. Their last inhabitants were human surveyors. Analyst had only to "read" the latest informations: the story of the surveying staff who had died as Victorians.

        Analyst's connection here was not the integrating empath, but the lover, for Security was the staff member able to connect with the aliens' particular manner of recorded memory. Sitting in an alien building as Register had before him, connected as though a musical segue between human gear and alien construct, Security entered the buildings, and found Matilda. But not enough. He learned that she had died as had the aliens before her, who were either her saviors, teachers, or seducers. Secure did not know which, but he trusted Empath. Although considering suicide a fool's solution to an unprovable future, Sec believed that Em had somehow been proper in her dying. Somehow. And dying instead of facing torture did not say enough. Em had found something Sec and the other staff could not. Regardless of Empath's success, Secure was a failure, for he had lost Matilda from his world, and that future would not change.

        Without Em, Sec had nothing but surveying. When Empath had been alive, sentience surveying had been a part of their lives to share. Despite his friends and family, Sec now felt alone in his career, felt that his profession was vacuous. Before, the searching had been noble; now Sec required results to validate his seeking, and moreover, to reveal exactly what he sought.

        Secure found the final story in the buildings' memory, but did not find their creators' home. No information gleaned by Reg, Intensive, or Sec divulged the Victorians' stellar system.

        With Con's empathic aid, Analyst found an implied connection between the chambers and the current state of the aliens' home world, as first noted by Register in his poem. The lines about the Victorians' world "killing itself methodically", and their "dying society". An additional, unspecifiable characteristic to be relegated to future comprehension was that the chambers, when removed from the planet's surface and connected to the boat's internal gear, seemed death devices, but when still on Victory, they seemed spirit separators. Objective Analyst could not solve this impression, one he attributed not to bad translation of alien intent, but to a lack of hard knowledge.

        Analyst would begin again, with the enemy, emphasizing the officially declared war with the Heinous. After the initial blast that drove their vessel from local space, the Heinous' path was lost. From orbit above Victory, the surveyors learned that nothing remained alive in the Heinous' settlement. But the humans expected deception, a cache of torture machines disguised as indigent flora, tiny bombs made to strip fingers of flesh, activated by touch or the scent of approaching humans. They found clothed skin sacks of protoplasm. Situated in the alien compound in poses made more awkward by their malleability were corpses folded over one another as though stuffed dolls without spines. The Heinous travelers had been reduced to constituent molecules, their skin thickened to support the pressure of homogeneous internals. Their machinery and shelters had received an opposing termination, fused into impenetrable forms.

        Analyst was unable to determine the nature of this termination, whether the Heinous hierarch had implemented the ultimate concealment of their abandoned kin, or if those people remaining had found a suicide on this death planet wholly unlike the Victorians' death, the surveyors' mimetic demise.

        Not the type to remain ignorant, Analyst examined his greater cache of data on the Heinous, the knowledge patterns he had stripped from the sphere in order to duplicate its idea system. With the old principal of like associating with like, Analyst's electre bug had accepted data of positioning: the sphere's matter conveyance and the greater vessel's journeys. There Analyst found not the ship's home, but hints of its previous location. The Heinous' last stop before Victory was a stellar system Analyst would only be able to identify by interpreting its description as the core star of a constellation the Heinous called Mother's Tongue (not a reference to language, but gender education). Analyst required weeks to reduce the number of possible stellar systems to a manageable quantity. The staff then began a survey not for sentience, but for torture.

        They found nothing for months, several stellar systems revealing worlds with fascinating weather patterns, but no thoughtful suicides, no decrepit killers. The next world of death they found was static.

        "Miss President, despite your claim that space is full of good guys, the only ones found so far don't want to live, a pretty basic measure of sanity. Those on Victory killed themselves and connived our people into their own suicides. The 'Heinous' are despicable torturers, and these latest we found destroyed their entire society. Doesn't experience prove us to be the aberration in the universe because we are sane? So, aren't we wasting our vital resources and jeopardizing some of our finest minds chasing across the galaxy after interstellar nuts?"

        "No. Next question."

        The journalists did not abandon that query, Hervieux addressing the topic by referring to war, protecting the home front, the vast potential value in having discovered the Victorians' home world, and so on, last question, good evening.

        Hervieux sat in her library with her chief aide, a former schoolteacher with a predilection toward dealing with the immature, thus his position. His pleasant personality and virile skeletal structure were never significant when the presidency was a television show.

        "A fine press conference, President Hervieux," M. Bolesly mentioned as he smiled toward the retreating chef, who had brought himself, Hervieux, and Mrs. Abilaine---the Secret Service lady---each a fruit salad, a nighttime snack.

        "I am quite satisfied, Jack," she told her aide, then turned to the walls, "and I hope you are, too. Good evening."

        As the President's smile ended, so did the day's broadcast of Know The President.

        "Not your worst press conference," Bolesly mentioned, pressing the full salad bowl aside. "Hello, chef!"

        She returned with a pair of dolphin sandwiches and two cookies.

        "Good night, Abilaine," the president said, dismissing the chaperone. "Take all the salad you want."

        She left with two bowls. One for the other lady on watch.

        Looking through the tall rear windows at the palace's private parking lot, Hervieux saw air superiority cars switching shifts, lifting above the grass and swinging over the kitchen.

        "A good press conference, but not the best," she said to Jack, having lost only a bit of the firmness she presented in public. "But I want to hear questions about the sentience surveyors, because those are the hardest."

        "You want the challenge?"

        "I want the responsibility. And I don't want to forget that the most significant decision in the entire, extending space enterprise was mine: that of allowing a team to remain alone on Victory. Had that staff returned to Canada with the boat, the Heinous aliens would have come and gone without ever contacting humans."

        "But the Heinous led to the surveyors' finding those 'batteries' in the Aureum system. They could be very valuable."

        "Or, they could cause further misery. Recent history of space surveying bodes poorly for all those involved. End quote."

        Hervieux looked to the walls, thinking of the unseen photon receptors behind the panels. The red light at the baseboard was not on. So the president stood, and began undressing in the library.

        She tossed her skirt to her aide.

        "Vive le me," she whispered with no firmness, regaling Bolesly with a linen seam.

        "They're here somewhere---we just can't find them," was Con's assessment of the Claudius Aureum system's fourth planet, a world of enormous technol implication and zero population. Evidence of a sophisticated culture was vast but obscured, for all artificial constructions on the planet had been molecularly "melted" into a nearly homogeneous mass.

        "Damn, we'd need decades to sift through this," Analyst told the staff as he stood on a plain of a hard, dark material that had once been a major city. "Damn, how did they screw up so much surface stuff without ruining the atmosphere?"

        "Maybe they did change the air," Secure suggested, kicking the edge of a narrow crack that extended a hundred feet down. "Maybe it used to be argon and evaporated urine."

        "No, baloney, it used to be and still is just what the Vickies like to breathe," his father retorted.

        "And the Heinous," Secure added.

        "And we, dears," Prime concluded.

        "So, where do you think they are, Con, a million feet down?" Analyst asked the empath, and nudged Sec's back as though wanting to dump him down the crack. Secure stepped over, smiling.

        "You already checked that," Controller returned. "I don't know where they are," and he looked up, toward the sky, beyond.

        "You gonna give us some mystical stuff now?" Analyst wondered.

        "I don't find the Heinous very mystical," Con replied, "and they might be the ones here." He tapped the hard surface with his foot.

        "Whoa, maybe implies maybe not," Analyst retorted, peering around Prime to view Con. "The Heinous didn't do this."

        Con only shrugged, looking down an endless seam.

        "It resembles what the Heinous did on Victory," Controller said. But Analyst disagreed.

        "Yeah, in the same sense that stone resembles steel---they're both hard. What does it 'feel' like to you?"

        Controller shrugged, looking up through an endless sky. "It resembles the spiritualism of the Victory people, but that might be my imagination more than my feeling."

        "Well, I'll tell you how it reads," Analyst informed the controller. "The Heinous didn't do it. This is the Vickies' work."

        "I guess you're right," Con sighed. "It even has a different cultural basis. The Victorians were seeking spiritual release, and the Heinous were hiding themselves."

        "But, dear, the Heinous were present on this planet," Prime submitted.

        "Yeah, sure, so what?" Analyst retorted. "They heard of the Vickies. They came to their planet to find it wiped out. They followed the crazy group to Victory. We backtracked them here."

        "If you're so smart, where are the Heinous now?" Sec asked his father. "And the Victorians. Are any of them left?"

        His father shrugged."Let's look around the universe and see."

        "You go left and I'll go right," Security said, and entered the boat, the osmotic vacuum lock sighing closed behind. The boat's hull had been painted to resemble clapboard siding. The osmotic lock had a knob.

        They succeeded by going in the same direction: out. Despite being more foreign than the last, the next sentience the surveyors found revealed part of past mysteries.

        Situated between planets of the Claudius Aureum system where they would not be destroyed by gravity were countless quasi-organic, grown constructions appearing as wet masses whose surfaces and interiors were rife with chemical interstices and electre channels. Each was smaller than an alien building from Victory, though larger than a suicide chamber. Visually, the objects implied artwork to the surveyors, with their moist, flowing shapes connected by sharp delineations, all forming a cohesive whole of gradated shadows, as though a negative cave of artificiality, obviously built by sentience, and protruding toward the viewer instead of existing as a void to enter. Regardless of purpose, the suicide chambers were no more inviting than a cave housing imagined dragons. Despite appearance, however, these new objects did not function as art wares. To the integrating empath, they felt like worlds, full of energy and life and death, not static, though not exactly growing.

        "Yeah, well, that's a great assessment, thanks," Analyst told Con as the surveyors floated near the "space shack" they had situated in a boat compartment devoid of air and maggrav, having destroyed one object with an inappropriate environment. Even the small forces of adherence shoes upset the shack's interstices, so the surveyors floated in vacuum sacks.

        "I am trying," Con nearly seethed, looking only to the alien construct, and Analyst turned abruptly toward him.

        "I know you are, damn it, and you've done a lot of good, so don't get all sensitive on me just because I'm a prick. Damn, man, we'd all be smashed up into blood and guts by the Heinous if you hadn't helped me with that damned sphere, and I appreciate it. What am I supposed to do, kiss your feelers?"

        That brought a round of guffaws from the staff, including Con. Then the surveyors returned to serious concerns more tangible to a scientist than bent emotions.

        "This is the work of the Vickies, not the Heinous," was Analyst's judgment.

        "All right, great, but maybe the Heinous still came along after this was done and wiped out the planet," Security proposed.

        "No, great, they did not, Sec, boy. I told you that this planet's modifications of homogeneity are sourced in a technol application beyond what was used by the Heinous on their own settlement. We're talking about melting something with a flame versus rearranging molecular structure by shifting subparticle forces aside. Even Con says it smells like Victory's suicide chambers."

        "Well, what the hell are they good for?" Sec wondered.

        "I don't know," his father replied, "they're full of stuff. Full of something. So what do we do, Prime, go chasing after the perverts, or dig into these things?"

        "The president, my dear, has coerced Parliament into furnishing funds to complete a second vacuum boat, so we'll be able to do both," Prime mentioned.

        They would only succeed at one.

Chapter 11

Any Given Crisis

        Chasing the Heinous became a fruitless affair, but not for the first staff of surveyors, who remained in the Claudius Aureum system with the space shacks, which received the name "batteries" when Analyst discovered that they were massive power sources. They were not called "furnaces" until a year later, when they were first used to burn the life out of people.

        The scientific basis of the batteries was known by the humans as Actal Manifestics, which postulates that matter is essentially conceptual, composed not of smaller and smaller discrete particles, but of ideas manifested as actual by natural but unknown forces. The Victorians knew, and more than the humans. The sentience surveyors' vacuum boats applied AM to sort through the lanes of ether, which constitute discrete space; but the human vessels were row boats slogging for weeks through the ether compared to the Victorian batteries, which transposed themselves in vacuum volumes across light years instantaneously.

        "Mr. Analyst, which aspect of these 'batteries' is more important: their transportation abilities, or their potential as a power source?"

        The President of United Canada had asked him while wearing slacks. Analyst wondered who had mentioned to Hervieux that her former display of skin was an embarrassment to the surveyors. Regardless, her thighs were so shapely when she crossed her legs that Analyst had to look away.

        "I fail to completely grasp the significance of these 'batteries' vis-a-vis our available energy technologies," was Hervieux's latest attempt to engender a conversation.

        "The batteries are better," Analyst replied, seated in the palace along with Prime, Security, and Controller.

        Trying not to immediately approach exasperation, Sec explained more fully. "The batteries get their energy directly from subatomic space, the separation between subatomic particles."

        "No, no, no," his father loudly retorted, shaking his head and shifting in his perfectly comfortable chair. "Come on, boy, stick with security; I'll do the analysis."

        "Yeah, well, it would be fine if you would analyze instead of acting like a brat when the president asks you---"

        "Gentlemen, thank you for your enthusiasm," Hervieux declared. "Mr. Analyst, perhaps you can continue now with a reasonable explanation."

        Prime smiled broadly, proving her stress. Con felt fine. He loved the grand living that father and son displayed with their emotion.

        "Sure, Miss President, I got all sorts of reasons. The batteries mess around in the submaterial realm in a way we can only dream of. What they do is decoalesce subatomic space---the universal characteristic of separation---into ether, which is the constituent of space. When you allow ether to manifest itself back into space, you got all the power in the world. Literally. Well, we can sorta do some of this stuff with huge expenditures of energy and even retain a little bit in our big old electre bricks, but the batteries generate this stuff on the fly. It really is like a battery, but one that recharges itself out of nothing. No moving parts, nothing to fill up when the tank runs dry, no cost to run. Just sit them anywhere, and---whoa---irrigate deserts by making water from air, and stuff like that. But that's not the good part."

        After a pause, Hervieux stated:

        "Thank you for making me ask you, Mr. Analyst, exactly what the 'good part is'."

        "Yeah, sure, well, it's uh.... I'm not sure I believe it, you know. Matter of fact, it might be a load of fish---"

        "Immortality, Miss President," Controller remarked. "If the Victorians did what they claimed, they found a type of immortality. A real kind of living forever, not as we live now, I suppose, but more than just dying and having your memories remain within others."

        "Do you believe they achieved this capacity, Mr. Controller?"

        "That's not exactly what I feel," he confessed, "but I don't know exactly what I feel."

        "Do you, Mr. Security, believe that the Victorians achieved a type of immortality?"

        "Yeah, well, I have to believe, Miss President."

        "Yes, I can understand that," Hervieux told him in a more personal tone. "I know that Miss Empath was your fiancee. I am so deeply regretful that she was---"

        "I'm not talking about that," Sec stated bluntly, staring at the president with wide, angry eyes. "We got plenty else to talk about, please."

        Prime smiled mildly now, proving her sorrow.

        "Hey, the energy bit is fact, not belief, Miss Madeleine, er, Miss Hervieux, uh, Miss President," Analyst continued with animation. "All we have to do is get them to Earth, but we figure the batteries can transport themselves, so we won't waste all of Canada's money making electre bricks, which is a bitch. Er, I mean, it's real hard."

        "Exactly how do we produce electre power?" Hervieux asked, ignoring Analyst's constant lack of tact.

        "We start with nucleonics to build a big, fat block full of electrelogical paramass wave/ray coalescence. Then we have to almost constantly recharge it with photons. We get a little bit of electre out of a whole lot of light. Crude."

        "You'll have to forgive my father, President Hervieux," Security remarked. "He's upset because another race developed Actal Manifestics. He thinks Canadians discovered fire."

        The president's laugh in response was so warm, so feminine, that Analyst had to look away again.

        "What you're telling me, sir," she said to Analyst, "is that the Victorian people used these self-powered batteries to transport sentient beings---themselves. Transport them where?"

        "Well, they sort of went nowhere. I think they've lodged themselves in a previously theoretical domain called second or static space, without duration or distance, the realm that is normal space not manifested in the real as part of the physical universe."

        "Why in the world---or out of the world---would they choose that?"

        "Well," Analyst began, looking to Con, trying not to look at the president. Not below the neck. "Well, I...."

        "Mr. Analyst, I'm sorry because of your discomfort. Is it because I have no grounding in the technol languages required to convey a meaningful description of Actal Manifestics and static space?"

        "That's not the problem, Miss President," Secure remarked, looking at the president's thorax, then meeting his father's eyes; the president's calves, his father's red face. "Let's get the integrating empath in on this conversation."

        Fine with Analyst, who sighed quietly and looked down from the president, but saw her feet. She wore pumps, no stockings, fine bones, pale skin, very feminine, very.... Analyst closed his eyes.

        "We believe that the Victorians entered static space to get away from it all," Con began. "But the feeling I literally get is that the two groups of Victorians are connected. Those who released their spirits on Victory and the populace of their home planet who entered static space give me identical impressions when I enter a battery. If transport is the activity, they moved the constituents of their lives from one sort of existence to another, perhaps living with reduced physicality in a realm that never changes, having instance without rate, no extension in time."

        "Dear Miss President," Prime remarked, "I am sure that you have read Register's poem. All of Canada has read his poetry. My staff thinks, or feels, that the 'transcenders' Register wrote of are these batteries."

        "You have been inside one of these batteries?" the president asked Controller.

        "We all have. Analyst has discovered that they were made to receive persons."

        "Whom they then transported to this static space?"

        "Yes."

        "But they did so by killing the person, did they not?"

        "The small chambers on Victory vaporized the occupants' bodies," Con said. "I believe that was a crude, even drastic, method for emulating the function of the larger batteries. We know that the batteries, when activated, remove the life-force of a person's body, but we don't know that this equals death."

        "Do we not have a similar, experimental technology based on methods of rapid aging?"

        "Yeah, sure," Analyst replied, "a peripheral discipline allows you to look only forty-years old although you're sixty."

        "Forty?" she said. "Sixty?"

        "Wait, wait," embarrassed Analyst rapidly added. "I mean that our people are trying to reverse the process of aging; the Vickies increased it to get to the end of aging."

        "Thus your experiments, which have led to some very old surveyors."

        "Modern medicine allows this artificial condition to be temporary," Control replied. "Normal aging is much more difficult to cure. So, we believe this artificial aging did not lead to the Victorians' bodily death in the sense that we humans know it. The question is, what state must a person be in to exist in second space? Can you have a normal body at all, or must it be contained or retained inside something?"

        "The goal of you sentience surveyors, then," the president stated, "is to bring these batteries back to Canada, initially for study, to determine the exact nature of one's being transported into second space. That would be a wonderful theoretical discovery, but tell me more of practical aspects."

        "Static space itself, dear President, is something to study," Prime told her. "Besides, at Claudius IV, we lost the path to the Heinous. Perhaps we again will find it in second space. If not, we might find the Victorians; if not their bodies, then their souls."

        "How practical is immortality?" Analyst asked the president, no longer red. "If Control is right, that was the Vickies' goal, and they succeeded. To use the batteries, we have to get them home. That ain't easy, because transporting them in a vacuum boat ruins them. It has to do with the boat's Manifestic forces messing up their own. Somehow, we have to learn enough about the batteries to connive them into transporting themselves here. What we'll ultimately be able to learn from them...I don't know. I'll at least make them an unparalleled power source. Maybe I'll give you immortality as well. Either way, you can change the world."

        "It's your decision, Miss President," Prime remarked. "Do we continue in search of the Heinous, or do we give great effort to the batteries?"

        "First, we are at war," Hervieux stated, "and the people love it. They love to hate the Heinous. Those visuals you recorded are most convincing. But. But the Heinous do not seem to be a genuine threat, whereas the Victory batteries have magnificent potential. Average people, however, see the batteries as more electre bricks. Having one in every back yard would be nice, but their hatred for the Heinous is pure passion, and that's what keeps the sentience surveying program funded. Besides, if we found the Heinous, we'd probably have to destroy them. So, if you run across the Heinous, fine, but get those batteries back to Canada. I'd rather perfect this world than ruin another."

        After months of study, Analyst learned to exploit the Victorians' transportation organics by situating their "transcenders" within mass-minimum spheres for translation to Earth via the immediacy of second space. The surveyors handled these batteries with extreme care, for the devices were not of normal duration space and its physical contaminants of gravity and temperature and movement. The problem with using static space was that the entry was guarded.

        After a year of experimentation, the growing company of surveyors made their first traversal through second space with a new system of feeding an alien battery the life-force of an entire family of surveyors. The unique apparatus with a Victorian battery at its core was known as a furnace because it burned away years of living. Power was applied by the battery, controlled by an integrating empath using the technols of the surveyors' boats as an interface. In truth, even Analyst did not know all of the secrets of the Victorians' life-force batteries, which ate human living and respired distance, parsecs at a breath. The first traversal was between planets, and successful. More cautious development led to a traversal of static space outside of the stellar system. Here the surveyors found the Victorian guards.

        When the furnace boat ended the first extra-system jump by resting in that limbo zone of no-trait static space, several large, featureless creatures wearing complex coverings reminiscent of attire became manifested as physical inside the vessel, as though materializing from nothing. Slowly they drifted toward the humans. Before an unplanned traversal of second space could be implemented---going anywhere, only to escape---one "guardian" trapped a surveyor, accepting him into its body for temporal processing. That person was seen later, and would be seen forever, because he became a time death: a person of constant occurrence, lodged in the eternal present, the only entity to exist in both spaces, no longer quite real.

        It was said a person's last thought before time dying went on without end. It was said he felt everything forever.

        A quick transference through static space was found to leave the guardians behind, but the furnace boat's integrating empath had to be prepared. The guardians had no such problems. Not being thieves, they had no fear of interspace attack. Their purpose, however, seemed obvious: prevent the humans from infiltrating second space. Since the Victorians had intentionally situated themselves in this realm, the guardians' job was to protect their masters. Perhaps excess usage of static space harmed the Victorians' new condition or existence. Perhaps the humanlike Victorians had turned themselves into fat creatures in order to exist in static space. Even Con was sure that the Victorians were no longer so grossly physical as the guardians, which had been dissected technologically, though not physically. Large, squarish creatures of no evident intelligence. The "attire" was organic, but not readable as being alive. Then again, studies of the guardians could only take place in second space.

