“Todd’s a sweetheart. A lot nicer than you.”
“Maybe sometime you’ll give me a chance to prove I’ve my own qualities with women. Let me show you how much I really care about you, Veronica.”
“You lay down more lines that a cocaine addict, Charley.”
“Well, princess”—he stroked her head affectionately—“I hope you’re ready for a bang right now.”
She scooted away from him. “Charley!”
“Don’t get excited.” He grinned mischievously, then continued. “There’s no way in hell we’re going to be able to get through these locks by just picking them.” He unslung the canister and backpack. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to make use of some of that glop we found back at the scene of Cog’s temporary prison.” He picked out the compound, wire and plunger, then gazed dolefully down to his companion. “Uhm, Veronica, you wouldn’t happen to be an explosives expert, would you?”
* * *
Merlin the Magician lay facedown on the blighted ground in a rapidly expanding pool of blood.
He groaned. “You know, for not being real, this certainly hurts a great deal.”
“Psychosomatic, I’m sure,” Todd said. “Our nerves are wired into the Fabrication. Don’t know what effect it has on your real body. I don’t suppose you can summon another of those fireballs, can you? Your first put a real dent in the thing.”
The smoking creature wheeled about and slashed a razor set of claws at Angharad. She dodged, capered back, then tilted her head, feinting a charge, her strategy merely to keep the beast occupied.
As monsters went, the Questing Beast was not terribly large.
But it was a nasty bastard.
“You think Ort Eath’s intended revenge has got something to do with this?” Todd had asked when the thing had snarled and hissed its way up from a crevasse before them, its single gigantic eye glaring balefully. “He lets us almost reach our goal and then rends us to bits?”
“You haven’t got much to rend to bits, Todd,” Angharad had said. “You go try to reason with the thing before it gets any violent ideas into its ugly head.”
“You needn’t bother,” Merlin explained. “That’s the Questing Beast.” A serpentine tail flicked over the cliff edge, winding around a convenient boulder. It tugged its woolly body up and over the precipice.
“You mean it’s after the Grail too?” asked Angharad.
“No. It quests for the flesh of questers for the Grail.”
“That’s not quite the way I heard the legend,” Todd said.
“Looks like that’s the way it is now,” Angharad remarked.
That was when the beast had sprung forward with incredible speed. While the others scattered, Merlin had stayed put and tried to zap off a firebolt. Before the blazing mass had ballooned fully from his fingertips, however, the beast had landed a blow. The blast knocked the thing back, singed and seething, dealing it a wound from which pus and burned blood oozed now between blackened scales and fur.
Now Merlin strained to heave off another fireball as the beast rallied itself for another whirlwind, snarling attack. The magician groaned as he attempted to lift his limp fingers. Feeble pulses of reddish energy bloomed like dying flowers from his hand, only to wilt away into hissing nothingness. The magician’s eyes dropped. His arms sagged. The creature advanced toward Angharad, who seemed to be having second thoughts about charging it, preferring to gallop back and forth beside it, confusing and maddening it.
“Hey, Todd. You there, chum? We really need you.”
Charley Haversham’s voice.
“Charley!” Todd cried out. The interior piping had caught him just as he was about to hurl his vaporous self at the Questing Beast, futile as that might be.
—You wouldn’t happen to know how to detonate a pile of plastic explosive, short of using a sledgehammer, would you?
“I can’t talk to you now, Charley. We’ve got a bit more pressing problem at the moment. A particularly nasty beast has taken a dislike to us and—”
—What’s the problem? It doesn’t really exist, does it? Not in any kind of physical reality. So it can’t really harm you. Now, you see, I’ve got these wire ends and I’m not quite sure what I stick where and—
Slathering foam dripped from lips and fangs. A heart-wrenching roar erupted from a throat no doubt yearning to be crammed with fabricated flesh. Claws flashed in sunlight.
“Wait a second. What did you say, Charley?”
—It’s just an illusion, right?
“Sure, but an illusion that is directly grafted in with sensory perception. Capable of dealing pain and the impression of death.”
Angharad charged and dealt the creature a quick stab, then managed to dodge a blow from its tail.
—Yes, but if you are all directly connected into this projected reality, this computational matrix, then isn’t there some kind of feedback control available? I mean, if it’s a dreamscape, then it’s a matter of will. You may not be able to wake up from where you are—but you ought to be able to affect the things you are dreaming. I’ve been thinking about that. If you folks are indeed part of a collective mind, then surely you have some say in the events that occur in that mind. The trouble is you’ve been treating it all as though it were a confused, distorted reality. But it’s not reality.
“It’s worth a try,” Todd said, and he stared at the beast and concentrated. Something small ... Suppose, as it made its snarling way toward Angharad, it lost its balance just ever so slightly, so that one of its limbs hit that boulder and—
The Questing Beast stumbled, then recovered quickly.
Surely a coincidence. All the same—
He tried again, this time harder, wishing he had more help. Todd imagined the beast’s front legs crumpling beneath it, sprawling the thing onto the ground—he attempted to reach out and change the nature of the picture, bold and real before him.