        The surveyors were not so foolish as to consider the guardians only guard dogs, but were intelligent enough to learn how to avoid their bite, a type of transportation into a "new form of existence" reminiscent of Con's earlier phrase, but no Victorians were found floating like ghosts in duration space as was the staff member who had time died. The surveyors learned to avoid this unknown journey as they traversed second space, transporting the batteries to Earth. Translations had become routinely successful until one boat failed to arrive in the solar system. An entire family of surveyors remained lost, a family of time deaths, perhaps, but never found by their brethren.

        All batteries had arrived safely in the solar system, except the last, and only one more remained. The surveyors had found no more "transcenders". Of those several translated to Earth, Analyst had experimented with all, and destroyed them.

        No empath made this journey twice, for no family of surveyors had enough members. The journey following the surveyors' first failure would be made by their most experienced member, the empath who had devised the furnace boat system with Analyst. Though having made second-space jumps experimentally, Con had never directed his own boat. As a founder of the system, Control was too valuable as a teacher and guide. But, politically, the surveyors could not afford to lose another family. Con's would be next, and last, to traverse the spaces, the next to face the Victorian guards.

        "President Hervieux, do you truly believe that the new public commission on space surveying will be enough to encourage Canadian citizens to provide further support for more of your gallivanting around the stars?"

        "The Canadian Sentience Commission on Space Surveying, which will report directly to Canadian citizens, is a delegation of ombudsmen and arbitrators who will provide assurance that rumors of the sentience surveyors' being irrational is only a misunderstanding. The commission will reveal to the Canadian populace that the activities of the sentience surveyors are thoughtful, scientifically necessary, and not destructive. Next question."

        "About these rumors, Miss President. Could you comment on the fact that the American Congress has voted to censure you for encouraging the sentience surveyors to make human sacrifices of themselves only to bring these battery things here?"

        "My comment is that this act of the American Congress proves why this once great nation is in the throes of poverty, political turmoil, and a continuing lack of influence over the greater world. Next."

        "Miss President, you have to admit that the reputation your sentience surveyors have received for being eccentric to the point of bizarreness is justified."

        "First, I don't own any sentience surveyors. Of course, I do take responsibility for their actions, but clearly the members of this profession toil for the people of United Canada, who will ultimately benefit from the tremendous technology that one day those very sentience surveyors will harness through their unique, unselfish abilities. From the very beginning of space exploration, one of the main intents was to discover superior technologies in order to benefit mankind, not just to fulfill our curiosity. Yes, the sentience surveyors are eccentric, but great people often are. It goes with great courage and great talent. Next question, please."

        "Miss Hervieux, opinion polls say that if the presidential election were held today, you would lose to Dr. Kurobota. The deciding factor for voters is the so-called war against the 'Heinous', who have never materialized, the vast expenditures of the budget needed to fund the sentience surveyors, and their, uh, remarkable activities in sacrificing years of their lives just to bring to Earth the 'battery' or 'furnace' objects, whose ultimate value has yet to be demonstrated. Besides, a man has died in the furnaces. Perhaps an entire Canadian family."

        "One sentience surveyor did pass away during the initial testing of the batteries. That unforeseeable incident was many months and many tests ago. The process remains risky, but so is crossing the streets in America. As for 'sacrificing years of their lives', the surveyors only temporarily give up the force that drives their individual living. The same technology that allows this expenditure---not sacrifice---also allows the affected persons to regain their health. These technols have been developed to a state of perfection, and will likely lead to our ability to cease the process of aging, a discovery that will change the world. My greater reply to your query is that the presidential election is not being held today. Tomorrow, or the next week or an upcoming month, the sentient surveyors will deliver to Canada and all of Earth a technology whose power is so magnificent and broadly applicable that it will eliminate virtually every problem of mankind, excluding the myopia caused by tiny minds that prefer to settle for mediocrity instead of waiting for magnificence."

        Good-evening one and all, and the president left with a smile. In her private chambers, she could barely wait for the door to close before shooing her secretary and two secret service ladies out, having only Bolesly remain. He looked at her with an odd expression, which she ascribed to her curt, wordless instructions.

        "Even I said those surveyors are eccentric. Eccentric? God, I hope they're not crazy. Take my clothes off, Jack. I need a rub."

        He looked to her with astonishment, face red, eyes unblinking, and whispered as though a ventriloquist, lips barely moving, the words coming from anyone but him.

        "Miss President, your program is on."\par Yes, the light was red. So was Hervieux. She stared at it a moment and thought her head would explode. The heat in her brain was incredible. There goes the election, she thought.

        Hervieux was struck with a devastating idea, one she had held for long, but never explicitly delineated. Once you have been president, what in the world is left to do? She stared at the red light at the baseboard for an eternity of seconds that numbered perhaps five before looking up to the wall, to her fellow audience.

        "Screw you," she stated pleasantly, smiling. "That's what he is going to do to me," and she led Bolesly away.

        She only took a shower, the water not cold enough to ease the burning in her mind. Why bother with these batteries? was the question she had asked Analyst. Because we will change the world with them, he replied, the exact answer she wanted to hear. Of course, the only thing beyond president of a great nation is savior of your race, or benefactor to the world. Hervieux would settle for the latter. Saviors, after all, are crucified. Just like presidents.

        The space lab seemed an alien shed. It was a conglomerate of smaller structures built during the space furor of the previous century when every country wanted its own orbiting lab for free-fall organics or astronomy or purity manufacturing. The electre technols of vacuum boats made the orbiters obsolete, but the surveyors could use a big shed to hold lot of gear; so Canada bought all the spare facilities at a discount, and Analyst had them glued together. The size of a metal gymnasium, the lab held electre accelerators and maggrav grids instead of grandstands. And a few researchers. Analyst felt that this was like retiring. His work could not be more important, but he missed the variety of professions and personalities that were the surveying staff of his boat. He missed the family they made.

        "We need to get going, Anal," Security grumbled. "The country is getting pissed, and I don't know how long Hervieux can keep them off our backs. We haven't exactly harnessed the batteries, you know. Matter of fact, we've ruined them all."

        Uniquely, Analyst had nothing to say, staring at his son, then through the porthole with no curtains, the window of their current house, at the full moon seemingly inches away.

        "You know, Dad, I sort of wish we could have brought one of those batteries back ourselves instead of being stuck in this box."

        "A family goes through hell, Sec. They get all shriveled and are sick for years."

        "Sounds like fun," Secure replied, and looked around their boring box.

        "Yeah, I know, but we don't have enough family members," Analyst returned. "I don't know why kin are so efficient in supplying their life-force, but I know they work. But we'll learn. We'll learn everything one day. You got something better to do? But you're right. We have to do something big pretty soon. I never could figure those perverts' spheres."

        "I could have been working on a family if Em had only hung around," Security sighed. "Damn. I remember what Con said one of the first times he entered a battery to check it out. He said it felt the same as those suicide chambers on Victory, like going to another country and finding an exact duplicate of your home among the adobe huts. He said the impression was so strong that he felt Reg and Ad and Em and the rest as though they had been there, within that very battery. Damn. I hadn't felt that good since her death. I couldn't feel better unless she came alive again."

        Analyst could not speak, could barely breathe. He could not look at his son, bending to cover his face. Ernie had not seen him like that since his wife had....

        "God, I loved Em," Analyst choked.

        "What do you mean, Dad?" Secure asked with the expression of a jilted lover.

        "Oh, damn, son, not that," Analyst moaned upon noting his son's discomforting stare, and began speaking in a manner Secure had never heard in his life, but one that did not surprise Ernie once it finally came.

        "I wanted her for a daughter. I wanted you to have the perfect wife she would have made. I wanted you to have kids. I wanted you and Em to come over on weekends and look at the sunrise with me. I wanted a family. Damn, I wanted a family where the mother didn't run off, where the father didn't beat his kids, where everyone was just so damn conventionally happy that they were bloody mindless. I would love to be mindless for a change. Damn, I never had a family like that, and I'm so bleeding sorry that you never did, but it was coming. Damn, I saw it coming with Matilda, son, and I wanted it for all of us: for you and her, and me. That's not selfish," he groaned, looking to the floor as he shook his head, "that's not selfish," and he turned to leave.

        Ernie did not have to follow. There was nothing more to say, nothing more to share.

        She did not want to attend the luncheon even though it took place in her home. No, not her home, the president's palace, whoever he, she, or it happened to be during any given crisis. At least, the meeting would not be broadcast.

        "Madeleine," the chairman of her party began, immediately after the sealskin canapes, "how you ever pulled that off is beyond me. The president and sex and the public just don't mix, never will. If Bolesly had been married, why...."

        "Why, I wouldn't have been sleeping with him," Hervieux retorted.

        "Fair enough, but it will be close in the election. Half the people hate you for that and half of them love you, and we don't know which half is the voting kind. But if one more thing goes wrong, Madeleine, you will lose that election. That means you will lose it not only for yourself, but for the party that put you where you are today. If you don't want to be president for another term, at least consider the people you're responsible for."

        "More and more I'm thinking of the people for whom I am responsible," she told him eye to eye---then suddenly stood, her napkin flying as she stared down to the chairman. "That being the case, I can give you a rerun and tell you to screw yourself. The world is a great deal bigger than your party, even bigger than your misplaced ego. Now, get out of my house."

Book III

Static Space

Chapter 12

Instant

        He did not want to view the decrepit woman because she was still his wife. Removed from the furnace nude, Janet was no longer the adult she had been upon entering. Now she was both ancient and infantlike, Controller grateful that Janet was so weak that she could not meet his eyes. Con looked to his selected wife, his chosen lover, and saw a child-sized elder being led away by staff members. With a clarity beyond mere vision, Control saw their years of married life, their occasional disagreements, their continual pleasure at having chosen so fine a person to argue with. He was surprised. All along, Control had known the exact outcome of being burned by the furnace, but now that he experienced the removal of Janet's life-force, he found it not a generous effort on her part, but a personal loss on his. They had taken his wife. By his own decree. Though what he viewed was no longer quite Janet, she remained a person he loved.

        Control was so upset he had his daughter burned next.

        He had no choice. Regardless of kinship, her life-force was needed to power her father's calibration. Regardless of love, Con was the integrating empath. He gestured to the executioner, who heaved Penny through the body slot with too much satisfaction. A moment later, a concussion went through second space, and the battery was charged. Then his daughter was ejected, and the furnace was ready for Con.

        He managed to avoid Penny's burning, Con not seeing his precious girl as she left a shriveled creature, a sick version of Penny when she had been three-feet tall and six-years old. Now she was twenty-eight, not sweet but grotesquely tiny, on her way to a lengthy recovery. Con was on his way to his next task, as described by the executioner.

        "Be so kind, Sir Controller, as to enter hell for me."

        Control ignored Yollandez; he was still busy not looking. Yollandez, however, was not alone in viewing Control to denote his response to the tiny semi-people being led away, pulled effortlessly through the free-fall interior of the spherical vessel. Silently manipulating data integrators monitoring the furnace, Prime and Omb measured the battery's concussion, but also glimpsed Control. They looked at their brethren because they could not resist. Yollandez did not care to resist. The executioner was greedy in his staring at the controller, but Yollandez was not family.

        Control looked only to the furnace. Enclosed in a luminous, near-massless plas, the furnace was a large cube situated in the spherical boat's center. The core of the furnace---a Victorian battery---was not visible, and Con did not care to see. He was no technol expert: his job was emotional. The battery's raw material was etheric energy, but the bias current was the life-force of humans who sacrificed not their lives, but years of accumulated living to charge the profound power source. Once transmogrified into usable energy by the Victorian concept core that was the battery, the life-force was regulated via human emotion, by the one Family member who had the best feel for his people: an integrating empath.

        Con suddenly felt that he was performing this task too early, for he sensed the value of his relatives, feeling their love and misunderstandings, their individual jealousies and occasional greed. Then, with his head hot, Con felt only Janet and Penny, the women of his life, his world, his heart. Throughout Control rushed the buzzing, abstract emotion of all the time and living shared with his wife and daughter, visual glimpses passing of their smiles, vivid recollections of their voices, the feel of their hands and hair returning to Con in a flow so precious it hurt.

        Before he lost control of his emotions, Con stepped to the furnace, preferring to enter an alien hell rather than display the distress of his wife and daughter demolished. But he could not enter due to Yollandez' own visage, the executioner's smirk.

        Unlike the casually attired staff, Yollandez wore a formal, skin-tight sheath, the yellow stripe across his back signifying government service, a Sentience Commission member. Though not his title, this liaison between government and surveyor family was called Executioner because of the pleasure he took in tossing people into the furnace. He would not, however, be jerking Control as he did the other relatives; he would have to wait on the integrating empath. Not being a sentience surveyor, Yollandez did not deserve to be known by his task, many of the staff felt, but it made the president happy. After all, she was known by her job.

        As usual, Yollandez was nibbling some foodstuff, floating flat as though about to spear someone. Con was uncomfortable with Yollandez' overfriendly appearance, his expression of impending pleasure, though Yollandez was never truly pleased. Control thought of his drained wife and daughter, then looked at Yollandez, and could not stand the comparison. He did not like this man. Not since that last thought, those previous feelings.

"        All charged and ready, dear," Prime reminded Con.

        In free fall, Psy moved beside his nephew.

        "Step into the Victorian parlor and we'll be on our way to fame and riches," Psybiology smiled to Con.

        Psy's smile was genuine, more honest than his final phrase, which implied only success. Time deaths were not mentioned. In some ways knowing his most important patient better than Controller knew himself, Psy was aware of Con's psychology by his stern staring at Yollandez. Between the men was a force greater than opposing expressions. Psy only wanted the controller to continue into the furnace, but he could not prevent the empath from confronting the executioner.

        "We should have a machine for a feeder instead of you," Control began as he braced himself against the furnace's body slot. "But with all your understanding of these technols, you're about the same as a lever, a screw."

        "Oh, Master Controller," Yollandez began pleasantly, as though bantering with a child, "what do I need to know of these technols? As long as your people go in normal and come out revolting, I know I've done my task. I know I've correctly overseen your bizarre procedure. I don't need to understand theory---my part is strictly mechanical. The difference between us is that your part is deeply personal, because the last grotesque creature I jerked out was your daughter. The freak before was your wife."

        "The difference," Control declared, "is difficulty. The last boat never arrived, so our translation will be different. Prime has decided to ready everyone aboard for the furnace. Other family staffs always had members left, but who knows how many of us will be processed by guardians? If we lack power at the end, I'm sending you in, feeder. I can't wait to burn you."

        Yollandez still seemed pleased, but Control knew the man was affected. Looking closely to Con as he bit a pod, Yollandez replied:

        "The difference with this translation is that the controller is not whole---he has no background. Instead, he came with this blank in his brain that might make him...insane. So, when the translation is at its most difficult, perhaps he'll do something mad---like ordering me inside the furnace, when everyone knows that only family will feed properly. Who will force me regardless? Not your relatives, who are sane and will demand that they go first. No one will be left but the integrating empath, and he'll be short too many bones. He'll be floating in the sac like his liver lies in him now. You won't make me, friend."

        Con replied with his own disingenuous smile. "If you stay, foolish feeder, you'll be left for the guardians. Won't they be pleased to find the criminals who stole their gear. So pleased they'll discuss the theft with the last naughty human remaining. The naughty executioner, who'll be processed in a guardian maw like sausage. But you won't come out dead meat, Yollandez---you'll be a time death, all nothing forever."

        Yollandez laughed as though delighted, but Con could feel his fear, for empathy was his profession. But Control had caused this fear, now felt it, and had no satisfaction. He had too much fear of his own, from that insane lack of history Yollandez had mentioned, from the loss of his girls, which Control had just experienced.

        He turned to enter the body slot. As the empath removed his robe, Prime smiled, and Psybiology squeezed Con's shoulder. Control, however, did not feel like thanking Prime and Psy for their thoughtful gestures. That useless conversation with Yollandez had been a drain itself, Con only wanting to be on with the enervating process. But the process was not working. Determined in previous translations was the value of feeding the controller's nearest kin first, to remove this concern from his functioning. Since his immediate family would be gone, the empath would not be worrying during the high-stress translation when to burn them, when to order their lives drained. But Con was worrying, for he felt that he had not drained Janet and Penny, but had killed them. This feeling of guilt was so stunning that Controller moved immediately into the furnace, proving that the process worked perfectly, painfully. Then he was inside the Victorian battery, and felt nothing.

        Relatives used for fuel left the furnace ancient youths. The battery scanned ahead in time to infer the potential old-age death of its food, manifesting the person's present with this elder state as a guide, peaking the life-force, which it drained. During translation, the family's collected life-force would be transmogrified by the battery into conceptual energy that would modify the space packet containing the boat, exchanging this vacuum volume for one in the Earth system. Previously each family member had entered the furnace for passive calibration. Only Control needed the furnace charged, because he would actively calibrate not only himself as integrating empath, but also his entire family, whose life-force characteristics had been recorded by data integrators. As a final preparation, Con needed to sense the furnace, to feel its potential for pulling his own life away. He would then gain full empathy for his relatives' being burned. Con already understood his family as persons; now he needed to learn how their lives would be taken, taken by the battery that drew him.

        The battery surrounded Control, its moist, part-organic interior seeming to be animal hide somehow combined with metal. Then Con lost all sensation, though he knew the cause. The battery's fiber was conjoining with him via the neural and chemical communicating link that is human skin. Controller felt nothing, though to the depths of his cognons his life-force melded with the alien battery; while beyond, family members monitored the flow between empath and battery, allowing their characteristics to merge.

        The process required only seconds. Control had experienced the battery before, but this would be his deepest meld. Seconds, only seconds, and the calibration concluded. As contact with the battery ended, every nerve in Con's system went raw. For an instant, he felt every sensation his brain could distinguish. This was a horrid sensation, an incredible, destructive feeling come and gone in an instant, yet intense enough to exhaust him completely.

        The plas door dilated open, and Con pushed himself out, finding comfort in the knowledge that his family waited immediately beyond to help him. But they offered no help. Out from the furnace into the boat's pale light, Con saw relatives staring at him, and not calmly. The surveyors would not approach, for they found something wrong. Then Control saw age spots on his skin, and wrinkles. Too weak to understand, he looked to his relatives, who next reacted with utter shock, staring not at Con, but behind him; for when he left the furnace, he did not leave alone.

        Behind him was a boy. Three or four years old, the size of a person drained by the furnace; but this child appeared normal, nude and without defect. He was unconscious but not at all strange, for the boy was recognized. The earliest fotos of Con showed the same face, the boy identical to Control of fifty years ago.

        Already Yollandez had activated his external communique segment.

        "The furnace has gone alien!" he croaked loudly. "I'm shutting the process; send the priority team---now!" And the Commission was on its way.

        As though testing himself, Control remained near the maddening fluid sac wherein he would float during translation. Within now were only diffusion tapes and electre tubes and the connecting fish that would adjust their attachment to Con's glands and brain. Already the empath was covered with joint sprouts; for just as his hormones and nerves guided his body, so would Control guide the battery. But having his blood flow through the alien battery was a terrible idea to him, immersion in the sac conceptual torment. He would not suffer in the sac, however, for therein Con would be without sensation, able to feel only his relatives' draining.

        He felt drained himself thinking of the sac, but in comparison to the battery, the fluid chamber had become a minor torment. With his back to the furnace, Control was barely able to calm himself and look past all the people staring at him. Of course, he was quite a sight with his changes. With a deep breath that to some seemed a painful sigh, Control glimpsed the continuous wall of the boat, all that tan plas. Housing and work compartments had been situated against the shell with all the regard for direction appropriate for free fall. With no halls or walkways, the boat was like a tiny, inverted world whose populace lived on the inner---not outer---surface. Yet it seemed a huge ornament to Control: the compartments so neat and symmetrical, the interior always softly aglow. In fact, it was all machine, a conceptual machine constructed like an atom, the furnace/sac complex with adjacent data integrators a center as dense as a nucleus. The electrons here were people, thirty-six family members. Still smiling and vital was cousin Sur, who would be Control's surrogate, perceiving for him while he floated in the sac. Continually anxious was active Omb, Janet's sister. Psy floated immediately beside his patient. Beyond was the impossible newcomer. Perhaps this boy alone was not concerned with poor Control. Even the government felt for him.

        The family group crowding together in the boat's center surrounded several yellow stripers. Some surveyors had work to do; the rest participated in the discussion. Visually, they were not a special lot except for evident tension. Individually, however, two were unique, chronologically unique in having singular, contrasting ages.

        Con was old. In an era whose medicine precluded one's being cosmetically demeaned by advanced age, wrinkled Control was an exception. Within the boat resided people nine decades old, but only the empath looked it. The child was incomparably more bizarre. Children his age had remained on Earth, lacking enough life to feed the battery, but age was not his greatest oddity. The boy measured and behaved just like a normal child---just like a young Control. He was Control, but no one would call him Con. He was a paradox, an impossibility; yet he was real. Both he and Control were growing older too rapidly, in proportion to their ages. In one Earth day, the boy had aged a year, Control a decade. Con was giving up his life-force to the child.

        Control could not bear to look at him. By viewing any family member, the empath could recall the facts of that individual's history and gain an emotional comprehension of the person's life. But the child meant nothing to him. Control remained away.

        The Commission members had completed their studies. Xelnopo, their chair, spoke to the staff while her associates tried not to stare at Control and the child.

        "Here is the Sentience Commission's position. We do not believe that the child's appearance was a fluke of your battery. We think the guardians are now able to tamper with the furnaces from their location, wherever it is. Second: Controller and the child cannot be differentiated biologically. As far as we can determine, they are literally the same person at different points of a single life somehow existing simultaneously. The batteries are of course oriented toward the temporality of life, and the child's appearance can be construed as a type of time travel. Since all theory states that such manifestations are impossible, what we have is not a paradox so much as a profundity. That being the case, his existence is more important than this battery's arrival at Earth. Our judgment is to return Control and the child via a vacuum boat, and to cancel translation of your battery."

        The prime minister of the staff then spoke for her family.

        "Thank you, dear Xelnopo, but we see some inconsistencies in your decision. First, if you send Controller and the boy home conventionally, the way they're exchanging ages, one or both will be dead upon arrival. But if they return via the furnace boat, they'll arrive in the solar system instantly."

        "The Commission considers him too valuable for the risk of your malfunctioning furnace," Xelnopo replied.

        "It's not malfunctioning," retorted Safety/History. His intrusion was considered overanxious by the staff since the furnace was not one of his fields. Safe/Hist knew it, seeing the glares; nevertheless, he continued. "The furnace eats correctly now---we've tried it," and he pointed to a step-aunt, thirty-years old yesterday, now shrunken and unintelligent.

        "There's no question but that Control calibrated perfectly," Psy remarked as though speaking to Safe/Hist, showing him the etiquette of remaining within one's specialty. "The risk," he told Xelnopo, "is not in translating Control and the child conceptually, but in sending them through normal duration space."

        "The proven risk is in second space," Xelnopo returned. "The last battery has yet to arrive at Earth. It never will. Either the empath failed, and sent the boat...anywhere, or it was attacked by the guardians. We think the latter. We think they have perfected the ability to attack us through their own batteries."

        "Maybe a time death is a Victorian reward," Con murmured. Few heard, and only Safe/Hist responded.

        "I saw a time death," he began, and everyone listened. They had all heard the story, but of those on board, only Safe/Hist had seen. Here was the history in which he was expert. The same as the child, the tale provoked both interest and fear.

        "I was on the planet for indoctrination. A body came flying by, right out of the ground. Of course, it wasn't moving. A time death is the only thing that's absolutely still---even a vacuum boat enters a system with velocity. The planet had moved through Mechanic. The only surveyor to time die. The Victorians might have a million, but we've lost only one staff member. The planet moved through Mech, so we went out into normal space and found him. Found it. Mech looked just like a dead person, and you could see him, and we all swore we could smell him through our vacuum sacks, as though he were sweating. But he wasn't sweating---he wasn't anything. We could read no reflected light or measure any physical activity; yet we could see Mech, smell him. We wanted to return him to Earth for proper rites; but, of course, we couldn't. It wasn't really there."

        Control was thinking of one's final thought going on without end. He was struck with a fear that chilled him, imagining not his final idea lasting forever, but that craving he had for his past, that fearful, empty history going on and on and....

        Now he had to speak, had to gain a new idea, had to prove himself still alive. When he spoke, his voice was old, was as startling as his face. His attitude, however, remained acute.

        "Chair Xelnopo, we have to get this battery home. There are no more."

        "But, sir, it's not required," Xelnopo replied. "Your chief analyst has proven by his failures that the batteries are unusable to us."

        "Ah, dear Xelnopo," Prime remarked kindly, "Analyst is no person to underestimate."

        Old Control then described his most important, personal need.

        "I owe Analyst. I owe him my life. And I know that if he has one more battery to examine, that's all he will need."

        "Please, Xelnopo," smiling Prime told the chair, "consider the great effort our staff required to calibrate with our battery. Do you want to lose that expenditure? Since we are willing to risk the journey, so should you. The Commission's only part now is supplying the feeder, and technically he is unnecessary."

        "Legally, he is required," Xelnopo asserted, "if any person is drained by the furnace. Besides, his presence describes the final difficulty: morality. The citizens of Canada will not stand for any further deaths of their sentience surveyors. Not when these deaths are to no avail."

        "Dear Xelnopo, in truth, doesn't most of Canada consider us surveyors a lot of eccentrics on the same order as vivisectionists?" Prime submitted. "In fact, haven't they grown to care less of us exactly because the batteries have yet to prove fruitful?"

        "If we fail, there's nothing more to lose," Con stated. "The project is complete after our translation, because there are no more batteries."

        "Allow us the choice, dear commissioner. After all, no one has a thing to lose except us."

        Xelnopo's slow reply was clearly official.

        "This decision is then a staff act?" she asked.

        "It is," Prime told her softly.

        "Then the Commission accepts," Xelnopo proclaimed. "You've proven you have the understanding, and your lives are your own. Ultimately, we agree because regardless of the child's value, we believe he might not be unique. If the guardians are tampering with the battery, all your members fed it may be duplicated, or all time die. If Canada does not prosper by receiving your battery, at least we might gain knowledge from your deaths. Agreed and accepted," she concluded, and began to leave, turning to reach for handholds on the plas bulkhead. Then she had to pause. She had to look carefully at the family members around her. She had to speak again, now with a quiet, more personal tone.

        "Understand this also, staff: the Commission is concerned with people, not technol discoveries. Understand that we want no one harmed, not the first person lost, for we are all a family. We wish that each of your members fed to the furnace recovers fully. With all the desire that people can have, we hope you arrive exactly as planned. And know that though Canada may be richer for your return, we who learn of your safety will be joyous."

        She turned, moving swiftly through the boat with her group, to the osmotic lock, and gone. In a shared moment of warmth to mitigate even familial tension, the staff felt fine for an instant, then proceeded toward either a long life on Earth, or an eternity in static space.

Chapter 13

The Alien Screamed

        He was sick of it. All about him, his relatives prepared for the translation, but Control was tired of their industriousness. Their work and their personalities seemed meaningless, and Con was sick of the feeling. He knew every life perfectly, through direct experience, description, history---through feel---but for too long he had felt no closeness, no tie. Medic, his brother-in-law, so stern and passionate that his character seemed tangible, was now just another nurse caring for bruises. Con felt the same for them all. Psy had said this response was typical, and would not carry with Control into the sac, but Con had tired of this removed feeling. Worse was the familial closeness he did feel, for it was only for his wife, now a pygmy he could not bare to view, and thinking of his daughter made Con ill. Psy had prepared him for these anxieties, but Janet, Penny....

        They were nearly ready. Actal Manifestic engineers constantly monitored the furnace. Plumbers sent trial fluids through the liquid exchanges between furnace and control sac. Within the thick fluid, the fish and its connections waited. Somewhere in the boat, Yollandez was eating again; so was the fish. Beside the sac was a cousin Control thought of disowning because she helped the child inject insect bits into the fluid. Look at the fish go gobble-gobble, she said, and the child laughed. Now Control felt truly sick, sick enough to vomit.

        Con recalled when he had been nice. The stress of translating with the batteries had not improved his character. Control appreciated Analyst's gruff force, though he had never admired his gall. Perhaps Con had gained some of his friend's best traits and worst flaws.

        He was nearly ready. Control continued to age rapidly, and felt old, yet somehow the condition seemed normal. Beside him, Psy now wore a psycho monitor. The instrument resembled a vest with tiny inscribed lines: synaptic readers attuned only to Control. While the integrating empath floated in the sac, Psy would be constantly aware of Con's emotions via their mutual spine links. Even outside the fluid, Psy knew how to lead his family's controller.

        "All that's left is to remove your bones, Control."

        "Yes, I know."

        "The skeleton interferes with the Manifestic flow within your system, so some major bones have to go."

        "Yes, I know."

        "The gelatinous sac supports you, else your organs would---"

        "Yes, I know," Control stated again. "What do you know, Psy? Do you know how delighted I am to go swimming in there? What's the difference---everything out here is so bleeding damp," he complained as he touched the nearest data integrator; and, yes, his fingers came away moist. "The damn fluid sac and liquid contacts and wet battery. Why can't there be anything on board dry and mechanical, like a levitator or automode. Even the outer walls are wet, but I'm sick of them anyway---that stupid tan light. Why couldn't they come up with a different color?"

        "The material will only give off that color, even filtered," Psy explained.

        "Yes, I know. But I'm sick of it anyway. I'm sick of everything glowing like some decoration. I'm sick of living in a ball---our old boats were houses, homes. I'm sick of never feeling weight like a normal surveyor. Even if we could walk, where could we go but fifty paces from one side to the next? Sometimes the sphere looks huge, like a cavern, and sometimes it's tiny, like a closet. And the sac, the sac is like a...a womb. Half womb and half casket. You wouldn't believe it, Psy. It is indescribable, having your bones removed and being in that thing and knowing exactly what's going on yet having no perceptions, seeing and hearing only through the surrogate, someone else's body. It will be better next time, when we make the translation, because it won't be familiarization---it will be desperation, and I won't have time to feel anything. Anything but my people being eaten by that perverse furnace. That's the worst part, Psy. It's all so alien---even the technols that Earth developed. What we're doing seems inhuman. How can these things be done to people? Remove a man's bones like squeezing a pimple? Stick them in again like an injection? It's not sensible. Send a ball through space with ideas instead of some decent expenditure of energy? It doesn't see human."

        "What is alien, Control, except something you're unfamiliar with?"

        "That is alien," Con retorted, and looked at the child. The only youth on board. Everyone wanted to ignore him because he was a conceptual anomaly, yet they wanted to be near because he recalled their own children. Apparently normal, the boy was learning to speak, but he seemed to grow before their eyes. The boy was impossible. He was the only alien aboard.

        "I hate that kid, Psy. I hate it."

        "Yeah, I know," Psy replied almost sweetly. "I know you feel that you hate the child. I know of your anxieties, from the confines of the boat, which restrict your freedom, and from the expansions of our technols that frighten you from the responsibilities they mandate."

        "Yeah, you know a lot, Psy; but do you know why I'm insane?"

        "Of course, you are not insane," the psybiologist replied without humor, "and you know that."

        "I can't recall anything before the age of twelve. Doesn't that describe some type of insanity?"

        "Of course not, Control. We've gone ever this before. Since I know it reassures you, I'll explain again. Your rejection of memory is a psychological defense mechanism to preclude emotional damage caused by a painful past. Your mental faculties are thus proven excellent, because they protect you."

        "And you know. You know exactly what happened."

        "Exactly. You were able to tell me during paraconscious therapy. I've explained that none of the events of your early life can damage you now---beyond reversible fear---and that one day you will recall and be pleased at your ability to live with the knowledge."

        "You could do this now. You could retrieve those memories and I would accept and understand."

        "Absolutely."

        "But you don't because the stress makes me...special."

        "Very special. Your lacking a history makes you especially empathic with the histories of your relatives. You have a greater sensitivity for your family's efforts in the furnace than any previous controller."

        "When we're home again, you'll fix me."

        "Only if we come out of second space alive," Psy told him, and laughed. Control also had his fill of humor.

        "I could get sick of talking to you, Psy," he announced unpleasantly.

        "Why bother to speak, Control?" Psy responded with a sly smile reminiscent of Yollandez'. "Since I'm wearing this," and he tapped his monitor, "I can read your mind."

        "No you can't---I know that," Control declared. "I know that even linked to the empathic data integrators, you still can't read my thoughts. You can verify mental patterns and judge the cognon paths in use, but you can't read my mind."

        "Let me try," Psy offered, and lost his sly humor. "I read in your mind thoughts of Janet. You see her as she existed days before, and now: shrunken, barely sentient. You're thinking of the years required for her recuperation. Even though she'll recover perfectly, for years you will be without her, and can you wait? Even if you achieve your life's goal as a sentience surveyor, can you wait for her? Especially considering your own aging. You feel it will stop, but when? Then there's your daughter: adult before, shriveled now. You'll be without her love for years. And the boy: what is he, how is he, why is he? You're thinking that with all the difficulty and uncertainty, how can you be expected to contemplate an impossibility as well."

        Control glared at him.

        "All right, Psy," he snapped, "you can read my mind. It's all true, and it's all useless, right? So what am I thinking now?"

        Psy told him."Your mental attitude now is not active thought, but inert awareness. You are aware that all I've told you is true. You are aware that both you and I have led you to a conclusion: that there is no more time for worry, about family lost, family to be regained. You know it's time now for concentration, not contemplation. You know it's time to leave, time for us all to leave."

        "Yeah, I know," Controller concluded distastefully. "It's time to take my bones. It's time to swim with the fish."

        He was a skin sack, a boneless man floating in a gel. Nearby, a skinny fish struggled to check connections. With its mouth, the fish moved a balance tape from Con's head to his torso, from pituitary to endocrine. The fish was unaware that Con's flesh and organs were loose, his skin slack, his body as bulbous as the sac itself. The fish was only aware of the stink, for its mechanical tasks stemmed from it's unique olfactory abilities allowing the creature to sense AM-tainted fluids better than any artificial perceptor could. Running its route about the controller's body, the fish observed with its nose, linked via neural transceivers to data integrators that analyzed its smelling. When the complex joinery required adjustment, the fish's muscles were made to twitch, tiny pulses guiding the creature until it understood the proper region. In the sac, the fish helped with fluid, electre, and AM connections; but the emotional control remained Con's.

        Nude in the fluid, his lungs filled with a rich mixture that supported his body, supported his breath, Con had feelings only for the furnace, and perceived only through his surrogate. Though detached from his perceptions, Con required an awareness of his family members' condition, how they appeared and behaved. He needed this extra understanding, needed to know how they felt before he decided which person to burn.

        Before the translation, Sur had been a nutritionist, but people did not eat in second space. The process would be over quickly: one or two preliminary exchanges of nearby vacuum volumes followed by stellar surveys of position, then on to the solar system, or...nowhere. Shorter jumps reduced the likelihood of attracting guardians, who were drawn by intense transitions through the spaces. The controller of this furnace was thus feeling mellow as three of his relatives were snatched into the battery by their executioner. Recalling Hull's miscarriage of twins, Lock's superlative paintings, and the older Head's increasingly short temper, Con felt his responses to these personalities, and ordered another five---from cousins to stepbrothers---pulled into the battery. He then felt all eight lives---all their traits and tendencies, all the histories and hidings---and felt the need for all to drain now, and their massed life-force was transmogrified, applied not as a trial concussion, but a genuine exchange of spaces.

        Decoding his electre link with the empath, Yollandez informed the staff, "He's done." And they began moving.

        The battery ejected its spent fuel as the information ombudsman called out, "Survey!" and pushed off to her instruments. With Psy remaining beside the sac, AM engineers moved to their data integrators, medics examined their reduced kin, and Safety read the boat's interior for invaders.

        "We've translated---we have translated!" Ombuds announced loudly. "About seven parsecs---a good, conservative fly."

        Safe/Hist was excited to relay to the staff, "I find no sign of guardians inside! They're not appearing, there are no images---they're not materializing aboard!"

        "Good feeding, Controller," Med intoned to the surrogate, smiling as he guided ancient youths away.

        Psy agreed. Wearing only his monitor, he found the empath's condition strong. Nearby, busy relatives situated radially at the data integrators and perceptors clustered beside the furnace complex performed their data tasks. Only Con in his sac was motionless. Old and bloated, he was an unpleasant sight to Psy. Con seemed to be in a torture chamber, seemed to be dissolving, countless neat lines and ribbons floating over his figure, the fish pushing through the gel, Psy looking away. Despite his age, Con's condition was excellent, but his sight was revolting.

        The staff had been grouped around the furnace entry, pointed in every direction, some members too anxious to allow their eyes to meet. Since they were necessarily burned nude, none bothered to wear clothing. This aspect of New Prudism had never been accepted comfortably by the staff, but removing even a robe might be too great a delay. The entire family had to be available, for no one could predicting whom the empath would feel he needed, though empaths had learned to save the surrogate and technols for last. The whole family, but not the child, who was nearby, but not close.

        Control had decided upon eight, a small number for that difficult, initial jump. Nevertheless, further translations were even more likely to attract guardians from their cryptic, killing locale. But so subtle, so efficient, was Con's control that he began the greater journey with a minimum of fuel. Though he knew of his success through info-circulation, he was also aware through the perceptions of his surrogate, who had no perceptions herself. Con had no ability to feel satisfaction, for in the sac he could only feel the furnace. All the other surveyors felt pride and pleasure---until the following word.

        "Hold."

        Safe/Hist had his face pressed into a second receptor. He was gleaning the vessel's exterior: not its position, but its local condition. He described his findings, the staff listening intently.

        "Pressure on the hull notated...with some movement. Over a great portion...separated areas. I'm reading organics...mid-force activity, and.... I have the photon reversal congruing so we'll be able to see."

        He paused. Then he moved back, flinging the receptor away in anger as the boat's hollowvid filled. The staff looked at a large light sphere just beyond the data integrators, a representation of the Vessel's hull as though it were transparent. Regardless of the viewers' positions, their vantage was ship's center looking out. Several blocky objects covered with drapery or attire moved along the hull. Victorian guards.

        "I never heard of this before," Safe/Hist wheezed. "They always begin appearing inside, manifesting themselves as real from...wherever. We thought it was from translating too intensely, but Con was so mild. Another fly and they're supposed to be left behind. I've never heard of them gathering outside the boat." He was stunned, unable to look at his family or the vid, staring at the terrible receptor as though it were responsible. "I never heard of waiting around while they...."

        Pushing past Safe/Hist, Omb connected with another receptor.

        "Hold, hold," she said. "Let me read what I can here."

        Trying to breathe normally, Ombuds concentrated on the external sensers as Safe, reluctantly, returned to his own instrument, and the staff stared at the guardians' representation.

        They were stretched and softened cubes, large enough to contain several humans. No features could be distinguished because the guardians were completely covered with a flowing material, like a bedspread, of a dull color, lightly textured. They moved across the sphere, as though crawling.

        "They match data we have from previous recordings," Omb confirmed. "They are guardians, and they're corporeal: completely manifested as actual in this space, solid as we are. And they are, uh, walking."

        "They cannot be walking," a surveyor called out loudly. "The boat hasn't enough mass to hold them against its surface."

        And a brother shouted:

        "How can they walk without feet?"

        "I can't tell how they're adhering," Omb added, "but it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because---" But she was interrupted by Safe/Hist's laughing.

        "Because they can't get in!" He pulled away from his receptor again to look at the staff and tell them with an immense, artificial pleasure, "They're so damn conceptual, but they can't even get through a plas hull. They're scurrying all over looking for a door---but they can't get in. They can't because---"

        "Because they don't have to," Omb asserted. "I'm telling you they're not trying to get in---they want to stay outside so they'll be conveyed to our system with us. They're making us take them to Earth."

        Everyone was busy: AM engineers tended the furnace, Psy examined Con, other surveyors contemplated the guardians' invasion. But the guardians were expected. The staff was prepared to respond in accord with the experiences of previous translations. But never had the guardians approached in this manner. Never had they attacked Earth.

        "Won't they be left behind if we translate?" Interior, Safe/Hist's wife, asked. "They always were before."

        "The others were left behind," Omb replied, "before they became fully manifested inside the vessel. But these guardians are all here, and all solid. They are completely physical entities, and that's why they can't enter."

        "But they are entering...," Safe/Hist choked, face in his receptor, and stiffly pointed to the hull where fabric penetrated.

        The surveyors near the vid---which showed only the ball's exterior---pulled themselves past the furnace to see that a single guardian was intruding. Everyone remained calm, everyone but Safe.

        "What is Con doing?" he demanded, looking between the sac and the guardian, the sac and the guardian, the sac and....

        "No loss of atmosphere," Omb reported. "I don't understand how it's---"

        The Executioner began shouting names."Comm, Seal, Plant, Over, and both Reps! Into the furnace---the controller is translating. Everyone gather---he wants more!"

        Con had decided. In his sac, the integrating empath knew all, receiving information circulated from the data integrators and human perceptions from his Surrogate. Whatever the staff knew, the controller knew.

        As though running to hide, the surveyors swiftly pulled themselves to the furnace entrance. They could see the guardian's fabric, a greyish shadow against the luminous plas, a material that was slowly seeping through. The surveyors continued, cooperating with the Executioner, who had tossed four of six into the furnace when the alien screamed.

Chapter 14

Final Fear

        A young voice. The scream came from the compartmented area against the hull. The child. Everyone knew it was the child. Though the surveyors were startled, Yollandez had only a slight response: a twitch of his arms, arms that continued to reach out and pull the food inside. Surrogate moved toward the scream, but no one else. The surveyors would remain to be fed, at Con's desire, though they wanted to leave, wanted to help the child; for with his scream, the boy became family. The staff knew the best way to aid was to have Controller move the boat away from the guardians. Six members snatched into the battery, then nothing happened.

        "He isn't taking them," confused Yollandez described, concentrating on his communique link, trying to decipher electre instructions that did not come.

        Psy, after reading his monitor, found an explanation."Con's response is toward the child."

        "Someone go find him, please," the prime minister ordered.

        A dozen surveyors shot from the furnace, toward the sound that had ended. Safe/Hist followed his wife, Interior, but Prime ordered Omb to return to the receptors. In a moment, Ombuds had determined which of the several compartments to examine.

        "He's in Main Medic!"

        They found him by a mud puddle. The boy did not seem harmed, only frightened, his back to a bulkhead as he stared at a corner that no longer was part of the vessel. He stared at the edge of a ditch, dark water with bugs buzzing the surface, long grass in patches, a thick bush. This portion of Canada ended two paces from the corner in each direction, fading back to normal boat plas. The boy stared here, and wept.

        Several surveyors, including Int and Safe, tried to comfort him as Med spoke to Omb via the boat's intrinsic communications.

        "Do you read where I'm pointing?" Med asked as though speaking to the air, and waved toward the corner, though he remained away from the area. Con's surrogate was closer, looking back and forth between the child and the patch of Earth.

        "There's some abnormality there," Omb advised, "but I can't suss it. I can't get a clear read, but it's as though part of the boat were missing. It's not being notated because there's no loss of structural integrity, no pressure drop. What's there, Med?"

        "What's the guardian doing, what is the guardian doing?!" Safe/Hist shouted.

        "It's still coming through slowly, and now several others have started," Omb described. "I think we have some time, but not much."

        Still holding the child as though holding onto him, Safe shouted again, but now to the surrogate, who was no longer herself, her perceptions given to Control.

        "Con! Why can't you get us out of here?!"

        Psy, by the fluid sac, then spoke, the surveyors in Medic hearing him as though he were in the same compartment.

        "Med, what do you have there? The executioner says Con still won't feed."

        Quickly Med described the scene, the weeping child.

        "Ask him why he's crying," Psy instructed. "Ask him what he saw."

        They did, Safe too anxiously, his wife more quietly; and the semi-literate boy managed to speak.

        "Sister, I saw sister...."

        Med approached that corner now, gaining the nerve to reach past Sur and touch. The bugs moved and buzzed. The smell was of decaying organics, fetid water. Mud came away on his finger.

        "It's real," he said. "It's really here."