A blur. A smudge of color. Binary dots, bleached of color, turned a blinking black and white.
The legs he had focused on shifted as though some invisible eraser had rubbed them out and a soft pencil had drawn in new, awkward ones.
With a surprised squeak, the thing looked down at its changing legs, then fell directly on its nose.
Angharad shot a surprised look at Todd, then speedily galloped back. “Hey. What happened?”
The Questing Beast roared as it tried to regain its feet; they were as unsteady as rubber beneath it. The result was the same as before: it got a mouthful of dirt.
“We really should have realized this before,” Todd said quickly. “Since our minds are embedded in this reality—in fact, constitute the substance of the reality, gulled by whatever pseudo-sensory perceptions that are fed into them—merely by altering the nature of that flow, we can change it. The Fabrication Computer feeds us data which our senses tell us is real but isn’t, despite appearances, despite the pain or pleasure involved. We can’t halt the flow of the data—but by concentration ... together ... we can alter its nature and its effect. Since this is in part our creation, we can control part of it.”
Angharad said, “I suggest in that case that we start putting our heads together again. Our vicious friend seems to be on its way once more.”
Todd glanced up. Sure enough, the Questing Beast had regained the use of its front limbs and was now making its way to reengage its attack, with increased rancor.
“So what do we think,” continued Angharad. “That it’s dead?”
“No. Too difficult. Why don’t we will its attitude to alter. Let’s change its mind. As one ... concentrate!”
Todd directed his sight and his willpower toward the manic monster approaching. He visualized it halting, developing a big Cheshire cat grin through which its ragged, forked tongue would dangle like a panting dog’s. He imagined soft amiable sounds issuing from the thing’s snout in pl
ace of harsh growls. Finally, he mentally directed the beast’s hurt hide to heal, so that it would have cause for all this good feeling.
The Questing Beast stopped in its tracks. A puzzled expression drooped its features comically. Like a swarm of silent bees, computer composition dots seemed to reassemble on its smoking side and the wounds magically healed, pus drying, blood disappearing, no scars, no scabs. The beast examined this change, then, eyes ablink, directed its attention back to the individuals it had once desired to dine upon with a light in its eye that had nothing to do with aggression.
It yawned once, stretched its scaly limbs, then curled into a tight, domesticated ball and dropped into a snoring sleep.
“Voilà!” Todd announced happily, trying to rub his hands together briskly. They blended into one another. “Now, if we keep this frame of mind, the creature will remain harmless as a lamb.” He became thoughtful. “You know, why can’t we just will this all to be over?”
“I’m beginning to understand that,” Angharad said. “Clearly the suggestion was given that we not try any recourse other than what would appear feasible in our world views and according to the situation. Clearly, that beast attacked because we expected it to. All of which adheres to the dictum that one generally creates one’s own destiny. I suppose if we wanted to, we could make it rain. Or cause a few flowers to bloom in this parched land. Simply because it’s all a part of us—and we’re a part of it. Rather like our real existences when you come to look at it philosophically.”
“You think we can heal Merlin with philosophy?”
“Goodness, I’d forgotten all about him,” Angharad said, clopping over beside the magician. “Is he still alive, do you think?”
“Barely,” the magician groaned.
“Think we can put him back together with willpower?” Todd asked.
“A tiny bit of your horn will do, I think,” Merlin announced in a weak voice.
“Of course,” Angharad said. “The unicorn’s horn is supposed to have healing powers.” She whispered in Todd’s ear. “As long as he thinks it does, that’s the important thing.” In a louder voice: “I’d better find a way to chip off some of this bony protuberance. We don’t want old Merlin to fade away, now do we?”
“And I’d better see if I can’t tune back in on old Charley,” Todd remarked. “He said he needed a bit of important advice.”
THE SLEEPER stirred from its rest, as it had done some hours before when the Projection had been cut off abruptly and violently. A part of its factioned mind was eager to renew that Projection. There was also the New One, dreaming troubled, painful dreams.
“The biobot has been renewed, regenerated,” explained the part closest to consciousness to mollify the uneasy rest.
Awakened, the Sleeper knew pain. Confused fragments of vision assailed its inner eyes. Tastes. Feelings. Smells.
Memories, jumping, clamoring in confused display:
The gigantic grav-suspensions bridging the mammoth peaks thrust from the crusty soil of Altair Six. Engineering derring-do unheard of in the history of mankind. The numbers, the symbols paraded like nimble dancers, pirouetting and leaping one another, slowly forging into alloys, beams and wires cemented by force-fields like breaths of a sun. Flickers of conversations, hissing a half-heard name, submerged by a sea of time.
Bertrand ... Bertrand Melthusius.
Recollections of the invitation to meet secretly with a Morapn. A majestic project, the communication claimed. An engineering monument to his genius. The most luxurious spaceliner of the universe! The journey to the neutral world, feelings of trepidation yet curiosity tingling him. He had brood sons, his preciously bought clones to carry on his genius and accomplishments throughout history ... but this was an undreamed of opportunity for technological sorcery within his own lifetime. Stamped with the brand of his own personality, not copies. The tickling of his ego.