        Omb spoke to the medic room."We're getting too much of that guardian through for comfort," she told them, and who could wonder of her calm? Not Safe/Hist.

        "Con, Con!" he shouted to the surrogate. "You have to get us out of here!"

        Through the walls, Psy quietly explained."He can't. He's gone trauma."

        Con had failed, failed as integrating empath, because he was thinking, feeling like a normal man.

        "He's recalled," Psy told them. "He's remembered his past."

        Through his surrogate, Con looked at that segment of his parents' farm just this side of the wetland where the main crop grew. But he no longer needed his surrogate, for with the child's words, Con remembered. He remembered the afternoon he went to check the fertilizer dam. The afternoon he walked on the path to the ditch edge to see his younger sister face down in the mud. Her arms were bent around her head exactly as when she slept, and Con could only think how foolish she was to be napping in the mud. His sister was not napping; she was dead, victim of a poisonous snake known to the locals. But the girl was too young to be walking in the wilds without protective boots, and everyone was blamed: mother, father, brother. The authorities sued the family for negligence. The parents finally voided their marital contract, and Con was sold to an education tract. Con's life turned so bad that his sister's death almost became a secondary loss. Almost. That's when Controller quit recalling.

        They called him Martin then.

        As Con received his past, he gave away his present. As the empath began remembering, surveyors attempting to comfort the child threw themselves away, because the boy was growing. Though aging abnormally since first appearing, the boy's growth rate now exploded. Visibly, rapidly, the child gained a year's growth, two, three; and his bones creaked, the growth accompanied by stretching sounds from within his body, sounds never heard by the enervated surveyors, sounds that cut them as deeply as their own bones. Uniquely frightened, the staff pulled away and stared, incredulous, forgetting attacking guardians for that moment. And the child began speaking. As he grew, the boy spoke with equal rapidity, not always clearly, not every word audible over his body's stretching, his voice changing---aging---during syllables.

        "...The tract...by myself...where is...? Always leaving...want to go back...."

        He recited his history, snatches beginning with his sister's death, to his next home, his constant loneliness, through Con's early professional life, meeting Janet, Penny born, the sentience surveyors, Victory discovered, the training of surveyor families, testing their battery, the voyage, ending with:

        "...The sac, but no bones...."

        The child needed only seconds to recite all those words, his body creaking oddly as he ripped through his clothes, and stretch into a twelve-year-old. Then he stopped growing, and from the effort, lost consciousness.

        Psy did not know this. Beside the control sac, he only knew that Con was aging. His wrinkles became deep, absurdly deep, his hair going completely white and thinning, skin turning mottled, covered with varicose veins, Con in seconds not becoming old but obscenely old. Psy had never seen such age. No one in the modern world had this appearance. Reports then came from the medic compartment, and Psy understood, telling a secondary psybiologist:

        "The child is at the age when Con began forgetting. I think Con is near his death age. With no cosmetics taken, he shows it. I think the boy won't continue to age, and I don't believe that Controller can."

        Shocked and needing to recover, the surveyors had to pause as though to begin breathing again. Med, however, examined the child: depleted and shocky, but a normal boy. Though other meds found Con's health marginal, he should still be functional as integrating empath. They needed his control, for everyone heard Omb declare:

        "The first guardian is almost fully on board, others coming. Let's go," she urged, trying not to moan.

        "Let's go!" Safe/Hist screamed.

        Psy gave a firm, sensible instruction."Get the surrogate out of that compartment. Get her out where she can see the guardians."

        The staff responded. They pulled Sur out, she and the staff staring at the guardians, that softly sifting fabric. Within the boat, the guardians seemed translucent; but on the hollowvid, they appeared solid. Prime thought she knew the reason.

        "That part of them outside is tangible, material in this space. To enter the boat, they're having to re-manifest themselves as actual on the other side of the hull. They have to be physical before they can attack us."

        Staff members gathered around the furnace, hoping to be pulled in by Yollandez, who awaited Con's orders. None came. The staff gathered there to be farthest from the guardians sifting through the hull, nearest to their salvation, which was the battery. The surveyors looked to the executioner, who concentrated on waiting, to the surrogate, who viewed the guardians, to Con floating in the sac. His fish was inactive, as though dead, and this seemed descriptive of their fate. Psy was arranging something new, manipulating a factingrate, but Safe/Hist had lost patience, pulling himself over to Sur and grabbing her.

        "Con, Con---you have to do something!"

        No response, of course. Then Safe shot over to the sac and violently grasped the clear surface.

        "Con, they're going to kill us! The guardians are going to kill us!"

        No response, of course. Con in the sac could not perceive. Though he heard through his surrogate, this screeching was of no significance. Con had greater concerns. He had recalled, recalled the trauma of his past. He understood exactly how the recollection had come about, by the child's remembering for him upon seeing the farm. Con became aware of Psy's correctness: Control could handle these horrors. Psy then told him the latest.

        The psybiologist had formed a verbal link with Controller's cognon centers, impossible when the empath was feeling the furnace. But Con was no longer controlling.

        "Con, you've lost it. You have lost your concentration, your empathy with the life-force furnace. Remember where you are, remember what you're doing. Use Sur to view the guardians coming for us and realize we are all about to die unless you regain your feel for our lives."

        Con knew where he was---he did not have to remember that. He knew his responsibilities as integrating empath. He was aware of the guardians, through Sur and the boat's data integrators. He knew of previous translations, previous death from these creatures. Before his past was discovered aboard, Control had considered potential difficulties with the next translation caused by the guardians' extra mass in their space packet. Con's feeling was to translate before the guardians gained the boat's interior. Now he only knew these things, and no longer felt them.

        "Con, you have to relax into emotion," Psy told him. "You've done this countless times. Or you have to concentrate on feeling. You have to regain your empathic place. Consider our position and fall into emotional cognition. Think of your immediate past, your wife and daughter, who need Earth for rehabilitation, your family---yourself---all about to time die permanently if you don't---"

        Controller cut him off. Con was fully aware of their situation, of everything Psy had mentioned, but the psybiologist was doing him no good. Con cut him off.

        Moving from his factingrate terminal, Psy looked to the surveyors, looked to his family.

        "He's disconnected me," Psy told them, appearing confused.

        Appearing physically ill, Safe/Hist with a pained expression groaned:"Why, why, why...?"

        Psy motioned for a secondary to take the receptor, to listen for Con.

        "Psy, the first guardian is nearly solid," Omb announced, still calm, but losing it.

        "I see," Psy replied, voice as cool as duration space.

        "The others are nearly all on board."

        "I see."

        "What do we do---"

        "With Con?"

        Psy explained, though he told them nothing.

        "He's lost his empathy with life-force drainage. He gained such a feeling for his sister's actual death that our reduction of life in the furnace became unreal to him."

        "How might we get him back, dear?" Prime asked, her presence the best force of moderation the family had. "How do we explain to him?"

        "He knows, he knows everything better than I," the psybiologist stated. "He knows our fear, our anxiety. He still has the same love for us and the desire to succeed in this translation. He still wants to save all our lives."

        "Could we perhaps shock him back?" Prime wondered.

        "He is back, and he's trying to recover," Psy returned. "Any further trauma would worsen his condition."

        The surveyors looked among Psy and Con and the guardians, glaring at the sac, the first creature seemingly huge because it was whole and nearly solid, because it was near enough to.... Even those busy with receptors had to look at the invaders, all their faces---their hearts---tight as fists. The surveyors' tension seemed to come from their intellects, their personalities, as though their spirits were clenched, as they stared up to the solidifying thing that controlled all their thoughts, their every feeling.

        "Of course, we don't have any weapons," someone scowled.

        "If you'll recall, dear," Prime firmly replied, "other staffs tried everything they could think of, but nothing worked against the semi-tangible guardians."

        "Besides, they've never come in this way before."

        "Why not? What's the difference?"

        Psy had the answer."Con. Control is the difference. His past was so important to him that paraconsciously he had a better feel for it than anything else. I think he exchanged space packets normally, but also exchanged a tiny part of the boat for a portion of his home as it existed years ago. These things are unprecedented, at least for humans. But for Control, it was easier to retrieve his past than fight through his fears. It's all too selfish for Con to have done intentionally. But it's just right for his fear."

        "Then what do we do, Psy? What do we do?"

        Psy, however, had no further answers; so his family sought answers on their own.

        "Can't we burn ourselves without Con? It's done to charge for calibration."

        "Even then, Con decides," Prime Minister noted. "It's never been done for translating."

        "But it's better than waiting for the guardians to manifest themselves inside the boat."

        "What if we feed ourselves and more appear?" Omb returned. "Or Con regains his feeling the next moment and we've wasted our power?"

        "Then what do we do---what do we do?!"

        "We die," Safe/Hist choked, "because that guardian is solid."

        The creature had turned opaque. The guardian now moved toward the surveyors, its fabric fluttering gently, no sound, but a clean, acidic smell.

        "It's coming, it's coming," Safe groaned, and began to sob.

        Int looked to her husband and slowly shook her head, not moving toward him, only now able to look away from the oncoming thing. Looking carefully at the tangible guardian, Prime grabbed Safe/Hist's shoulders.

        "Look, dear, it's slow," she asserted. "It doesn't move well in free fall. We'll always be able to avoid it."

        "But the rest are becoming solid---we can't avoid all of them," Int said.

        "What if it gets Con in the sac?"

        "Good---he's letting us die anyway!" Safe cried. "Let it kill him first!"

        "That's mad," Omb insisted, "he's our only chance."

        Some surveyors wept and others looked everywhere, some only toward that solid creature, some at Con or Psy, all feeling like meat on the ground before a carnivore, all wanting to be fed to the furnace.

        "Psy, why is Con hearing from your second instead of you directly?" Prime asked.

        "Control is not listening to anyone," Psy answered, and tapped his still-connected monitor. "He's transceiving nothing. Of course, he can't speak when he's controlling, so perhaps.... But I have to think of something else to do...." But he could only stare at the approaching guardian and its solidifying peers.

        Con heard little of this, because his surrogate had left the other surveyors. Control had not ordered her away---had he?

        "Psy," Med noted, "Sur is at Medic again."

        "Hell---kill her or something!" Safe/Hist screamed. "Con's going back to his memories. We'll never get him back with us!" And Safe followed her, followed Sur to kill her.

        Prime turned quickly to Psy as Safe/Hist shot away to stop Sur, stop her in any manner. Psy thought a moment as he stared at the guardian, the approaching guardian, stared at the other aliens materializing within the boat. Only a moment, and he decided.

        "Go after him! Don't let him stop the surrogate. Go! go!"

        The surveyors believed Psy instead of Safe/Hist, and clambered after him. Int could not follow her husband. In a loud rush of movement, a dozen surveyors thrust themselves toward Safe, gaining him just as he reached for Sur's throat. His family stopped him, pulling him away in a complicated, rotary ballet. They surrounded Safe, smothering his struggling limbs with their mass, explaining only that, "Psy said." And the surrogate continued.

        Con was attempting to regain the proper intensity of empathic understanding for him to feed his family members. Yes, Con understood that he had ordered Sur to move. He sent her to the medic compartment, or to his past.

        Psy explained his hopes, his ideas.

        "Con can get no worse, but I think he's trying to return to controller; I think he's trying something new. Perhaps he wants to force the recollection away or.... I don't know. But I know integrating empaths. I know them all. Only Con could so uniquely allow us to die as this. But no other controller, no other controller could save us."

        Though drifting toward the boat's center, the guardian had yet to near any human. The first human it would reach floated in a fluid sac, unable to move. Should the staff try to drive the alien away with their bodies? Improvise weapons from technols the guardians' masters had invented? Let Con die though he might be preparing to save them? Sacrifice themselves though Con would allow them to die regardless?

        "Psy," Omb reported, "Sur is going directly toward the corner with the Earth parcel."

        "We should have killed her...," Safe moaned, still detained by surveyors, still sobbing.

        Con saw this mud he might worry of tremendously later. He saw the floating child, who required no concern. He saw Sur's goal, this corner, and felt she was going on her own. But Con knew that as long as she was surrogate, only he could guide her. The room held equipment and medicines and modifiers, chem exchanges, and storage bores. Sur pulled herself toward a closet adjacent to the mud, the bush. No coincidence. Directly before it now, Sur touched the panel to make it transparent and reveal its contents. The closet held a stack of bones. A stack of bones marked with scribblings. An untidy pile, and they were bloody.

        He had never seen this before. Con had been unaware of the storage arrangements. Now he knew. Knew that his family had stuffed his skeleton into a hole like garbage. Squeezed him like a pimple and....

        Far away, the executioner began screaming.

        "He's feeding! He's feeding! Everyone, everyone, everyone!" Yollandez cried, and waved his limbs frantically, cramming man after woman into the body slot. "The whole family, ever person, get in! He wants everyone---we're going all the way!"

        A practiced rush commenced in which every surveyor flew to the furnace, the body slot, and threw themselves in, Yollandez pulling surveyors past hand over hand. Everyone came but Sur. Con had no order for his surrogate, only for the furnace and the executioner. Omb and Psy and Prime entered, the remainder following in seconds. Through his connections, Yollandez knew they all were being properly fed. Seconds after the last, something would have to occur. As he pressed the final surveyor out of sight, Yollandez became terrified, for he found himself the only human left in the universe. For that endless moment, he stared at the guardians filling his vision, all nearly opaque now. Seconds, and the universe changed.

        They disappeared. Yollandez saw the guardians vanish before his eyes. Ecstatic, he turned to the sac as though to share his joy with Con just as the empath in a wordless code explained.

        "We are not near Earth," Yollandez read in his brain.

        Yollandez saw the guardian. The one solid guardian had remained. It moved against the sac, brushing, rubbing, pressing. Only yards from Yollandez, it was destroying the sac.

        "We have to fly!" Yollandez screeched. "I'll be the fuel---I'll be the difference! Feed me, Controller!"

        Yollandez was terrified for himself and for Con, and was lonely in this dying place, ready to partially die to avoid complete death, and was excited and....

        Con felt none of this. He had relaxed into answers as he heard Yollandez, examined their situation, and felt for a final understanding.

        "The surrogate!" Yollandez shouted, having seen Sur near the medic compartment. "I'll go for---" but Con gave an order.

        "The child," Yollandez read in his brain. "Get the child."

        Not a blink passed before Yollandez began tearing to the medic room. Hand over hand across the furnace, down bulkheads, into the compartment, passing Sur to grab the unconscious child and kick, swim in the air, no contemplation, the mud was gone, the vessel whole again, but this meant nothing. Only returning with the boy had meaning. Yollandez approached the furnace just as the guardian ruptured the sac.

        Con saw it through his surrogate's eyes, saw the gel spill loose, the empath jostled, some connections gone, the fish scurrying to reconnect him, as the guardian pressed nearer.

        "In with him alone," Con ordered, and the executioner did not pause.

        The guardian floated so near Yollandez that it seemed a building about to fall on him. Con was even closer to the creature. The empath, showing no consciousness, could not move. While cramming the boy through the body slot, Yollandez looked up to that guardian, then waited seconds for feeding. Seconds enough for the guardian to gain the floating, drying man, viscous fluid in huge drops splattering its covering.

        Con saw. Through Sur, Con saw the guardian take this flopping skin sack against its cover and within. Then the controller felt his most passionate drainings, for what could he sense more deeply than himself in the form of the child lose part of his life in the furnace? A feel enough to take them to Earth. A greater empathy the controller had was for his permanent, simultaneous death as the guardian processed him.

        His ultimate understanding was experience as the Victorian's bodily remains loved him with the Manifestic technols about which it was wrapped, through its total morality sending the pitiful human to the religious reward of a time death and peaceful thoughts without end, Con with a flash of this mud and this girl and a fear of not knowing them....

        As they arrived near Earth, the guardian disappeared, left behind or forced by the empath, who shot away as the furnace ejected his family past the stunned executioner. First came the child now grown into a man---the same man as Con before calibration---accepting the consciousness Control could not retain and the memory he no longer required, for the empath had given all. Moving out with effort, the current Con tried to see and feel and think, collecting the thoughts received from a skin sac with no final fear to last him forever.

Book IV

The Slash

Chapter 15

Death And Resurrection

        The president appeared amongst hard machines that might have been threatening if she had been more than an image. The main chamber in the orbiting lab was big enough to swallow a six-pack of blue whales beached in space. The electre accelerator, a suite of vacuum-grown crystals connived into taking the shape of an electren's submaterial mid-force route, was one whale in itself. The logolyzers put together would have made another. Continental versions, their sponged metal sides like a bubbly volcano's leavings, two logolyzers flanked the room's main occupant: the last Victorian battery, Con's battery, housed in a hard-air container, a pomegranate in a bowl of vacuum.

        Photon tubes pulsed in non-spectral hues, connecting sodality purveyor to logolyzer to electre accelerator. This cubical cave held no decoration. No gilded handrails, no crayon drawings, only scribblings of Analyst's technol team adorned the walls. To one side, the President appeared, decorative only to Analyst. To the rest of the surveyors, Hervieux was a demon, for she would disperse them due to insufficient funds.

        Analyst felt it improper that the nation's most elegant fem should appear amongst the crackling static and circulating smells of leaking ether. Of course not. The president was only a vision.

        "Mr. Analyst."

        Her knees were showing. Analyst would not look away, and would not blush. She had never learned how to address him correctly, so why should he avert his view? He wasn't seeing her vulva, after all, just shin.

        Let's ask Con and his naked horde about modesty.

        "Mr. Analyst," the president began, "my career cannot bear any further bad decisions. Allowing a small staff of you surveyors to remain behind on Victory was the first. Were it not for that, we would have never met the Heinous. Obviously, they were cowards, and disappeared from the skies as soon as we stood up to them. My next bad decision was having you follow the Heinous regardless. Only through the Heinous did you find the Victorians' home. Only then did you find the batteries. My next bad decision was believing that you would change the world with them as an unparalleled power source. Instead, a Canadian citizen died, and the greater populace now spurns you for the bizarre methods used to bring the batteries to Earth. Now I hear even from you that without the Victorians' technology, the batteries are nothing more than that: hard wet things that hold a bit of juice. I remember Chair Xelnopo's quote of Mr. Controller regarding the final translation: 'If we fail, there's nothing more to lose.' But there is always more to lose. Pride, power, respect, position, all of these things. What I have left, sir, I am keeping."

        Analyst said nothing, so Security had to reply.

        "Yes, Miss President."

        "Canadian citizens will accept no further failure, not considering what it costs them in taxes," Hervieux added. "The sentience surveying program has brought our people nothing but some unusual stories. Citizens still need an hour to get to work, not an instant. Private enterprise cannot afford maggravity. The medical technology allowing one's major bones to be removed and returned was first applied to you, not to benefit the health of the general populace, who are demanding some return from the expenditures of space."

        "Yes, President Hervieux," Sec replied, not waiting for his father's latest silence.

        "Why has Mr. Controller not joined us?" the president wondered. "He might be more talkative."

        "No way," Analyst muttered, but Sec stated more clearly:

        "Well, Miss President, he doesn't feel well around people since his, uh, achievement."

        "Feeling people was his expertise, his profession," the president reminded Sec and Analyst.

        "Well, uh, he's much better with gear now."

        He's just not the same, Analyst thought without speaking, and never will be. That was Analyst's feeling.

        "My best wishes to him, but apart from his returning with the battery, Canada doubts his success. Perhaps I should have said 'Earth', for it seems apropos that you surveyors are in orbit. The removal, you see, is increasing, that between our people and your profession. Regarding Mr. Controller, no one believes that he existed as a boy and a man simultaneously. Excuse me. A new religious affiliation has been formed that proposes that Mr. Controller has proven the Messiah's resurrection and foretells the Second Coming. You people are very popular in the sense that mass murderers are fascinating. It's called infamy. No one rational believes this back and forth instant aging bit. If you can prove it by demonstration, magnificent, the potential is enormous, but I don't know for what. People don't want to get old rapidly. So, what do you propose to do?"

        You, I propose to do you, Analyst thought, but Security spoke, not wondering of his father's pause.

        "Miss President, Analyst figures it's best to disassemble the battery completely."

        "No, I want to smash it and look at the pieces. I'm gonna kick out it's keystone and watch it fall apart," Analyst replied after first glimpsing his discreet son.

        "I don't expect you to do any good with this final battery, but absolutely no one must be harmed," Hervieux told them. "However, if you don't achieve some concrete benefit, the sentience surveyors are no more. Mind you, my opponents are running on the ticket of removing Canada from space, which they claim is filled with crazies, like the Victorians, the Heinous, and the sentience surveyors."

        "Yeah, well, thanks, Miss President," Analyst responded, shifting in his seat, his son wondering of professional or personal discomfort. "But you got to understand the real potential of the batteries, which is temporal."

        "Previously you told me about the enormous potential of the batteries, then regarding power, energy, and now it's time?"

        "It's immortality, which is what I said all along."

        "Your first bold, inaccurate assessment was over a year ago, and now you have a collection of batteries that have deteriorated like fruit in the sun."

        "Yeah, well, they're sorta organic, and die if exposed to too much stuff."

        "Therefore you propose to 'smash' the last one?"

        "'Disassemble' is a better term, Miss President," Secure submitted.

        "'Pick its bones' is a good one, too," Analyst returned. "Let's see what we got here, Missus, uh, Miss Hervieux, uh, President Hervieux. You gotta understand what's going on with these batteries."

        "Are you implying that you do? You're beginning anew after ruining the other batteries, and now you think you know something?"

        "Gosh, I'm sorry you're so testy, Miss President," Analyst said, "but it's my career, not yours."

        "Sir, I suggest to you that the continuation of my career, in the form of the upcoming election, may very well ride on your---"

        "No. No, it don't Miss President," Analyst interrupted with some agitation, "because you are president, and have been president for two terms, and will always be known as a president. But I have to figure these batteries, or me and all the other surveyors will be known as a bunch of clowns who wandered all over the bleeding galaxy without doing nobody no good."

        "Excuse his mouth, which has never done anyone any good," Security snapped, but his father continued quickly.

        "All I've done with the great stuff we found is bring the damn batteries here---so what? I never did figure out that Heinous sphere---"

        "Like another bad decision," the president interrupted.

        "Yeah, all right, sure," an exasperated Analyst retorted. "And because the sphere bit was bad---"

        "Was a failure."

        "All right, damn it, yes, Hervieux. Because the bleeding sphere bit was a failure, I have to do something to make up for it. I have to do something to make the whole mess worthwhile---the guy lost as a time death, and Em and her staff. Damn it, I have to do something, not you."

        "Very well, Mr. Analyst, what do you intend to do with this final Victorian battery regarding time and immortality, and, well---what else is there?"

        Ignoring her facetious words, facetious mien as she stared at him, Analyst continued.

        "You gotta understand that the Vickies are living, or existing, in static space, static as in no movement, no time passing. In a way, they've learned to stop time by doing that: stop the time of their lives. The battery-feeding bit is sort of making time go faster, but you're right---who cares? That's just acceleration. But to make time stop and stay alive is to have immortality."

        "A condition desirable to few if it means turning oneself into a rag and wrapping one's fabric around a machine in outer space."

        "Well, we haven't figured that part. It's not a rag, it is organic, though not alive. We think it's just a connection between the Vickies' consciousness/personalities/anima and their previous physicality. Con ain't telling too much about what he felt with that. He doesn't do too good with personalities anymore."

        "What might your results be?" the president demanded. "If you succeed in duplicating the Victorians' state, do you expect all of Canada to eliminate their bodies and lie in space forever?"

        "Let's look at it this way, Miss President," Sec added. "Analyst figures that Con somehow tapped into usages of a battery that are endemic to the Victorians' current existential state, through his own talent, but also through the guardians using Con's battery to get at his staff."

        "Yeah, well, we don't know which is more important," Analyst added, "that Con got some of his past to return, or that he brought it to the boat. Either way, what in the universe could be bigger than that?"

        "Nothing, perhaps, Mr. Analyst," Hervieux returned, "if it is verifiable, and ultimately repeatable, or usable with modifications. Will it be?"

        "If I can help it, yeah, Miss President. You see, I have a basis for study. The temporal kinesis Con produced in his furnace boat is like the perverts' sphere that they dumped in our office. Con's getting a feel for it when he was trapped on the damn thing was a help for him, I know. The similarities between conveyance functions of the sphere and the batteries are too similar for coincidence. I think Con found those similarities through desire. When he was holding that sphere, he wanted more than anything to get back, so he did. I don't know who did most of the work there, him or me. In the furnace boat, Con's deepest longings were the control that caused the battery to supply him with what he really wanted in life: to learn of his past. After all, the Vickies got what they wanted out of life with these things---that was the batteries' purpose."

        "Why in the world, Mr. Analyst, would the Heinous' sphere device and the Victorian batteries be of the same technology when the two races had no connection?"

        "I think there's more time between the Vickies' flattening their planet and the perverts' getting to Victory than we thought. I think it was years. Maybe it took the Heinous that long to arrive. Maybe they took a cruise boat, sort of, instead of a rocket, but why not? They weren't in a hurry. Maybe the perverts found some Vick stuff lying around just like we did. Not on Victory, but Aureum IV, the guts to a sphere, maybe, and it took them a long time to learn how to use it."

        "We think they got no more, though," Security added. "If they did, they'd be on our backs by now."

        "Is Mr. Controller able to assist you in this endeavor you propose?" the president wondered.

        "Yeah, the battery is like his best buddy. Like family."

        "I would instruct you to proceed, but I know you are working under your own orders at this moment. Therefore, I will not tell you to abandon all your studies and vacate the laboratory. Not yet."

        Neither surveyor thanked the president for being magnanimous.

        "Apart from instructions, I have received a suggestion that I tend to agree with," Hervieux added. "During the years of your sentience surveying, the citizens of Canada, despite increasing misgivings, have supported your program with their best wishes and their bank accounts, but have seen nothing of your results except TV programs. Now is the time to allow them a more intimate perusal of your results, considering that you have an accumulation of genuine alien artifacts that are dead. I suggest that we bring one or more of the deceased batteries to Canada for an exhibit, thereby allowing people to peruse the object at an intimate distance. There is no substitute for direct contact to allow a person a feel for your otherwise removed enterprise."

        "Uh, Miss President, I'm not too sure that's a good idea," Secure responded. "The batteries are dead, as far as we can tell, but we never really noticed how their internal energy was dissipated."

        "I thought you said it was akin to suicide, that the batteries' energy went into killing themselves?"

        "Yes, that's what I said," Analyst returned harshly, as though speaking only to his son. "Yeah, great, Miss President, we can throw your voters a bone. You can have all the damn things you want. Sure, we'll be safe, and duplicate planetary conditions of gravity and atmosphere to test it, even have a malmetal container to house the thing when mom and the kiddies aren't ogling its pulchritude. I can see why people would want to see them, they're so beautiful. They look like a big tree stump that a giant peed on until he killed it."

        "The aesthetics are irrelevant," Hervieux declared. "You should know, Mr. Analyst, that many things are fascinating to examine despite their lack of surface appeal. The batteries may not be beautiful, but they certainly appear alien."

        Analyst could not disagree. He had his staff begin a feasibility study to send a pair of withered batteries to Canada, though Hervieux had a better idea. She strongly suggested that either Analyst or Secure accompany the shipment, for the citizens believed that more than any artifact, the sentience surveyors were truly alien.

        Visitors swore they stank, which was impossible considering their sealed containers. Each day, thousands of people marched past the stars of the National Sentience Surveyor Exhibit in Toronto. The World's Largest Accumulation of Alien Encounters was the promise. After passing hollowvids of Victory and the suicide chambers, censored movies of the Heinous making art with Register and Controller's escaping alien aesthetics with most of his face, visitors arrived at true alienness.

        Near enough to touch behind their invisible shields, the batteries appeared alien with their material that seemed neither stone nor wood nor complas, but something otherworldly. Their color was neutral, but implied an alien hue. Though obviously vertical, the batteries' irregularly straight lines blended with the curves along the horizontal axis in an alien manner. Many people swore they smelled the batteries, like the bottom of a little green man's shoe, one child described.

        Every major news program on Earth showed President Hervieux of United Canada standing beside a depleted battery with her hand against its surface. She could not imagine how many votes that stunt gained her, but she had no comment as to its odor. Not even to Analyst when next they spoke, during a live demonstration.

        Hervieux was in Toronto with Sec and Con. Analyst had remained at home: in orbit. The two older men seemed more kin than did Analyst and Sec, for Secure was only aiding his father while waiting for the next translation from Earth to anywhere, while Controller and Analyst had each lost a certain empathy with the specifics of their profession, Con from success, and Analyst from failure. Con only wanted to find himself, unable to comprehend the means that had led to his survival. He felt that he had outgrown his family, felt that sentience surveying had become too tangible, too concerned with the batteries, which were beyond human comprehension, in his view. Analyst believed that when he came to share Con's impression, he would either be totally lost, or would verge on the great success he had promised his president.

        Hervieux did not share the two surveyors' apathy. Her displaying the withered battery was a cultural coup, and now the president expected more from Analyst, as per his vow of changing the world. Never having expected immortality, Hervieux would settle for being elected again. Therefore, she had arranged a minor demonstration. Con would relive his past, not his early childhood for years vacant from his memory, but his time in static space, his control of the battery's barely credible life-force draining. In demonstration, Con would show how he had entered the battery for calibration, how his family members had entered to have parts of their lives temporarily removed. His wife and daughter and the remainder of the staff were recuperating in medical facilities near the surveyors' base in Toronto. Doing just fine, as proven by shriveled Med's accompanying Con at the Ontario Technol Center---in a carrychair.

        An audience of ten thousand waited for the demonstration. Secure thought the decision to make such a display was up to the individual surveyors involved. Analyst considered it all a bloody sick freak show.

        "Big damn deal," Analyst told Sec. "Con walks into the worthless battery, walks out, and the bleeding spotlight shines on poor Med looking like the jungle headshrinkers got his whole body in their pot. Then the bloody bleeding president says vote for me. What a bunch of crap."

        "You great problem is that the president doesn't say, 'Please screw me, Mr. Anal.' What she will say is, 'Let's hear it for the sentience surveyors and let's get them back on the road.' That's what I want to hear. I want that bill to go through Parliament so we can fund some more surveying. I don't want to float around those useless batteries the rest of my life. You can do that all by yourself. As though you gave a damn."

        "I give a damn, you little shit," his father scoffed. "There's something in those batteries, and I'm gonna find it. I don't need your help. I don't need Parliament's stolen money. I don't need Con and his shit-eating grin."

        "Well, what do you need, Anal? If you have all you need, let's see something magical with your last battery, the one that nearly killed Con---it killed part of him for sure. So what do you need to finally get something done up there while I'm down here selling my soul for a damn buck?"

        Analyst could not say. He did not know exactly what he required for that major discovery, but he could wait. He was going nowhere, and wasn't going to rush into this last battery and ruin it. Analyst didn't know what he needed, but felt it coming. Unfortunately, the staff empath could not help him with this emotion.

        The thousands of people before and below Con did not irritate him. He thought it would be just fine to fund another survey, though he might not bother to join. Con's permanent smile depicted the latest stage of facial expressiveness in his professional life, a mien irrelevant to the removal of certain parts, considering the perfect surgery that had returned his face to normal. Con developed new normalcies with every era of his surveying. Worried in the Victory era, hard and hot on the edge of static space, now he seemed happily uninvolved, though his smile did not signify a complete lack of interest. Con did not wish to retire from the surveyors; he was waiting for their next epoch, and felt it would come without his direct influence, direct torment.

        The mass made Sec uncomfortable. Though quiescent as the president's narrator began the introduction, the mass of humans with their breathing and slight movements of their shoulders and twitching hands was a cacophony to the man accustomed to the quiescence of the paired spaces. Sec was not so anxious that he had difficulty proceeding. After all, these were his fellow citizens, not the Heinous

        After voluminous applause, the president strode forth to describe the alien demonstration, which had not been rehearsed. Not rehearsed because Con was wary of entering the battery, wilted or not, and did not want to waste his effort. Do it once, over and done with.

        "...will now step into the alien apparatus exactly as he did so heroically those months ago, those many light years removed," the President announced.

        Control would not. With no anxiety, no fear, only that recent look of amusement, Control said no via his com link. Connected were Con, Secure, and Hervieux in Canada, and Analyst in orbit, separated by space, the substance of removal, but truly he was with his peers. No, Con said in his throat, and the audience wondered of the delay.

        "Are you feeling something?" Sec asked Con without looking toward him. To the crowd, the two men stood without activity, without communication.

        "My past is in there," Con whispered to his friend. "The last time I found my past, it was a relief. But being processed by the guardian was like being in the Heinous' ship. One was ecstasy, but both were torture. I don't see that I'm going inside a battery again."

        "Now you tell us," Secure muttered.

        "Good, this is fishshit," Analyst snarled aloud. "Forget the damn show and throw that thing in the trash."

        "One moment please," Hervieux assured her audience, and Analyst wanted to slap her.

        "Well, nothing of mine is in there," Sec replied to Con and Analyst. "Maybe I'll just pop in; that'll look all right to the crowd. All us surveyors look alike to them anyway."

        "Why don't you step in, Miss President?" Analyst snarled loudly. "You're the one grubbing for votes."

        He know she heard, but Hervieux did not reply, standing with a partial smile, raising her hand toward Sec as he entered the alien battery. No door, no discrete passage, but a channel for interior conveyance like the suicide chambers on Victory. Reminiscent of those small devices, Sec entered, and did not leave.

        "Damn, Con, I'm getting nothing from him!" Analyst shouted, watching the scene on a hollowvid as he read his sensers.

        The president heard, but the audience remained unaware. Hervieux waited for the surveyor to exit and stand near the shrunken medic, who would approach from the wings. But Sec did not exit, because he was gone.

        After Analyst's fearful assessment, Con stepped inside. He sensed nothing. It felt like a wilted Victorian battery to him. No potential for disappearance, no previous death and resurrection, and no Sec. But Con believed that Secure had somehow removed those previous traits with himself. Con exited the battery alone.

        Security had proven himself mistaken, but his brethren could not know. Though feeling that the battery contained nothing of his, no properties or possessions, Sec entered to find his love.

Chapter 16

The Sepulcher Of Space

        They considered the battery too dangerous to move. President Hervieux wanted the device transported to the surveyors' high-security compound outside of Toronto, but the staff were wary of disturbing it before a thorough examination. Dangerous, perhaps, but empty, for Con with no smile could not feel Secure inside, no matter how often he entered, and Con was no longer apathetic toward this alien apparatus. Using a portative lab from a sentience surveyors' vacuum boat, Analyst examined the battery with equivalent results, unable to find his son or Sec's remnants inside the alien killer.

        Hervieux would never forget this disaster. She would never forget standing on stage before thousands, the event broadcast to millions, personally demonstrating the surveying project's erratic danger. Though the impeachment hearings in Parliament soon dissolved, Hervieux was unofficially judged to have reached her career's peak, now rapidly headed downhill. Some pundits expected her to disappear from the political scene after the next election as abruptly and absolutely as Security had from the battery. Analyst disagreed. The president's future was of scant concern to him, but he expected to find his son.

        Analyst did not seek him in the Canadian battery, but inside the last unspoiled example. In the ad hoc orbiting lab, Analyst suffered the terrible idea that he had ruined Sec just as his own father had ruined him. A terrible idea, for why should Analyst consider himself ruined? Analyst had not caused Sec's...situation. Not his death, no, bloody bleeding hell, not his death, for Ernie still lived, somewhere. Somehow. Analyst only had to find him.

        "My experience in static space doesn't tell me enough," Controller stated to Analyst as technol adjuncts rigged a new arrangement of instruments near the battery's container. In the background, a smell of distance wafted toward them, the ether dumps' leakings coalescing into molecular sized packets of vacuum, of space, that medium of separation, the exact aspect keeping Analyst from his son.

        "Damn, Con, is he even alive as we know it?" Analyst returned harshly. "Is he in some existential space crap like the Vickies' guardians? If he's normally alive, then ain't he starving or dehydrating wherever he is---and where the hell is he?"

        Though Control did not know, he entered the active battery to search. Inside, he felt connectivity, an impression that frightened him. Control could not remember last sensing the deceased surveyors through a Victorian battery and feeling the peace and ecstasy of extended existence in a supposedly superior state, but Con was frightened that he might be feeling Secure. In the alien battery with its moist tissue tight against his shoulders, pressed against his face but not smothering him, dark in this interior but not blinding, Con smelled the past's presence. He found his first loss from these transcenders, but avoided Empath. That fear, he did not need. Em remained in a state he could not comprehend, though it might be common death.

        The battery was somehow connected to Victory's suicide chambers, but the impression might have been no more than Con's sensing similar technologies. With his emotion in either a nihilist or objective mode, was Con becoming less of an empath, no longer able to sense the subtleties of the idea system that is life, or had he so matured in his discipline that he avoided poetic responses emanating from himself? Control did not know, but in this battery, he found Secure. He remained uncertain, however, of this discovery's source. Either Con recalled Ernie, or unclearly observed his current state: death or alien removal, Sec and his friends suffering the separation of having their emotions disconnected.

        He told Sec's father, but Analyst did not know how to apply this new information. Though he welcomed Con's impression, Analyst had been convinced before that Sec was retrievable. Now he had to manifest this idea in the real, to make the emotion tangible.

        Con and Analyst preferred to work alone in different manners. Analyst would clear the hold and stare at the battery, his adjuncts out of sight, making minor tests, reading informational feeds. Con did not want Analyst's volatility to interfere with his empathy, but felt the need for other surveyors busy about him. Seldom were Con and Analyst together with the final battery, though in the days following Sec's disappearance, the men sought Ernie constantly, Controller working to the point of emotional fatigue, Analyst to the point of desperation.

        Because Con studied the battery, Analyst sat in his office. He had made damn sure that a maggrav field was woven in this room so he could sit at his desk. He could float while asleep, but when working, Analyst wanted to be anchored, solid in space. He sat on a hard chair like his father's; but, no, Papa's was soft. A winged chair, a cheap version of the president's. Papa held him on his lap and rubbed his chest, rubbed his chest, speaking with a deep voice. Analyst could still hear that sound, but not the words, not quite the content, something about son, but what about him?

        Analyst did not have a wooden desk in his office; it was plas. He had no trophies from his college flatball team, no self-erasing pads from home with his initials, no fotos of his family. The only personal item in Analyst's office was his father, a poor substitute for his son.

        He never closed his office door. He could not; too many people had to enter. Adjuncts bringing news of the latest failure with the battery, Con saying he had felt Secure inside, but did not know how or where. Analyst left the door open because he had to let Ernie in, and Matilda. And his damned father, though not his damned wife.

        Con had found Security in the battery, but Analyst found his father. Analyst found his father everywhere.

        He rubbed his chest, rubbed his chest, and tried to remember what Papa used to say. Why should he find Papa rather than Ernie? He loved Ernie, not that sick bastard. Analyst found his father in the battery because both were alien. And he recalled, finding his father by feel just as Controller had felt his way through static space. Like Con, Analyst now found his true past, as though delivered by Sec's disappearance, a past he had avoided before, excluded from his ongoing present. Analyst found his father in the battery by recalling those words when he rubbed his chest, and lower, lower. I love you, son, he said. I love you.

        Analyst understood the battery by comprehending his father's love, for it was a foreign sort, exactly the requirement for sussing an alien emotion system.

        He left his office, going from artificial gravity to the pull of space, which was a lack of attraction, as though space wanted no surveyors in its midst. Moving to the main hold, Analyst understood his failure in examining the Victorian battery. He had been too smart. He had been too technical, a failure because technologically, the Victorians were beyond humans. Analyst had failed in attempting to be alien, like his father's love, instead of human, like Secure's.

        He passed the huge electre accelerator. A woman, floating upside down, tightened a bib on the long ether nipple, the accelerator resembling a kitchen appliance, all slick and plas and permanent, its substance never to disintegrate in normal space. With his new enlightenment, Analyst continued past Controller, who looked at him with surprise. Not a word came from either man, their staff in the background sharing the occasional useless idea, a minor point, and weren't they all? They shared the fallacy of trying to become like the aliens. Em might have succeeded, but only in her death. In order to live with these aliens, Analyst would remain human, and find his living son.

        Analyst stopped at the apparatus shed. To Con, the shed suggested a large version of the closet containing his skeleton in the furnace boat. Opening the door, Analyst pulled forth a gross separator, which resembled a chain saw, and had a similar purpose: cutting big hard things into pieces. Analyst approached the battery, and the entire staff watched, not a one surprised, for Analyst looked like a man about to tear into something. No one tried to stop him. No one called out of his foolishness, not because Analyst was their superior or because they were frightened, but because they had no better idea.

        He plugged in an electre link and the separator began receiving from an adjacent brick. In the floating hold of no attraction, the air seemed to shrink as a basic universal force was applied away from integration, that common universal force of things holding together, coming together, growing together, adhering into a greater whole, a totality, a family. Analyst entered the battery's chamber through an osmotic lock to apply himself to this tomb of the undying, pressing molecular bonds aside in a thick swath as he wielded the separator like a butcher against a carcass: there the ribs, there the steaks, there the excess intestines. Analyst sliced the battery right where the thing was most foreign, where the organic curves of the exterior tissue melded with hard angles, as though of a machine's joint; and Con wondered why it was yellow. Why not green or red, or that ugly tan of the furnace boats? Why yellow for the separator?

        Why should he do things their way? was Analyst's final thought before working with his hands, his human hands. Cooperating with the Victorians had only brought them failure, and an alien type of success. Em and her staff had saved themselves from the Heinous by bloody killing themselves? All those years of living wasted by Con and his family to bring the batteries home so they could devour Secure?

        He sliced the battery, looking for pieces not read by his machines, not denoted by energy flow or wave/ray penetration. Analyst looked for essentials, for guts; and though any fool can wreck a fine machine with hammer and chisel, only humans can cut up an ugly wad of rock to make sculpture. Finding aesthetics in the sepulcher of space, Analyst in a religion of anger became so human as to turn righteously extreme. Cutting through the battery, large slabs of the organic machine floating away, Analyst sculpted the aesthetics of alien space, discovering doubled ignorance. Though Analyst incised from the battery a vital organ, he could not guess its purpose. Though Analyst revealed his son, the father remained unaware.

        Ernie found himself outside the battery in Canada, as though tossed away by its explosion. The battery had instantly expanded away from him, exploding into a thin grey light that covered cubic miles exactly as Analyst came away with the alien organ. The battery with Sec exploded and changed the world, a small area. Analyst made a new discovery, proving himself and his staff wrong: the battery was a bomb, if manipulated too crassly or exactly as the Victorians desired, a time bomb.

        Ernie found himself beside the remaining demonstration battery, seeing nearby surveyors static, their expressions hung on their faces like mannequins, as the battery blew static space and the progression of existence became null instantaneously. Observers in orbit saw a refracted rip across Canada, as though a distortion of the earth's very fabric, forming a slash in the land.

        Nearby technol adjuncts blew with the battery. One woman shrunk more than Con's wife when the furnace ate her life-force. She became a fetus, motionless except for a continuing growth that Security sensed. The man beside her gained all the living energy the woman had given off, like Con and his doppelganger, becoming instantly ancient, too old to continue living, nude with no color, hair, teeth, no solid skin, only implied life, which remained.

        Being instantaneous, the change instantly ended, Secure and the staff soon stabilized in the progression of their existence, which differed from people outside the Slash, for none outside could enter, and none inside could leave, the Slash progressing in an alien style compared to the remainder of the planet, a bit of static space on Earth caused by the religion of family love.

Chapter 17

How To Eat

        In King's College Research Hospital, the wing devoted to sentience surveyors recuperating from a dearth of life-force lost its patients via temporal displacement. When the grounded Victorian battery blew, expanded, or rid itself of either static space or temporality (depending on the theorist), the living energy that best attracted this similar force was the artificial aging of furnace boat surveyors. Con's family healed abruptly, regaining their lost years of living in an instant. They found themselves bruised and fatigued from the acceptance of extreme tissue growth and organ regeneration, but found their overall conditions fine, very fine. They regained their ages when entering the furnace in second space. Their current locale seemed little better.