The meeting with Ort Eath. The testing.
The darkness ...
Though the memories whispered Bertrand Melthusius, somehow that name blended into another name, the memories with other memories.
Wolfgang Reither. The sweep of thundered scores of majestic sound. Wagner trumpeted through the universe on wings of the techniques of space-art. The ardent interest of the creature known as Ort Eath. The interview. The commission to work upon the Morapn world on the entertainment section of the Star Fall ... meeting the designer of the biospheres ...
... Vanderbilt Morgenstern.
... The blending, becoming Morgenstern ... The strange murkiness. Shambling about on metal legs, glimpses through a faceted, multigraphed window ... the coming of others ... the shadow presence ...
The final addition, merging them all into another mass, another world view, another name ... the name that held on to its identity. The name that, briefly awakening in wholeness ...
(My name is Russell Dennison. Russell Dennison!)
... had shot forth vision of imagination, jarring the Dark One from its tunnel vision, kaleidoscoping black and white into endless spectrums of possibility ... distracting it from its intentions for just long enough to prevent it from pressing ...
Then, the confusion. The mixing, the terrorized flight, the feeling of programmed actions. The Merging Selves, even the Dark One, hooking their umbilicals into the Deep Womb of the Core, being pressed into a disjointed, troubled sleep that lasted for centuries until the arrival of the Intruder.
Then the Odd Things had happened ... the unexplainable things the Sleeper had done in moments of consciousness, as though controlled by some greater power ... Things had happened aboard the Star Fall, important things which the Sleeper only vaguely remembered ... yet knew he played a vital part in ...
In what?
The Sleeper allowed the Projection to renew itself and power the biobot again, which he could feel immediately hopping to its legs to be about its business.
The Sleeper attempted to submerge itself again in unconsciousness, that blessed release from the agonies of awareness, but found it warring among its selves.
“Stay awake!” cried an insistent voice. “Stay conscious! There are things to be done.”
But consciousness was torture, and the Sleeper finally dragged all its selves to slumber.
It dreamed it was a spaceship, suspended in the bowels of God.
* * *
Veronica March stoppered ears with fingers.
Charley Haversham pressed the plunger.
Nothing happened.
A quick peek around the corner later, Charley sighed.
“Are you sure that Todd gave you the right information?” Veronica asked, annoyance plain in her voice.
Charley checked again. A mound of plastic explosives hung on each of the mag-locks, pierced by bright copper wire that snaked back along the corridor some ten meters to the small canister in Charley’s hands, which blinked its lights slowly and solemnly.
“Maybe I’ve got the leads on wrong,” he said, unscrewing them with the small whining sonic screwdriver that had been in the bag. He took the lead wires out, switched them and—
“Charley, the plunger—” Veronica said.
—connected them.
The explosions merged fire, smoke, and sound into one gigantic messy concussion that caught them both and whacked them off their feet.
“—the plunger is in,” Veronica finished in the wake of ear-ringing silence after the boom.
“Did the job, though,” Charley said, gathering up the bag of equipment. “Now let’s go and have an interview with our Mr. Hurt.”
The floor of the corridor was splattered with debris. An acrid stench hung in the air, like the morning after Fourth of July. They picked their way through the mess and reached the doorway, braced now by two blasted-out holes.
“Interesting version of doorbells,” Charley said, examining the twisted, newly
exposed wires, trying to figure out how to open the still-closed door. “Let’s try this.” He touched two wires together. With a burst of air, the door slid open. The chamber that stretched before them was dark save for the pulse of eerie white lights here and there.
“I suggest we be careful,” Veronica said. “Our method of entrance was not exactly friendly. Here. Wait a moment.” She stuck her head into the dimness and called out, “Earnest! We have to talk to you, Earnest. Are you there? It’s Veronica.”
Only silence and the murmur of machinery answered her.
She turned to Charley, shrugging her shoulders. “I dunno. This is where I left him. This is where he should be, it’s his center of operations.” She fumbled for the light switch, found it. Soft flows of color brought the illumination to an acceptable level.
Machines upon machines. Levels of blank screens, inanimate computer consoles. There was no sign of activity.
“Funny,” Veronica said, gazing about quizzically. “Last time I was here, it was a regular beehive.” Footsteps echoing, she walked to the slanted face of a wall, riddled with holes. “This is the Artificial Personality Storage Bank. Each hole has an Identity Crystal.”
“Any way of identifying who is hooked up to what?” Charley asked, studying the huge thing, above which hung a webworking of cable.
“There’s a code under each slot, but I don’t know it.” Uneasily, she turned around, eyes sweeping the chamber. “This is peculiar. This is his center of operations. It’s where the Fabrication is controlled. I thought, anyway. But where is Earnest? I thought that we might be able to talk with him, reason ...”
“Vu-tank. Controls ...” Charley said, touching this button, that toggle. Nothing seemed to respond. “They don’t work. Nothing is working. But I just spoke with Todd, and he’s still in the Fabrication ... it still exists.” He tapped his back. “This thing is still fitted firmly in place, as well. I don’t understand.”
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