        A few square miles in area, the Slash included all of the sentience surveyors' facilities, a bit of the surrounding countryside, and part of the small city of Daesveld. In early Canadian summer, the alien battery expanded in time to change bright daylight into a greyish cast. Sunlight did not exactly penetrate the Slash. Perhaps some light from the previous day or the following morning seeped through, but no one was certain, the surveyors having scant ability for research considering the additional changes. Within the Slash, electrons seemed shellbound, as Analyst would say. Voltages beyond the tiny flow in animals' nervous systems were impossible to generate. Chemical reactions were inconsistent. In the surveyors' generator, hydrogen nuclei refused to undergo post-plasmic fusion, and electrelogics lost viability.

        The initial human response was a light-headed feeling, not of chem usage or alcohol consumption, but of being released from any anxiety, need, or responsibility. The psychology of the Slash would preclude these fine feelings from continuing, for the area was no boon to people who wanted to live normally, to exit, to eat.

        Secure found no special change in himself from having been within the battery when it expanded. He had no feeling of entrapment for days. But when he left, he wanted to return. Inside he had found an afterlife, but the life was not his. Sec left the battery in emotional shock, for Em had been inside.

        While within the battery, Sec had felt himself and Empath together again, in some unspecific state where position and literal touch were inapplicable. Secure would later wonder of dreaming, wonder of a paraconscious state induced by alien chems, but the experience retained its felt validity even when Secure was beyond the influence of immediate experience. He found himself outside the battery, in a different site, on his hands and knees as though rejected by the alien apparatus. Not by Empath. Secure could not say if he had experienced an existential foretelling that described a future to come more than the lost past, or merely the finest imaginable dream. But he could not deny Empath that claimed release of spirituality.

        Along with their civilian peers, the surveyors learned to function in the Slash. They could not communicate over fone lines to anyone in or out of the area. They could not transmit TV or radio signals. Fiber photons stopped in their thin lines at the Slash's edge.

        This demarcation was Secure's goal. There he walked, the only modes of transportation available in the Slash being legcycles, shoe soles, and a horse cart whose motive power was foaling. Where Slash met the remaining world, Sec looked at thick nothingness, a depthless murk made of the same dull light as the Slash's interior, the barely perceptible movement beyond being people on the outside looking in, gaining an equal view. No sound passed. Those outside attempted electre wave/rays, x-rays, even neutrino sprays, but could not penetrate the Slash with communication. More personal attempts at passing through were equally unsuccessful. Even after hearing descriptions, Secure tried to walk through only to find himself walking in, his line of travel 180 degrees reversed. Objects thrown through shot back in the same manner. The sight of a motorcar passing through itself in a zero area reversal was difficult to believe as observation, but undeniable. This null zone extended to space. Only at orbital height could a vehicle pass over, but no success was achieved in penetrating the top of the Slash.

        The trapped surveyors knew nothing of that term. The outside world developed the term Slash, the staff within having no proper name for their cage, referring to it only as a zone, or the demarcation, or their little hell.

        At the zone's edge, Sec in his drab uniform appeared the mercenary delivery man, no corporate tag on his chest, no sponsor. His shaven face and short hair were not stylish, but his concerned look was typical for people who found themselves populating the Slash. As he stood on the dark complas roadway that now seemed dull in the zone's curtailed light, Sec saw that this greyness was the color tainting his profession, formerly so astonishingly bright with the discovery of Victory and that new race, a desirable friend, the fulfillment of centuries of Terrans staring at the stars and wondering, wishing for any result other than the Heinous and the Slash, the refuse of galactic discovery dropped in the nation's lap, delivered by sentience surveyors.

        A man observes him from his home above the ceramic paper store he owns, the business beginning to succeed after years of effort and anxiety. Beginning to succeed, until the Slash. Looking down to Sec, the man recognizes a sentience surveyor by his attire. Standing beside boxes of handmade ceramic stationary that he can no longer sell, that he must sell to survive, the man thinks of killing Sec, of tossing a heavy box onto the surveyor's head, for these people caused the zone. Even if he could sell his merchandise, to whom would he pay the mortgage? His bank was outside the zone. Would his insurance cover this act of God, of Satan? Then the man understood that his situation was probably temporary, and certainly could be worse. After all, he was still eating and breathing. So he watched the surveyor walk away without violating him, not understanding that one of those two necessities had already ended.

        The two groups remained mutually ignorant. Those outside wondered if the Slash contained anything but that murk, no life, no matter. Those within, however, were certain they observed a line of demarcation, not a planet turned to colorless mud.

        As the Slash began, an observer at the demarcation swore he saw himself arriving home from the ball game the day before. Then nothing. The most significant aspect of time was how long the Slash's populace could survive within, how long the Slash would exist before dissipating or transmogrifying itself into something else, something worse, a harder version of static space, or common duration space, a vacuum on Earth, an area devoid of matter and life. The surveyors' concern with time was the amount they would need to solve the problem of the zone. But the individuals within soon found themselves beyond the concerns of common temporality, unable to wait for new developments or solutions, for they found they could not live beyond their last meal.

        The surveyors were certain that no air passed through the Slash. Still, enough oxygen was present in the tall zone to support the populace---no more than several hundred---for months. The people would starve first. In private houses and public grocery stores, the Slash held food enough to feed its people for months, though the fresh produce and packaged materials would not be replenished. But the people could not digest. After eating normally, people defecated their foodstuffs undigested.

        Here, the Slash and the exterior world parted in their problem solving; for whereas the world outside continued to seek a method for entering or ending that odd locale, those unfortunate few within sought base survival. People in the Slash could drink, but water would not keep them alive. The weaker, older people and those ill would soon begin dying. Not even modern medicine could save them, for modern medicine depended on modern power sources for its application.

        Though the surveyors believed that the problem of digestion was caused by a temporal discrepancy of the human internals' not quite existing in the same time frame as consumed food, the theory could not be proven in the grey light of the Slash. The sentience surveyors and the scientists at King's College Research Hospital thus began attempting mainly trial and error solutions.

        Eating animal flesh was as revolting to the New Prudists as eating defecation. The surveyors tried both. Prime tried a broiled parrot slaughtered for the occasion. To the surveyors, this murder seemed exactly the type of hypocritical greed that the New Prudists had vowed to abolish in their lives: sacrificing the existence of other animals to provide humans with an entertaining garment or a satisfying meal. The surveyors would not forget their own inconsistencies, even if it meant saving their lives, and the lives of other folk trapped in the Slash.

        Psy ate the bird's meat raw. Ombuds tried the flesh cooked, but had to vomit it away before her stomach had a chance at survival. Psy had attempted to slaughter the animal himself, but with the bird in his hands and its bright feathers flapping against his fingers and the beak so gently biting him to please not, please not hurt me, Psy had to retch himself, and the bird went free. Free to live its previous life for five minutes. Med succeeded where Psy had failed, the psybiologist making amends by eating the bird he could not kill.

        It tasted like a man, a surveyor, for Psy felt that he was eating himself, the ultimate debasement in survival. But Psy was not surviving. After Ombuds made amends to herself and her peers for her failure by consuming dog feces, and Med ate the stool of a cat, all found themselves the next day voiding their colons of the material, the scant nutrients intact, the experimenters still starving. Their success at violating their own morality had been wasted.

        The surveyors consumed weeds and algae without receiving nourishment. But surveyors were scientists. Common people leading lives of less rigorous intellectual pursuit swallowed complas, chewed metal foil, and drank cleansers, but found no acceptable foodstuff. Two weeks after the Slash formed, people began dying: the first from inadvertently poisoning themselves, then others from starvation. To the scientists, the worst failure seemed temporal, not medical: with no power, the dead bodies could not be frozen for later repair. Outside the Slash, these starved people could be recuperated with some brain repair, but in the zone, they were as dead as though in a different century.

        Only two solutions were available: find a new material or method for digesting foodstuffs, or end the Slash. Security wasn't hungry; he preferred the latter solution. Examining a metal marker left at the demarcation, Sec found that, no, the Slash was neither contracting nor expanding. Staring into the greater world's colorless murk, he saw a vision. Sec felt that he was staring at the battery's fabric stretched to its ends. He believed that if the battery had been whole instead of withered upon blowing, its coverage would have encompassed the world.

        Breathing yesterday's air and seeing tomorrow's light, Secure wondered of purpose. Had the battery been transformed from a device for liberating the Victorians into a terrorist device to punish the surveyors? Could they be that heinous? Could the Heinous be that subtle? Perhaps, but where were they to enjoy their art? In their own part of the universe, Security was certain: the batteries' mode of activity belonged to the Victorians. Sec considered their spirituality. Con would have sworn on his returned life that processing by the guardians was a religious reward intended by the Victorians, just as those aliens on sabbatical had released their spirits in the manner discovered, then duplicated, by Empath.

        An observer would have noted Security's slumping posture improved by sudden anger. Snapping his head upward in startling comprehension, Secure understood his purpose in coming to the demarcation. He had not been seeking Empath, but her epitaph. An appropriate act would be culminating the Victory project with a denouement paralleling his father's promises to the President, vows that had been fulfilled as failures. Analyst had promised Hervieux immortality---which Canadians had received as premature death---and promised to change the world---received in the form of the Slash. Time had come for Secure to help his father, and himself. The surveyors were wary of tampering with the remaining battery, believing that if it blew, all the world would become a Slash. Secure did not envision studying the battery. He intended to destroy it.

        Standing above his place of business in a flat that had been a successful home before the Slash, a man looked down to Security at the demarcation. The man recognized a sentience surveyor by his worthlessness, for there he was walking around instead of solving the problem he had caused. Of course, the problem these surveyors caused could never be solved, for death is permanent. Standing beside the bed where his youngest child slept the night before, starved to death the night before, died peacefully in the darkness instead of living for the hundred years that he was due, the man considered murder, considered survival, considered crushing the surveyor's skull and feeding the dead flesh to his family. But these surveyors could never provide a decent person with nourishment, for they were only death, had found and promoted and brought to Canada nothing but death since the program first began. So, he watched the surveyor start upright, watched him walk away without killing him, soon to achieve a type of reversal wherein average man would teach the brilliant researchers how to achieve so simple a goal as survival.

        The Slash held no funeral home. No undertaker was available to properly bury the man's dead son. He would have to bury him alone, but not on his own property, for he had only a path of grass between his store and the sidewalk. He had never touched a dead body, never dug a grave for even a dog, and now he would have the luxury of practicing on his son before proceeding to his wife, so weak that she could not stand, could not open her eyes.

        The child was so cold and stiff that his father dropped him. The boy seemed asleep, nothing worse, but when the man reached beneath his young son to lift him, he found a lifeless mannequin in his hands that sickened him, and he had to drop the body onto the bed. Then he understood that the boy was distasteful because he was alien---what could be more foreign in a world of life than premature death? Perhaps that was the key to their survival in this dead world, the man thought, not trying to eat normal food, but death itself, best represented by dead people, dead flesh.

        In his tremendous courage and generosity, the man would remove a bit of the boy's muscle and feed it to his wife. No, no, he wanted to feel so courageous that he would sacrifice his son's body to feed the dying mother, but the man found it easier to cut up the kid and store the rest in a complas bag rather than walk to the nearest patch of earth with the cold, stiff, alien form in his arms to bury it. This feeling proved the man had sacrificed his sanity, verified as he reached beneath his son's sheet to slice away part of the boy's thigh, cut through his son's leg with a butcher knife, hack away some of his beloved son's body to chop into fine pieces in the kitchen, then force down his wife's throat only to weep on her chest with folded arms and a racking sound certainly no less alien than cannibalism was to a moral man, one so tortured that after finding his wife recovering, he would also have to eat his rancid son, then complete his torment by teaching his fellow citizens not how to eat, but whom.

Chapter 18

The President Slept Nude

        He wanted to look up the president's dress, but imagined finding tentacles. Perhaps the Vickies were not so human after all, but creatures worse than the Heinous. Perhaps their extremities were less common than hands and feet, and Hervieux was their spy. Creatures worse than the Heinous because they had connived the humans into accepting their terrorist devices, and Hervieux had paid for them. No, sentience surveyors were the traitors here, for they had brought the batteries home, seduced by the beautiful aliens into planting their time bombs on Earth.

        A mature man in the neatest suit stepped behind the president. Since the Slash, Hervieux would not speak with Analyst alone, despite being separated by space. Analyst was never certain how many aides or cabinet members lurked beyond the hollowvid, beside the secret service.

        Bolesly leaned near Hervieux's chair, speaking not to the president, but the analyst."Are we going to get on with this, Mr. Analyst? I don't think the president cares to see you sun yourself."

        He referred to Analyst's outfit: sandals and solar-yellow swimming trunks, nothing more. Analyst recalled the outfit Hervieux had worn during their first interview. Linen, linen and legs. Analyst couldn't stand it. He couldn't stand anything beautiful, desirable.

        The president was displeased, her face tight, posture grim as she squeezed her crossed legs and stared at Analyst. Having gained his attention through an intermediary, that of her aide or her legs, Hervieux shook her head almost imperceptibly and spoke.

        "Notice this," the president stated, and that was an order, not a comment. Behind her, the curtains parted on the tall windows overlooking the palace grounds. Beyond, on the public streets, shone flames, as though a bon fire. "After burning their picket signs, they burned the hedges flanking the gates. Then they burned me in effigy. I do not consider that a reasonable expression of dissent toward the executive's initiatives. I consider it a threat of death toward my career. I love my career."

        Analyst could only shrug, his bouncing breasts making the hair on his thick chest move as though blown.

        "I've always wanted to believe you people, Mr. Analyst. I still want to believe in the potential of immortality or endless energy or advanced cultures on different worlds to change ours by improvement. But all of your promises have turned out to be nonsense. Your sole achievement is concrete destruction: the Slash."

        Analyst did not bother to shrug.

        "Do you understand the pressure that I am under---that Canada is under? Uninvolved nations now fear that they'll be next to receive a planetary bomb. They believe that the Slash is the first strike of the Heinous, caused by our declaring war against them. You can't prove otherwise, can you? You cannot disprove that the Slash was caused directly by the Heinous."

        "The Heinous are piss ants," Analyst replied. "The Vickies caused the Slash, intentionally or not."

        "'Intentionally or not'? Don't you know? Of course not, because you can't even say how the Slash occurred."

        "Sure, I know. I messed with a battery, and another blew up. It's part of learning. You gotta kill a bean to make a burrito."

        "In your great process of learning, did you kill your own son?" the President retorted with agitation, staring at Analyst as though only their breaths separated them. Analyst had never seen her so upset.

        "I don't think so."

        "You 'don't think so'? Is that all you can say. Why don't you 'think so'?"

        "Con feels that Secure is still alive."

        "You take the word of a madman?"

        "Controller is not mad; he's only distressed."

        "He is scarcely able to function."

        "He functions with me," Analyst insisted.

        "Which is no assessment of his normalcy," the president returned sharply. "Mr. Controller should be removed from your facilities and taken to a ground hospital where he might recover."

        "No," Analyst stated quietly, "he should not be removed from space. That's like death for a sentience surveyor."

        The President then formed her latest bad decision, though perhaps she had no choice, for this professional conversationalist lost her patience with an underling

        "What happened, damn it?!" she demanded of Analyst, who did not consider her especially lovely when angered. "You virtually admitted to setting the Ontario battery off with your foolish experimenting. What the hell happened, Analyst?"

        She finally used his name correctly. Too late.

        "I want to fuck you," he said.

        The president stared a moment, then vanished from the sphere. The broadcast ended. Madeleine removed herself from his space.

        Hervieux had not remained long enough to learn that Analyst had rediscovered the Heinous' sphere. She had left without seeing Analyst's brain or Controller's heart. When Analyst sliced the battery into pieces, butchered it like meat for the eating, the alien apparatus wanted to reform, like a wound healing, a limb reattached. It wanted to heal itself until Analyst and his surgery found its brain. A discrete part, separate from the battery's pervasive, contiguous tissue, floated free of the loose tissue as though the greater battery no longer had the will to retain it.

        Analyst did not want to touch the thing because it seemed a grey mass of convoluted flesh, a mind muscle. But he did touch it, first with an air net, then his hand. Once in his fingers, the item seemed to change. Visuality lost import, for though it looked like something out of the battery, vague and visually insignificant, it felt as warm as a mother's womb and smelled like the most perfect flower. Analyst did not understand this, not even upon discovering the other object, other organ.

        He removed the brain and the battery went limp, now a cut pile of tissue unwilling or unable to reform into a living whole. Without this removed portion, the battery lost its meaning, Analyst judged. Like losing a lover.

        Controller approached. He had heard of Analyst's surgery, and came flying through the lab hold, still smiling. Con placed his hand on his friend's shoulders, seemingly pleased with Analyst's great accomplishment. Everything seemed a great accomplishment to Control. This achievement was Controller's, for after a moment of feeling Analyst's emotional state, Con turned to the cut battery, and reached within. In the pile of limp pieces lay a discrete form that seemed separate in the sense of not wanting to remain where it wasn't needed, or could not function.

        Analyst did not want to touch this object because it seemed a pulsing, wet lump of muscle. So Controller touched it, handled it, held it in his hands. The impression it gave remained, but the appearance of Analyst's organ changed with Controller's grasping the heart. It seemed to be a hard, metallic sphere---the sphere of the Heinous. Analyst did not understand this, but he would. He vowed to Ernie that he would.

        "I love being a sentience surveyor."

        With the advent of the Slash, Controller had grown. He stood taller---gravity or not---his voice fuller, deeper, his facial expressions more active, alive.

        "I hate it," Analyst replied, and to Con, he seemed to have been shrinking for years, ever since Victory. "I'm losing everyone, damn it. First Em, then Sec, then Hervieux, and now you, I guess."

        Analyst wasn't jesting, but Controller laughed, that rare, fine humor come again.

        "Ah, but you're a liar, Analyst," Con told him. "You don't really believe you've lost everybody---you believe me. You feel that they've just been misplaced, and you have to find them. That's why you're still working on the Victorian transcender."

        "Who are you, Psy all of a sudden?" Analyst snapped. "Geez, it was bad enough when you were feeling instead of thinking, now you're doing both at once. Hey, I'm working on the bleeding Vick battery because that's all I have."

        "You feel that your life is empty now, and you can fill it with science? What's left? After all, you've gained fame, you've changed the world, you're involved with the immortality of the Victorian anima batteries. The last, you understand, is the only verity in this conversation," Con smiled in return.

        "Damn, I liked you better when you were just crazy," Analyst claimed. "What do you want, anyway, in this stinking profession?"

        "Nothing new," Analyst replied brightly. "I want to live happily and die without dissipating the essence of my existence. The difference is that I can no longer sufficiently denigrate the nebulous aspects of the latter to avoid its verity. I've felt it too often. The latter's being the de facto future makes the former unavoidable."

        "You should have stayed a feely," Analyst moaned, and moved away, to his office to study his battery brain, laughing Con dancing in the air toward the main lab and his alien heart.

        The Slash had existed for weeks. International teams of researchers surrounded that otherworldly aberration, bringing the excitement to Canada of bad publicity, but no solutions. No sentience surveyor was included in this congregation of exported teams, as though examining the Slash for intelligent life, for they all resided within the Slash, or in space.

        Though closer than ever before, the two surveyors continued to work apart, Con because he had to be with other people, Analyst because he could not bear to be with them. In the main lab hold, Con cheerfully accepted the probes and proddings of Analyst's technol adjuncts as they examined the battery's heart with their massive gear. Con's own sensings were not so quantifiable, readily accepted but not easily counted. Though not concerned with the contamination of skin oils, he did not touch the removed organ. Though not concerned about damage from gravity or air, he allowed the heart to float in a hard-air vacuum bubble without his tactile interference, though Con remained in touch. The adjuncts doubted his worth, for Controller only roamed around the sliced battery with the organ in tow. Con had allowed them their chance at tissue sampling and electre wave/ray penetration, and they had found nothing. Now Con's turn, the integrating empath sought an equivalent concreteness, but a superior idea. Nothing would suit him fine---physical nothingness, that is, for Con felt tangible emotion. Around the butchered battery he roamed, humming, that anxiety of his previous living somehow vanquished by the Slash, perhaps along with Con's sanity, some believed. In the orbiting lab, the battery's pieces floated like a huge vegetable sliced to make a dense salad, tissue the mass of several men. Con pulled the organ in its bubble about the slack but nondecaying battery, not seeking the place where it fit, but its intent in having left.

        Despite never contemplating the blown battery, Control did not neglect the Slash; he sought to join his brethren therein. Then he discovered his failing. This cut battery seemed more alive than the withered examples, but how could anything properly exist with all of its pieces separated? Surely, Con had not been properly alive with his elder state in the gel tank and his youth aging improperly. Control thought of the furnace boat, thought of that parcel of land, of his home, the boy---no more than a memory returned, no less---that past delivered more concretely than the future before him now, but no less genuinely; so Controller sought the present in a similarity, for time was all the same. The batteries, after all, were not time bombs, but limbo machines, made to remove the Victorians from the vagaries of time's progression. Con thus sought time's continuity in a withered battery that remained continuous.

        He moved to the nearest whole transcender, withered but not butchered. Not encased in any protective shield, this battery floated to one side of the lab, neglected. Con determined to find where the heart beside him would fit within the whole. The battery wasn't a person, so he didn't have to concern himself with fitting the organ in a thorax. But the battery was of persons, so Con must not neglect this device as a human instrument. It did not seem human. In that instant, the battery seemed too alien to comprehend, though Con's ignorance was only due to separation. So he stepped inside. Here was an alien difference, for entering a fresh battery was like being held by a living thing, whereas Con seemed to have entered the crack of a log: dry but still solid, and not actively accepting him. Neither did the battery reject him, but again it seemed living, not a person, but for people.

        Analyst's technol adjuncts wondered if they should direct sensers toward Con's activities, but the empath gave no orders. Con never instructed Analyst's adjuncts; it was not his place. His place was not with technicians, but with his peers, those surveying space, those ensconced in the Slash. Holding this feeling, Con sought the place of the organ he now held in his hand. The organ's place in this battery, withered but not dead, as proven by the equal example that had expanded into the Slash. The empath contracted the emotions of the battery and the separate part until that feeling became one. Yes, there it fit, not in a locale, but in a situation, Con releasing the core organ and finding his hand on a friend.

        An old friend, one departed, not dead. Within the battery, as though absorbed due to having fed his total life-force to the releasing apparatus, was Mechanic, the only surveyor processed by a Victorian guardian. Except for Con. But Controller's previous life had been retrieved. Con's segregated sections of old age and new life had been conjoined into currency, his present state, and no one had died. The only time death here was a death of time, but that was Analyst's specialty. Con's expertise was living, and in the battery, he found existence. Controller felt and sensed his colleague when the nearby adjuncts could not, for they lacked the experience of having fed the battery themselves. Mechanic's condition was both a time death and common dying, life without duration and death without end, that same state of no-perception, no-experience, no-feeling.

        Con did not see Mechanic; he felt him. He did not touch him literally with his hand, but they were truly connected, the experience as valid as objective vision, the sheer information from smelling a person, embracing a friend. Con only regretted that Mechanic would have been more demonstrably present if the battery revealing him had been more alive.

        Con left the battery, allowing his and Mechanic's new, intense relationship to rest. Feeling that he had to share his discovery, Control pulled himself along the bulkhead handholds to personally deliver his revelation to a friend. But Analyst was not extant in Con's space.

        The lab's false pull convinced him of solidity. In his office, Analyst and his demanded maggrav felt as planted to the ground as Canadian wheat. Why this need for gravity in a sentience surveyor, a resident of space, whose only pull was between planets, not against them? On his desk with no fotos of his son, remnants of his college term, memoirs of his deceased marriage, an object lay that could have been living, and Analyst did not worry about its being denigrated by gravity. If he could function in gravity, so could it, for were they not companions? Still scientist enough for objective study, Analyst had allowed his adjuncts their turn at the battery organ with sodality purveyors and electre encephalographs, devices Analyst had perfected, but now he required a mind more than a machine, and thought would be his best measurement.

        Fine, his adjuncts agreed that the organ was the guts of the Heinous' sphere, but Analyst had learned that at first glance, first feel. Again, the Heinous were proven so human that they could be Canadians. The Heinous had taken an alien apparatus and applied their own interface for using it, abusing it, their own ergonomics of idea, just as the surveyors had stolen every battery and connected people to them for their own purposes, own greed. Analyst wondered what torture the Heinous had to apply to a transcender to rip loose its organ. Probably the same slaughter as his, Con proving that humans are alien.

        Analyst had determined the organ's identity upon removal, because the alien item projected its function. Perhaps the transcender had learned human psychology from the life-force acceptance of the furnace boat staffs, and weren't all the batteries connected, just like Con and his family members, just like the Victorians themselves? Analyst's adjuncts promised to decipher this mechanism for projection, given time.

        Fishshit, Analyst had told them. The battery literally gives time, or takes it. The transcender/batteries took time away from the Vickies, and we call it immortality. In forming the Slash, the batteries took time away from our ground staffs; that's why they don't quite exist on Earth no more. We don't have time for conventional studies, Analyst determined. When those guys in the Slash run out of time, they run out of living. Gimme the damn thing, he commanded, and I'll learn it.

        Just like you learned the battery by cutting it, they mentioned. Just like you learned of the Slash by creating it.

        Analyst then proved himself akin to Controller's current state by laughing at his adjuncts instead of slapping their damn mouths. But he took the organ. Took it to his office, and there they remained, alone, studying one another

        Day after day. Perhaps this brain of the battery learned of Analyst as they sat together in his office hour after hour. Day after day. Time after time. Analyst would have stared at the organ if it possessed appearance, but recently the brain had either learned how to manipulate his observations, or was learning how to communicate its purpose. Currently it appeared to be nothing. At first, Analyst saw a Heinous sphere, but with intense staring, he saw the organ itself, appearing the size of his head, composed of a densely striated material of no hue that could have been flesh or metal or plant fiber or mineral, having that combination of hard-edged delineations and flowing shapes characteristic of the greater battery.

        Intending or desiring or demanding to learn more, Analyst wondered what he would have to invest in this study in order to retrieve information and identity. Perhaps the brain was projecting a disguise, hiding its true self from Analyst because it did not trust him. Because he might slice it up as he had its whole. Perhaps it was testing him for ability, for function. If Analyst had been so brilliant as to dissect the battery, could he now suss its chief organ and thus prove himself worthy of its truth? The truth was that Analyst had been too anxious, trying too hard and making bad decisions as though the president himself. In truth, Analyst had changed Earth via ruination, lost his son just as perversely as Analyst's father had lost him. Here was the time bomb in his own life: not the Slash, the batteries, or this organ, but his own future of irrevocably bad decisions. If this were the truth, could Analyst bear to find it in either this brain or his own---and which was more alien?

        He did not concern himself with Con's results with the battery heart. Controller felt that his future had been verified by his past, and Analyst would not contradict time's master, this achievement more of a mystery than mastering one's own life. If Con had accomplished both, then bless his mad soul, his alien spirit akin to the Vickies'. For now, for the ongoing present, Analyst would remain human and suss his alien self, whose truth seemed hidden in the compatible battery brain.

        Let's play scientist instead of forlorn waif, Analyst thought. What do I want? I want to know about all this manipulation of temporality. Do the Vickies really exist in static space in a time limbo of immortality? How is the Slash a disjuncture of time with the rest of the world? How could the batteries infer the old age of humans and eat their life-force---is that how the Vickies were released, not by common dying, but by having their life-force removed to the point where they no longer existed as physical? What about Con's retrieval of his past in the furnace boat, not merely an old era, but a concrete locale? What truly happened to Controller while in the Vick guardian? What else have I screwed up recently, and how do I learn all this stuff? Shit on Illuming its reified immanence. This is man to man---no, brain to brain. Man to man was when I cut the battery up. Maybe I should think nicer here. Instead of an incision in the gut, perhaps a pat on the head to embrace its information, seek its facts with affection, caress its data with a viscid kiss. Not lip to lip, but mind to mind, so to speak.

        Where to begin...? Hey, this brain began as that Heinous sphere, so maybe I should think in a circular manner. My first great failure. That's where I started going downhill, or around in circles, and that's what the brain first showed me. Yeah, the sphere as a conveyor, its function implemented by desire. You want to turn on your thresher, you push the starter button. You want data from a factingrate, you think for the information. You want the Heinous sphere---rather, its Vick interior---to take you somewhere, you wish for it. That's what Con did with the mud flat in his furnace boat. He wanted his past revealed to him so bad that he had it delivered. Obviously, he used his battery's conveyor internal, but Con really knew his battery---he was connected to it with his own organs, his own life-force. What do I have to communicate with? Just asking real nice and being considerate, thoughtful?

        Analyst wondered how he could implement affection toward an alien organ. Not considering himself empath enough to be projecting emotions, Analyst reached out to give it a hug.

        He touched it. He actually touched the damn thing, and got something all over his hands, something sticky, like alien brain mucus. Maybe he had been too friendly. Analyst looked down to his hands. They smelled as though he had been fingering a woman's twat. Perhaps this brain was female. Maybe he had the wrong organ.

        He washed his hands without taking a tissue sample. Then he returned to his office, staring at the organ's non-appearance until he fell asleep, not concerned about its attacking him during unconsciousness. Asleep in bed, Analyst rolled over to find that the president slept nude.

Chapter 19

Cows Aren't Artists

        "We have been deliberating another aspect, Security," Medical told him as they stood in a staff ground lab. "Perhaps the battery was activated from outside."

        It seemed a confrontation. A pack of nervous surveyors positioned themselves between Sec and the last battery. Secure considered the largish room of interconnected chambers archaic because of its wasteful use of space. But space and mass dependency for transport, thus function, was a consideration of vacuum boats, not ground facilities.

        "He means, dear, that it may not have been a time bomb, ready to activate, but was set off via a removed battery."

        "We still think the batteries are all interconnected informationally," Omb, offered, "even the withered ones. If the one that expanded itself into the demarcation was manipulated from outside, maybe someone outside can end the change, or cure it. Maybe through this one."

        "Someone", of course, meant Analyst.

        Ombuds brazenly attempted to appear casual by sitting on a thick table whose particle attributors were collecting dust. Prime only attempted to sound unaffected by Sec's threat: not his words, but the intensity of his demeanor, his certainty, his absolute lack of casualness.

        "The situation isn't all bad, dear," she advised. "We returned to our previous ages instantly. I think that's wonderful, and it shows potential."

        "Give your father a chance," Med concluded.

        "Analyst gave his father a chance and what happened?" Secure retorted. "He got screwed. Literally."

        "If you can't tell the difference between your father and your grandfather, then you're a fool. And you are not a fool, dear."

        "No, you're just hungry," Omb told him, and smiled as though ashamed. Sec laughed as though starved for humor, and walked away.

        Sec walked so far that he might have been running away. Stepping along the outskirts of Daesveld to seek new developments with those great experimenters, the general populace, the unprofessional, involved folks, Security heard a shouting. First believing that a fight had developed over potential food, he was startled to learn that the argument was with him.

        "There's one of them damn space surveyors!" a man on the street shouted. "They're the son of a bitches who are killing us!"

        Sec walked past them, too dejected by their anger to fear for his life. For the first instance in his career, Secure was ashamed of his profession. The next people he met had less room within their lives for hatred, being stuffed full of malnutrition. He saw average people in fine clothes, their bodies skinny but their stomachs fat, though not distended, filled with food that would not digest. These people were eating. Though the populace about them starved, this family ate fruit that with modern preservation would stay fresh for months. None of nearby starving denied them their meal, for eating was useless, proven by the piles of feces on the streets, waste material containing unavailable nutrition and the sloughed off cells of dying folk who ate so much they could not detain their bowel movements, could not survive though stuffed.

        Secure had seen enough. Though moving around the block to leave the city, Sec found that the contagion of hatred had spread. As though expected, he was met by a meal. From the windows above, plas packages of gourmet entrees imported from Montreal were hurled at the surveyor with more epithets as to his culpability, his guilt, this expensive product wasted on another starving man.

        Avoiding the bombing, Sec ran away as though jogging, no guilt visible in his gait. Security ran to a riot. But this gathering seemed a riot of joy, for the congregation shouted in glee, not anger. The congregation seemed a riot of madness, for tears of horror and distress punctuated the joy. Then Sec met the central figure standing on a car and speaking, a stationer whose malnutrition was improving, his wife regaining her strength.

        "Friends!" he called out happily. Unable to deliver his message with joy, the man without pause had to weep, "I am so sorry...," and described how his family had survived on itself.

        "All the people who starved are gone---who will they eat now?"

        Tension in the Slash was scarcely alleviated by the discovery of a food source known as cannibalism. Starved people, irrevocably dead in the medically archaic Slash, were considered moral food. But the source of starved people soon ended. These citizens were consumed down to the bone by their fellows, the bones given formal burial services. Sec thought of Control in the furnace boat, thought of his bones' ungenerous removal, though returned in the form of life. What of Con now? What of the lives of the remaining people in the zone? Sec wondered if any world beyond the zone existed.

        The sentience surveyors remained on their property. Finding the last few starved people was no concern of theirs, for New Prudists did not eat even animal flesh. The surveyors continued to starve. Days later, Prime was too weak to walk. Sec could not bear to be near her. As though a pattern on her counterpane, Prime retained her slight smile, not to bolster her own strength, but that of her staff.

        Neither could Sec bear to look at the battery, but never did it leave his mind, a realm devoid of deliberation. Too weak himself for the careful consideration due a researcher, Sec could not even provide security for his staff except to have them remain within facilities. One did not. On a day that seemed one of Prime's last, Ombuds rode an efficient, silent legcycle into Daesveld. She was looking for a body. With no firm plan, Omb intended to find some method for feeding her staff's prime minister, her aunt. No surveyor had died, so they would not be eating their own kind; and how would Omb convince her aunt to eat human flesh if she found any? Perhaps Omb would try conniving instead of convincing: Prime, I've paid this great price only to keep you going---you can't reject my sacrifice. That seemed an adequate plan to Omb, though she intended no great act of nobility. A personal payment, yes, even a sacrifice, but she did not expect an insane price.

        She had to stop for the moans, for they seemed the whimpering of a child. Travelling closely to the buildings to avoid being seen, Omb heard a sound that stopped her, and cautiously entered a downstairs flat to learn of the citizens' latest method for eating. Inside, a man sat at a table, his face in a terrible grimace, as he cut away the skin on his forearm, then began chewing it in relief, his head dropping to the table as he wept.

        Ombuds knew that she had entered madness, and would be mad herself to proceed. But Prime was starving---they all were starving. Prime was dying. Just one more block, she decided, and perhaps I'll find a rational solution. Instead, she found the Heinous.

        In this moral society, not the first person had been murdered for food. The citizens had ingeniously discovered that one need not kill people to eat them.

        They had the appearance of normal citizens in the zone: gaunt, fat bellies, sunken eyes, weak except for strong expressions, bad emotion creating their only energy. Omb had considered dressing in flowered trousers and a flowing shirt, just like a citizen, but Slash citizens knew every surveyor face. In the Slash's grey light of some other day, Omb rode peacefully until a mob stopped her. In her fear, she expected hateful words about the surveyors' responsibility, about their needing to be punished. These people had no words, only knives. These knives were not for punition. After turning to flee on her rapid cycle, Omb understood how foolish her idea had been, but the weak mob could not gain her on foot. Not from behind.

        When the next mob attacked, surrounding Omb as she turned a corner, Omb expected crazed expressions. But they approached with mournful faces, as though they were making a sacrifice, abandoning their morality for the propriety of survival, rejecting their spirits for revenge. But they had no judgemental intent. They denigrated their immortal spirits for another day on Earth. To live longer, they would have to eat.

        In the mob's last steps as they quietly, swiftly approached, Omb thought of the Heinous, their cool artistry of torment, thought of static space and the Victorian guards moving to process her. Those alien threats had been worse, she knew it. The utterly foreign assaults from the volatile Heinous and the implacable guardians were more horrifying in their alien nature, much worse than these citizens' understandable, human fear. The difference was that only her fellows killed her.

        "I don't know where she was going, Secure," Med replied. "I only saw her ride away, toward Daesveld."

        Secure followed Omb, accompanied by Med. Too weak to walk, and hurried regardless, the two men rode a pedcar. As though having an intuition for finding lost fellows, Secure and Med drove directly to the mob with Ombuds in its center. The pack dispersed with the surveyors' approach as though Sec and Med drove a tank, as though two weak, unarmed men could compete with them for their prey.

        She appeared bored. Omb looked up to them, but could not blink, could not focus, as she breathed weakly. The men knew Omb suffered shock, and with no connection to modern medicine to end her brain's useless need to notate damage, Omb's only refuge against pain was feeling nothing, being ravaged in her mind as well as her body.

        Omb's friends had to retrieve her, for Omb could not pedal a cycle with no leg muscles. She could not have guided the vehicle with hands and shoulders, but only bone between.

        Her fellow citizens had cut away the flesh of her limbs. They left the arms and legs of her uniform, and a red tide in which she floated. Omb's drab uniform was decorated with death, uniquely marked with borders of drying blood, and she looked unreal, more alien than the Heinous, with long stretches of nude bones, bloody bones, connecting her feet to her hips.

        Sec and Med expected toothmarks, but saw only the clean incisions of kitchen knives that had cut neatly through meat and snicked against bone. The mob had left Omb's torso intact. After all, they weren't murderers, just hungry.

Her brother and Sec returned her to the staff in time for Omb to die.

        Sec's look was unplaceable as he entered the lab, but one gets a strange expression from watching people eat each other. Secure had arrived at the profound deduction that if the situation in the zone worsened, it would then improve, for they would all be dead, immediately dead, without being tortured first. He thought of being in the vacuum boat with the Heinous' plants eating his face. He recalled the fear, and worse, a horror that was more filling than either fear or pain, and more corrupting. Even while having his eye eaten, Security knew he would be repaired, but the idea of intentionally torturing any living thing had never left him. His Slash citizens proved themselves art geniuses beyond the Heinous, for they had tortured Omb to death, but not intentionally. Had she survived and regrown her flesh, they would have eaten her again.

        They saw him approach, more of his people, but these like family: never to intentionally harm him, like Analyst. For all his damage, ruinous Dad had never intended pain. Excluding his murdering the Heinous crew. He would not kill a cow, but cows aren't artists, no more than artists are innocent. Sentience surveyors examining the last ground battery saw Sec approach, and understood his mien. They recalled Omb's death. Sec had the expression of a wonderful friend fiendishly, foolishly slaughtered. Since they wanted no part in Omb's death, the surveyors walked away from Sec's demeanor. They walked away, leaving him not alone, but alone with the transcender.

        He might have been a zone man about to eat, for he carried a cutting implement, but this a razorax for slicing logs. Sec became the active researcher, not observing changes, but demanding needed results. Sec moved decisively now, no longer contemplating the solutions he sought from the battery. Sec cut himself away from the battery. He was attached to the alien object as though a skin, a lesion, and had to remove himself to live or die on his own. The battery was like gravity, adhering him to an object and preventing a life of exploring for sentience, Sec having found only ignorance. Thoughtless Sec applied ignorance with his arms, long, smooth swings of the razorax whose effortless use was contradicted by Sec's expression, but one gets a strange look from seeing a beloved friend eaten. One dies a bit when his greatest love dies alone.

        Did Sec and Analyst arrive at similar solutions without communicating due to the connection of familial trait, or only because they applied a desperation stemming from equal failures? Secure began cutting the battery, looking not for its center, but its end; and though any fool can destroy fine sculpture with a hammer, only an artist can find beauty hidden in an alien form, ensconced by misunderstanding. The comprehension that Security gained as the battery's flesh fell away was of identity. He found the battery a tomb, a sepulcher, for it contained a corpse, the end of human life, Omb's and Em's and his own and the lives of the starving surveyors. When the battery's tissue lay on the lab floor, indistinct in purpose with its no-hue striations, Sec discerned a clear object, a body, an alien death. Mechanic's corpse lay on the floor, dead but not deteriorated, removed from the passivity of second space to explore with his fellows again.

Chapter 20

A Slice Of Extra

        He considered it reasonable, upon placing his arm about the president's torso, to grasp her breast. The sensation was not of a fantasy fulfilled---the most magnificent breast perfectly fitting his ecstatic hand---but of reality, thrilling reality. The sensation was of holding the bosom of a woman he craved. Size and shape and consistency were irrelevant to the satisfaction he gained from this true experience. She did not pull away, responding with a deeper breath, reaching out to touch his hand, that hand on her bosom. Then she pulled away. Her next deep breath was of surprise, fear, and he felt her quickly exit the bed, smelling her clean torso as he sat upright in his office.

        Analyst knew he looked ridiculous with his eyes wide, mouth open, a foolish expression as he stared nowhere and spoke aloud.

        "That was no dream, that was no bleeding dream."

        He did not appear foolish. No one saw him. Having left the bed, he sat in his office alone.

        His intercom pulsed. Analyst did not know if this interference were a blessing or a curse, removing him from the need to deliberate the impossible. He touched the communique pad, and it spoke.

        "Analyst, geez, the president wants to speak to you---now."

        He checked the time. Two AM in the palace.

        "Voice only?" Analyst asked his adjunct. "Can I take it here?"

        "No, she's in the vid."

        "Uh, I'm coming," Analyst said unsteadily, and stood.

        Before leaving, he had to dress. He had been wearing only those yellow swimming trunks, but now wore nothing. The apparel was not in his office. He donned a robe.

        Analyst hated free fall as soon as he left his office field. Pulling himself effortlessly along thereafter, he hated the encumbrance of gravity. Then he wasn't sure what he hated.

        Six people waited in the lab hold, standing about the hollowvid. The seventh was Hervieux. Analyst did not care to shoo his adjuncts away. He wasn't certain what he had to hide. Nothing as bad as the Slash.

        The eighth was Bolesly, his foot visible at the vid's edge. He wore a slipper. Hervieux looked nearly ready for a luncheon with diplomats. Nearly ready, but her woolen dress was slightly askew on her shoulders, her hair imperfectly brushed. Her voice, however, seemed complete in its intensity.

        "Mr. Analyst, will you kindly explain this?" and she held up his yellow shorts.

        "Ah, damn, I'm uh, I'm...."

        "Mr. Analyst, will you wake up, please?" the president snapped. "I had to."

        "I've been working on a part of the battery that sorta fell out when I cut the thing."

        "Thereby forming the Slash."

        Analyst frowned, and continued with his reply."It's some conceptual core to the battery. I didn't know its function until I put it in my office and fell asleep beside it. It's, uh, a magic lantern."

        "Mr. Analyst," the president returned with a nearly frightening cool, "if you do not begin making sense immediately, I will have you arrested. I will have you bodily removed by marines from that lab and incarcerated. Then I will explain to the citizens of United Canada how you foolishly caused the formation of the Slash, through your own anxious incompetence. Now, what happened in my bed?"

        "I'm not sure I was really there," Analyst returned. "Did I leave any semen?"

        With utter calm, Hervieux turned to one side, and nodded. The slipper then withdrew from the hollowvid. Analyst began speaking again, and rapidly.

        "Look, the 'organ' I removed from the battery is evidently a control unit of conveyance activated by paraconscious desires. I've always been sexually attracted to you, Miss President. Somehow, the control unit sensed this in me as I slept, and sent me to you, though I did not intend it consciously."

        Hervieux stared at Analyst a moment, then turned away, shook her head in negation, and the slipper reappeared. Then Hervieux watched Analyst try not to weep.

        She would not be so unkind as to ask if he were upset because he didn't get to screw her.

        "Analyst, I don't want to hear about potential for changing the world, the nature of transportation, or providing us all with immortality," she spoke. "I want to know if that control unit will help end the Slash. Was being delivered to my bed an achievement or a joke? Are you moved because of success or failure?"

        "Because now, damn it," Analyst stated sharply, his composure returning, "now I know I can reach Ernie," and made to implement that wish in the real.

        Secure and Prime seemed in a race to die first. Despite a sorrow that felt worse than starvation, Prime gained strength upon learning of Omb's demise. Ombuds had sacrificed herself to bring Prime food. Should not Prime pay her niece the ultimate honor of consuming enough of Omb's flesh to live further? No, because Security accepted this job.

        His surgery on the battery had weakened him. No longer could he walk; some doubted his desire to stand, to breathe, to eat.

        "We've been partially able to apply an old process of preservation via dehydration," Med explained to prostrate Security. "The tissue will not deteriorate for some time. Neither Omb's nor Mech's. You know, Sec, we don't have an empath in facilities with Em or Con's abilities, but those present feel that Mechanic was virtually a gift to you."

        "Yeah, crap," Sec slowly replied. "Analyst didn't send him. The Victorians didn't send Mech for me to munch on. If they wanted to get us out, they'd find a better way. That's what I feel."

        Too weak to stand for long, Med spoke as he sat by his friend's bed."No one believes that you just happened to find the one surveyor who died on the Victory project, Secure. If you have a better interpretation, we're waiting for it. But you cannot wait long."

        "Yeah, you're waiting on me like a cat with a squirrel. I brought it home, so I should eat it."

        "If you have the courage to save yourself with Mech's otherwise worthless remains, perhaps the rest of us will gain the same strength that we can only speak of, only seek in you."

        "Who's the chef?" Sec scoffed with surprising strength. "If I say go ahead and feed me some of Mech's guts, will you cut him up?"

        "Yes," Med declared. "Mech is dead, and wouldn't mind."

        "Then eat him yourself," Sec returned with a previous weakness. "I won't mind."

        After Medical left, Sec found that along with his strength, he was losing his emotions. He next felt jealousy, for Em. Despite the approaching threat of the Heinous, she had managed to die peacefully. Sec was not certain what he envied here: Em's peace, or her death. Was he so cowardly that he wanted to die? Had he so lost his intellectual acuity that he preferred the vague potential of suicide to continued living in a difficult world? Difficult, but no longer impossible, since he had received revelation in the form of a meal. Sec then had a thought so striking that his eyes opened wide and he breathed hard, as though healthy. Em had sent the body. Somehow, Empath via her influence over the batteries by being connected from spiritual release had sent dead Mech in order to save Security's life. With this impression, was Sec becoming empathic, desperate, or merely deluded?

        He was becoming strong, strong enough to stand, to walk, to find a knife.

        They knew he was coming, knew to offer no aid. Empaths themselves, the staff sensed that Secure could only manage to eat if he fed himself, if he refrained from taking his friends along as he achieved depravity. Or was he merely hungry?

        No hunger of the body could drive so moral a man toward eating the flesh of a fellow. His own life was not so precious that Secure would save it with cannibalism, thus ruining his anima, the last thought immortal in his mind of hideous, heinous guilt. Perhaps Sec was not so noble as to sacrifice his own ethics to demonstrate to his friends that meat, once dead, is all the same. In fact, Secure felt his actions influenced by the presence of Em and the Victorians; thus, he felt guided by superiors.

        The slicing and dicing was the easiest part. Mouthing the meat and swallowing was easier than making the decision. Retaining the food in his stomach was less difficult than retaining his sorrow, his remorse. Eating Mech's flesh was no more difficult than eating himself.

        The shoddy insistence he last had was of sickness. He would not vomit. He would not puke and have to eat Mech again. Then he understood the foolishness of that thought. In order to survive in the zone, he would not have to eat again, eat flesh again, eat people. How many surveyors would Mechanic's body feed? Omb's entire torso remained. And her brain. Her face. Outside of the Slash, a virtual industry could begin of volunteers allowing muscle tissue to be painlessly cut away for food, then rapidly regrown, but how could they import this meat? How could they notify the real world to begin the crop? The same characteristics that formed the Slash and caused starvation was responsible for there being no sophisticated industries within. What had Security accomplished? Had he only partaken of breakfast? Having no answers, he returned to his bed, waiting for his superiors to answer.

        "Doesn't that mean we can enter the Slash?"

        "I think so, Con, yeah. What do you feel we'll find there?"

        "Mech. I really felt that Mechanic was in my battery temporarily, that he was on his way somewhere else, and I don't think returning to where he came from. Someone sent him, or sent for him."

        They sat in Analyst's office. Con had none, for he was never comfortable being alone.

        "I don't know how these two guts we got are working together, but everything about the damn batteries and Vickies is connected. Maybe their functions, too. So we're dealing with wish fulfillment, and conveyance, just like you in the furnace boat."

        "That means time, too, Analyst. I retrieved my past, and you say the Victorians exist in static space, which is a realm of no duration, and I remember when I was processed. The guardian was sending me to the eternal peace of a time death. I'm still not sure what that is. I'm not sure that I want it."

        "Yeah, we're dealing with a physical system's temporality. The Slash's time is screwed up---you can tell that by the rate of ether decay at the border. So we got conveyance and wishing and time. Let's keep all that in mind and figure how to get inside the Slash."

        "Or end it from here," the empath concluded. "That's where we began it."

        The men parted, continuing to examine the battery's organs on the lab's opposite ends. Even their miens opposed. During that conversation, Con had seemed optimistic, prepared for a major success. Analyst had seemed starved, needing some exterior sustenance to continue functioning. The president had been right: Don't give me no more of that potential crap; give me results.

        He did not know what to do besides sleep beside the battery's brain and wish for his son. Analyst feared activity, for here the president had been right again: his anxious incompetence in applying the surveyors' resources to the batteries would have ruined the entire program had he not ruined it first by forming the Slash. Now Analyst feared that too great an effort applied to the brain would not send him to Sec, but separate them forever. Analyst felt guilt, felt additional failure, by understanding that when his wish had been fulfilled by the battery's guts, he had not found his son, but a piece of ass.

        Secure made it back to bed before collapsing. Though presuming the ordeal had further weakened Sec, Med hoped that the eating would replenish him. But he did not believe it. His prognosis was that Security's meal had not come in time. Medic was not so depleted as to be eating people, but wondered what weakness would overcome him first: that of the body, or the spirit.

        Later, those few surveyors able to walk looked in on Secure. Prime did not attend, being comatose. Medic examined Secure, hoping he was strong enough to stand and force-feed Prime. Med was not weak enough to do this himself, weak in his morality, his new prudishness.

        Secure appeared so strong that he seemed to be growing. Med then knew his own condition was deteriorating, his brain so starved for oxygen that he was seeing illusions. But Med was not alone with Sec. Psy and Safe/Hist were also present, and saw the same effect. Sec had four eyes. He had two noses, one too many mouths.

        "What in the...?" Psy muttered.

        Med looked closer. He saw a slice of extra iris in either of Sec's eyes, toward the bridge of the nose. The second nose was smaller than his original, and not adjacent, not exactly behind, but seemingly attempting to occupy the same place as Secure's. A smaller nose that Med had seen before. He had also seen that mouth. Lips narrower than Security's seemed to be pressing his aside, attempting to take their place. Feminine lips. The second face trying to occupy the same site as Secure's was smaller, belonging to a woman, a dead woman.

        Only now did Psy gasp, not at Sec's bizarre condition, but because he was seeing Empath.

Chapter 21

Together Forever Again

        He could not imagine the organ's mechanism for psychological projections, but he was affecting it. One day, he could not even see the organ, though it was not invisible, not disguised. It simply appeared too alien for him to perceive, and here was its greatest truth. He was not smart enough to figure it, not enough of a Vickie to use it properly. But he had used it. Just as early scientists had harnessed electricity with only a perfunctory comprehension of the physics involved, Analyst intended to use this organ for his own goals without fully understanding its alienness.

        Analyst slept beside it and wished too hard. He wished to be in the Slash, aiding the surveyors there, wished to end the Slash, desiring so intensely that he did not truly sleep. The next day, morning on Earth, the alien brain had no appearance, only a sound, one he could hear, but not quite the content.

        Analyst slept beside it and wished too little, too actively. He was so concerned with relaxing and allowing his true wishes to drift out where the organ could sense them that his sleep was full of wet dreams of the president. When he awoke, the alien organ was only a smell. It smelled like Hervieux, like her body, her crotch.

        After the next sleep, the organ seemed a bottle. Analyst would not open it, because it contained either medicine or poison. But the batteries had always held the capacity for killing or curing; sometimes they seemed the same.

        Then the organ seemed a nothing. Could Analyst expect it to eventually become only an emotion, an idea, a wish itself? What effort, what physical, technical effort, could he apply toward the battery without ruining it or achieving another failure, such as changing the world by creating the Slash, or delivering people with the immortality of death?

        Controller remained cheerful, urging Analyst's technol adjuncts to do all the measuring they chose as he placed the heart organ throughout the withered battery, allowing it to fit wherever it might. But he could not make it fit again. Wherever he placed the heart, it popped out, as though a bubble floating to a pond's surface. Perhaps a toilet.

        Analyst considered previous data, his adjuncts' findings regarding the brain's being partially organic. Of course, Analyst had never influenced it via desire: the organ contained an oxygen switch. When the brain was released into the lab's atmosphere, a bacterium grew with the available oxygen, closing a passage like a switch, activating the organ's conveyance aspect. Or maybe it was reading his mind.

        Maybe he was losing his mind. Maybe that would be a blessing.

        Both Control and Analyst considered the temporal aspects of the batteries, of their respective organs. Con remained hopeful that they would find the solution to the Slash in time. Analyst was becoming terrified that they were running out of time.

        Con and Analyst considered their respective objects as being organs, internal aspects of the battery critical to the whole's function. Since Con could no longer find the place where his fit in any of the withered batteries, he thought of inserting it into his own chest. Maybe he had room. Analyst considered eating the brain, placing the organ within himself instead of placing all his effort into it; and what did they eat in the Slash?

        Both thought of family in the Slash: Con his wife and daughter, Analyst his son.

        Analyst considered how individual aspects of the battery might either be integrated or separated. Something in that brain before him---which seemed that day to be fluid, perhaps blood, a hemorrhage---had conveyed him to his wishes, combining the functions of physical transport with that of fulfilling desires, all via sensing his paraconscious intents. Controller's battery had provided the additional function of returning his past: a temporal event. Well, what did Analyst want from it? His previous concentration on wishes had been for himself. He had desired to end the Slash, to free his son and the ground staff. He assumed the organ would act as an intermediary, as it had with the president's bed. Perhaps that function had been available only once, and Analyst had depleted it. Maybe he had depleted its ability to sense his desires, and he needed a more direct approach. Maybe he could smash the fucking thing right to bloody bleeding hell. Maybe he could ask it to please help him. Maybe he could communicate with the organ, as though it were intelligent, which is more than he could say for himself, with his foolish ideas. Maybe he could smash the fucking thing right to bloody bleeding hell.

        Analyst then understood that time had come for decision. After his brief but intense studies of the organ, now he must solve the Slash, as Empath had solved the Heinous on Victory.

        With that thought, he had the answer. Empath had shown him the way. The Victorians' had been her teacher, and Analyst now learned from them all. To solve one's problems in life, end it. To gain the perfect state of existence, commit suicide. Analyst felt that he only had to kill himself to solve his problems. True, perhaps true, but how would that solve the problems of the Slash? Did he truly believe that his death would influence the battery organs in the lab to release his people---release them from what, from the common living whose end he contemplated?

        Instead of killing himself, Analyst fell asleep. Fell asleep beside the brain. He did not want to awaken, for the only thing left in his career was death. He did not want to awaken, not ever awaken, but wasn't that suicide in itself?

        Instead of wishing himself to sleep, Analyst worried himself into unconsciousness. Then he dreamed. The organ again was a sound, but this time, he recognized it. Repetitive, percussive, the second of two beats emphasized, about two hertz. The organ was ticking, but the clock's time was wrong, so Analyst reached out to set the hands. Then he found himself starving---not his body, but his career. So full of failure that he wanted to vomit his mistakes away, Analyst required a purgative to reverse the ingestion of failures. Before him was no clock, but a bottle. Analyst had seen this before, while awake. Now he opened it. Inside was a pill, a big, white pill that promised good medicine. So he swallowed. When Analyst awoke, he had cured his career by losing it.

        The president attended her last press conference. The perimeter of the palace grounds was populated by tens of thousands of protesters, but they were eerily silent, most seated with their picket signs, as though waiting for something, a great pronouncement from their president, or a notice of impeachment from Parliament. I wish I could talk to them, Hervieux thought as she stepped to the podium, having scant concern for the journalists before her. I wish I could have a pleasant chat with all those people who hate me.

        She was smiling brilliantly when a patriot stared at her, his vision connected to a removed control unit. By the time Secret Service read his broadcast, it was too late. They would have great difficulty determining how the man achieved a mil spec hand guided grenade. Once locked to a target with its intelligent vision, the fist-sized weapon need only be tossed into the air, and it guided itself to the only sight in the world it wanted to see. The president seemed to have the same desire, for the silent streak was the last thing she saw.

        He left the dorm late; the others had already gone to work in the orbiting lab as Adjunct's technol analysts. What a vivid dream he had suffered. Therein, Analyst was the research chief of the sentience surveyors, not his superior, Adjunct. His most important ally was the integrating empath. But where was Con---who was Con---now?

        Analyst pulled himself along in freefall to find the empath, then found something else strange. Oh yes. He had been working so hard lately that he hadn't eaten in over a day. But he was not hungry. His stomach was full, and some kind of foodstuff was on his lips, the taste in his mouth. He couldn't place it, but it tasted like medicine.

        Finding Controller in the lab hold, still trying to apply that heart organ to the battery, Analyst approached him at once, the remainder of the analyzing staff busy in the background.

        "Hello, Analyst," Con greeted him with that permanent smile so unlike Prime's. "Tech and Research are waiting for you."

        Controller turned away, but Analyst remained.

        "I dreamt I was boss," he told the empath, and Controller faced him with interest. Analyst continued.

        "I dreamt that I was in charge, and that I had found this other organ---a brain---and it was in my office."

        "That's odd," Con replied, no longer smiling. "I've had that dream...forever."

        Analyst grabbed his collar, grabbed Con's drab uniform. He could not remember the last time he had touched him, touched another man. When next he spoke, Analyst seemed fearful, desperate either to speak or to hear ideas superior to his own.

        "Damn, Con, everything the bleeding Vickies do is interconnected. But even if they wanted to fix this mess, how could they do it? What are they good at---suicide and screwing up time---what are they doing now?"

        Controller had no answer. Neither did the analyzing staff, who were staring at Analyst. Con had no answer, but he found a solution.

        "I dreamt that you were starving," Con whispered only to Analyst. "I dreamt that you could only survive by eating yourself. So you tried to eat your own heart, but you couldn't do it because it was beating too fast. It was always ahead of you because you were in the wrong time frame."

        "What happened?" Analyst demanded, still grasping Con's collar, but trying to share the knowledge with Controller rather than stealing it as they had stolen the Victorians' knowledge: that of spirit release, and static space, and battery technology. "What happened, Controller? You're the empath."

        "I awoke," he told his friend. "It was just a dream. If there's a solution, we'll have to find it in real life. Wishing won't do it; we have to act."

        Analyst moved away from him.

        "You're screwed up, pal," he said, looking to Con's hardened-air trailer. "And you're totally right. That damn heart don't go in there again---you already fit it in the damn battery. That was your dream, that was your desire---now you got to find where it fits in the real world. The brain is in place," he insisted, and pointed to his medicine mouth. "That's how I figured it. Only one organ left, one problem. Now, what do we do with it? It's your heart."

        Of course. Controller understood. He had not coincidentally found the heart. The organ had not been a discovery, but a delivery. Delivered by his desire, via the great aliens. Again, Con had misunderstood, typical of the surveyors. The great aliens could not do everything for them. The surveyors' responsibility was to solve their own mistakes. Analyst had.

        Controller looked at the hold. Though filled with equipment, the hold held too much space. Despite the prevalent gear and the ubiquitous staff, the entire lab was empty. Except for inadequacy, failure, and bad decisions. If only it could be filled with better times.

        He knew where the organ fit: right where Analyst had shown him. It fit with the surveyors because it was their problem. Just as the brain's place was with the staff's best mind, so the heart should be placed within the surveyors' prime emotionalist. That man's identity only now became obvious.

        Con reached for the heart and pressed it against Analyst's face. The scientist had not expected this solution, but despite his wide eyes and moaning as the empath shoved the organ past his teeth and down his gullet, Analyst could not disagree. The finest sentience in the surveyors' careers was now being revealed, and Analyst could not resist accurate ideas. Even if they killed him.

        The remaining analysts were in no position to stop this event. After all, they were no masters of time.

        Analyst was smothering on the organ that filled his throat. Analyst was choking on the truth. Along with his respiration, he felt his life lock solid, experiencing the lack of progression that was imminent death.

        The staff noticed a new sight outside. The Slash was expanding, as though having taken Analyst's last breath. Its rate of progression, Con saw, was zero, then less.

        "It's all a clock!," he gleefully told his dying friend. Distressed before, Con now seemed truly mad. "You were right! Everything they have tells time. That's how they saved themselves from living. But telling time with them is an emphatic verb. They went somewhere, all right---nowhere. The battery, the organ, the whole system---it conveys moment, Analyst!"

        They felt themselves falling. The impression was of having one's self pulled away---not their bodies, but their lives. Pulled away in the wrong direction. Backward. What enterprise could be more alien? A progression so foreign only empaths could feel. Empaths and sentience surveyors.

        From orbit, the zone was no longer a slash, but an atmosphere, a time cast that coincided with the world in reverse.

        "Analyst, moment conveys it!"

        They all recognized her. Only Safe/Hist, however, recognized the cause.

        "The way you can see Sec sort of behind her," he quietly told Med, as though afraid of the data. "The way you can see through Empath. It's like a time death. That's how Mech looked when he was stuck in both spaces."

        Sec felt himself changing, emotionally, not physically. He thought of Medic, aware that Med was awaiting his own desperation before eating Mech himself, or feeding Prime. Sec felt Medic's exact emotional state not because he agreed with him, but because he could grasp his position so fully that he seemed to be Med. That's exactly how Em would feel, Sec thought. I'm becoming an empath.

        Exactly, Med observed. Sec was becoming an empath. One empath. A particular empath. He was becoming Em.

        Sec felt himself changing, existentially, not physically. His greatest empathy became with his lover, and he had never felt that way before, not when alive. He had felt sympathetic towards her, yes, but Sec had always felt that they were individuals. Now their feelings were so mutual as to be of one person. Security felt exactly what Em felt, but Em was dead. She had killed herself. Or she had released her spirit as though a Victorian achieving the existential nonprogression of static space.

        Secure did not believe that she was delivering a message from death, but if she were, he would have had the understanding of empathy with her ideas, her feelings. He would have understood her to feel that the surveyors were ruining the Victorians' peaceful immortality---which she also had achieved---if only by forcing remorse on them, remorse from being part of the sentience surveyors' ruining their own future.

        Med checked his condition. Secure's odd pulse was due to his having two hearts. Med believed that they would not mutually strengthen each other, but overburden Sec's weak constitution, or mutually interfere with each other to the point of malfunction. Safe/Hist thought this minor point did not matter. Looking at Sec, he saw Em in a time death, and knew she was taking Secure along.

        Analyst would be needed for a complete understanding of the situation. The observing surveyors were not fully aware that they viewed how Sec was being conveyed to his greatest desire, not of surviving the Slash, but of being with Em.

        Secure felt that Em should not be present. Yes, we should be together, would be her feeling if she could have any. We should be together, but not in this manner. Their shared empathy would provide the understanding that Em and the staff on Victory were in no position to return. No position to desire, to refuse, to disagree. They can't return, but Sec can join them. We can all be together forever again.

        "Are they both going to live, or both going to die?"

        In a weak blink, he looked at Empath's hands, which seemed his own. With this vision, Secure recalled aspects of the Victorians no human alive had learned. They did not have hands, more like claws, living machines. Only Terrans had soft fingers.

        "I'm losing both heartbeats. They're canceling each other."

        Secure's last initiative as an individual before finding his life was to fulfill his emotion.

        "Med, Psy---I can't tell who it is anymore!"

        Correcting his mistake of not loving Matilda long enough, Ernie along the lay of space bid his love hello.

Book I

Victory

Chapter 1

No Time

        Victory resembled the surveyors' home except for its spirit machines. In this handsome landscape, the partially alive chambers seemed less out of place than the sentience surveyors, for living people were alien to this planet.

        Though Prime Minister felt remorse for leaving Victory behind, the surveyors would return. Exploring for sentience was their profession, their lives.

        "I know you'd all like to stay, dears, but we have instructions from the president," Prime explained in her firm, sweet voice. "It may not be my choice, but I consider it a good idea."

        "I find it a superior decision," Science Intensive proclaimed. "If a few of us remained, our resources would be too limited. I agree that we should return with a complete research population. After all, we don't want to miss anything."

        "Yeah, sure, we'll learn plenty," Secure submitted while rubbing his chest, a bad habit from his father, "but all in good time."

        Empath agreed with her fiance. If a portion of the staff remained, Science would be the technol leader. Though a thorough professional, Intensive was no fan of empaths. Neither was Analyst---who would head the research population---but Empath would change him when they became kin. She was sure that Analyst would come to understand her, just as Security had. That understanding had turned to love, and despite his childhood of abuse, Analyst had more of that emotion within him. All he needed was time.

        "I don't feel bad about leaving," Control, the integrating empath, told the surveyors. "Separating our staff is like splitting up a family."

        The boat lift then chirped; Prime alone listened to the message.

        "Time to leave, dears," she told her staff. "The sooner we go, the sooner we'll all return with Analyst and a research population."

        "I don't know if Dad would leave Canada for anything less than an immortal discovery," Sec drolly remarked.

        The staff attached themselves to the lift with hip grips. A moment later, the apparatus had adsorbed sufficient gravity to separate its cargo from the planet, to return them to their ether boat, their home.

        Before leaving, Security and Empath whispered a message for the planet.

        "I love you, Matilda."

        "I love you, Ernie."

        After years to discover the planet, having searched scores of stars, the sentience surveyors would not long abandon their greatest victory. They needed preparation, not greed, needed to implement only good decisions. After sorting through the ether, they returned to Earth, a section of the galaxy bypassing the boat in no time as humans fly along the lay of space.
THE END
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